There has been an immense, gaping hole in Christianity for lack of a fully articulated civic theology. And in the absence of a civic theology of how Christians should address our common culture and politics, there has been the inrush of all these other forces we've seen–such as toxic polarization and partisanship.
The core of this book is–I describe it as two mistakes and a correction.
So I guess we'd better start with the mistake.
That's me, age 16. A good example of why we're all happy not to be 16. At that point in my life, I already knew, and had for some years, that I did not believe in God. I never have, I’m a lifelong atheist. I was Jewish. I am Jewish. And I also knew there was something profoundly different about me because I was in love with boys at my age. At that point, I didn't know what to call it. But something that I did know was that I was marked as an outcast from the prominent and predominant faith of my country, Christianity. I knew because anyone who turned the radio dial on their car radio on a Sunday morning knew that people like me were a stench in the nostrils of God, that God hated us, wanted us to change, and thought we were sinners and outright sick. I believed, at age 16, that Christianity was a home of bigotry, hypocrisy, and cruelty. And I have to tell you, standing here tonight, sometimes it was, and sometimes it still is.
That's where I was coming from when I met that man. That's Mark McIntosh–we were thrown together as college roommates. These are four of us from my freshman year suite in college. Mark was a profoundly devout Episcopal, and he was the first Christian I was ever exposed to who not only talked the talk, but walked the walk. He was a brilliant guy, but also a person of great humility and compassion. Of course, he had a temper, of course he could lash out, but this was the first time I saw someone modeling what Christianity could mean. And that set me on a journey which led, over time, to a change in attitude and change in understanding. But, unfortunately, not enough of a change in attitude. This is an article I wrote for The Atlantic in 2003, and it is officially–wait for it–the dumbest thing I ever wrote. This article celebrated the rise of secularism in America. I called it apathy-ism. People not caring about God one way or the other. I said “I believe that the rise of apathy-ism is to be celebrated as nothing less than a major civilizational advance. Religion remains the most divisive and volatile of social forces. Apathy-ism is not a lapse. It is an achievement.” Now, the context is, in 2015 I wrote in The Atlantic that Donald Trump would never be president. This is dumber.
I thought in 2003 that as religion–which in America means predominantly Christianity, which means predominantly white Protestantism–as it faded from view, as people became less invested in Christianity, more secular, that we would turn into a kind of Scandinavia. Religion is a divisive force. So we'll get along better. We'll be more enlightened. Isn't this a nice thing? Well, what I did not know was that in 2003, when I wrote those words, we were embarking on exactly that experiment. For the last 20 years–and, folks, this is a recent phenomenon. This is all in the last 15 or 20 years–we've been embarking in America on an unprecedented wave of secularization and a collapse or near collapse of Christianity as we've known it. So, in this chart, you see the number of adults–it's the red line–never attending religious services. This is overwhelmingly Christianity we're talking about, of course. That number grows from 44 million to 85 million. 40 million people over the course of only 14 years. That's more people leaving religion than entered during all three of the Great Awakenings.
This chart is from Gallup. This shows the percentage of people who are church members among U.S. adults. And what you can see there–this goes back to the 1940s, and you see right through the end of the 20th century this number is more or less stable. It declines a little bit, but not very much. It hovers around 70% of the population. And that's why when I was growing up as a kid, it was routine to ask people when you met them, not “what job do you have,” “what school did you go to,” “where are you from?” You might ask those things, but at least as commonly, you would ask “what church do you belong to?” Well, you can see what happens to this line starting in 2000. It drops like a rock. So that by 2020, only 47% of Americans are church members–fewer than half. Here's what's happened to Christianity specifically. This is Pew data. What you see here is, in 2007, 78% of Americans identify as Christians. Only 14 years later, that's down to 63%. That's a 15 point drop in 14 years, a percentage point a year. We've never seen anything like that. Where are they going? You can see that in the other line. No religion. That's up from 16 points to 29 points. That's 13 points. Now, I want you to focus first on white mainline Evangelical Protestants. You should be able to see that trend. It's circled at either end of the line. What we're looking for here is the blue line–17.8% of Christians are white mainline Protestants, and that drops over these last 20 years to about 13%. So that's a drop, but we all knew that the mainline churches are caving in. That's a 20th century story. What's different is what you see here. That top line there, that's white Evangelical Protestants. And what you see is what's happened over the same period: they have followed the same trajectory as the mainline churches and wound up at the exact same place at the bottom of that curve. They, too, are only 13% of the population.
Only 20 years ago, the story was that the mainline churches are bleeding out, but the Evangelical churches–which are more scripturally focused, and more countercultural and hard-edged, and giving people more of a reason to be Christian–are thriving. Folks, that is yesterday's newspaper. That is not what's happening anymore. Those churches, white Evangelicals, are caving in too. Where are they going? This is people unaffiliated with any religion at all. The so-called “nones”. This is now America's predominant faith. That's over a quarter of the population. Well, I was supposed to love this, right? Whoopee! Great news. Well, I picked a few variables at random. You've seen all of this data yourself. I am the first to agree that for what I'm about to show you, a lot of things happened at the same time. This is not all about the decline of religion. You had the coming of cell phones, and you had over-parenting, and social media, and all the things people talk about. But it can't be a coincidence that, for example, over the same period you see this rapid increase in mental health problems.
This is the number of “not good” mental health days. And you can see there, that top line, the red line. That's people 18 to 25–look at that spike. Here's the Surgeon General's Report in 2023, “Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation.” Here's what was going on at exactly the same period that we saw the collapse of Christianity. Social isolation, up, social engagement with friends, down–way down. Social engagement with others, down. Companionship, down. I pulled those at random. There's pages of that stuff. And it's dangerous, it's really bad for you. The surgeon general says lacking social connection is as dangerous as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.
And here's something else I didn't anticipate. Setting aside health, mental health, and everything else, another development in that same period is this. This is what political scientists call affective polarization. We've always been a society that's been divided on policy, you know, taxes too high, too low, government too big, too small, foreign policy, intervene, don’t, you know, all that stuff. Abortion, whatever. This is different. This is the percentage of people who hate and fear the other side. That's not about issues. This has skyrocketed, just in recent years, to these levels like we have never seen before. These charts are from Pew. Again, they're typical, there's lots of stuff like this. The percentage of people saying that the other party is “closed-minded” has risen 69% and 83%. That's Democrats and Republicans. Dishonest: 64%, 72%. Immoral: 63%, 72%–up from only six years earlier, numbers that were below 50.
Again, ladies and gentlemen, there's no precedent for this in American life. And the problem with affective polarization is that it's not transactional. You can't negotiate it away. It's one thing if you disagree with the other side, then maybe you can work things out. But if you hate them, if you fear them, if they're a threat to your country, to your very existence, we're in a different world. We're in a world that is, in fact, becoming ungovernable. Well, there are some people who warned us this would happen, and I wish I’d listened to them. Here are three of them: John Adams, George Washington, James Madison. But they all said it; Franklin, Hamilton, some version of this. What you see here are three quotations. You may have heard them. Adams says that the Constitution is “wholly inadequate” to a people that's not “moral and religious.” George Washington, this is from the farewell address: “Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” “To suppose,” this is Madison, “that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people is a chimerical idea.”
What the founders were telling us here is not that this is a Christian nation per se, or that you have to believe in Jesus Christ or any other religion to be a good American. They're making a more subtle point about liberalism, our form of government. Liberalism, the idea that people are created free and equal, gives us the Constitution, which gives us a process for compromising and working things out and dividing power. But the founders understood that those principles are not self-sustaining. They rely on an underlying substrate of what they called “republican virtue.” Virtues like honesty, civility, forbearance, law-abidingness. And they told us those need to come from civil society. That means, for example, family, it means social groups, and it means religion. They expected that religion in America would do a large share of the job of socializing us into the institutions that they gave us to maintain. And they assumed that that would happen. And there's an even deeper reason, I would argue, perhaps even deeper than that, why there have been these consequences of the collapse of Christianity. I happened to come across this–this is just from December. I just thought this was such a beautiful statement by former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who's asking the core question about liberalism.
Angela: “Freedom is something rather difficult, because then, all of a sudden, you have to decide yourself: I'm not only free of something, I'm free for something–free to do something good for society. And my experience is: that makes you happy.”
Our liberal democracy can make us free from tyranny or oppression. But it can't tell us what we're free for. What's our purpose on this planet? Are we more than just a passing clump of cells? And most people, and most societies, need an answer to that question. And what I didn't understand in 2003 was that in the absence of the great church teachings and the communal worship, the prayerfulness, and the shaping of attitudes and souls that go with that–in the absence of that, we would see the rise of substitute religions. There’s a wonderful book about this called Strange Rites by Tara Isabella Burton. It's everything from, you know, Wicca, witchcraft to SoulCycle, DIY religions. But they're very non-institutional. They don't have storied histories of theologies and deep moralities and all the traditions that go with that. And then you've also got political movements that have taken on some of the roles of religion: wokeness–as John McWhorter writes–is one of them. QAnon, I would argue, is another. MAGA has aspects of an idolatrous religion. These things, they have their place, but they are no substitute for the great religious traditions which date back hundreds and thousands of years and are deeply rooted in evolved theologies.
Now, one of the things the book covers, which I won't cover in any detail, is a little bit of defensive action, because there's a whole crew in America right now–they're called postliberals and integralists and other things–that look at the situation and say I'm to blame. “You secular people have created a kind of a kind of tyrannical, all consuming, individualistic, consumeristic, anti-family, anti faith, anti tradition form of liberalism which makes it impossible to be a good Christian or a good religious person in our society. I agree that we in liberal America, consumerist America, have made it difficult to be a Christian. I would submit it has never been easy to be a Christian. I would submit that there's evidence in the Christian Bible that it was not all that easy for Jesus Christ to be a Christian. And I like to quote our friend Ben who says: “When religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not support itself, and God does not take care to support it, so that its professors are obliged to call for help of the civil power, ‘tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad [religion].” The message for my book is: yes, Christianity faces challenges. But if we're going to have an honest conversation about the de-churching of America, it would be helpful to start by Christians looking in the mirror. So, what do we see if we look in the mirror?
Now, I'm an outsider to the church. I hope it's clear that I come from a place of needfulness, a place of respect and love. I hope that's clear in what I'm about to say, but it is a little critical. Here is the trend that we have seen since mid-20th century. Two waves of secularization. The first was in the mainline church which got away from teaching the Bible, got away from doctrine, got away from cultural distinctiveness, and became kind of a lifestyle choice and a political choice about social justice and so forth. Well motivated, but it turned out to be too weak and too secular to maintain. The adherents and followers drifted away into the larger society. But then you had a second wave, and this is the wave that has really hit the white Protestant churches, especially the Evangelical churches. I should say that in what follows, I'm not addressing Catholics. I am addressing white Protestant Evangelicalism. You hunt where the ducks are–that's where the crisis is right now.
What's happened there is a particular form of secularization, which is politicization. Starting in the age of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson in the 1980s, white evangelicals formed a union with the Republican Party. They began to vote Republican. That solidified over time. Here's how that looks. Evangelicals have become more Republican over the last two decades. This is from Gallup data. You can see that steady trend. Here is the Evangelical vote. You can see that it's leaned Republican for many years, going back to the 80s. But starting in the same period we're talking about in this century, it swings over and becomes the most solid Republican voting bloc in presidential elections–80 plus percent.
Here's a really interesting chart. This one's a little tricky to understand, but I will do my best. This is from the religious demographer Ryan Burge, who's the best in the business. So, surveys asked people of different Christian stripes to place themselves on the ideological spectrum, and then also to place the two parties on an ideological spectrum and see how they matched up. And what you can see here in the upper left: that's white evangelicals. They are exactly, precisely in line with the Republican Party. That is not true of any other Christian group. Non-white Evangelicals, Mainlines, white Catholics, non-white Catholics and down there, lower right, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. They have historically been close to Republicans, but look what happens in 2017–they differentiate. I wonder, what happened in 2016-2017? So white Evangelicals stand out, and it's reached the point where Ryan Burge tells us: “Evangelicalism used to be a term that denoted a certain adherence to a specific theology and active engagement in a Protestant community. Now, evangelicalism just means ‘I am a conservative Republican.’ It's become little more than a cultural marker, and has little to do with any type of religious devotion to the teachings of Jesus Christ.”
So, white Evangelicals made a bargain in the 80s, 90s, but especially recently: they made a gamble that they could influence and unite with the Republican Party without the church being equivalently influenced by partisan politics. And it turns out that they were wrong about that. Over the same period when the church has politicized, it has shrunk. We've seen that happen. A lot of people who are there for nonpolitical reasons, who want to hear the gospel preached, have been drifting away, and something else has happened. Others have entered the church not for the message of Jesus Christ, but because it's become part of the partisan conservative brand. Labeling Evangelical is something that denotes who you are.
This is particularly interesting data from Ryan Burge. This is the percentage of non-churchgoing Evangelicals. They identify as Evangelicals but they don't show up. This gives you some idea of the increase, the filtering, into the church. It's changing composition into a less godly type of follower. You can see this goes from 5% in 2008 to about an eighth of churchgoers today. And you can see how that trendline is growing.
So we've seen a change in the composition of the church. We have also seen a change in the attitudes of the church. Here is a poll result you may all have seen–this is super famous, this is from Public Religion Research Institute. In 2011, what this shows is: Christians of different denominations were asked if an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life. This is a little tricky because the answer and the question don't match in terms of whether they're stated negatively or positively. But what this shows is that in 2011, white evangelicals were the Christians in America who most said, were most likely to say, that character is important in an elected official. Only five years later, in 2016, they were the Christians who were least likely to say that character matters in an elected official. Hmm! Again, what happened in 2016?
But here's one that we really should think about, potentially even more. I call it the “Church of Fear.” This is the percentage of people of different religions saying that their religion is “under attack” in America. And you see that two lines in this chart stand out. Now, this is taken in 2023. Two thirds of Jews think their religion is under attack. You may agree with me that in 2023, with what was going on in campuses and elsewhere, Jews had some reason to answer “yes” to that question. But two thirds of Evangelical Christians are also coming from this place of feeling that they are under attack, that they are living in fear. And they're giving answers to this–this is something we've never seen before–people are asked whether they agree that “immigrants entering the country illegally today are poisoning the blood of our country.” As you can see there, there is exactly one Christian denomination that agrees, majority, with that sentiment–and that's white Evangelical Protestants. And you can see that their answer to that question is, perhaps not all that surprisingly, exactly the same as the standard Republican view. So I call this the “Church of Fear.” Here's an example of what it sounds like. This is a pastor named Jim Garlow.
Jim Garlow: “The homosexual movement, the LBGTQ, the transgender movement, is being forced upon–climate change–forced upon us. They’re taking our private property rights, and you'll go to one country after another, they use the same language over and over. Satan is not particularly creative in the way he's operating right now.”
“I assure you, the enemy would love to take this congregation out, and they would get it by going after him. If a pastor will not stand, the people should leave that place.”
There it is. They're coming here, they're coming for you, they're out to get you, be afraid, be very afraid. And he goes on to say, by the way, you should buy my book and you can get a whole case of it on discount.
Here's something else that comes from that. These are promises made by Donald J. Trump in 2016 and 2024, during his campaigns. I picked them at random–he says this again and again, it's his core message to Christians: Christianity will have power. Christianity, “if I'm there, you're going to have plenty of power. You don't need anyone else.” “If I get in, you're going to be using that power at a level that you've never used before.”
Power in the earthly world. That's what he's promising. And what are the implications of the search for power for Christians and Christian doctrine? Well, we don't have to wonder, because his son, Donald Trump Jr, told us.
Donald Trump Jr: “We've been playing T-ball for half a century while they're playing hardball and cheating. Right? We've turned the other cheek, and I understand the biblical reference, I understand the mentality. But it's gotten us nothing, okay? It's gotten us nothing.”
It's gotten us nothing. That guy who died on the cross, what did it get him? What did it get his followers? Have you had it with being a sucker? That's the message we're getting. Well, I'm not here to tell you this in my own voice, I'm an outsider, I get that, I'm being presumptuous. But I've been listening to Christians, and their hearts are wounded by what they're seeing in the church. This is Russell Moore. He is a former senior official at the Southern Baptist Convention, today he's the editor of Christianity Today, wrote a book called Losing Our Religion. It’s a wonderful book. He's one of many Christians, but he makes these points particularly well. He says “The frantic rage we can often display in supposedly protecting ‘Christian’ values might feel like strength, but the world sees it for what it is: fear, anxiety, and lack of confidence. They can also see that it's nothing like the confident tranquility of Jesus.” He goes on to say: “That sense of paralyzing fear can also fuel the loss of the next generation. If the only choices we offer are secularization and paganization, then we shouldn't be surprised that they choose one or the other.”
If the only choices we offer are secularization and paganization, we shouldn't be surprised that they choose one or the other. This is causing not just the diminishment of the church, its witness, and the decline in its membership; It's causing pastoral burnout. The people who like this the least are the pastors. The first wave of politicization came from the pastorate, from big public leaders like Falwell and Robertson. This wave is very different. Pastors are going to church and discovering parishioners are watching, as the pastors say, “we get them for an hour a week if we're lucky, cable news gets them for 12 hours.” The parishioners are bringing that to church and saying, “Our way of life is in danger! We can't afford to lose the battle for our culture, our church needs to get into the culture war, we need to fight, fight, fight!” A pastor I talked to called this a “battlefield mindset.” And this is one of the results of this: this is a poll of pastors conducted a couple of years ago.
42% had given real, serious consideration to quitting full time ministry in the last year. Here's the reasons that they gave.
Being a pastor is a hard job, so the first two reasons are things like “the immense stress of the job” and “I feel lonely and isolated,” but there's number three, third from the top there, “current political divisions.” And I talk to pastors. They want to be preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ. But they dial into their email Monday morning and it's an inbox full of emails saying “What is this ‘turn the other cheek’ garbage?” Very discouraging.
This is the aforementioned Russell Moore, but he's with David French, another Evangelical, he's a New York Times writer now. He’s not clergy, but he makes a point here, which I want you to listen to very closely, because this is the hinge toward the correction that I spoke about earlier.
David French: “The fruit of the spirit are not just tactics to be deployed to win people over. They're the markers of who we are. Okay? And then the last thing I'll say is, you cannot go into the political world and say ‘you know, I know I'm a bit of an ***hole on Twitter, but you should see me in the soup kitchen.’ That's just not the way it works. You can't cabin off parts of your life.”
You can all guess what the bleeped out word is, so you get the message there.
Christianity, like all of the great faiths, is not meant to be something you just do in your immediate environment, in your home, your church, maybe your community. It's meant to be a seamless garment. It's meant to cover all your life. Here is a term that I did not know, I had never been exposed to, until I started work on this book. Raise your hand if you know these terms. Are these part of the Latter day Saint tradition? “Discipleship…” is. “Spiritual formation…” not so much? In the Evangelical world, these basically mean the same thing, and they mean forming your life and your character, in word and deed, in the image of Jesus Christ. Discipleship in Jesus Christ. So here's another breakthrough moment for me. This is something that’s said by Jon Ward. He's a journalist, he was an Evangelical, he recently converted to Catholicism, author of a wonderful book, I can't recommend it too highly: Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Failed a Generation. And here's something he said in a podcast.
Jon Ward: “One of the conclusions I've come to in writing the book that I've finished recently is just that a lot of Evangelical churches do a pretty good job of discipling their members in private virtue or private character, within the family. Yes, there have been scandals and leadership scandals and abuse scandals, but I think broadly, Evangelicals are virtuous people in their homes and in their local communities, but they have not been discipled in how to exercise public character.”
So that's interesting, right? So we have this concept of spiritual formation, but it hasn't been extended by Christians in today's America to the public realm. It's spiritual formation in your own life, but it hasn't developed a civic theology. A civic theology is a doctrine, a fully articulated doctrine of how Jesus would want us to behave not just in our community, not just rebuilding the homes when the hurricane strikes, but how we behave, for example, on social media. How we comport ourselves in politics, not the positions we ultimately take, but the way in which we address our fellow citizens in politics. There has been an immense, gaping hole in Christianity for lack of a fully articulated civic theology. And in the absence of a civic theology of how Christians should address our common culture and politics, there has been the inrush of all these other forces we've seen–such as toxic polarization and partisanship. Meanwhile, it turns out, the Bible has something to say about this. Here are the three principal teachings of Christianity, according to theologians.
You know, others say other things matter too. You know, redemption, repentance and so on. But these are the big three, according to the theologians I consulted. Number one, don't be afraid. The most frequent injunction in the Bible. Number two, be like Jesus, imitate him. And number three, forgive each other. They say, if you get those things right in your life, that's Christian discipleship. So I'm an outsider. I'm looking at those three things and a light goes on. Where have I seen those kinds of virtues talked about before?
And here's where. Those three virtues–don't be afraid, imitate Jesus, and forgive each other–map quite neatly on three of the core tenets of Madisonian constitutional liberalism, the things the founders told us we need to do to defend the system that they gave us. “Don't be afraid” maps onto “be willing to share power.” Do not view the next election as a fearful apocalypse. Understand you might lose an election, but maybe you win the one after that. And maybe in the meanwhile, you actually get the opportunity to learn and improve. “Welcome, welcome.” The uncertainty inherent in sharing a liberal republic. “Imitate Jesus.” Jesus is a radical egalitarian. He is concerned with the least of these. He consorts with the most downtrodden and marginalized, and he also preaches the equal and full dignity of every human being. Those are two core tenets of liberalism as it comes down to us, from John Locke, Immanuel Kant all the way through John Rawls. The basic equality of all humans, and the fact that we treat every human being, and liberalism, as an end unto him or herself, never just as a means to an end. That's Immanuel Kant. Same idea. Finally, “forgive each other.” There's an analog to that in Republican virtue, and that analog is “forbearance.” Sometimes, you win an election. When you win an election, a good citizen does not say “we won, we’re crushing the other side, we're going to drink their tears and rig the system so they can never come back.” “In victory,” we say, “we continue to share the country.” We continue to give the other side a voice first, because we know someday they may be running the country and we will seek the same kind of forbearance from them. But second, and most important, because that's what Washington and Madison and the Constitution require us in order to make this country work.
Okay, so I'm looking around and looking for examples of this doctrine. Meanwhile, on a separate track–and if you recognize that picture, raise your hand if you know what that is. Someone shout it out. Yeah, that's the Utah Compromise. That's March of 2015, the person you see there at the podium is Troy Williams, who's present in this room, head of Equality Utah. The people behind him you will recognize as senior leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints, you've got legislative leaders behind them, you've got eventual governor Spencer Cox in that room, and they have just agreed to a landmark compromise that I, in 2015, from my point of view, it came out of nowhere. It was the product of years worth of work, you've all heard about it, but this was a compromise which created anti-discrimination provisions for LGBT people in Utah–in exchange for carefully targeted exemptions for religious entities like The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And Troy Williams will tell you that the effect of this compromise has been galvanizing in this state in creating a friendly culture for LGBT people. Not just a legal change, but a friendly culture.
I love this picture. This is the signing at the Capitol. All those people, those are LGBT couples. So in 2015, I'm looking at that and I'm thinking, where the heck did that come from? And then something happens in 2021 which gets my attention, and probably got yours too. You all know that man. He gives a speech at the University of Virginia. It is a remarkable speech. It is deeply conversant in the doctrines of Madisonian pluralism, as you might expect from a former state Supreme Court justice and legal authority. But he doesn't just come to the conclusion, he works through the logic.
Dallin H. Oaks: “We've always had to work through serious political conflicts. But today, too many approach that task as if their preferred outcome must entirely prevail over all others, even in our pluralistic society. We need to work for a better way. I come to you not as a lawyer with the experiences already mentioned by Rick Turley, but as an apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ, whom many of us worship. I advocate the moral and political imperative of reconciling existing conflicts and avoiding new ones, not to promote my favored outcome in any particular controversy. The goals of both sides are best served by resolving differences through mutual respect, shared understanding, and good faith negotiations, and both must accept and respect the rule of law. What I have described as necessary to going forward, namely, seeking harmony by finding practical solutions to our differences, with love and respect for all people, does not require any compromise of core principles. Both religious and secular rule are ordained of God for the good of his children. Reconciling adverse positions through respectful negotiations is a virtue. What if the conflicting demands of civil and religious law are such that they cannot be resolved by negotiation? Such circumstances rarely exist if they do. The experience of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints suggests that a way can be found to reconcile divine and human law through patience, negotiation and mutual accommodation.”
Patience, negotiation, and mutual accommodation. Not merely in order to get a certain end, but because that way of life is what Jesus Christ tells us to do. It's a virtue in and of itself to practice. What I've been telling students in two classes today is that it may be hard for people here, within the church, to quite grasp how countercultural that message is in today's white Christian America. And the church has not only talked the talk, it has walked the walk. In, I think, an even more remarkable development than the Utah Compromise, the Church put its back into the job of helping get through the 2022 Respect for Marriage Act, which enshrines my marriage to Michael in federal law in case the Supreme Court ever changes its mind. It did this despite the fact that homosexuality is a sin in Latter-day Saint doctrine, and same-sex marriage is not allowed. I can tell you that the bulk of the Evangelical community and the Conference of Bishops did not behave this way. They opposed that bill. But this church said, in a pluralistic society, and in exchange for some very significant religious liberty protections, which were voted on by an overwhelming vote of Congress, including every Democrat. In doing that, the Church set out a very different path. And it said: if we have the freedom internally to pursue our vision of what Jesus Christ wants us to do, it is incumbent on us to allow civil society to reach its own conclusions about the way other people behave–and it is our job as a church to work for Madisonian pluralism. If there's ever been a better and clearer statement of Madisonian pluralism, I have never heard it–than the one you hear right here.
And I mentioned civic theology. One of the reasons that I'm here is that in all of Christian America, I can only think of one church that has worked out an articulated civic theology of how Christians should address politics and the public world. And you heard it here yesterday from Elder Stevenson. It is this church. And it's not just the conclusion. It is a fully articulated chain of reasoning. Now that's filling the civic spiritual formation gap. I am not here to say that other Christians have to become Latter-day Saints, that they have to use the same logic, the same theological assumptions, nothing like that. But I do believe that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the teaching of Dallin Oaks and President Nelson and others, I believe that that deserves the audience, the hearing, of the country, not just the Church. And I believe the theology behind it can inspire other Christians to begin filling the same gaps in their own theology, asking and answering the question of “How would Jesus Christ want us to behave on social media?” And, fortunately, other Christians are beginning this work. There's a bunch of groups now. You know, this is small, it's budding, but they realize this gap is present. I can throw a few of them up here. This is Redeeming Babel, this is Curtis Chang's movement. The Center for Christianity and Public Life, which was founded a couple of years ago by Michael Wear, recently wrote a wonderful book about how to integrate Christian teaching into our public life. The One America Movement, this is Andrew Hanauer’s movement, this is working with pastors to give them tools to depolarize their conversations and bring more Christlike dialogues to their own churches, and maybe also help with the pastors quitting problem. This is The After Party. This is David French and Russell Moore and also Curtis Chang. This is a curriculum for church small groups–it's where evangelicals do the bulk of their spiritual formation. This is, you know, the Bible studies. And this is discipling them in a different way to talk about politics. It is not a political agenda, there's nothing in here that's partisan or about Rs or Ds or public policy, but it's about “How do we talk to each other across these divides, as Christians ought to do?” Here's one I just found out about. I'm having lunch with this guy in a couple weeks. The Center for Christian Civics. I didn't even know about them. And there's more. All of these people are in the space where I think Christianity must go if it's to uphold the bargain that it implicitly made with our founders.
I cannot do that work. Only Christians can do that work. But I do have something to say to secular liberals like me. I mentioned earlier that yes, we have our share of the blame for this. For far too long, we took Christianity for granted. We assumed that the churches would always be there. We assumed that their role in public life was either inconsequential or negative. We assumed, as I did, that if Christianity would collapse, that nothing else would go wrong. Well, it turns out Christianity is still a load bearing wall in our democracy. And it turns out that secular liberals like me need to do a better job of valuing and welcoming and cherishing our religious, and especially Christian, fellow citizens. And that means we need to go from “Mark McIntosh” to “Mark and me.”
We need to do more introspection about “Have we really made people of faith feel welcome in our workplaces?” The answer is often no. I've talked to Christians who say they kind of keep it on the down-low. They wouldn't face discrimination, but people think they're weird if they talk about God. That's wrong. Why isn't faith a routine part of diversity and inclusion efforts?
Making sure that people of faith feel welcome, identifying that as an institutional priority? Why aren't universities and employees surveying their employees of faith to see? Ask them, are you comfortable here? Is there anything you need? It wouldn't kill secular atheists like me to accompany friends to church, or for that matter, mosque or synagogue. It wouldn't hurt us to show more curiosity to people of faith as a way of showing that we care about them and that we value their beliefs. We have a job to do too. But that is not mainly the message for this room. The message for this room I hope I've made abundantly clear in conversations all through the day today, in this talk, and also with senior leaders of the Church who are kind enough to give me time yesterday. I believe that the discipleship that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints has embarked on has national civic implications. I believe that it deserves an audience outside of the Church, not just inside the Church. I believe the work that it is doing to articulate not just the conclusion, which is “be peacemakers,” but how you reach the conclusion, why that's what God wants–that theological element is crucial because that's instructing the world in what it actually means to be like Christ. That work you're doing is important. And I will say, as a secular person, if I can help spread the word, the gospel, as it were, I will do my best. I have written a book for that purpose, and I hope I can elevate and magnify the work you're doing. And above all, I hope that you can continue that work. Dallin Oaks is not a young man. But he mustn't be alone. As he told me yesterday, this message of his needs to be carried forward by the next generation and the next generation after that, in their own voices. That was a charge he told me that he was laying on the church. And as I told some BYU students today, I hope and believe that they can carry that charge.
I have to end on a personal note. This always chokes me up. I hope it always will. I want to dedicate this talk to the memory of Mark McIntosh. He got ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease–became completely paralyzed from the neck down. Fortunately, was able to speak, and even continue writing thanks to Dragon Dictation software. This is a picture of him about two months, three months before he died.
In memoriam. Thank you all for hearing me out.
Jonathan Rauch is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute in the Governance Studies program, journalist, activist, and award-winning author.
Deseret News - America is divided. Can religion provide a better way?