Jonathan Rauch’s Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy (Yale University Press, 2024) is both an apology and an apologia. It’s an apology to a dear Christian friend whose beliefs he once scorned, and it’s an apologia, or defense, of the role of Christianity in public life, a position that as a lifelong atheist he finds himself surprised to hold.
This short book is based on lectures that Rauch, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, gave at the University of Virginia, but it begins with a prologue called “The Dumbest Thing I Ever Wrote,” which comes in the form of a letter to his former college roommate. “Dear Mark,” Rauch begins the book, “In hindsight, there should have been a Neil Simon play about us. Heck, maybe there was.” As freshman roommates at Yale, they were an odd couple. “I, a scrawny Jew from Phoenix; you, a tall, broad-shouldered Christian from Chicago. I, a lefty Naderite who railed against the evils of monopolistic corporate power; you, a National Review reader who thrilled to the presidential aspirations of George H.W. Bush.”
They had been placed together because they had both indicated on their rooming forms a love of classical music. They also clearly shared, although Rauch does not put it this way, a love of ideas, books, the life of the mind. All in all, a successful rooming match. They became lifelong friends. Which is why Rauch feels even more sheepish that he was so disdainful of Mark’s deep faith. What he once buried, he now comes to praise.
It’s not that Rauch has found faith—far from it. He holds fast to his atheism. But in his years as a journalist and commentator—and he’s one of our best—he has come to believe that the common project of religion served as a necessary glue for the civil society whose decline, most of us would agree, has become such a pressing concern.
The decline of religion is real, and it’s consequential. How real? Only a quarter of Americans are practicing Christians, half as many as twenty-five years ago; almost half of Americans attend church less than once a year, compared to 17 percent in the Nixon years; eighty-six churches are closing, on net, every week; and 42 percent of pastors have considered quitting their jobs in the past year. How consequential? Rauch looks at the negative trends that have accompanied the collapse of church life and argues that the trends are linked. Not only has the percentage of Americans saying religion is “very important” declined substantially in the last quarter century, but so have the percentages of Americans who say that patriotism, community involvement, and having children are important. “What value tested by pollsters rose in importance over the period? Just one: making money.”
Of course, correlation is not causation, and it may be coincidental that as people go to church—or synagogue, or mosque—less, they also see less value in love of country, or in other kinds of community involvement. Or some other, unknown factor could be influencing these trends. Off the top of my head, one candidate might be suburbanization, which makes it harder for people to get to their houses of worship and to their Masonic lodges, bowling alleys, YMCAs, softball fields, and League of Women Voters meetings. Maybe we’re not losing associative life because we are abandoning religion, but we’re losing associative life for the same reasons we are abandoning religion.
Except that suburbanization is nearly a century old–we’ve been living with car culture since World War II, give or take—and the collapse of religious life, and all these other kinds of meaning-making, social activities, has really hastened in the last couple decades. One could dig deeper into the statistics than Rauch does by noting that church attendance peaked around 1960, then began a slow decline. Feelings like patriotism, or a preference for having children, have only begun to crash more recently. I suspect that, drawing on demographics and survey data, one could sustain Rauch’s intuition that it was Christianity, or Christendom, an American- and Christian-inflected civil religion, that held it all together.
Of course, one could look for yet more causes—it will be decades before social scientists accurately scrutinize all the ways the internet, smartphone, and social media have devastated the culture. But Rauch argues, and I think he is right, that the loss of church life, and of the para-church organizations that attended it (youth groups, singles clubs, ladies’ auxiliaries, etc.), has been uniquely costly. “My younger self acknowledged the social benefits of religious participation,” Rauch writes, “but imagined that other institutions and pursuits could substitute, an assumption which proved wrong as an empirical matter.”
Even worse, when religion recedes, it doesn’t leave nothing in its place—it leaves really bad things. “Because the quest for spirituality and religion is deeply human,” he writes, “it is insistent. We need commitments to something larger than ourselves, communities rooted in more than transactional gains, truths which transcend time and place, and missions worth fighting for; and if we do not find them in institutional religion, we will look elsewhere.” Drawing on Tara Isabelle Burton’s 2020 book Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World, Rauch catalogues all sorts of idiocy that have flourished in the vacuum left by religion: “wellness culture, occultism, wicca, radical social justice (‘wokeness’), the New Age, techno-utopianism, the alt-right, and more. Q-Anon, MAGA’s cultic cousin, comes complete with its own prophet, eschatology, and redemptive mission—all twisted into a grimacing, politicized caricature of religion.”
Not only has the percentage of Americans saying religion is “very important” declined in the last twenty-five years, but so have the percentages of Americans who say that patriotism, community involvement, and having children are important. “What value tested by pollsters rose in importance over the period? Just one: making money.”
Rauch is utterly persuasive that these pseudo-, crypto, and neo-religions are, on the whole, a sign of a society that lacks better things to do, let alone higher callings. (If anything, he is perhaps too nice on this count. The column I had to write, ten years ago, about CrossFit as religion nearly destroyed my faith in humanity—try talking to a CrossFit obsessive who sincerely believes that her CrossFit buddies will be there when she is postpartum, or if she gets cancer, or when she dies.) But he is on shakier ground when he tries to explain religion’s positive good. What was it about Christian culture circa, say, 1957—when it was, of course, more patriarchal, more racist, and more homophobic—that made it so conducive to uniting people around love of country, community, and family?
Rauch’s answer seems to be that it was simply the right key for the Constitution’s lock; something about our country made it well-suited for, and needful of, a Christian culture. He quotes the Christian ethicist David Gushee, who writes, “This [Christian] religious, moral, and political background filled in much of the moral substance that was intentionally left out of liberal democratic constitutional documents. The kinds of people required to operate these new democratic systems—to govern well, to vote wisely, to debate civilly, to write good laws, to live with minimal state supervision—were produced by already-existing moral communities that inculcated moral virtues, values, and vision.”
I think this is mostly right, although I would frame it a bit differently, and more simply. It’s not that church made people more moral, but it taught them how to get along. We know, from decades of rich data, that very religious people, and churchgoers, are no less likely to commit adultery or watch pornography (to pick two indices) than the secular or unchurched. But communities with the old, strong church culture are, I think, less likely to engage in petty disputes, to see feuds among neighbors, or, well, to devolve into atomism, narcissism, and selfishness.
At my own synagogue, every week, I spend time praying with, then eating lunch with, people whose politics I disagree with. Our views on Israel, like our views on America, are quite diverse. Age-wise, we’re diverse, coming together in a mixed-generation crowd. Several of our congregants are intellectually challenged and live at a nearby residence for such adults. In short, it’s not a stretch to say that, because of my religious congregation, when I vote, I am more likely to think about how that vote will impact old people, young people, disabled people, and people of other political persuasions. It’s three hours every week that civilize me.
Religion keeps our politics from becoming our religion. By seeing Jesus or Judaism, salvation or sin, as the arena of ultimate concern—by singing about it, hearing sermons on it, arguing over it—we refrain from treating politics that way. By talking about real prophets, or at least what a real prophet would look like, we accept that no president is likely to be a prophet, neither Trump nor Obama nor whoever will come next. By going to real worship services, we understand that political rallies are not the proper arena for worship.
Cross Purposes is a short book (always welcome), and it leaves many questions unanswered. For one thing, there are many irreligious countries that have high levels of social trust. They tend to be more homogeneous countries than ours, so is it possible that, say, being Icelandic functions as well as being Christian? That living in a monoculture is, in some ways, beneficial? And what of the content of Christianity—is it uniquely suited to a self-governing people, or would any religion do? Democracy has not flourished as well in Islamic lands, or for that matter in Buddhist ones, as it has in Christian Europe or North America—is this the fault of colonialism, of mineral wealth and kleptocracy, or of the religious texts that the people hold dear?
The biggest question for me is what all this reckoning means for Rauch, the Jewish atheist. Can we expect to see him at shul any time soon? I ask not to play gotcha, but because people like him—educated, affluent, center-left—were the first out the door, and are today among the least churched in our country. If he is recommending a return to religion, is he recommending it even to his fellow elites, whose communities and family lives have remained relatively intact, even during the great unchurching? Or is it simply Mass for the masses? I don’t think he would be so cynical, but nor do I think he has a good answer. Just a very good book.