Christianity's "broken bargain" with democracy

In Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy, journalist Jonathan Rauch argues that American Christianity is in crisis...

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...

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...

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.”...

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...

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.

“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...

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