Jonathan Rauch is asking all the right questions. “Why should secular Americans, including many who feel they have a beef with organized religion, care about the state of Christian America?” for one. For another, “What happens to our liberal democracy if American Christianity is no longer able, or no longer willing, to perform the functions on which our constitutional order depends?” These questions, and the paucity of answers currently available to them, worry Rauch, a self-described secular gay atheist Jew. And if they are troubling enough to move Rauch to write Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain With Democracy, that should set off alarm bells. Christianity’s decline matters to all of us, he writes, because religion is a “load-bearing wall,” a source of purpose and a mechanism for transmitting the virtues necessary to use freedom responsibly. Secular democracies don’t provide those things but do rely upon them. We need Christianity to flourish.
Of course, Rauch is hardly the first to recognize this. He quotes President John Adams, who famously wrote, “We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net.” Without religion to ensure that citizens answer to a higher authority for their actions, our constitutional republic, which takes a more laissez-faire approach to interpersonal relations than the monarchies of Europe ever did, would descend into a state of nature. Our experiment in self-government demands that citizens govern themselves, not just as a polity but as individuals. Thus, wrote Adams, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
President George Washington made an even broader version of the same point in his farewell address: “’Tis substantially true, that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government,” he said. “The rule indeed extends with more or less force to every species of free Government.” It is not just our particular Constitution that requires virtue to endure; any free country will depend on religion’s ability to inspire obedience, forbearance, and obligation where human nature compels self-centeredness. And, added Washington, “reason and experience both forbid us to expect that National morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”
Following their first two presidents, Americans have long recognized there is a public interest in the proliferation of religious piety, as long as it is not coercive and does not interfere with public peace and order. Rauch joins that tradition first by apologizing for his long-ago contributions to the public discourse celebrating Christianity’s apparent demise, and second by arguing—admittedly not as forcefully as he could have, and with pages of asides about Rauch’s disputations with faith—that we need to find a workable balance between a secular liberal state and religious communal flourishing. “The church’s crisis is not only the church’s business,” he writes. “It is … indeed my business.” He deserves applause for saying so, and, despite his prolonged efforts to distance himself from Christianity, making it his business in this book to strengthen rather than weaken the church.
Unfortunately, the answers he offers to all the right questions are wholly inadequate to dealing with what ails religion and stands in the way of secular-religious reconciliation. The inadequacy begins with a questionable survey of the landscape.
Rejecting the idea that secular culture is to blame for evangelicals’ embrace of the culture wars, Rauch writes that “the idea of a relentless legal attack on Christianity is fanciful. Never before in American history have the law and the Supreme Court been as protective of religious liberty as they are right now.” One problem with this analysis is that there is more to life than the law. What about American culture? Christians are mocked, demonized, and discriminated against in every elite American institution. That doesn’t make them Jews in 1930s Germany or black Americans under Jim Crow, of course. But bigotry against Christians is alive and socially acceptable today.
Another problem is that Rauch’s proffered evidence for his proposition actually proves him wrong. True, Christians have won a “string of victories” in religious-liberty disputes at the Supreme Court. But religious liberty is a shield against attempts to prevent Christians from practicing their religion. The fact that there has been a “string” of such cases only highlights how Americans are trying to compel Christians to violate their faith. The Supreme Court, moreover, has had to overturn lower courts who ruled against the Christians—is that string of lower-court losses evidence of an ongoing persecution? And does Rauch think that if we had a slightly different Supreme Court—current personnel being the near-coincidental result of elections, deaths, and Mitch McConnell—these cases would have turned out the same way? Dissenting liberal justices in nearly every religious liberty case indicate they would not.
These misapprehensions lead to analytical mistakes. Because Rauch thinks American Christians suffer from a persecution complex, most of his criticisms are directed toward them, not the secularists who fail to appreciate Washington’s and Adams’s wisdom. He urges Christians to conform the tenets and practice of their faith to a set of abstract principles he considers compatible with “Madisonian liberalism,” his name for the American system of majority rule limited by minority rights and tempered by the separation of powers. By doing so, “the Christian and secular worlds [can] become more mutually supportive, helping each other uphold the Founders’ vision instead of drifting apart into mutual incomprehension.” I share his worry that religious and secular Americans don’t understand each other at all. But who needs to learn to speak the other’s language? Do today’s Christians really hold the keys to return us to a culture of pluralistic coexistence?
Rauch’s elaboration on “the principle of Madisonian liberalism” can help answer those questions. The principle “is that the common good,” the proper object of government, “cannot be divined objectively or authoritatively by any one person or faction. It must be constantly negotiated.” Secularists and believers have, broadly, both given up negotiating. Ascendant right-wing Christian movements wish to impose Christian morality on an unwilling public. But Rauch misses that secular Americans have also abandoned negotiation by anathematizing religious reasoning in the public square. That’s why Christian sexual ethics have gone from being instantiated in state laws for centuries to evidence of bigotry and bias in the span of just decades.
This points to a larger deformity in our ability to negotiate the common good: doing so is impossible when a large chunk of the political community only speaks the language of liberalism—the justifications for every policy being rights, autonomy, and choice. We Americans have inherited a long tradition of speaking about our shared life this way. But we have also inherited a tradition that counterbalances liberalism; civic republicanism (to use one name for it) emphasizes that liberty will not secure itself without adopting restraints on our exercise of natural human freedom. We cannot achieve the synthesis Rauch wants without appreciating both of these traditions. And it’s quite clear which one is currently dominant: We’re all quite familiar with lexicon of liberalism—fluent in it, even. Churches are hardly immune to its influence, which is why so many Mainline Protestant churches (and liberal denominations of other faiths) have simply submitted to it, becoming temples of liberal therapy where Americans go to be told not that they have to be better, but that they are perfect just the way they are.
What we need is to redevelop our republican muscles. That is what we’re missing—and it is what Christian Americans bring to the table.
If Rauch won’t say it outright, this Jew will: America would be better off if Christians were more Christian. Not militant, necessarily, but not looking to compromise with liberalism so much as engage it in productive competition. We are parched for a Christian answer to cultural liberalism. We would all benefit from Christians answering the call to share their view of a life well-lived, advocate virtues like forbearance and self-sacrifice in a culture that could use a good deal more of both—and demonstrate that being part of communities that make real demands of you can be just as fulfilling as being “affirmed” or “validated” regardless what you do. And we non-Christians should stop feigning offense when our fellow citizens try to show us what they consider the truth. Our Madisonian bargain is that Christians get to preach as loudly as they like, as long as they don’t coerce me into converting or treat me as less of a citizen on account of my remaining Jewish.
If Christianity is going to play the role it was expected to in this republic—and the role it remains called upon to play—Christians should commit to being proud, attractive, and uncompromising representatives of their faith. Not to bargain with secularism by submitting to it.
Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy
by Jonathan Rauch
Yale University Press, 168 pp., $27.50
Tal Fortgang is a Legal Policy Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
