‘I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President,” Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde thundered in January at the newly inaugurated President Trump in the National Cathedral, “on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away, and that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here. Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger.”

Bishop Budde’s rebuke of Trump, who had just issued numerous ex-ecutive orders aiming to stem the swelling tide of illegal immigration, was immediately hailed on the progressive left as a courageous example of speaking truth to power, an unapologetic confrontation of political evil with religious righteousness. Within days, more than 50,000 Episcopalians had signed a petition commending the bishop, asserting that her “direct plea to Donald Trump calling for mercy for our LGBTQ, immigrant, and otherwise marginalized people in America speaks to the greatest commandment: to love our neighbors as ourselves.”

But you didn’t have to be an ardent Trump supporter to appreciate just how tendentious and religiously misguided Bishop Budde’s homily appeared to ordinary Americans and just how poorly faith commitments in the United States have influenced recent public discourse.

This critical topic forms the backbone of Cross Purposes, Jonathan Rauch’s concise and elegant polemic against the deformation of Christianity’s role in American politics. A Brookings Institution fellow, one of the leading non-academic political philosophers in the U.S., and a self-described gay atheist Jew, Rauch applies careful research and incisive prose to examine, diagnose, and prescribe a cure for the maladies afflicting contemporary religious-political dynamics.

“What happens to our liberal democracy if American Christianity is no longer able, or no longer willing, to perform the functions on which our constitutional order depends?” he wonders. “The alarming answer is that the crisis for Christianity has turned out to be a crisis for democracy.” Rauch surveys three varieties of the faith tradition: “thin,” “sharp,” and “thick” Christianity, concluding that only the last offers a plausible path forward.

Regarding “thin” Christianity, Rauch begins by cataloguing the “great dechurching” that has perplexed religious demographers. Only 25 percent of Americans identify as practicing Christians—down half from 2000. In 2021, for the first time, U.S. church membership dropped below 50 percent; some 40 million Americans (16 percent of all adults) who used to attend church no longer do.

During the early 2000s, Rauch rejoiced over what he called “apatheism,” or the apathy that Americans increasingly exhibited toward faith. “Because religion is a source of social divisiveness and volatility,” he writes, “I predicted that apatheism would tone down friction and represented nothing less than a major civilizational advance.” In place of religious contestation, we would see secular comity.

He now regrets just how wrong he was, lamenting that “we see evidence everywhere of the inadequacy of secular liberalism to provide meaning, exaltation, spirituality, transcendence, and morality anchored in more than the self.” Rauch explains how, while liberal theory can furnish answers to many weighty questions—his The Constitution of Knowledge (2021), which I reviewed in these pages,¹ discussed these masterfully—religion can provide profound wisdom about morality and mortality.

Yet Christianity has, alas, turned in another, “sharper” direction. Over the past several decades, evangelicals have embraced a harder-edged, more assertive approach to matters of public import, culminating in widespread support for a twice-divorced, philandering, norm-shattering leader in the form of Trump. As its numbers have slumped, the Christian right has become more combative and less accommodating. “A spiritual outlook has been replaced by a core identity that’s political,” argues Peter Wehner, an evangelical Christian and former speechwriter for President George W. Bush.

Meanwhile, post-liberals, including Catholic integralists and Christian nationalists, have openly espoused and promulgated a deeply flawed alternative that, in Rauch’s view, leans heavily on straw men, catastrophizing, grandstanding, and authoritarianism.

How, then, can robust religious practice enrich the public sphere? Here, Rauch turns to “thick” Christianity, or a pluralistic faith tradition that endows its civic commitments with as much sincerity as its spiritual ones. Quoting a prelate of the Church of Latter-day Saints, Rauch contends that reconciling divine and human obligations can be effected “through patience, negotiation, and mutual accommodation, without judicial fiat or other official coercion.”

Indeed, Rauch highlights the Mormon Church as a paragon, a faith community that actually enshrines the holiness of the U.S. Constitution into its scripture. In 2015, LGBT activists, the LDS church, and elected officials in Utah struck a remarkable bargain that authorized same-sex marriage while ensuring appropriate protections for
religious congregations. The church’s exemplary tradition of community service, up to and including the years that young Mormons invest in missions across the globe, exposes its adherents to a broad spectrum of populations and diverse views while encouraging them to deepen their spiritual commitments. Moreover, the LDS doctrinal emphasis on individual moral agency—rooted in Adam and Eve’s fateful choice to eat from the Tree of Knowledge—provides flexibility and space to tolerate the different ethical choices others make.

And while most Christians are not Mormon, Rauch demonstrates how they can nevertheless adopt an LDS-style posture toward civic obligations and fair-mindedness. Then, too, Rauch argues that secular liberals must redouble their own efforts to accommodate religious practice and belief. After all, “because core Christian principles track closely with core liberal principles, they can be brought into alignment in ways which strengthen both.”

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Two lacunae mar Rauch’s otherwise convincing study. First, he largely neglects to analyze the Christian left and its excesses, in particular its purportedly religious teachings that, like Bishop Budde’s sermon, have become nearly indistinguishable from an orthodox progressive policy platform. What Rauch calls the right-wing “Church of Fear” has an authoritarian counterpart on the religious left, whose views on open borders are, to put it mildly, not universally embraced.

Second, in correctly castigating the immodesties of the Christian right, at times he incorrectly pinpoints the wrong predicate. Specifically, he argues that “liberalism embodies these same principles of intrinsic moral worth and equality” and argues that we should not “blame the secular world for the path conservative Christians have chosen.”

But in supporting leaders like Trump, evangelicals are not abjuring liberalism or “the secular world” per se. Instead, they’re fighting back against an aggressive and misbegotten progressive understanding of what liberalism is, yoked to a cultural hegemony that ruthlessly reinforces it. In the face of extreme activism broadly unpopular with the American public—an obtuseness that begat the current rightward “vibe shift,” which swept Trump back into office—people of faith have themselves, grudgingly but understandably, forged political alliances that ordinary circumstances could never justify. In fact, even Rauch’s beloved Mormon community supported Trump in 2024 by a two-to-one margin.

Still, Rauch’s alarming prognosis is as important and necessary as his fervent hope that “thick” religiosity can enhance both faith and politics. As John Adams famously wrote, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

^{1 “Discourse Dysfunction,” September 2021}

Photo: Getty Images

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