The price of Christianity’s “broken bargain” with democracy

Over glasses of merlot in 2003, the journalist Jonathan Rauch was asked about his religious beliefs. He nearly answered “atheist,” then paused. 

God never made sense to Rauch. As a child in Hebrew school, he went through the motions but was unable to believe. In his teens, he heard pastors on AM radio rail against gay people like himself, calling them “a stench in the nostril of God.” His atheism hardened. 

But now, sipping wine in his early 40s, the idea of calling himself an “atheist” seemed to imply he still cared about religion one way or the other. He hadn’t for years. Then it hit him: “I’m … an apatheist!” he replied, getting a chuckle. 

Rauch told that story in a 2003 essay published in The Atlantic. His essay celebrated the decline of religion in American life, pointing to falling church attendance and broad changes not so much in what Americans believed but how: with a shrug, increasingly. Calling religion “the most divisive and volatile of social forces,” Rauch was heartened that religion seemed to be losing its grip on American public life.

Today, Rauch calls that essay “the dumbest thing” he’s ever written. His latest book, Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy, sets out to correct it. 

Cross Purposes is no come-to-Jesus moment for Rauch. It is humbly meant to be one for, well, Christians — especially white evangelicals, who, Rauch argues, have become misaligned with the virtues of Christ, and therefore misaligned with the virtues that liberalism (in the classical sense) depends on.

The book is also intended to be a wake-up call for nonbelievers like Rauch who have underappreciated Christianity’s role in “stabilizing” America’s liberal democracy, a role the Founders wrote about centuries ago. 

So, Rauch writes, secular America should greet religion not with apathy but arms wide open. “We should even, perhaps, cherish religion.”

Christianity’s crisis 

Cross Purposes argues that Christianity is in crisis, both in numbers and spirit. Drawing on interviews with pastors and analyses from previous books on religion in America, the book diagnoses the problem in two broad ways: Churches are “thinning” (losing members and distinctiveness from the outside world), while some are also “sharpening” (becoming politicized, partisan, confrontational, and divisive). 

The trouble started decades ago when Protestant churches made decisions that caused them to become more secularized and politicized. First, the mainline churches aligned themselves with the center-left progressivism of the mid-20th century, focusing less on theology and more on issues like poverty and civil rights. Then, in the late 1970s, white evangelical churches and the Republican party formed an alliance with each side believing it had something to gain: Christian-friendly policies and a loyal voting bloc, respectively.

These shifts had different motivations but a similar effect: Churches became more open to the influence of external culture as Christians focused less on scripture and more on worldly issues.

“The mainline ecumenical churches and the more conservative evangelical churches are, for different reasons, too secular to really distinguish themselves from the outside cultural and political world,” Rauch tells Big Think. 

(Rauch has put it like this: People can do good deeds or talk politics on their own time, so why give up their Sunday mornings?)

As churches drifted away from theology, Christians drifted away from churches. From 2000 to 2020, the share of Americans identifying as “practicing Christians” dropped by nearly half. Today, “nones” — an amorphous group that spans from zealous atheists to the vaguely spiritual — account for nearly 30% of the American population, an all-time high representing a cohort larger than all American evangelicals. 

Christianity’s rapid decline caught most by surprise.

“I don’t think in 2003 we had any idea how rapid and dramatic the next 20 years would be,” Rauch says. “It’s really unprecedented.”

The early 21st century saw another collapse, too: Americans’ trust in institutions, politics, democracy, and each other (a deterioration reflected in rising rates of affective polarization, where people view opposing political tribes with growing hostility while viewing theirs more favorably).

These declines happened concurrently but not purely coincidentally, according to Rauch. As churches became less able to provide people with a sense of meaning, transcendence, and identity, many Americans filled the void with politics.

“And that’s an absolutely terrible place to get your sense of identity,” Rauch says. 

The apatheism argument assumed Christianity’s fall would make American society less divisive, and that the secular world would build something more stable and enlightened atop the rubble of churches. 

That hasn’t panned out, Rauch writes. 

“Instead, we live in a society which, on both left and right, has imported religious zeal into secular politics and exported politics into religion, bringing partisan polarization and animosity to levels unseen since the Civil War.”

After trying to figure out why America was becoming “literally ungovernable,” Rauch came to the conclusion that Christianity’s crisis is democracy’s, too, because Christianity is a “load-bearing wall” in America’s liberal democracy, helping to stabilize society by instilling citizens with virtues.

The virtues of Jesus, but also those of James Madison. 

Religion and liberalism 

The American Founders wanted a separation of church and state, but they also generally thought America’s liberal democracy by itself was unsustainable. It needed some kind of moral infrastructure to hold it all together: religion.

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People,” wrote John Adams. “It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports,” wrote George Washington. 

“The practice of morality being necessary for the well being of society, he [God] has taken care to impress [its] precepts so indelibly on our hearts, that they shall not be effaced by the whimsies of our brain,” wrote Thomas Jefferson.

Christianity, Rauch says, has long helped do what liberalism in America cannot: reliably provide citizens with moral grounding and transcendent meaning. Meanwhile, liberalism brings procedure and pluralism that, at their best, help us peacefully negotiate the common truth and the common good. 

By “liberalism,” Rauch doesn’t mean the political movement but rather the broad social philosophy he’s detailed in previous books like Kindly Inquisitors and The Constitution of Knowledge. 

Cross Purposes defines it as:

“… the tradition, dating back to the seventeenth century, which grounds ethics in the proposition that all humans are created free and equal; politics in the proposition that the people are sovereign and government’s powers are limited and consensual; and authority in the proposition that everyone follows the same rules and enjoys the same rights. Liberal regimes regard individuals, not groups, as the fundamental bearers of rights and responsibilities. To make public decisions when differences arise, they deploy public debate and open-ended, decentralized, rules-based processes.”

The book argues that the Founders wanted Christianity and secular liberalism to be legally separate but morally and civically aligned. The two have an “implicit bargain” that “requires that the Constitution be interpreted in a way which is consistent with the well-being of lawabiding faith communities, and that God’s word be interpreted in a way that is consistent with the well-being of democratic pluralism.” 

At least in America, Rauch writes, the two need each other.

“… [W]e secular atheists rely on Christianity to maintain a positive cultural balance of trade: we need it to export more moral values and spiritual authority to the surrounding culture than it imports,” Rauch writes. 

The “most important” thing Rauch says he does in Cross Purposes is show how Madisonian liberalism and Christianity share three core values.

Don’t be afraid: Jesus counsels followers not to fear; liberalism depends on citizens having faith in democratic processes and resisting fearmongering from authoritarian demagogues. “[Christians] have to have some confidence in Jesus,” Rauch says. “And you have to have some confidence in your Constitution.”

Be like Jesus: Jesus and liberal thinkers like Immanuel Kant believed each individual has intrinsic moral worth and equality, and that people shouldn’t be treated as a means to an end. There’s no justification for violating these values even if your political enemy does. “Jesus is very clear on his view of fighting fire with fire,” Rauch says.

Forgive each other: Jesus preached radical forgiveness. Liberalism, Rauch argues, embraces closely aligned ideas: forbearance, civility, and compromise. A healthy liberal democracy doesn’t seek to drive political opponents out of public life but learns to live with them in the spirit of pluralism. (“The war is over,” Ulysses S. Grant said at Appomattox. “The rebels are our countrymen again.”)

Rauch believes those virtues are being tested — and in some cases abandoned — in churches where politics takes center stage on Sunday morning.

Sharp Christianity

While Cross Purposes is to some extent a self-critique of Rauch’s past apatheism and a broad critique of American Protestantism, its sights are mainly set on white evangelicalism: the “Church of Fear.”

One evangelical pastor in Texas whom Rauch interviewed said his congregation brings a “battlefield mindset” to church; they’re consumed by the culture wars and believe “Christianity is under attack and we have to do something about it.” 

The pastor suggested he has considered quitting the church, as did other pastors Rauch interviewed for the book. While those interviewees weren’t a representative sample, survey data from 2022 shows 42% of pastors had considered quitting in the past year, citing politics as the third major factor, behind stress and loneliness. 

Politics in churches isn’t new. But Rauch says this wave of evangelical politicization differs from the one decades ago, which mostly came top-down from church leaders like Jerry Falwell. 

“This is coming from the pews,” Rauch tells Big Think. “It’s coming from political pressure.”

Rauch points to an example from 2021. The conservative advocacy group Turning Point USA hosted an event where Donald Trump Jr. said: 

“This will be contrary to a lot of our beliefs because I’d love not to have to participate in cancel culture. I’d love that it didn’t exist. But as long as it does, folks, we better be playing the same game.”

“We’ve turned the other cheek, and I understand sort of the biblical reference — I understand the mentality — but it’s gotten us nothing. OK? It’s gotten us nothing while we’ve ceded ground in every major institution.”

The crowd responded with only scattered applause, to be fair, and a speech from Donald Trump Jr. isn’t necessarily indicative of the theological or political opinions of American evangelicals, 80% of whom voted for President Donald Trump in 2024. 

Still, how might some Christians justify this view that the Bible is holding us back? One potential answer is the battlefield mindset: Like an otherwise liberal government that forces citizens into military conscription during wartime, Christians might feel justified in taking exceptional measures during perceived times of “spiritual warfare,” when everything seems to depend on the outcome of the next election in an existential battle between good and evil.

But Rauch says this is a misappropriation: Spiritual warfare “is not literal war. It’s the opposite of that. It’s the fight to gain control of your soul and give it to Jesus.” 

Churches might suffer costs by embracing tactics that are antithetical to the teachings of Jesus. 

“The price for that will be being perceived as a hypocrite,” Rauch says. “And that will drive people away who are looking for something that’s not hypocritical.”

I ask Rauch what he’d say to evangelicals who point to illiberal behavior on the left — people who cynically engage in “cancel culture” or try to keep those with the “wrong” beliefs and opinions out of institutions and public life.

“I’d say they’re absolutely right. Progressivism, at least in its radical formulations, is profoundly illiberal. Those versions of ‘wokeness,’ and radical leftist ideology, and cultural Marxism, and all those other terms that are thrown around — yeah, of course they’re right about that.”

The question — moral and theological — is how to respond.

“If you decide to adopt fundamentally un-Christian tactics in order to meet the pagan and secular and radical tactics of non-Christians, in what sense are you a Christian?”

Critics of Cross Purposes have claimed the book is incurious about why conservative evangelicals are politically incensed; questioned its summary of fundamental Christian values and its “load-bearing wall” claim (how can Christianity stabilize democracy if, as Rauch believes, its foundations aren’t true?); and noted that it spends relatively few words on the role that Catholics, Black Protestants, and other religions play in American democracy. 

But Rauch says some of the biggest pushback comes from secular liberals. He sums up one common criticism: “It’s over. You can’t just wish away the fact that Christianity is shriveling in America, and it’s made the choices it’s made.”

If it’s time to throw in the towel on religion, then the cultural task, according to Rauch, is to fill the void left by Christianity’s decline.

Secular substitutes — from “wokeness” to the alt-right to techno-utopianism — often have religious features, but they’ve failed to fill “what has been called the ‘God-shaped hole’ in American life,” Rauch writes.

So, what should secular America do? Rauch’s answer is “more” — be proactively accommodating and willing to strike reasonable compromises within constitutional bounds.

“My hope for this book is not that Christians will make some sacrifice of principle for my benefit,” Rauch says in an email.

“It’s that Christians will elevate the principles of Jesus. (Don’t be afraid, imitate Jesus, forgive each other.) Our country and possibly their church would benefit. In the same light, I don’t think my suggestions to liberals involve sacrificing a principle. Rather, they elevate liberalism’s own principles of pluralism and toleration.”

American Christianity won’t vanish anytime soon. A Pew Research Center survey published this year suggests its decline is stabilizing, with young people recently seeming more interested in organized religion. 

If American Protestantism is going to regenerate itself, Rauch suggests it’ll be from the bottom up, and he hopes it’ll have a civic theology that rejects the battlefield mindset and instead asks what Jesus counsels Christians to do in a broken world.

“Do you model your behavior on the worst behavior of the people who are positioned as your antagonists? Do you fix your gaze on the next election, or do you fix your gaze on the next life? Do you model a countercultural, indeed radically countercultural, set of values and ethics: the values of Jesus?”

This article The price of Christianity’s “broken bargain” with democracy is featured on Big Think.