Moral Agency and Sustainable Liberalism: Rauch’s Proposed Liberal-Christian Alliance

Editors’ Note: This is Part I of a two-part essay.

What is the right or the best way for Christians to live in a non-Christian world? How can we, who find ultimate meaning and hope in a source of truth beyond scientific demonstration or democratic construction, best serve a country and a community that increasingly disdains our faith and the moral understanding that faith supports? In a new book, Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy, Jonathan Rauch, a candid atheist, proposes a mutually beneficial alliance between Christianity and secular liberalism. His proposal includes a surprising appeal to members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) to join his efforts to cement a new liberal-Christian friendship and a still more surprising appeal to other Christians to model their political theologies on the Latter-day Saint understanding of “agency.”  

While the latter strategy seems an unlikely way to engage theologically serious Protestants or Catholics, it is undeniable that the LDS-directed appeal has met with some early signs of success among some members of the Utah-based faith. More generally, Rauch’s ideas interest us insofar as their reception is symptomatic of a psychological and sociological need felt by many Christians. For believers eager to have a voice in a secular liberal society or simply to find peace and a home in such a society, and thus to avoid dispiriting “polarization,” Rauch’s appeal appears to resonate with a surprising power. 

While the author’s efforts are in the end of no great significance either in terms of political philosophy or of Christian theology, they do provide a telling case study of the problem of Christianity and secular liberalism as we are living it today. Rauch’s fledgling reflections on the status of “agency” in Christianity can prompt a serious return to the perennial problem, both practical and theological, of how best to interpret and conserve the moral liberty that liberalism, at its best, has fostered. Engagement with Rauch’s argument may thus yield lessons for all Christians and for all friends of a sustainable liberalism.

Jonathan Rauch on Christian Politics: “Thin,” “Sharp,” and “Thick”

The resonance of Jonathan Rauch’s appeal for a liberal-Christian friendship has been undeniable among certain members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Rauch received what can only be called a hero’s welcome at Brigham Young University’s Provo, Utah campus last January. (BYU-Provo is the flagship institution of higher education owned and operated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.) Hosted by BYU’s Wheatley Institute, a think tank focused on “the core institutions of family, religion, and constitutional government,” he addressed a packed ballroom of eager listeners to whom were distributed hundreds of free copies of his book. 

This event was prepared, moreover, by a well-organized publicity campaign touting Rauch’s religious outreach, notably in the LDS church-owned daily newspaper, the Deseret News. Many prominent Latter-day Saints were apparently encouraged to receive the suggestion of the nationally prestigious journalist and  emphatically avowed atheist (an avowal that is clearly re-affirmed in the book in question) that a certain feature of LDS theology is now crucial to liberalism, precisely because it holds the key (in this atheist’s considered opinion) to what it means to be like Christ. Clearly there is something appealing in Rauch’s proposition that Christianity has “broken its bargain with democracy,” and that LDS theology is somehow best equipped to restore the friendship between Christianity and liberalism. 

Rauch objects to the way that religion and politics have gotten mixed up together in contemporary politics. But he is by no means arguing that they should be completely separate. Whereas he once thought the best way to deal with the religion and politics question was to require a strict “separation between church and state,” he now sees this approach as simplistic and inadequate. The problem today is that religion (in particular the former majority belief, which Rauch labels “white Protestantism”) is bound up with politics in the wrong way. This is what he calls “sharp,” that is, politicized, partisan, divisive, even “secularized” Christianity. His aim is to promote what he considers the right way of “aligning” religion and politics. This depends upon the active social and political role of what he calls “thick” Christianity.

“Sharp,” the reader will have guessed, is bad: “sharp Christianity” is conservative white Protestantism. It is “sharp” because it has been politicized in a conservative way. “Thick” Christianity is good, because it adds moral substance to liberalism but without adding anything “illiberal.” 

But let us start where Rauch starts, that is, with the political and religious developments that set the stage for the rivalry between versions of Christianity that he labels “thin,” “sharp,” and “thick.” Rauch defines the “thinning” of Christianity, not with reference to its doctrinal substance or salvific power (in which of course he, as an atheist, has no intrinsic interest), but in relation to the requirements of liberal democracy. He seems to feel no need to spare the religious sensibilities of the “thick” Christian allies he is courting. Since he regards the normalizing and constitutionalizing of “gay marriage” as an irreversible “advance of enlightened secular values,” as a matter of the “very real social and moral progress” of “secular culture,” there is no question of opening a conversation with those traditional Christians who are obviously on the wrong side of history. “I am not on board,” he plainly confesses, “with those who hanker for a time when ‘morality,’ ‘faith,’ and ‘tradition’ gave cover to oppression, superstition, and dogma.” The scare quotes make it clear enough how little interest the author has in engaging a conversation with any who might still harbor any sympathies with an old-fashioned, let us say “pre-liberal” understanding—Tocqueville’s understanding, for example, of Christianity’s moral contribution to liberalism. 

In any case, Rauch does not hesitate to ridicule the idea of a personal God, a “big Father in the sky,” though he then recounts how he learned to recognize a possibility he had as a youth found oxymoronic, that is, the existence of “a good Christian.” And so Rauch is willing to relativize his atheism, his allergy to the idea of the “big Father,” as a kind of idiosyncratic “color-blindness.” Still, he shows no signs of hesitating in his atheistic commitment: “faith is a part of the human experience in which I do not share.” It is from this standpoint that he proposes to instruct the reader on the true, operative meaning of Christianity in American society today.

Having outgrown his earlier, simplistic strict separationist understanding of the relationship between Christianity and liberalism, Rauch explains that he is now ready to acknowledge that liberal democracy needs a kind of Christianity ready to “align itself” with liberalism. Here, in an apparent concession to Christian sensibilities, he insists on a rather careful distinction between “aligning” and “supporting:” “religion’s job is not to support republican government,” but rather to stabilize it by teaching virtue. But then, in apparent disregard for this fine distinction, Rauch goes so far as to cite George F. Will’s 1984 “classic book Statecraft as Soulcraft: the businesses of making public laws and shaping public morals are inevitably interwoven” (my emphasis). This formulation is indeed very far removed from a “strict separationist” sensibility. But how can religion “align” itself with liberalism, even be “interwoven” with it, in the task of shaping the souls of citizens without at some level in or some way “supporting” Rauch’s liberal (that is, atheistic and “scientific”) understanding of truth and of humanity?

Rauch’s Rational Liberalism

Rauch defines liberalism by the belief that all human beings are free and equal, that the people are sovereign, or, rather, that no one is “in charge,” because society is governed not by rulers but by rules. We are thus asked to believe that the “rules” we must follow favor no class of persons and are absolutely neutral with respect to contending views of human flourishing, as if a regime of laws, institutions, and regulations could somehow equally honor all possible priorities of the governed. The essential task of “shaping public morals” can apparently be achieved without favoring one or another idea of human meaning. For Rauch, the rules in question include, not only the basic political principles (those of the US Constitution, most notably), but also those of “market capitalism” and of “science.” The rules that are taken to be inherent in this impersonal trinity (rule of law, capitalism, science) represent the institutional framework that accords with the belief (apparently a self-evidently rational truth, independent of any religious foundation) that “all humans are free and equal.”   

It is not clear how the ascendancy of “science” is supposed to align with what appears to be the fundamental ethical truth of freedom and equality. Rauch acknowledges that modern naturalistic science, which sees all reality as finally reducible to the chance motion of blind matter, cannot address the question of the purpose of human existence, and he has no problem understanding himself as a “soulless clump of cells.” But “philosophers and societies” need answers to certain questions, even if Rauch does not, and thus on pragmatic grounds he is ready to accept pragmatically the notion of God as a “philosophical shortcut.” He thus stipulates that societies need some foundational paradigm of knowledge, and he sees the authority of “science” as a bulwark against irrationalism both left and right. Concerning the left, Rauch acknowledges the threat posed by postmodernist and neo-Marxist enemies of reason. As for the right, Rauch warns against MAGA “conspiracy theorists” and “science-deniers,” as well as against those who would promote the direct public relevance of religious beliefs. 

Rauch seems completely untouched by any concern that scientists as human beings themselves be influenced in any way  by partial or partisan views of the truth or driven by motives other than some assumed fusion of pure love of truth and pure benevolence toward humanity—understood, that is, as pure, selfless commitment to the ideals, mysterious in their origin and foundation, of freedom and equality. 

Rauch’s confidence in the alliance between liberal democracy, market capitalism, and science thus appears quite untroubled.  He imagines our political order, not as a form of moderated democratic self-government, but rather as a regime, or rather a kind of anti-regime, a neutral system, where impersonal rules are sufficient to organize society and where an institutionalized “science” fulfills the whole vocation of reason. Society needs knowledge, he posits; and human beings are admittedly fallible. Therefore we must trust in some supposedly morally neutral, non-partisan, non-religious, and progressive “constitution of knowledge.”

This is Rauch’s portrait of a rational liberal order. The author long considered such an order complete and self-sufficient, and regarded religious beliefs as personal idiosyncrasies that could be tolerated as long as they confined themselves strictly to the private realm. But of late Rauch has seen through the “wall of separation” view of religion in liberal democracy and experienced a kind of religious awakening, by no means an awakening to the truth of religion, but rather to the usefulness of religion (the right kind of religion, to be sure), as a kind of complement to the rational liberalism that defines his own worldview.  

Aligning Christianity with Liberalism

It is clear that Rauch’s stabilizing “alignment” between Christianity and democracy brings with it a certain perspective on ultimate truth, and that any contribution of Christianity must be provided on the terms of the “soulcraft” established by secular liberalism and its purely “scientific” constitution of knowledge. There can be no question, certainly, of secularism’s retreating in the slightest degree from its commitment to the “moral progress” represented by the radical redefinition of marriage, which presupposed a liberation from oppressive “dogma” or “superstition” under the cover of so-called “faith,” “tradition,” and “morality.” 

The progressive-liberationist gains of just the last decade (which depended, it should be noted, not on democratic deliberation or, for that matter, on some impersonal scientific process, but on the dictate of the Supreme Court) must now be considered essential to liberalism itself. The “bargain” that Rauch proposes renewing between Christianity and secular liberalism is very clearly to be negotiated under a post-Obergefell regime.  Still, Rauch is now ready to concede that liberalism needs to “bargain” with Christianity to fill the “God-shaped hole in American life.” He is even prepared to acknowledge that liberalism and religious faith are not only “instrumentally interdependent” but are in fact intrinsically reliant” on each other “to build a morally and epistemically complete and coherent account of the world,” but somehow so as not to compromise in any way the secular and supposedly scientific self-understanding of liberalism.  

It is far from clear how this expression of Rauch’s openness to religion is to be squared with his modern natural-scientific understanding of liberalism’s “constitution of knowledge,” not to mention his personal self-satisfaction as an atheist and “soulless clump of cells.” Clearly, Rauch has his work cut out for him in proposing a version of Christianity that will “align” with his post-Obergefell liberalism, and even contribute to its “soulcraft,” but without conjuring any of the dogmatism and superstition of Christianity’s past. Rauch seeks a Christianity that will somehow complete liberalism in practice, but without interfering in any substantial way with its “scientific” epistemology or with its “progressive” understanding of “freedom” and “equality.”

Rauch proposes to explain the necessary “alignment” of liberalism and Christianity by reference to the four existential questions to which “most people” feel the need for answers. These he presents in the form of a mnemonic, that is, the “four M’s:” mortality, morality, murder, and miracles. Rauch’s own blithely reductionist nineteenth-century view of the “strictly scientific” account of humanity is that “[a]ll of our loves, hopes, and fears are the result of chance combinations of organic molecules.”  

As a “scientific materialist,” Rauch admittedly has no answer to this rather dreary, if not desperate, vision, but somehow, he claims, this really is not very much a problem for him. But, happily, for others less “weird” than himself, “in those moral and spiritual areas which science cannot reach, we are just as entitled to accept the guidance of faith as to reject it.”  After all, we need some answer to the central question of Plato’s Republic:  why should we be just, or do the right thing, even when we know we can get away with doing what society considers “wrong”? Rauch is willing to admit that, for now, secular thinking cannot provide a foundation to morality.  Neither can Christianity, really, he thinks, but it cheats with its talk of “God” in a way that can provide a necessary service to a secular liberal society. So, despite the fact that the belief in God “breaks the universe” or completely short-circuits any rational stance toward existence, Rauch is willing to befriend Christians, or, rather, to accept their friendship, in order to bolster the moral basis of liberalism.  Apparently, Rauch sees this need as temporary, since he has faith in scientific reason in the long term, that is, faith in the wholesome “directionality” of “secular thinking,” in the “objective advance of moral knowledge” on the basis of “reason.” Meanwhile, along the way to this “objective” moral knowledge, Rauch would have us follow the rules of his scientific Constitution of Knowledge (capitals in the original), which requires us to take our public bearings from “a coherent, reliable, and socially adjudicable account of the material world” (my emphasis).

In Rauch’s view, both secular liberalism and Christianity are insufficient to guide and sustain human society. Both involve a certain faith in the eventual vindication of one or another view of reality and human meaning. But the Christian faith can have no independent public standing, since it is in the end a delusion that requires the positing of an unknowable “God.” Faith in the secular Constitution of Knowledge, based ultimately on a materialist view of reality and of humanity, has proven to be shareable and reliable. Thus only secular and scientific materialism can provide the basis of a shared and publicly authoritative understanding of reality. Christianity can support the authority of secular liberalism by supporting its attendant morality with stories concerning “God.” 

In Rauch’s vision of a partnership between liberalism and Christianity, there can thus be no question who the senior partner is. Adopting a liberal strategy that in its essentials is at least as old as John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration, Rauch invites a moral and political alliance with a version of Christianity for which the moral essentials are for all practical purposes the same as those of secular liberalism. Any additional moral beliefs that Christianity might bring to the partnership would thus be tolerated insofar as these do not conflict with the certified secular interests of society, that is, the interests of the individual understood as a material and yet somehow self-owning or autonomous being.

Political Christianity, Good and Bad

While still on the path toward this secular “moral knowledge,” however, Rauch acknowledges a “cultural trade deficit” resulting from religion’s failure to answer liberalism’s need for religious support. Religion in America, in particular, the religion of American white Protestants, has failed to keep its part of the implicit bargain between Christianity and constitutionalism that has sustained us so far. Rauch dismisses the possibility that secular liberal elites might have violated the terms of this bargain by, say, espousing and imposing a worldview incompatible with Christianity. The critique of contemporary liberalism from the standpoint of more conservative Christianity and a traditional moral framework is nothing but a “straw man” argument. The notion of a legal attack on Christianity is fanciful. American Christians are the least persecuted in world history; even the Supreme Court is on their side. Still, Rauch concedes that there is some truth in the conservative complaint that cultural elites have long been waging war on morally conservative believers. “That is true to an extent,” he avers, even granting that “America’s secular culture has been adversarial to conservative Christian values . . . [and] has been aggressive and successful in moving the Overton window in its direction, especially on cultural issues.” 

Obviously, as he confesses, this profound transformation has been massively beneficial to homosexuals like himself, “and we don’t apologize.” But none of this counts for much as a grievance, because the elite warfare is motivated not by their adversaries’ Christianity, but by their conservatism. In any case, although Rauch might be willing to admit that some degree of partisanship and political activism on the part of “white evangelicals” might be considered acceptable, the decisive practical point for us here and now is this: “Absolutely nothing about secular liberalism required white evangelicals to embrace the likes of Donald Trump.”

All that is needed to overcome the illiberal temptation of some Christians is for them to understand their Christianity as perfectly compatible with liberalism as Rauch understands it, that is, post-Obergefell liberalism. Thus, rather than engaging any non-liberal moral or political propositions (say, for example, the question of the conception of sexuality and of the family most conducive to human well-being) on their merits, Rauch warns of “sharp” Christianity’s vague, incoherent, baseless and authoritarian “catastrophism” that evokes the specter of the Inquisition, of pogroms, and of the Crusades. 

Rauch explicitly invites Christianity to partner with liberalism, or with a certain liberalism, yet, at the same time, he diagnoses the problem with Christianity as resulting from succumbing to the temptation to be “political.” But has Christianity ever been simply “apolitical?” How might one even conceive of a Christian worldview without political implications, without a stake in the fundamental direction of our country? Rauch is well aware that American Christianity’s self-understanding has always been bound up with fundamental political questions. But his view of religion’s purpose is that it “works best when it adapts to meet the needs of real people.”   

Speaking “for many gay and Jewish Americans, and also many women and for the matter Christians,” Rauch posits that to be “more Christlike” can be reduced to being “more tolerant,” and, again, more “reality-based.” If “secularization” is understood as being tolerantly reality-based, or, if I may translate, tolerant of emerging social realities that Rauch favors, then of course secularization is a good thing. Thus he credits the mainline churches in the twentieth century with the noble and “well-intentioned gamble” of becoming “the church of social justice,” but recognizes the risk inherent in this strategy, that is, that mainline Protestantism thereby ended up standing for nothing. Religious zeal was diverted into (progressive) politics, which led to the collapse of the “ecumenical churches.” Rauch would love to see a revival of the mainline, with its “noble aspirations,” but given the unlikelihood of such a development, he proposes a renewal of the American alliance of Christianity and liberalism on new terms: Christianity must retreat from politics, except insofar as it forms the personal virtues and attitudes needed to support liberalism. 

Rauch’s quest for religious support for contemporary liberalism bears a striking resemblance to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s finally contradictory wish, at the end of his Social Contract, for a new “civil religion” fashioned for the moral needs of his political ideal of equality and solidarity embodied in a general will. This purely democratic general will excludes all appeal to a higher authority, natural or divine. But it needs the support of a religion just religious enough to motivate obedience to the laws, yet not so religious as to pose any threat to a tolerant and agnostic civility.  

To promote his new liberal civil religion, Rauch ventures to “skate out on thin ice” by lecturing Christians about their faith, the same faith that he regards as an appalling short-circuiting of reason.  Rauch proposes that Christianity, reconceived as the perfect ally of liberalism, should be defined by three injunctions: “Don’t be afraid. Imitate Jesus. Forgive each other.” These mantras are the key to reversing the tendency of American evangelicalism to become conservative and thus “antithetical to authentic Christianity.” And they all reduce, it is clear, to one negative injunction: Don’t try to win in the political realm! Let it go, forget the culture war, and focus on eternity, while accommodating the unquestionable reality of the emergent new society that Rauch so values. 

Rauch is indeed amazingly open in his pleading with Christians to abandon all hope of substantial participation as Christians in public life. Rather than seeking “dominion,” he proposes, they should have an attitude of “exile.” “Can conservative white Protestantism make its peace with exilic life?” he asks. Rauch’s solicitude for the spiritual purity of his cultural rivals is touching. And here again, Rauch follows in a long line of liberal political theorists, going all the way back to John Locke, who argue: you Christians say there is another world. Well, we’ll concede that world to you, just do not interfere with our rational management of this world. 

Rauch makes a fair and important point about Christianity and politics that we should pause to appreciate. Certainly it is true that believers should strive to adopt a perspective of eternity, to trust in God’s grace and his providence. There is no doubt that politics can loom too large in the concerns of some Christians and can even become the object of a fanatical idolatry. Trump-adoration, where it exists, is a case-in-point. The fact that Rauch would be happy to endorse a partisan Christianity that embraced his partisan liberal understanding of justice should not prevent us from accepting his warning against the political “thinning” of Christianity on the political right. What should concern us is the speciousness of his invitation to adopt his supposedly apolitical interpretation of Christianity, one that just happens to hit the sweet spot of his post-Obergefell progressive (but perhaps not by post-2015 standards “radical”) political vision. Christians should not need a confirmed atheistic progressive to tell them that God’s love and their eternal souls are much more important than whatever controversies are roiling our political world today. At the same time, it would be foolish for Christians to accept Rauch’s assurance that there is nothing at stake in today’s political controversies that bears on fundamental moral and religious concerns. 

“Don’t be afraid. Imitate Jesus. Forgive each other.” While subject to interpretation, these injunctions certainly deserve a place in any Christian worldview. Still, Rauch must strain even the most expansive credulity when he proposes that this Christian essence coincides with what he takes to be James Madison’s pluralistic politics of “negotiation.” In any case, it should be clear that for serious Christians, “don’t be afraid” cannot mean: don’t worry, the ruling media, academic, and political elites can be trusted to serve your interests as a Christian citizen. “Imitate Jesus” may be interpreted, according to Rauch’s modest suggestion, as recognizing the “equal intrinsic worth” of each human person, but certainly not, for an actual, serious Christian, in the relativistic and liberationist sense understood by today’s left. “Forgive each other” indeed implies civility and a degree of forbearance in the public realm, but whether a Christian disposition to forgive translates into a readiness to “compromise” must depend on what is to be compromised and what are the available practical options.   

To see the tendentiousness of Rauch’s “Christian” appeal for “negotiation,” it is sufficient to consider whether the author would care to “renegotiate” the recent and thoroughly radical redefinition of marriage that is so central to his conception of liberal justice.

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