An old joke: A man walks into a psychiatrist’s office and says, “Doctor, my brother is crazy. He thinks he’s a chicken.” The doctor ponders this and suggests that the man bring his brother in to be treated. “Well, I’d like to, Doctor, but you see, we need the eggs.”
Jonathan Rauch was in no joking mood, however, when he wrote Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy. Donald Trump’s persistent presence on the national stage rendered Rauch in a permanently sour mood. The book is the latest in the long line of “our democracy is under threat!” jeremiads and suffers in many ways from its inability to reflect seriously on whose democracy is under threat or whether we have a democracy at all.
The book possesses many of the earmarks of Rauch’s work: a breezy and accessible style; an ability to categorize complex phenomena into intelligible rubrics; a disposition both libertarian and progressive, making him, to his credit, difficult to categorize; an iconoclasm that never fully challenges regnant orthodoxies; and an ability to engage serious ideas and thinkers without himself getting too serious. His references to historically important thinkers seldom—with the exception of Nietzsche—bleed into the superficial, but neither do they go deep. As a result, the analysis of democracy gestures at a level it never quite achieves. It’s a book that allows people to feel smart but also smug.
So why the joke? Rauch claims that modern American democracy is a bargain made between secular liberals and Christians. He also argues that Christianity is a false religion. Democracy needs Christianity as its “load-bearing wall,” but that wall is also hollow. My brother thinks he’s a chicken, and we need the eggs.
Rauch makes it clear throughout the book, repeatedly, that he is an atheist, a Jew, gay, and a secular liberal. He acknowledges his audacity in telling Christians what they believe, or at least ought to believe, but this only downplays his theological ignorance. His book also does no small amount of cherry-picking of authors whose books support his prejudices, such as Whitehead and Perry’s diatribe against Christian Nationalism entitled Taking America Back for God, while ignoring Mark David Hall’s thorough takedown of their work: Who’s Afraid of Christian Nationalism? None of that would matter were it not for Rauch’s normative claim concerning Christianity’s role in sustaining American democracy even while he debunks both its truth claims and its practitioners—with one notable exception. More on that anon.
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According to Rauch, religion in general and Christianity in particular must align itself with secular liberals for democracy to survive and thrive. He argues that secular liberalism and Christianity are “instrumentally interdependent” as well as “intrinsically reliant” on one another, thus ignoring at least 1,600 years of Christian history. Only that relationship can create “a morally and epistemically complete and coherent account of the world.” Each incomplete in its own right, secularism and religion play complementary roles in developing a fulsome and enduring worldview. This bargain has sustained our constitutional republic for nearly 240 years, until one of the parties ceased playing its proper part. Thus, “American liberalism and American Christianity are pulling apart, largely (though of course not entirely) because of the tragically misguided choices made by many white evangelicals. The result is a crisis for both Christianity and democracy.”
To make his case, Rauch resorts to one of his clever shorthands: the four “M’s” that make us “complete as moral beings”: mortality, morality, murder, and miracles. In Rauch’s telling, religion does a competent job with the first two as secularism struggles, while the roles are reversed as regards murder and miracles. Rauch concedes that religion does a swell job creating a moral system and giving people a sense of meaning and purpose, but can’t resist noting that it’s no less false because of it. Demonstrating his misplaced hatred of Nietzsche, Rauch’s position might well be described as seeing Christianity as nothing more than Platonism for the masses, replete with noble lies.
As head-scratching as his assessments of the first two “M’s” are, the second two tend more toward hair-pulling for the reader. Under “murder,” Rauch offers the standard problem of evil as the cudgel with which he hopes to batter religion. One can reasonably take Rauch’s approach that the universe, being nothing but inanimate matter, contains no moral order in and of itself, a point of view rejected not only by religious thinkers but also philosophers such as Plato. But if one is going to raise the theodicy question, one could at least read writers who have dealt with it intelligently, such as Dostoevsky. When accused of not appreciating the atheist argument, Dostoevsky rightly pointed out that the accusers had apparently not read his work, because if they had they would realize he made better arguments for atheism than they did. I don’t think atheism is trite, but it comes off that way in Rauch’s hands.
The argument against miracles is even less literate and points to what I regard as the central problem of his book. Rauch relies exclusively on Hume’s arguments against miracles, which, Rauch claims, “have never been successfully answered.” I suppose Rauch can be forgiven for not knowing that William Paley had an ongoing dispute with Hume over that very issue, and I doubt Rauch read the pretty thorough response given by Richard Swinburne, but apparently he hasn’t even glanced at C.S. Lewis. That aside, Rauch argues that religious affirmation of miracles necessarily results in a world of “warring revelations” and “violent conflicts over competing supernatural dogmas” that not only destroy social life but “breaks the universe.” So what kind of system of government requires such nonsense to sustain itself, as Rauch claims democracy does? How can democracy be stable and solid—how can it be right?—if its foundations are all wrong?
The truth claims of Christianity are not really Rauch’s concern, however. Christians can be useful to democracy so long as they are the right kinds of (democratic) Christians. What happens to democracy in the hands of the wrong kinds of Christians? Here Rauch has two groups in mind: Catholic post-liberals and American evangelicals. Taking on Patrick Deneen’s argument, Rauch argues that post-liberals wrongly see democracy as a threat to Christianity. Deneen, like Rauch, sees democracy as a kind of alliance between religion and secularism, but specifically Protestant Christianity. Not attuned to the difference between Catholics and Protestants, Rauch misses how Deneen’s thought stands as a work of Catholic social theory, seeing political allegiances as subordinate to religious ones, and not the other way around, as Rauch would have it. The “liberal” effort is to reverse that relationship, most notably present in the HHS mandate and the case against the Little Sisters of the Poor, connected to America’s long-standing anti-Catholicism as well as an imperious ideology that seized control of democratic institutions to advance an agenda. Rauch is mute about all that.
This silence results in Rauch’s inability to recognize how the advancement of progressive ideology created a counterreaction within certain Christian quarters. For Rauch, “good” Christianity is old-fashioned “noble” mainline Protestantism, which not only embraced progressive ideology but in many ways created it. Rauch confirms that he “would love to see a revival of mainline Christianity,” ignoring the fact that its decline is largely due to people not wanting to join the Democratic Party at prayer. The few theologians Rauch affirms as obviously right in their views come out of this camp and include James Brownson and his controversial defense of gay marriage, which Rauch, without considering the actual argument, declares “hermeneutically and morally” sound. I suspect Rauch didn’t read a lot of the books he lists in his bibliography. Indeed, most of his conclusions are drawn from informal conversations he had with select scholars and church leaders. His book isn’t rigorous in the least.
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Rauch never considers Trumpism as a counterreaction to progressivism. Evangelical Christians, he repeats, mistakenly consider themselves a persecuted minority; instead, Rauch wants to “consider the role Christianity has played in its own demise.” Rather than following the enlightened example of their mainline brethren, evangelicals took “a more radical and perilous path” that resulted in Trumpism. Granted, Rauch does ask an important question backed by some data: “What if partisan politics becomes the main reason people decide to identify as evangelicals?” The identification of a religious group with a political party creates concern whether it happens on the left or right, but Rauch is only concerned when it results in the election of Donald Trump.
Rauch claims that evangelical Christianity needs to give up its fear that it is “under siege by the secular world and the political left.” This “fanciful” narrative of “aggrievement” counters the obvious truth that “conservative American Christians are not just the least persecuted religious community in the world today; they are arguably the least actually persecuted religious community in all of history.” As evidence, he offers “the string of victories” Christians have enjoyed at the hands of the Supreme Court, without asking why so many religious liberty cases have appeared in the courts in the first place. “America,” he writes, “is anything but a combat zone for Christianity.” Perhaps, but Rauch makes no effort to consider why Christians might think it so, what sorts of progressive actions sparked the court cases, nor how the culture in general regards bigotry against evangelical Christians as permissible. It may be the case, as Rauch recognizes, that the courts upheld the rights of bakers and florists not to cater gay weddings, but that those court cases arose because progressives were using the blunt instrument of the law to compel private businesspeople to violate their conscience. Rauch evinces no memory of what happened to Memory’s Pizza. Never drawing attention to this important background, Rauch instead makes the remarkable claim that “cultural institutions in the media and education” are “friendlier to religious worldviews than a generation ago.” Permit me to doubt.
Neither does Rauch attend to rhetoric on the left such as that which law professor Mark Tushnet provided in May of 2106. Overly confident that Hillary Clinton would be Barack Obama’s successor, thus continuing history’s arc, Tushnet argued it was time for liberals to get out of their “defensive-crouch Constitutionalism” (this after Obergefell, no less) and to show no mercy to their vanquished opponents. “For liberals, the question now is how to deal with the losers in the culture wars. That’s mostly a question of tactics. My own judgment is that taking a hard line (‘You lost, live with it’) is better than trying to accommodate the losers, who—remember—defended, and are defending, positions that liberals regard as having no normative pull at all. Trying to be nice to the losers didn’t work well after the Civil War, nor after Brown. … The war’s over, and we won” (emphasis in original). This is “live and let live” Madisonianism?
In one thought experiment, Rauch concedes some legitimacy to the evangelical “fear” narrative, but wonders why that results in supporting Donald Trump, whose one political skill is “sociopathic cruelty.” The paradox is obvious: A religious group that values moral rectitude enthusiastically embraces a morally objectionable human being. Fair enough. As far as it goes, I have no objection to Rauch’s argument. It’s what he doesn’t consider that bothers me. For example, he doesn’t acknowledge the fact that the vast majority of evangelicals voted against Donald Trump in the 2016 primaries, nor the possibility that they voted for Trump only because a) the alternative candidate had already called them “deplorable,” and b) Trump promised to deliver to them the kinds of justices who defend the religious liberty they experienced as under threat. It’s possible that people might vote for a person they find otherwise objectionable because of the role interest plays in politics—an essential part of the Madisonianism Rauch defends. Here, too, Rauch’s narrow understanding of Christianity simply juxtaposes the Beatitudes to Machiavellianism, arguing that evangelicals have subordinated the former to the latter. Christian thinking about politics, however, has seldom submitted to that rigid either/or, a point carefully made by Barack Obama in his Nobel Prize address.
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Mainline Protestantism may have struck Rauch’s preferred and nostalgic balance between Christianity and liberalism, but its waning means any renewal is unlikely to come from that quarter. Rauch has no hope for either “white” evangelicalism (he’s strangely silent on the black churches and Trump’s increasing support among racial minorities) or Catholicism. So if the bargain gets renewed, as it must if democracy is to survive, from whence will that renewal come? “For today’s most intellectually complete and pragmatically proven vision of a distinctively scriptural pluralism, we should travel to Utah.” The Mormons, because they regard the Constitution as divinely inspired, strike the proper balance between Christian belief and Madisonian liberalism. The problem with Catholics and evangelicals (“The Church of Fear”) is that they are “purists.” Mormons alone understand the value of compromise. They are the most willing to put religious principle aside. Yet isn’t that also his complaint against evangelicals who supported Trump against their own best principles?
Rauch seamlessly identifies evangelicalism and Catholicism as “the Church of Fear,” which he elides into “Christian Nationalism.” Such elision is illegitimate, nor is “Christian Nationalism” the widespread phenomenon in Christian circles that Rauch thinks it is. It is likely the case that Trump would not have won either election without the support of Christian evangelicals, but that doesn’t mean they see him as the means to creating a coercively Christian nation. Nor does that mean they are opposed to political compromise or pluralism.
The big problem Rauch never addresses is the outsize importance of the presidency and presidential power in our politics, nor does he recognize the role progressives played in turning our politics into a zero-sum game. How does this align with the thin Madisonianism he misidentifies as the essence of American Constitutionalism? How does he make sense of the polling data that indicate that people on both the left and the right regard their opponents as evil, as needing to be vanquished?
I found myself sympathetic to many of Rauch’s instincts and conclusions but less so to his arguments. No doubt part of my reaction stems from the fact that Rauch doesn’t really understand Christianity nor have much of a grasp of the history of Christian reflection on politics. He’s on surer ground when discussing liberalism, but here too it’s a pretty thin understanding, even if I share his general endorsement of the liberal project. I suppose the issue comes down to the degree to which we see Trump as a threat to “democracy,” how effective the guardrails are, and whether the “threat” he poses is absolutely sui generis. My own view is that Trump is a scourge rather than an autocrat-in-waiting. If I’m wrong, a lot of eggs are going to get broken including, I would expect, my own. Either way, it’s no joke.
