Lines must be drawn

Crosspurposes: Christianity's broken bargain with democracy by Jonathan Rauch

This is a strange book. Someone -- don't remember who -- must have recommended it. I needed distraction while Democrats were failing us in DC yesterday, so I rushed through it.

Mr. Rauch is at pains, repeatedly, to express his diffidence about commenting on American Christianity -- after all, he's gay, Jewish, and a non-believer in all things religious. And he should be diffident. This book, purportedly about American Christianity, contains nothing about Catholics, nothing about the Black church, nothing about Latino religiosity, and darned little to suggest there are any women in the mix. He gives mainline Protestantism a once-over-lightly, rushing on to center white evangelical Protestantism. (Actually membership in the mostly white mainline denominations is about the same percentage of white Christians as the percentage of white evangelicals; he falls into the common journalistic fallacy of substituting the latter for the whole.)

His impetus for the book seems to be that Rauch has concluded that secular liberalism and some sort of Christianity need each other within American democracy -- and that white evangelical Protestantism has gone off the rails, transforming itself into a regressive political force. Well, duh!

He calls this situation a "cultural trade deficit."

Sometimes Christian America [he means white evangelical Protestantism] and secular America can rub along merely leaving each other alone. But sometimes they come into conflict; and when they do, they have positive obligations to make room for each other. ... Their bargain requires that the Constitution be interpreted in a way that is consistent with the well-being of democratic pluralism. The bargain is implicit, but America depends upon it nonetheless.

... America's demonstration that a country can be both devout and diverse, secular and spiritual, has been a historic achievement and a gift to the world. ... But the religious side has been less and less able to uphold its end of the bargain. ... A result is what I think of as a cultural trade deficit.  

... Look at it this way. Secular liberalism certainly promotes important values: tolerance, lawfulness, civic responsibility, equality, and so forth. But they are primarily procedural values, which orient us to follow certain rules. The legitimacy of those rules must come largely from outside of secular liberalism itself ... in practice, that has meant relying on Christianity to support the civic virtues. So we atheists rely on Christianity to maintain a positive balance of trade: we need it to export more moral values and spiritual authority to the surrounding culture than it imports. If, instead the church is in cultural deficit -- if it becomes a net importer of values from the secular world -- then it becomes morally derivative rather than morally formative. Rather than shaping secular values, it merely reflects them and thus melts into the society around it. ...

Yes -- one subset of Christians has replaced the way of the uppity itinerant peasant murdered by a vicious empire (that's Jesus) with the worship of Emperor Donnie. Many others, Christian and not-Christian, merely try to keep their heads down and wonder what became of values like decency, generosity, honesty and kindness.

Rauch gives an affirmative nod to the bargain Mormon officialdom has made with the existence of LBGT+ people in Utah. It's certainly interesting and better than what passes for a moral order in Texas -- or in the White House. I wish he had talked with someone other than the higher-ups of the Mormon church; at least in days past, LGBT people and anyone who was not a Mormon have often felt repressed where the Church of the Latter Day Saints sets the rules. Yet movement in the direction of pluralism must be good.

A strange book. I find it too confused to recommend -- and I feel confident that the confusion is not mine but Rauch's.

We live in a time when lines are being drawn. Confusion is a luxury. Evil is afoot. On the one side, the billionaires. On the other, everyone else and democracy and equality.  Once upon a time in this country, the moral evil which had to be repudiated was slavery. Today the lie which must be repudiated is that acquiring billions of dollars should give license to a few to rule the many.

That goes for Christians in all our diversity, for believers in other traditions, and for those who find their values through other sources.