Mark Labberton:
It is really a gift today to have Jonathan Rausch as our guest on Conversing. Jonathan is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and he works particularly in the area of governance studies. His latest book called Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy has been published in January and it’s that that we’re going to be talking about today.
Jonathan has written many books. The one that has I think been the most meaningful to me has been his book that’s called The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth. It’s a great book and it shows the same kind of clarity of mind and purpose and intent for the well-being of society for all people and has a kind of reasonable civic mindedness that is generous for everyone in all kinds of circumstances, and I’m just delighted that he’s with us.
In addition to his books, he’s authored many articles as a contributing writer for The Atlantic and a recipient of the 2005 National Magazine Award, the magazine industry’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize.
Jonathan, welcome. So glad you’re here with us on Conversing today.
Jonathan Rauch:
I could not be happier to be with you, Mark. You’re someone I’ve admired both as a friend and as an inspiration for this book.
Mark Labberton:
Well, it’s certainly the case that from my point of view, you are an exceptionally important voice right now. And what you’ve captured in this book Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy is something that I think is just a very important set of themes that you’re picking up on analysis that you’re doing and doing it in the most ironic and constructive point of view with a graciousness toward a faith that you don’t share, with a faith that is outside your ethnic background, a faith that you have described vividly as something that earlier in your life you really disdained and derided, but which has now come to occupy a different space.
Just as we begin, tell us a bit about how you opened the book and this transition from where you were in college days to where you are now in terms of your attitudes and perspectives on Christianity.
Jonathan Rauch:
Well, it’s a bit of a story, so please feel free to interrupt if the story becomes a shaggy dog story.
I was born in 1960. From a very early age, sometime in the lower grades in grade school, of course, I knew I was Jewish. I also knew that the idea of God seemed silly to me. I just never could believe it. There was one time in adolescence at a Jewish summer camp where I really tried and I still couldn’t. And then from very early on starting age five or six, I knew that I had this unquenchable attraction for boys and men that I did not understand. It took me 20 years to figure that out. But you could not literally spin the AM radio dial in your car on a Sunday without hearing a preacher talk about how homosexuals were a stench in God’s nostrils and would all burn in hell. And being a member of those three groups who were all viewed dimly, to say the least, by Christians, I grew up thinking that Christianity was basically cruel and hypocritical, a font of ignorance and bigotry and we’d be better off without it.
And that’s where I was when I arrived at college at age 18. And by luck or God, depending on your point of view, my roommate was a young man named Mark McIntosh. He gave me the first exposure to a Christian who didn’t just talk the talk but walk the walk. He had a sense of humor and he got angry and annoyed and a normal human being, but the way he thought about everyday life, Mark, was infused with the question about what would Jesus do. He went on to become a very distinguished theologian and Episcopal priest, Reverend Dr. Mark McIntosh. But he’s the first person who showed me that it was possible to be a Christian and mean it and what that actually might mean.
I then I had a long journey, but as late as 2003, I was writing in The Atlantic what I now officially call the dumbest thing I ever wrote, and that includes my confident prediction in 2015 that Donald Trump would never be president. And the dumbest thing I ever wrote was a celebration of secularism. It said, “Isn’t it a great thing that people are just losing interest in religion? They’re not becoming militantly atheist, but they’re just losing interest in religion. And since religion is a font of divisiveness and often ignorance or superstition, we’ll be like Scandinavia. We’ll all get along better and we’ll have a post-secular post-Christian world and that’ll be great.”
Well, we then engaged in exactly that experiment. I didn’t know it in 2003, but we were about to see an unprecedented decline in Christian belief in America. I can recite some of the statistics, but it’s gone from throughout the 20th century Church membership was 70% of the American public. So you could say to someone, people often did, one of the lines to introduce yourself was what church you went to. Now it’s below half and falling fast. Younger generations in particular are disassociating just as fast as they can.
The result of that was an increase in all kinds of harmful social indicators, things like loneliness and despair, enemy, but also toxic polarization. It turned out that when Christianity started to fail, people started looking for substitutes because they were looking for a source of identity and values and transcendent meaning. And some of the stuff they looked for was just incompetent and not up to the job. That’s like soul cycle and fad diets and Wicca and crystals and all of that. But some of it was actively toxic. And a lot of them turned politics into what my first Christian friends call an idol. They began organizing their lives and their identities around the cultural and political conflicts of our time.
And so here we are, lots of bad indicators. And I think a major reason the country is becoming ungovernable is because of Christianity’s crisis. We can no longer separate the two and that’s why I, a very secular person, am writing a book about Christianity.
Mark Labberton:
I do think that it is both an irony and a gift that someone who, as you repeatedly say inside the book, distanced yourself and are outside the faith, would be one of the clearest voices in trying to help the church understand its identity and reclaim it. And I’m sure there will be people from the hardcore religious right who will find your book scandalous in that way. I mean, for that matter, finding you scandalous as well as the book scandalous. But from my point of view, it’s often been the case throughout history that I would say God has used people outside the life of the community of faith, to speak to the community of faith, and I do think that that is definitely true of what you’re doing. And whether the church has ears to hear, well, that is another story which we’ll come to, but it is an extremely important call.
So just because people may or may not yet have read your book, give us the arc of what the argument is and then I want to talk about certain pieces of it.
Jonathan Rauch:
The core thesis, the big idea is that our country’s becoming ungovernable in significant part because Christianity is no longer playing the role that the founders envisioned and hoped it would play, and that’s for a bunch of reasons. But the first thing that happened was the decline of the mainline churches in the 20th century. They went from being huge cultural forces to being virtually irrelevant. And that seems to have been because they lost their cultural distinctiveness and identity. They adopted a kind of generalized centre-left liberal politics, they lost their anchor in scripture. They stopped being countercultural, and so they became like a consumer good and people drifted away.
For a while though, it looked like the evangelical church was picking up that slack because it was booming and everyone was saying America is an outlier, it’s still so religious. What we didn’t know is that the story in this century is the wholesale abandonment of the white evangelical church. That’s two things. It’s the rise of the so-called Nones, N-O-N-E-S, people with no religious affiliation. Christianity, the last few years has gone down by about 15 percentage points in terms of the number of adults, white adults, who say they believe. The Nones unaffiliated is up by 13 points, so that’s where they’re going. But also within the church you see the rise of non-denominational, the rise of the so-called Nones, and that’s a real stew pot.
So the second big point of the book is secularization happens in the white evangelical church not just by blending into the culture, but by politicizing, by becoming very wedded to the Republican Party and the cultural conservative movement and moving away from the teachings of Jesus.
The third big point of this book is where I think it really does some work, is to argue that the core teachings of Jesus align very well with the core teachings of James Madison. And so you don’t have to look very far, you don’t have to struggle to put the church and the vision of the founders, the constitution into alignment. You just have to look at what Jesus says and do that. And we can talk about what those things are and why I think that’s true.
And then the final thing I look for is, okay, so what does a church look like today? What could it look like if it maintains its counterculturalness? That is, its distinctiveness, its hard boundaries, its roots in scripture, it’s being a demanding faith that gives a lot back in exchange while also viewing its mission as consistent with the Constitution and working to make those pluralistic values work? And there’s a very prominent example in the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I’m not saying the Christians need to become Mormons to heal our country or anything like that. I’m just saying, guys, if they can do it, you can too.
Mark Labberton:
Jonathan, the argument that you’re laying out is persuasive to me. I realise that I am not in the right-wing majority of white evangelicals. But it certainly is the case that I’ve spent my life as a pastor inside of mainline denomination, in my case, the Presbyterian Church USA. I was ordained when I was about 30 years old. And I was not born into a context in which the Christian faith was what it became for me as I was entering college. At roughly the same time that you were encountering your friend Mark, I was approximately in that same moment entering college.
And really out of a very skeptical home, my dad used to save certain neck veins for the discussion of religion because he felt like it was something that should be avoided at all costs, particularly its most zealous kind. And his primary critique was that what religious people do is that they take great things and make them small. And if you want to be a person with an expansive heart and mind, a capacity to love and be loved, to engage the world in all of its fullness, you needed to avoid religion.
And what shocked me when I became a Christian was this discovery that Jesus and my dad had this same theme in common, that Jesus often objected to the small making of various religious authorities of his day. And that what he was continuously doing was cracking open the universe to his followers, to understand the breadth and depth and range of God’s capacious grace and creativity and love and God’s commitment to the well-being of human beings made in God’s image relentlessly pursued throughout, in my view, of the Old and New Testament, the Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament.
So when I read what you’re writing, it does strike me very, very powerfully because while I was an evangelical inside a mainline denomination, what I liked about that was that it gave me oxygen to breathe. And I think I never envied those who were inside more strictly evangelical spaces because it felt to me like the oxygen began to diminish the small making felt like it was a true stereotype.
So when I read your book, one of the things that strikes me is just this sense that I affirm your general analysis and I have not been put off by the understanding at all that you give of the church and its crisis, which is really a crisis of its own identity. The way I’ve been saying it is, will the church live its identity? And if it’s not going to live its identity, then it shouldn’t claim to be the church. We should go and do something else. But to claim that we are going to live our identity is not to claim to be part of a political party or a certain specific social agenda, but really an identification as followers of Jesus.
And part of what you relentlessly pursue in this book as a secular person who lives inside an atheist framework is to call the church to itself over and over again. What you’re really saying is, will the church live its identity as followers of Jesus? And the failure to do that is at the core of the crisis that it then helps foster and foment in a certain way inside democracy where the role of the church in its moral and theological and other elements has really set up the crisis by vacating the space that a healthy vigorous identity practicing church is meant to play in a democratic nation.
Jonathan Rauch:
Well, that says so much and so well. The metaphor I often use is that what I did not understand in 2003 was that Christianity is a load-bearing wall in our liberal democracy. That’s not to say this is a Christian nation, that you have to be a Christian to be a good American, nothing like that.
Mark Labberton:
Exactly. Right.
Jonathan Rauch:
That the founders specifically rejected calls for them to include mention of Christianity in the Constitution. That was controversial at the time. But they did all tell us that the constitutional system that they gave us was not self-sufficient, that it’s a process, but it relies on certain what they call Republican virtues. And those are things like being lawful and truthful and getting a good civic education so that you’re well-informed and being tolerant and pluralistic so you don’t try to just destroy everyone else in politics. And they said, and this is crucial, “Without those things, our republic will not survive.” And they also basically told us, “You guys need to go and get this somewhere else.” And who they were looking to, to foster those virtues with civil society, meaning family and community and civic groups, but very largely it meant Christianity. Our founding religion is white Protestantism.
And so without quite explicitly making a deal with Christianity, they were counting on Christianity. There’s an implicit bargain there, which is, “Look, you’re going to get unprecedented religious freedom in this country, but you’ll have a role to play in upholding the values that keep it a democracy where you can do those things.”
So they did not expect Christianity to be allied with the state. That would’ve made them Christian nationalists, which they were not. But they did expect Christianity to be reasonably well aligned with the values of our constitution because when they pull in opposite directions as they’re doing now with Christian nationalism and Seven Mountains theology and New Apostolic Reformation and all these other things that I can’t even count them, when they start pulling in opposite directions and when Christians begin demanding things that are inconsistent with those core values, then the country, that makes everything else in the country harder, it makes it hard to get along politically, it makes it hard to pass bills in Congress. It means the kinds of people who are getting elected to office with Christian support are against compromise, and everything starts to break down. Does that sound like an overstatement?
Mark Labberton:
It doesn’t sound like an overstatement to me. No, it seems completely apt. So in the book, you describe the church in three different dimensions; thin, sharp, and thick. I wonder if you could just briefly summarize those. But the one that I want to talk about is really in the Sharp Church, which is really the Church of Fear as you portray it. I want to understand more about what you mean and why that’s so important. So lay out, again, kind of the three churches that you’re describing as it were, and then we’ll talk about the middle one.
Jonathan Rauch:
The Thin Church is a church that blends into the surrounding culture and it becomes diluted and thin, and it’s just no longer really able to do the work of socializing people into those Republican virtues and just kind of fades away and becomes irrelevant. And that’s a description of what’s happened to ecumenical churches, the mainline churches.
Sharp is what we’ve been discussing. That’s the other form of secularization where the church takes on the political colourations of the surrounding environment aligns itself with a political party and the causes of taking up political battles. Fight, fight, fight. We’re losing our country, we’re losing our culture, everyone’s getting woke, our kids are coming home with sex changes. The role of the church is to fight this. That’s Sharp in the sense both that it is divisive and polarizing, but also in the sense that as it gets more and more pointed, that church gets smaller. So it’s membership changes. It becomes more extreme and less numerous that the opposite of what you want.
The third is the Thick Church. And there the challenge is that you want a church to be countercultural. You want it to have a strong sense of its own values, otherwise it’s just not doing the work. So it needs to ask a lot of its followers, it needs to give a lot back in exchange. That’s what sociologists mean by Thick communities and groups. At the same time, it needs to be reasonably well aligned with our constitution and our liberal democratic values. And that’s hard to do. It’s hard to maintain your true colours as a faith and still get along with others in a pluralistic republic. But that’s what a Thick Church ought to do, and that’s what I think Christianity could do.
Mark Labberton:
When I think about the Sharp Church, and you talk about it as the Fear Church or the Church of Fear, I’ve reflected on that theme a great deal and working on a larger piece about it. But I would love to have you, for our listeners’ sake, describe a bit more about the kinds of fears that you’re naming when you see the presence of that so dominantly as you do.
Jonathan Rauch:
Well, I’d also love to hear your reflections on that. What you see is a man of the church, so there’s fear of demographic decline.
Mark Labberton:
Yes.
Jonathan Rauch:
The country’s changing in terms of the diversity, people who are living here, the number of faiths, there’s cultural fear. We’re losing the country to the woke left. It no longer reflects our values. White Protestantism is the founding faith of the country, and there’s a sense of ownership of the country that Catholics, for example, don’t have. So we’re losing our country culturally.
There’s this Kristin Kobes Du Mez, I hope I pronounced that right, has pointed out there’s fear of emasculation, that certain masculine virtues and values and differences in gender and sex roles are being eroded. And then there’s just plain old political fear, which is, “Our side isn’t winning. Our side needs to win. If we don’t win this election, it’s the end of Christianity, it’s the end of our church, it’s the end of our values, it’s the end of our country.” The so-called Flight 93 election. And those things get absorbed into the church and become the heart of what one pastor I interviewed called the Battlefield Mindset, where people come to church, it’s mostly as bottom up. This is not primarily coming from the pastorate, it’s coming from the pews. And people come to church bringing all of that baggage with them and saying, “What are we doing in this church to fight those fights?”
Mark Labberton:
Right. Right.
Jonathan Rauch:
Does that sound right? What do you see?
Mark Labberton:
It does sound extremely familiar. And what’s fascinating about it to me is that fear, as you know, is really a major theme in the Bible. Numerically speaking, its references overtly are about not fearing. But the other part of the Bible’s teaching about fear is how important it is to fear the gift of fear, fear especially, as defined and centreed in the fear of the Lord, which is the beginning of wisdom.
And there’s a sense of grounded fear and tyrannous fear. And I think it’s really the tyranny of fear, which is what you’re describing, which has completely upset the apple cart of the church living its identity, the evangelical white church living its identity. Whereas when I talk to friends and pastors of colour, this doesn’t seem at all disorienting to them. This feels like this is exactly the kind of minority position that they’ve always understood the church to be in. They are not fighting for the same terrain. They’re fighting for justice and for appropriate acknowledgement of respect and diversity in all of its array, but they’re not “fearful” in the same way as white evangelical pastors frequently are. And I think it’s all part of this cultural mix that you’re describing in which the tyrannous fear’s driven especially by politics, but also by the other elements that you mentioned all arose, this underlying primary fear, which people of biblical faith I think are really exhorted to which is a life deeply grounded in the trustworthiness of a God who holds all things and whose justice and love and mercy is for all people.
And the nature of the development over time of the way that God even instructs through the ministry of Jesus in the New Testament and in the voice of the apostles, a church that actually has at its identity a communion of unlike people who come together because of this confidence. And fear that is awe, trust, understanding, recognition of the primacy of God’s love and justice, which grounds all of our tyrannous fears and calls us into this unlike communion where people who do not look or talk or vote or act like us are brought into one common communion.
And then that becomes a workshop in which the character of God and the character of the church’s identity is meant to be learned, not to stay inside the holy huddle, but to do that work at close range so that in fact the manifestation of the fruit of that shows up in society and culture where the character of God is demonstrated by a church that has learned through the school of its own practices, an identity that is now to be given away for the sake and wellbeing and healing and fullness of human society and culture and the character of creation itself.
That is, to me, the large picture of what the Christian faith is meant to be. And this tendency toward tribalism, which has always been part of Israel’s life, it’s always been part of the church’s life is always there. It’s always, always there, but it’s seen as a trap, never as a destination.
And I think what most motivates me in this moment is how rawly this exposes the immaturity and lack of wisdom in the life of the church and it exposes it in a raw, embarrassing, profound way, which I have to also acknowledge I am a part of. Undoubtedly, I have been a contributor to blindness and tribalism in ways that in most cases I would find hard to exactly measure. But I am not the least bit hesitant to acknowledge that I’m a sociological creature and live inside social institutions which have bred blindness in me and anxiety that really isn’t related to the fear of the Lord, but related just to the latest fearmongering that may be going on in this or that or the other direction.
So when I read your book, one of the things that it feels like is really a clarion call back to first things centreed primarily in being a follower of Jesus in communities of difference, not of similarity, not of tribalism, not least white evangelical tribalism. But really beyond that, into a new communion, which is actually in the Book of Ephesians is the language the chief apologetic, the chief defence of the faith in the world that Jesus died and rose is that unlike people find communion with one another in a union that only Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection could actually accomplish.
Now, that’s the Christian identity that to me is primary and it’s that that’s meant to evoke for us this vocation of transformation, not of assimilation and not of mirroring and pandering and conceding to what is really nothing more than a bunch of secular thinking. So that’s the frame.
Jonathan Rauch:
Beautiful. Beautiful. Wow. You can still preach. I just want to clarify, you used the word tyrannous fear as distinct from the fear of God. Did you mean tyrannical over the self or what does that mean?
Mark Labberton:
I think on every level, tyrannical over the self, tyrannical over a communion of people, of a family, a congregation, a neighbourhood, a tribal group of whatever kinds, where suddenly we believe the lie that we are only ourselves, it’s only us in the game. That therefore if I’m going to survive or if we are going to survive, the first line of defence must be, A, fighting, and B, dominance. That’s what tyrannous fears are always driving to.
Now they may be completely superficial like using the right skin creams, so you won’t be one of those older people. That kind of silly fear. But also social fears of course. How dare we let this or that or the other thing happen? Now, clearly I’m not saying that a Christian vision of the world doesn’t have a distinct and non-secular vision of human being, of human dignity and value of all kinds of moral and ethical issues that need to be carefully considered. That’s just really different to me than this tyrannous fear where out of anxiety, out of a sense that power is slipping away, that we must get a grip by reclaiming our territory, that kind of mindset, which is really a dominion mindset rather than actually a servant mindset, which I think is-
Jonathan Rauch:
That’s helpful. Mark, you put that so beautifully. Much better than I just did because it came up in a podcast that I just did with a non-Christian right before this. He’s someone from right of centre, very worried about wokeness and all of that, and he says, “But yeah, don’t you have to acknowledge that evangelicals, conservative evangelicals, have reason to be afraid when they look at the culture and politics? This isn’t something that they’ve hallucinated.”
And I didn’t answer this closely near as well as you did, Mark, but I said, “Yeah, of course. Fear is part of the human condition. Yet what’s so countercultural about Christianity is its teaching that you can’t be governed by that fear. You can’t let it run your life and go around in a state of panic. And that Jesus Christ himself had lots to be fearful of as we know from the end that he came to and yet comported himself in this calm and dignified way, did not let fear triumph over him.” And so that’s why we need Christianity. It’s not because we don’t have reason to fear, it’s because we do.
Mark Labberton:
I’m Mark Labberton. Thanks for listening with me.
Well, and as the scriptures say, “Perfect love casts out fear, but fear casts out love.” And part of the paralysis of fear and then a paralysis that becomes endemic to potentially any of us is a sense of a fear that holds us in its grip so that we are not capable of living out the identity of love and sacrifice and service and compassion and empathy and kindness because we’re paralyzed by self-protection and we’re paralyzed by keeping a grip on whatever it is that we think we have a hold of or should have a hold of and are entitled to have over and against anyone else having a hold on something.
This is the gruesomeness of what’s happening in so many of the early weeks of this second Trump administration, is a demonstration of a capacity to have literally no compassion, no empathy. So there’s ways of making severe cuts even and doing it with mercy and not in the way that it’s being done. But absent any conviction about that and driven largely by fear, which I think Trump tends to be, it means then that the followers of the MAGA world are excluding more and more of the very thing that the Christian Church is meant to have a response to and engage with rather than a protection of its own terrain.
And this is where, John, one of the things that you say later in the book is that this biblical image of exile is so interesting at this moment then because in a way the MAGA movement is a movement toward Christian dominionism, and that’s really at the core of Christian nationalism and so forth.
What I find more interesting and profound and relevant is actually the opposite of that, that temptation toward religious dominion is intrinsic to a lot of religions and a lot of religious practice even if it’s not intrinsic to the religion itself. And in this case, the Hebrew scriptures, of course are defined by two great paradigms. One is the paradigm of the Exodus and the other is the paradigm of the exile. And the paradigm of the exile, it is not because of something untoward having been done to Israel as it were, it would seem, outside the will of God, but actually a suffering inside a reality from which God will ultimately provide deliverance and rescue in the Exodus.
In the exile though, it’s a suffering that comes on as a judgment of God on the people of Israel saying, “I’ve sent prophet after prophet after prophet to call you to be a community that mirrors my life. But you fail to do that and especially you fail to do that in relationship the most vulnerable.” Isaiah 58, “And therefore, I’m going to put you into exile and call you now stripped of the land, the temple, the covenantal promises that had existed inside the boundaries of Israel’s life. And now as strangers in a strange land in Babylon, I’m going to ask you, who are you now? Who do you trust now? Who are you going to put the full weight of your life on now?”
And so much of the exilic literature is trying to lift up the language of the agony of exile, but also this grounding reorientation that calls Israel back to its fundamental identity. Who are you when you don’t have the trappings of the covenant? But where I am still the making covenant keeping God who loves you, who are you going to be and will you let your life individually and nationally show my life? Or will it just be a reproduction of what you’re mirroring in the cultures which are surrounding you?
By the time you get to the New Testament, you have this image really of Jesus who, in many ways, could be understood even in his incarnation as an exilic visitation of God into a context where Israel is under Roman oppression, where the suffering of people is great, where the question of what is the sorting of power going to lead to? And in this amazing way, Jesus lives a life that I would describe as an exilic life that reflects the same character of God that you see in the Hebrew scriptures where God is meant for his people and, in this case, Jesus, to reflect the priorities and values and commitments that are the counterintuitive, counter-dominion values that are inherent in the kingdom of God.
So Jesus can use this absurd kind of metaphoric language like, “The kingdom of God is like yeast.” Oh my gosh. I mean, just imagine hearing that sentence, feeling the thumb of Rome on your neck. And Jesus says this, “But the power of the kingdom of God is like yeast.” This is a counterintuitive exilic form of power. And the prophets, rather the apostles, understand this over time. And this re-sorting of power, the last shall be first, et cetera, all of that is underscoring this kind of exilic life.
In 1 Peter, a letter in the New Testament, which really uses this exilic language pervasively is a very powerful letter for many reasons, but it is in part saying, “This is a Christian identity. You live as exiles, strangers in a strange land.” And it’s Constantinianism and all of Christian history that flows from that has always therefore been in this tension between dominion theology or servant theology. The servant theology is the counterintuitive theology and practice, values that I think are the ones that you’re naming are so critical in a healthy democracy that sees ourselves but sees our neighbours not through the lens of tribe, but through the lens of a God who’s self-revealing love. Now, at least from a Christian point of view, exceptionally and uniquely in Jesus Christ is a demonstration of a love that is actually meant to set us free from fear and free for the acts of love and justice that need to be embodied.
Jonathan Rauch:
That phrase exilic church exhibited an important influence in this book. In fact, I use it to conclude the book, the main part of the book. And there’s certain moments when I would come across teachings that would be breakthroughs in how to frame the ideas in this book. One of them was a sermon that you gave two or three years ago, I’m not sure when, but that somehow I discovered, in which you talk about the need to have return to an exilic church and you explain what that means. And a light bulb went on, which is that Christianity is not about owning the country or winning in politics. And it literally cannot be that it is at its best both morally and in terms of the appeal of its witness when it’s an exilic church. And it can’t be a coincidence that at a moment when at least white Protestantism in the United States is obsessed with political influence and has mortgaged itself to the least Christ-like figure possibly in American political history, in any case right up there, that its numbers are shrinking catastrophically.
Mark Labberton:
Right. Right. It’s not unexpected. This is the emptying out of what is meant to be the fruitful presence of the church.
In these last years, I’ve thought often, especially in all the period of division and everything, to just think, would it not just be extraordinary if instead of what we’re seeing in the life of the American church is really instead this flowering of a capaciousness, a depth of servant-heartedness, a mindset that takes power and power domination in political terms seriously, but not controllingly? That subverts it and can name from lies, et cetera. Which is why for those of us who care about our elections and who care about the constitution and about our country, the thought of electing someone who doesn’t care about the Constitution and doesn’t care about the rule of law is just brutal.
But if the church had understood that and named and lived that, we wouldn’t even be in this situation because we would’ve reflected a different kind of set of priorities than has actually been reflected by the white evangelical movement in America. And I think it’s fair to say, Trump would not be in office without the white evangelical church, which many in the white evangelical church celebrate like, “We have finally found our voice and the one who’s going to represent us,” whereas to me it’s the degradation and really the blasphemy of so much of the Christian MAGA movement that misnames God and attaches the God of Israel, the God made known in Jesus Christ to someone who, as you say, not only in presidential terms may be a low point, but certainly in morals terms, not just personal moral terms, but public civic terms has been a person that has been the opposite of what a faithful Christian leader would be.
One of the things that happens is of course they’re attracted because of feeling powerless, therefore fearful. And then claiming that power will be the redemption, whereas the irony of the cross always is this self emptying power. It’s the absolute opposite of what Trump is demonstrating. So I’m curious how you see that.
Jonathan Rauch:
Well, this will amuse you, Mark. One of the things I talk about in the book is that white evangelicals starting way back in the ’80s and into the ’90s made a gamble that they could, by aligning with the Republican Party… In a pretty partisan way because they cared about issues like abortion and family and so on. They had reasons to do that. But that by aligning with the Republican party, that they could influence partisan politics more than partisan politics would influence them, and they lost that gamble.
It turned out that the influence moved both directions. And in fact, if you look at the Republican Party’s current stance on abortion, I think you would have to say that the church has done more of the being influenced than the Republican Party has. It’s now willing to follow this leader almost anywhere he goes.
And then I noticed that not many people know this, Mark, but it’s kind of interesting. You remember when famous quote of Donald Trump in 2016, he says his supporters are so loyal he could probably shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any supporters? Do you happen to know where he said that, what the context was?
Mark Labberton:
I don’t.
Jonathan Rauch:
Most people don’t. It’s interesting. This was at a-
Mark Labberton:
I think it was at a religious gathering of some kind, but I can’t remember.
Jonathan Rauch:
It was at an evangelical college in Iowa called Dordt College, D-O-R-D-T. And that’s this very same speech in which a few minutes earlier he lays out his proposition and he says, “If you vote for me, you will have power. Remember that.” Now he says that many times. He says it in 2024 to the religious broadcasters, he tells him, “You’ll have power if I win like you’ve never had before.”
But you see what he’s doing here is he’s offering a transaction. He’s saying, “I will give you power. And in exchange you’ll give me unquestioning loyalty.” So I pointed that out in the talk I gave and someone said, “You know…” I can see your grinning. You can see where this is going. “You know there is a little something in the gospel about this,” and reminded me that after Jesus is baptized, he goes to the wilderness and Satan leads him to the highest mountain and shows him all of dominion and says, “All of this will be yours if you bow down to me.” Jesus, of course rejects the offer.
So I’m thinking the Bible has a little something to say about this transactional relationship with power that has led 82% of white evangelicals to support Trump. Now, I’m not saying it’s always bad to support Trump, and I realise there are lots of reasons to do that, and people are concerned about inflation.
Mark Labberton:
Yes, absolutely.
Jonathan Rauch:
And so forth. But 82%, that’s as close as unanimity as it gets in American politics. These were folks who had other choices who were just as conservative. They had, for heaven’s sake, Mike Pence, a real Christian and more consistent and conservative on these issues than Trump. So this, it seems to me, it’s not necessarily the particular positions that Trump or any other person in any party takes. It’s about how do you approach politics and is it from a standpoint where your fear lead you to make this transaction for power? And what does that do to your faith?
Mark Labberton:
Exactly. Jonathan, one of the things that happens in the book is that you’ve moved through these three descriptions of the church calling on the church to become this Thick Church that you’re describing, and I think very, very helpfully so.
And then you use an illustration of the Church of Latter-day Saints as a church that has found, in a certain way, a third way. And I have great regard as you do for the Mormon faith as much as I would distinguish it from Christian Orthodoxy. I also believe it’s like a Venn diagram where there’s a significant amount of overlap but not identity. And in any case, you use it really as an example of a faith centreed in Jesus that wants to find a way of living in a civil way that can live in a pluralistic culture with the kind of spirit that makes the Constitution and democracy actually have a much greater chance of working. I wonder if you could briefly distill that, but then I really want to move on to something that I happen to know about your research, which is that if you, as I understand it, had had more words allowed to you about your publisher, the next section of the book possibly would’ve been about the black church.
So I want to come to the Black church, but I want to get there by pausing for a moment and talking about this really powerful example that you use from the Church of Latter-day Saints.
Jonathan Rauch:
It’s so interesting, Mark. And I could take too long talking about what the Latter-day Saints are doing, but it’s remarkable and it’s countercultural. And in its way, it’s very Christ-like.
So for a bunch of reasons grounded in theology and of course grounded in their own history and their church regards the US Constitution as a divinely inspired document. It’s not scriptural, but it’s inspired. They have developed a civic theology that is a theology about how Jesus wants Christians to act in the spheres of politics, social media, that kind of thing, of the theology of patience, negotiation and mutual accommodation. Not to walk in the door giving up on your values, not compromising on your values, but entering the civic realm, looking for ways to expand the space, to reduce the conflict.
And they’ve not only talked the talk about that, they’ve walked the walk with several remarkable pieces of legislation, one in Utah and then another in the United States Congress, which protected LGBT rights and same-sex marriage while also in significant ways, I think landmark ways actually, expanded religious liberty for churches like themselves, which do not approve of homosexuality and same-sex marriage. And they see that rightly as a win for everybody. It allows gay people like me to be married in civil law while allowing Latter-day Saints and Christians like them to not be part of that.
And this is all grounded in… It goes way back into their theology. It’s super interesting. So some people said to me, “Don’t even put that in the book because they’re not Christians. They’re the last people that evangelicals will see as a positive example.” But I ignore that advice.
I’m not saying that people have to become Latter-day Saints. And the book also includes examples of Christians who are doing thinking along similar lines, but it’s an example of how a faith can be conservative and demographically, predominantly white and countercultural and distinctive while still viewing it as part of its mission in the world to get along with others and share the country.
And I also argue that in the core teachings of Jesus himself, the three core teachings of Christians say, those are, “Don’t be afraid. Imitate Jesus. And forgive each other,” you have the core elements of Madisonian liberalism. “Don’t panic if you lose an election. Protect minorities and the dignity of every individual. And don’t seek retribution if you win. Share the country.” If you do those things, that’s what the founders want you to do.
So all I’m saying is, look, if the Mormons can do this, so can you guys. It’s right there in your scripture. Everything that you need to heal the country and maybe the church is right there in your scripture. So I kind of feel like when Gandhi was asked what he thought of Western civilization, he said it would be a good idea. So wouldn’t Christianity be a good idea right now?
I was out there in Salt Lake City and I was talking to some political scientists and people like that at BYU and saying that in a way, what the Latter-day Saints are doing is setting up an opposite pole to Christian nationalism, which is Christian constitutionalism. And they like that idea and they said, “You ought to write that.” And I said, “Well, there’s a reason that I don’t.” I’m looking for a term that describes these core values of liberalism and their relation with Christianity. I don’t think it’s Christian constitutionalism or Christian liberalism. I think that word is Christian. That’s the word. That’s all you need. It’s right there.
Mark Labberton:
Amen. Amen. So take us to the black church, because while you didn’t have time to write about it, it feels like it’s right there in the wings. And had you had more time, there’s so much that could be said. It certainly is a church that has understood itself to be exilic from the beginning. It literally is formed out of a practice of slavery that was about forced exile. So tell us about what that would add if you’d had more time and space.
Jonathan Rauch:
Well, I haven’t studied the black church in enough detail. I just didn’t do the work to go much into the church as a whole. But the figure who is missing from my book, who really should be there and maybe will be in the next edition if I’m lucky enough to earn one, is Dr. Martin Luther, Reverend Dr. Luther King, emphasis on Reverend, who was, I think, America’s greatest civic theologian in the 20th century. There’ve been some very important voices in Protestantism.
But King thought deeply about how people in dire need of justice seriously oppressed with every reason for fear and hate and even violence. How do people like that if their Christian approach politics and social change? In other words, how would Jesus do this? And the result is profoundly counterintuitive. But it’s the Jesus answer, which is, you accept the stripes and the crown of thorns. You turn the other cheek and the power of your countercultural example and your moral witness will do the work.
So that’s a direct translation of the principles of the Bible into civic action in the political realm. When you think about it, an extremely daring, risky way, controversial when he did it and still controversial to this day. So that’s the figure who looms here, who is missing, who has so much to teach? I think white Protestants and for that matter, all of us, about Jesus’s way of doing politics. Does that seem right?
Mark Labberton:
It does to me. It’s an example of that counterintuitive teaching, like the kingdom of God is like yeast. It’s the same kind of unexpected from below authenticity of lived evidence of the fruit of a kingdom that is not “of this world,” but is meant to be present in this world.
And I think, again, as we close our conversation, I just want to say, Jonathan, how really grateful I am for this word. You’re a clarion voice. You’re calling the church to itself. You are saying, “Be consistent with the one you claim to follow.” And if you do that, not only will the church be the church and experience its own healing, but also society and culture in America that needs the church to be healthy, for democracy to thrive will be much more likely.
There’s no panacea, there’s no ease to any of this, and you are fully aware of that. But I am so grateful for the way that you’ve articulated these things. And for the challenge, I find it personally as well as the challenge that I find it when I think about the broader landscape. So thank you again and thank you for being both a friend and a guest today.
Jonathan Rauch:
Thank you, Mark. It was a joy to be with you.
