Pod Insights EconTalk Why Christianity Needs to Help Save Democracy (with Jonathan Rauch) About this episode How does a nice Jewish boy who is also a gay atheist have the chutzpah to lecture Christianity on its obligations to democracy? Listen to author Jonathan Rauch talk about his book Cross Purposes with EconTalk's Russ Roberts as Rauch makes the case for what he calls a thicker Christianity.
Transcript 10,952 words · 2 speakers
0:02 Speaker 00 Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to econTalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links to other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is [email protected] . We'd love to hear from you. Today is March 24, 2025, and my guest is author Jonathan Rauch of the Brookings Institution. This is Jonathan's third appearance on the program. He was last here in August of 2021
0:47 Speaker 00 talking about the Constitution of Knowledge. His latest book, and the topic of today's conversation, is Cross Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy. Jonathan, welcome back to Econ Talk.
1:01 Speaker 01 I'm always glad to see you, Russ.
1:03 Speaker 00 Well, let's start with the chutzpah of this book, if we might. I don't think you used that word explicitly, but you could have. Why is this a book of chutzpah?
1:13 Speaker 01 Because I am an atheistic homosexual Jew, or if you prefer, a Jewish atheistic homosexual, writing about Christian America and writing to Christian America and asking that Christians behave more in the spirit of Jesus Christ. And I think on multiple dimensions, it is not clear to me that Christians want to hear from an atheistic homosexual Jew about the teachings of Jesus, much less preached at them. But here I am.
1:43 Speaker 00 What gives you that urge to do that preaching?
1:49 Speaker 01 Well, so I work at Brookings, and we're in Governance Studies, my department, and we spend a lot of time, in fact, all day, trying to understand how to defend the values and institutions of a liberal democracy. And of course, you know all about that. There's Shalem College in Jerusalem. Similar missions and ideas. And we're trying to figure out why Americans, and not just Americans, this is true of voters in Western democracies around the world, are so deeply discontent, so polarized, so angry. We see indicators like loneliness and isolation rising, and we see that expressed in the trashing
2:34 Speaker 01 of institutions, the growth of political extremism, especially authoritarian populist parties. And something else that we started to see was the attribution to politics of the kinds of quasi-religious attitudes that are more traditionally associated with religion, you know, apocalypticism. If we don't win this election, it's the end of our country, it's the end of our lifestyle. We see the same kind of zeal on the left in America.
3:12 Speaker 01 You were seeing these strange kind of rituals in wokeness of repentance and ritual purification and original sin in the form of racism. On the right, you were seeing the idolatryization, if that's a word, idolatry of Donald Trump. Christian nationalism, which is not, in fact, a Christian movement, it's a secular movement that claims the authority of Christianity. And people are looking at this, including me, and saying, "Well, look, something is going on here where it looks like our dominant religious tradition, Christianity, seems
3:57 Speaker 01 to no longer be able to channel the energies and do the work of socializing that we've relied on it to do, and those religious energies and needs seem to be being displaced into politics and pseudo-religions like, you know, MAGA and wokeness and QAnon and so forth. And that's making us ungovernable. So if you care about the future of liberal democracy, I just concluded, you have got to look at Christianity and understand if it's failing, why it's failing, and what might be done about it."
4:36 Speaker 00 Listeners know, one of my favorite quotes is from David Foster Wallace, "Everyone worships." It's just that if it's not a traditional religion, it's something else. He has an eloquent takedown of the worship of power and beauty and other money. And on this program, for a long time, I've talked cautiously about the substitution of secular causes for religion. It offends people a lot when you tell them that their cause, whatever it is, is like a quasi-religion or a religion. And for the reasons you talk about, the dogmatic nature of it, the ritual that's associated
5:19 Speaker 00 with it, the sense of belonging that it provides, these are things, as you point out, have... Religion satisfies these desires, that for whatever reason, we have as human beings, the desire to belong, the desire for something larger than ourselves. And I think we're in a pretty powerful moment for the, as you say, for the governability of our polities in the West, because they do seem to be falling apart. What went wrong? You have a nice historical analysis at the beginning of your book, where you talk about
6:01 Speaker 00 what went wrong with the Enlightenment that brought us to this moment. And I just want to sum up what you've just been saying, what I was trying to say, a quote from the book. You write, "Secular movements have their benefits. I'm not here to condemn them, but it turns out that none of them is capable of replacing the great religions where anchoring moral codes, maintaining durable communities, and transmitting values are concerned." As Jessica Gross wrote in The New York Times in 2023, paraphrasing the sociologist Phil Zuckerman, quote, "A soccer team can't provide spiritual solace in the face of death. It probably doesn't have a weekly charitable call, and there's no sense of connection to a heritage that goes back generations."
6:45 Speaker 00 Add to that anything you'd like, and to the human desire for those things.
6:53 Speaker 01 Bueno, hay mucho allí. Y debería decir, Russ, he sido especialmente ansioso de estar en su programa porque creo que tenemos en común que somos ambos liberales seculares en nuestra orientación política y hemos llegado a este lugar en el viaje de pensamiento sobre la incompletud, las inadequacias, los fracasos del liberalismo secular en este contexto. Así que, por supuesto, me agradece sus reflexiones.
7:22 Speaker 01 Así que liberalismo, por lo que quiero decir en este contexto, y su audiencia lo entenderá, no el estilo estadounidense de izquierda progresista, sino la gran tradición de Locke y Kant, la tradición de gobierno limitado, derechos básicos, toleración, libertad de expresión, etc. El liberalismo es un sistema de gobernanza y tiene valores importantes que forman parte de mantenerlo a帆
8:00 Speaker 01 y los liberales, desde el principio, los fundadores de los Estados Unidos, por ejemplo, nos dijeron: "Miren, podemos proporcionar los sistemas y las plataformas para el gobernanza liberal. El liberalismo, sin embargo, no puede proporcionar necesariamente los valores a los que depende. Va a crear espacio para las personas en la sociedad civil para crear sentido y comunidad, pero no va a hacer eso por ustedes. Tienen que salir y hacer eso, y luego tienen que traer esas fuentes de sentido y comunidad y valores al liberalismo." Y los fundadores nos dijeron, eran muy explícitos sobre esto:
8:47 Speaker 01 "El liberalismo, la Constitución, solo funcionará si hay lo que llamaban virtud republicana."
8:56 Speaker 01 In the population, in the citizenry. And by that, they meant things like honorable civic behavior, being well-informed, well-educated, being truthful, being tolerant, allowing for the rotation in office. And they said that civil society was going to need to provide those values. And by that, they meant, of course, the family and schools and community. But they also meant very particularly Christianity, Protestantism, which was the founding faith of America, white Protestantism, to be even more specific. So there was an implicit bargain that they made with Christianity. It wasn't explicit, nothing was assigned. But they said, "We're going to have unprecedented religious liberty.
9:41 Speaker 01 That's going to be the founding principle of our republic." But implicitly, Christianity needs to use that liberty, that religious liberty, in part to inculcate the values that will sustain our republic. And for many years, it did that. Now, you know, I am gay. I can give you chapter and verse on the many, many shortcomings of Christianity, its abuse of minorities like me, its historic antisemitism. It has a dark side. Yet nonetheless, for 200 years, the mainstream Protestant churches did actually a pretty
10:26 Speaker 01 good job of socializing Americans into our life together, you know, through, of course, through the teachings themselves, but also the Sunday schools, the youth groups and pastorates, the small groups where Bible was studied. When I was growing up in Phoenix in the 60s and 70s... Very often, the first thing that people asked each other was not, "Where do you work?" or "Where are you from?" It was, "What church do you belong to?" In those days, 70%, right through the 20th century, 70% of Americans belonged to a church. So these were just huge organs of socialization and collective life.
11:09 Speaker 01 And they provided something liberalism can't, which is, answers to the question, "Why am I here? What is the transcendent meaning of my life? What will happen after I die? What is the fundamental source of values?" Liberalism doesn't answer those questions, and it doesn't try. It says, "Go out and find your own answer." That means if Christianity collapses, and I and others argue that's more or less what's happened in the last 50 years, but especially the last 20, who does that work? And the answer is that SoulCycle and Wicca and Crystals and self-improvement don't do it. They don't even try. And the pseudo-religions that we talked about earlier, you know, the things like MAGA and QAnon
11:51 Speaker 01 and radical wokeness and radical environmentalism, they're polarizing and disruptive. They're fake religions. They're also incapable of doing this job and, in fact, drive us against each other.
12:07 Speaker 00 You chronicle the... how much the church has faltered in terms of its role in American life in the last 20 years, church attendance, belief, all kinds of different measures. How much of that do you think is driven by the delay in marriage and the reduction in marriage rate and the challenges that the family faces in America and in the West? Because I think they're entwined. The religion I know more about, Judaism, people affiliate, once they get married, especially when they have children. And religion is obviously a huge part of it, is connecting generations and heritage and tradition,
12:50 Speaker 00 as you alluded, as was alluded in that earlier quote. Isn't that part of the problem?
12:58 Speaker 01 It may be. You know, there are tons of things that are part of the problem, Russ. I am not a believer in mono causality.
13:06 Speaker 01 There's, for example, educational polarization seems to be part of this. Religion, faith, and community participation tend to be stronger and healthier among people with college degrees than among people with high school or less. So lots of things are going on here. I don't have a particular comment on the specific role of marriage and family foundation and demographics, except to say I would guess they work in both directions. And that the decline of Christianity and all the social structures and supports that went with that has probably, I would guess, contributed to the deferral of marriage and
13:50 Speaker 01 then the instability of marriage. So I think that probably works in both directions. And I think I would probably cite that as one of many ways in which the decline of Christianity as a core institution ramifies through social life in the United States. So that said, what I try to do in my book is look more specifically at the decisions that Christians have made about Christianity in understanding why Christianity has caved in. Yeah, I'm sure there are external factors, of course, you know, social media, cell phones,
14:34 Speaker 01 what have you. The post-liberals blame liberalism. They say you can't really effectively have faith, family, tradition, or nation in a liberal country because, you know, there's just too much competition from radical individualism. I don't think that's true, actually. I think Israel's actually a modern liberal, trying to remain liberal, state in which religion remains extremely strong.
15:06 Speaker 01 So I look at the decisions that Christians have made about Christianity as a core element, maybe the core element of the story. And that's where you find some big changes.
15:18 Speaker 00 So you talk about three kinds of Christianity. And of course, being Jewish, I thought about the parallels in Judaism. Maybe we'll get to those. But Christianity matters a great deal more to the United States than Judaism does, at least in the public square. You have three kinds of Christianity you talk about: thin, sharp, and thick. Let's go through those one by one and just tell us what you have in mind by those terms. And then we'll talk about why this analysis is important.
15:51 Speaker 01 So by thinness, I mean cultural and spiritual thinness. Christianity is fundamentally a countercultural religion. It was born outside of the state. Jesus, of course, met a-- was a deeply countercultural teacher, counter to everything that Roman society around him taught. Christianity is at its best when it's countercultural. And more broadly, sociologists tell us that religious groups are at their strongest when they are different from the surrounding society, so that they impose burdens on their
16:33 Speaker 01 followers that are different from what they would, you know, just get in ordinary life. And they also provide benefits, rewards, social technologies that are different from what the outside society provides. Thinness is what happens when the religion just begins to blend into the surrounding culture. It loses its distinctiveness. It loses its message. It just becomes more or less a lifestyle choice, a consumer good. You know, you shop around for religion. It does very little for you. Maybe you show up on a Sunday now and then if you're Christian. Or maybe you don't even do that.
17:13 Speaker 01 That seems to be what happened to the mainline churches in the United States. People who are younger than my age probably just don't recall. In the 1950s and 60s and into the 70s in the United States, the Lutheran Church, the United Methodists, the Episcopal Church, these were mighty pillars of society. They were just very influential. Now they are a couple of steps from extinct. Only 13% of white Americans associate with any mainline church. They went left.
17:57 Speaker 01 Not radical left, but they decided that instead of being rooted primarily in Scripture and in a countercultural Christian teaching, that they would get busy with social causes, predominantly progressive ones. A lot of people seem to feel, "Well, I can do that without giving up a Sunday morning." So in the latter portion of the 20th century, they declined and declined fast, and they lost their cultural relevance. They began just blending into the surrounding culture to the point now where they figure really very little in American life. And that's the story of the ecumenical, or so-called "mainline churches." Sharp. You want to do that one?
18:42 Speaker 00 Yeah, go ahead. We'll go through all three, then I want to come back. We'll talk about each maybe in turn, or why they're, what we need to talk about.
18:50 Speaker 01 Okay. Sharp Christianity. So the one multi-syllabic word for the story of Christianity in America in the last 50 years is secularization. And that's when the religion comes to resemble the society around it. And instead of exporting values into the society that surrounds it, it imports values from the society around it.
19:17 Speaker 01 What we just talked about, the thinning of the mainline churches, is an example of that. While the mainline churches began to become comatose in the late 20th century, evangelical Christianity was thriving and growing. And people said, "Aha! This shows that people want a more countercultural church. They want something rooted in Scripture. They want something prescriptive that gives you boundaries to life, you know, about how you behave sexually, what your values and mores are going to be around things like abortion and homosexuality." There was a hunger for that.
20:00 Speaker 01 And that was the story that we all told ourselves. Until in this century, a couple of things happened in the evangelical, the white evangelical church. The black church is a whole different story, and I don't get into it.
20:16 Speaker 01 So the first thing that happened was its own wave of secularization.
20:25 Speaker 01 Starting in the 80s and then proceeding into the 90s, the white evangelical church
20:35 Speaker 01 got very involved in politics and partisan politics. It became very closely aligned with the Republican Party. Now, that was gradual. But by the second decade of this century, white evangelicals were voting 80% for the, 80-plus percent, for the Republican presidential candidate, no matter who that was. And they were arguably the Republican Party's core base. And the church made a gamble, which is that we can influence the Republican Party and partisan politics more than they will influence us. And they lost that gamble. They were wrong.
21:19 Speaker 01 Because as they increasingly became partisan and politicized, the complexion, this is the second thing that happened, the complexion of the evangelical church began to change. This is what really picked up speed in this century.
21:37 Speaker 01 People who are there for spirituality and the message of Jesus, who may not be Republicans, for example, begin to drift away because partisan politics is not what they're there for. They don't necessarily share those values. They don't assume that electing Republicans is just essential to keeping your identity. And people begin to identify into evangelicals who really are not very observant Christians. And you get this weird phenomenon that the sociologist, the demographer of religion, Ryan Birch, himself a pastor, has pointed to. So 20 years ago, some very small percentage of evangelicals,
22:21 Speaker 01 like 3% or 5%, said that they never attended church. Because church attendance is, you know, that's that's kind of the deal for evangelicals. Today, that's about 1 in 8. So you see people filtering in who are there for the politics and people filtering out who are there for the message of Jesus. And that sharpens the white evangelical church. It becomes more and more radicalized, politicized. This becomes a crisis for pastors. A couple of years ago, 42% of them told pollsters that they had seriously considered quitting in the past year. And the number three reason for that, after obvious things like, you know, I guess it was maybe low pay and high stress,
23:06 Speaker 01 I don't remember, but number three was politics. They said people were bringing Fox News and partisan politics and the culture wars to church and demanding that the church do that. We're losing our country. It's a battlefield out there. Our church needs to fight, fight, fight. That's not the message of Jesus and it's not what pastors want to be doing. So increasingly, that wave of secularization radicalizes the church, aligns it in a partisan way. Until you reach the point, in 2016,
23:47 Speaker 01 possibly one of the most famous polling results of the 21st century happens. In 2011, Public Religion Research Institute, I'll botch the wording of the question, but I'll get the idea right.
24:04 Speaker 01 PRI (Politician) asks people: "If a person of poor character can be a good political leader," and 70% or so of evangelicals say "no." They say, "You have to have good character really matters in political leadership." White evangelicals are the strongest on the importance of character in politics. They asked the question again in 2016, and the numbers have flipped. It's about 70% the other direction. Character does not matter in choosing a leader.
24:49 Speaker 01 In fact, white evangelicals become the group that is least concerned with the character of political leaders. And so you ask yourself, "What happened in 2016?" What happened is, of course, the rise of Donald Trump. After initially being standoffish, white evangelicals go all in with MAGA. They have become MAGA's firmest base in America. In doing that, they seem to have made a bargain with power that Jesus did not make.
25:28 Speaker 01 You remember in Matthew 4, Jesus begins his ministry by going to the wilderness for 40 days and 40 nights. There he encounters Satan, who brings him to the highest mountaintop in the world, shows him all of human dominion, and says, "I will give you power over all of this if you will bow down and worship me." Jesus refuses the deal, and that launches his ministry. He's about the next life, not the next election. In 2016, in January of 2016, as he launches his presidential campaign, Donald Trump
26:11 Speaker 01 goes to Dort College, which is an evangelical school in Iowa, and he says two things.
26:18 Speaker 01 The first thing he says is, "If you vote for me, I will give you power. Remember that." The second thing he says in this speech, yes, it's the same speech at the same place, is, "My followers are the most loyal. I could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, and they would not mind." You see what he's doing here? It's the same deal that Jesus offered Satan, which is, "I'll give you power."
26:51 Speaker 00 Satan offered Jesus, yeah.
26:52 Speaker 01 Yes, thank you. The same deal that Satan offered Jesus. That was blasphemy. Which is, "Power, I give you power. You give me unconditional unquestioning loyalty." White evangelicals take that deal. And that transforms the nature of the church, at least as it's seen in the general public. I mean, how Christian can you be if you are enthusiastically embracing the most un-Christ-like figure in modern American politics? And so now the white evangelical church is in a state of collapse.
27:37 Speaker 01 According to the Pew Research Center, the percentage of white Americans who identify as evangelicals is 13%. That's no more than identify as mainline Christians. Where are those people going? They are becoming so-called nuns, N-O-N-E-S, people who are not affiliated with any religion. And that's what gets us to where we are.
28:04 Speaker 00 Talk briefly about what you mean by thick Christianity, and I want to come back and talk about all three, and challenge a little of this, and give you a chance to expand on it.
28:18 Speaker 01 So by thick Christianity, I mean Christianity that asks a lot of followers, that gives a lot in return, that is countercultural in its teaching, while also being supportive of the liberal democracy that it relies on, the general American context. And that's a tall order, right? A lot of the Church did that pretty well for the first 200 years. Tocqueville comes to America in the 1830s, and the first thing he notices is how Christian the country is and how in America Christianity seems to align itself with the values of the secular liberal democracy,
29:03 Speaker 01 something that's not true in France. So thick Christianity does those things.
29:11 Speaker 00 I like, you can also riff on this quote, this idea of James Allison's three pillars of Christianity: "Don't be afraid, imitate Jesus, forgive each other." And you say they all have close parallels in liberalism's core civic values. Explain.
29:30 Speaker 01 Well, so this, Russ, is really the hinge of the entire argument of the book. I mean, so far, I've been describing what's happened and the forces behind it, and I've described the ways in which Christianity, Christians have made, I think, tragic choices, choices, excuse me, that have redounded against Christian witness and also weakened liberal democracy. I've said that Christianity's crisis has become democracy's crisis, but now we get to what I think is the core of the argument, which is, we talked earlier, you know, is marriage, is family part of this? Probably.
30:12 Speaker 01 But you can't understand what's happened without looking at theology. Theology matters. The actual content of Christian teaching is just crucial in this context because Protestantism is the founding faith in America. So I'm secular. I don't believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ. I'm an atheist, but a Jewish atheist.
30:40 Speaker 01 And yet, when I look at the gospel, and when I talk to theologians about Christianity, they cite three principles as the distinctive principles of Jesus's teaching. Now, you know, some say you should add repentance, or this and that, but no one I've talked to disagrees about these three, and you have just named them. The first is, "Don't be afraid." The most frequently cited injunction in the Christian Bible. "Don't be afraid." And that means we live in a scary world, but have some faith that God has a plan for you.
31:25 Speaker 01 Don't let fear rule your life, because then you will make unwise and un-Christian decisions. The second principle, "Imitate Jesus." As he did care for the least of these, that's how Christians judge themselves. Not "How do you treat the powerful who can help you?" But "How do you treat the least of these?" And his radical egalitarianism, in which every individual is made in the image of God, Jews have that, of course, and also in which everyone has a core and basic dignity which we are all obliged, or Christians are obliged to observe. A pretty radical concept in the Roman Empire,
32:10 Speaker 01 in Jesus's period. The third is, "Forgive each other." Retribution and judgment are the province of God, not of man. That's not why we're here. We need to show grace and mercy as Christians. I say "we" being imitating them. So I look at that. And it's not hard to see that those three principles are also linchpin principles of Madisonian-style liberal democracy. The founders told us that we need to bring republican virtues in from outside the system. Well, there they are.
32:54 Speaker 01 And not coincidentally, because of course, the founders' error was marinated in the teachings of Jesus and Christianity. But these principles all have secular equivalence. So, don't be afraid. What the founders feared more than anything as a threat to democracy is the kind of demagogue who mobilizes fear in the population to overturn the democracy. Hamilton warns about this in so many words. Lincoln, in his very first speech, the Lyceum Address, warns about this. They know this can happen. They know this tips over democracies in the past.
33:37 Speaker 01 If you're fearful, that fear can be mobilized to undermine our way of government. Further, sometimes you lose elections. If you view that as an apocalyptic catastrophic loss, as a fundamental threat to the country, you can't have a democracy. You've got to be willing to say, "Okay, I lost this time. Maybe I'll come back next time. Maybe I'll lose something... Oh, excuse me. Maybe I'll learn something in the process." If you're not willing to do that, if you're not willing to approach politics without apocalyptic fear, putting some trust in your fellow citizens, and in the constitutional order, it will fail. Second, imitate Jesus.
34:19 Speaker 01 So those two doctrines we talked about, the least of these, and everyone being in the image of God, being equal before God. Of course, those come over directly. All men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, to write out of Jesus. The least of these... The Bill of Rights. What's different about a liberal democracy as opposed to an illiberal democracy is there are a lot of things majorities cannot do. They must protect minority rights. That's why we have the Bill of Rights, why we have the First Amendment. That's radically counterintuitive, but it too comes very much out of the teaching of Jesus. They're closely aligned that way.
35:03 Speaker 01 We judge a liberal democracy by, does it tolerate, for example, the speech of minorities, who take very different views from the majority? Third, forgive each other. So a politician who says, "I am your retribution," is not only un-Christian, he's illiberal. Because politics in a liberal culture, it can't be about maximally punishing the other side, crushing them, and after you win an election, salting the soil with the tears of their women and children. You can't talk that way, and you can't think that way.
35:46 Speaker 01 When you win an election, you need to share the country. You need to behave as you will want the other side to behave someday if maybe they win an election. And that's not just instrumentally so, because power changes hands. It's intrinsically so. That's a core liberal virtue. It's not virtuous to try to dominate the whole country. Pluralism is the heart of Madisonian liberalism. And so, once again, forgive each other. It translates over a little less directly, but I translate it as toleration, pluralism, and forbearance, sharing the country.
36:27 Speaker 01 So here I am, I'm looking at this, I'm very secular, but it dawns on me that you don't have to believe that Jesus Christ is your Lord and Savior to believe that Jesus Christ was right.
36:41 Speaker 01 And that leads me to conclude that the teachings of Jesus, the core teachings of Christianity are far closer to Madison than they are to MAGA. And that allows me to say, your first question was about chutzpah. There's some chutzpah here, I'll own that. But that allows me to ask Christians, to say, you know, to heal this country, to realign Christianity closer both to its own mission and with liberal democracy so that it's supportive instead of oppositional. I'm not asking that Christians become more Republican or Democratic
37:22 Speaker 01 or left-wing or right-wing or secular or anything like that. I'm just asking Christians to become more Christian. It's right there in your scripture. Elevating those aspects of Christian teaching, which align with liberal democracy, could do a lot to heal our country.
37:46 Speaker 00 You have some nice things to say about compromise. I read your book last night, so I'm maybe a little more familiar with it than you are. But do you remember what you said about compromise? I think, I think most people think of it as something related to fair play and preventing violence and preventing the kind of apocalyptic fears that you have about the future. I think of it sometimes as forbearance is one way to think about it. You know, Mike Munger on a previous episode about Doge said, "You really don't want to create a sword that your enemy might wield someday." So, you know, one sense of compromise is let's not push things in too far,
38:30 Speaker 00 even in my own direction, because someday it may, you know, things may be turned around. But you have something much, I think, more profound to say that comes out of, perhaps out of Christianity or Judeo-Christian values, or perhaps even maybe out of Adam Smith. So, but if you remember it, tell us about it. I tease you about remembering because it's a subtle idea and it's on like one page.
38:58 Speaker 01 Oh, it's not teasing.
39:00 Speaker 00 But I really liked it. I really liked it.
39:03 Speaker 01 I write so much, I look at my own work and even sometimes recent work and think, "Did I write that? That's pretty good." So compromise is the core value of the Constitution in the sense that if you had to summarize the Constitution on a bumper sticker, it is a compromise-forcing device. That's why it splits powers in so many directions.
39:29 Speaker 01 Madison is, I think, the greatest politician and political thinker in history, including Aristotle, because he answers the question that has bedeviled democracies and government from the beginning, which is, "What do you do about the power of ambition, the threat, the challenge of ambition and the challenge of faction?" The challenge of ambition is that you have these people who believe very strongly and who want to dominate the system. What do you do about that? How do you channel that? No system until then had managed to do that. And the second is, "What do you do about factions?" These are interest groups that try to take over the system or go to war with each other
40:14 Speaker 01 and divide the country and ultimately it collapses. Madison says on the second of those things, "Faction, you enlarge the sphere of the republic. You have a big enough republic so that you have lots of factions and you put them into contestation with each other and that becomes a creative force." What do you do about ambition? This is so brilliant. There's only one force capable of restraining ambition and that's ambition. So you pit ambition against ambition.
40:45 Speaker 01 And you require people to make bargains and negotiate with each other in order to achieve their ambitions. And that becomes a dynamic, yet stable, energy source for the country. This is so subtle and so intellectually daring. You know, it has roots in Montesquieu and other things. But Madison's the guy who really sees how to implement a stable, yet dynamic, system, and it's based on compromise. And here's what so many people miss about this that I think you're alluding to, Russ. Sorry, I'm winding my way there.
41:17 Speaker 00 It's great.
41:19 Speaker 01 But we're there now. Americans today don't understand compromise because they think of it in the sense of compromising on your values. They think of it as, okay, two people walk into a room. They have different ideas. They split the difference. Both walk out unhappy. That's not what compromise is. Compromise is when the two kids can't decide whether to play chess or checkers and make up a new game of their own. Or go out and find a third and fourth kid and say, what do you want to play? And wind up playing something different. Or even make up their own game, Chester's, I don't know.
42:01 Speaker 01 Compromise is a dynamic force where people are required to channel their disagreements by looking for new solutions. What often happens in a compromise, ask any legislator, is you walk out of the room with a better idea than anyone walked in with. And there are all kinds of reasons for that. One is the compromise process forces people to gather information. Another is that it forces them to bring in new players. Okay, we can't solve this by ourselves. Let's go ask Russ if he can add such and such to the mix. So it enlarges the sphere, as Madison says.
42:43 Speaker 01 It forces creative and innovative thinking. So compromise is a dynamic engine. It is a constructive and creative engine. It is not just about splitting babies in half. And that's why it's so important for the Constitution to support it. And that's why it's so important for our great faith traditions to support it.
43:06 Speaker 00 Beautiful. I want to talk a little bit about, I don't think this words in your book, at least I didn't notice it, which is fundamentalism in a religious context. It makes an appearance, fundamentalism does, in the last part of the book, because you have a very, really interesting discussion of compromise and the Church of Latter Day Saints with the political sphere. But I want to talk about fundamentalism more generally, and again, since I don't know much about Christianity, and I know a little bit more about Judaism, I think, you know, in Judaism, and I suspect in other religions as well, both Christianity and Islam, there's
43:47 Speaker 00 a deep appeal of fundamentalism. It's more authentic, it's real, it's tied back to often a source of divine revelation, and that source of divine revelation isn't a suggestion or inspiring, it's the word of God, and therefore it acquires a power and credibility that a watering down of that would not provide. At the same time, fundamentalists tend to be small, at least that's the risk. You have this pure but passionate form of the religion, and while it's appealing to be part of that
44:30 Speaker 00 group, but that group often has very strong community bonds as a result, you don't fit in so well, it's too counterculturally for a lot of people. So they want the more watered down version, the version that you alluded to earlier, that's imported a lot of the values of the culture around us. And I think that's a perennial challenge for religion, and if you think about over decades, centuries, millennia, you can see it play out. How do you think about that? How is it possible?
45:07 Speaker 00 Let me say it differently. Isn't some of the sharpness of Christianity that you decry this fear that the popular culture around us is, quote, "winning"? Now, you provide some evidence that that fear is overwrought, and I'm sympathetic to that evidence. But there's other evidence that I think is also on the other side, which is religion has a very tough time in the high ground of our culture. The fact you can write a book like this, or that Ralph Stouth, who's recently interviewed the episode as an heir, can write a book called Believe, has a very new feel to it.
45:47 Speaker 00 Defending Christianity, defending religious belief, has a little bit of, can get a little bit of purchase in our culture. But for the last 40 years or so, in my adult life, and probably yours, it's just socially unacceptable. So I think there's this tension in religion, where it heads, the competitive marketplace that it finds itself in with secular ideas. It's hard to compete. And so it either goes in one direction or the other. It either becomes much more like everything around it, which is the thin version, or it becomes sharp, maybe in the fundamentalist way, maybe in other ways.
46:32 Speaker 00 But what do you feel about that tension and that question of fundamentalism?
46:37 Speaker 01 So much there. So I'll say a few things, if I can remember them, and hopefully they'll tie together into a meaningful worldview. So this book is largely about tragic choices that Christians have made that have undermined Christian witness and liberal democracy. But it's not only about that.
47:07 Speaker 01 It's also about a mistake that I made and that a lot of people like me made, which is to neglect at best and sometimes be outright hostile to Christianity in secular society, and to take to extremes doctrines like separation of church and state, so that not one school prayer could be acceptable in any public school, or every single mom-and-pop cake baker in the country would be required to cater every single same-sex wedding, even if there's a baker across the street that's happy to do it.
47:46 Speaker 01 We showed surprisingly little interest or curiosity about faith. We did not make people of faith welcome in universities and workplaces. People who found out that I was working on this book would tell me, "It's not that Christians are oppressed," or anything like that. That narrative is just wrong. The Supreme Court in the United States is more pro-religion and religious liberty than it ever has been. Yet it is true that a lot of people of faith in secular workplaces keep their faith on the down-low. You know, it could be a little bit embarrassing.
48:30 Speaker 01 I don't know what will people think if they find out that I'm an evangelical, that I go to church, or that maybe I speak in tongues. You know, so they leave all of that at home. And that's a loss for secular society, for civil society. People should be able, as they say, to bring their whole selves to work. I could go on. DEI is now very controversial, but at its best, it is about just asking ourselves, are we making sure that people feel included and welcome? That's okay. And sure, we ask that about race. But do we ask it about people of faith? The answer is pretty much never. So I think people like me bear a substantial burden of having ignored, overlooked...
49:17 Speaker 01 The importance of Christianity in our society. Christianity is a load-bearing wall in our democracy. We forgot that. In fact, I think we helped undermine it. So there is an important element of truth in the critique of secular liberalism. And we got to do better, and I own that. This whole book is framed as an apology to two Christians, both of them now deceased, but an apology for the dumbest thing I ever wrote, which was an article 22 years ago in Atlantic celebrating secularization as a great civilizational advance. Won't we be way better off without this religious mumbo jumbo? Boy, was I wrong. I was instrumentally wrong, and I was theoretically wrong.
50:01 Speaker 01 So, OK, let's stipulate that liberalism has not been as welcoming of Christianity as it should be, and I hope we can fix that. Nonetheless, something people always say about this book, and I think this is a way of restating the point you just made, Russ, but tell me if I'm wrong, is that, look, Christians have a lot to be fearful of in modern secular culture. I mean, they are swamped by the consumerism around them, the online pornography. They're worried that their kids will come home from school with a sex change of some sort.
50:44 Speaker 01 This secular culture, it's a drumbeat. And then you've got the progressive left, which, you remember that moment when Beto O'Rourke announced in a presidential debate, if, basically, "We're going to use the power of the state to force compliance with anti-discrimination laws, including same-sex marriage. We're coming for you." He walked it back the next day, but everyone understood that he was saying what's in the heart of progressives.
51:14 Speaker 01 So yeah, the answer to that is there is a lot for Christians to be afraid of. But let's go back to what we were saying earlier. The most repeated injunction in the Christian Bible is "Don't be afraid." One of the great parallels, excuse me, parables. Jesus and the disciples are in a ship. And a storm comes up, and it's a bad storm. And the ship looks like it's going to founder and they're all going to drown. The disciples panic and they run up to Jesus, who is, excuse me, asleep. And they say, "Oh, Lord, what do we do about this? You know, my God, my God, we're sinking."
51:54 Speaker 01 And Jesus awakens just long enough to tell them, "Be calm." That's his injunction. Jesus understands that this is a fearful world. Jesus knows, we know that it's a fearful world because he winds up crucified. And yet, his injunction to Christians is about, "Does your faith amplify fear by telling you we are losing our country? We won't be a Christian republic anymore if the Democrat wins the election? You should panic about everything that's going on? Or does it counsel the opposite?
52:38 Speaker 01 Does it counsel bringing a sense of calm and dignity and humanity to our political life? Coming at it in a sense that fear, there are reasons to be fear, yet we should not let fear dominate our personal lives or our politics? Great theologian Mark Laberton, the former president of Fuller Seminary, had a wonderful way of putting this. He had me on his podcast. We were talking about fear and he said, "Of course you should be fearful of God if you're a Christian. And of course, fear is a reality in life. But what Jesus is warning against," he says, "is tyrannous fear,
53:21 Speaker 01 a fear that dominates your life. So you become a slave to fear instead of fearful of God." So I think that's the answer to that. I think Christianity, properly understood, could help people approach these fearful questions.
53:39 Speaker 01 In a less fear-driven way. Does that make sense?
53:43 Speaker 00 Oh yeah, it was beautiful. I can't help but note the Rabbi Nachman of Brusselof dictum that's been turned into a song. It's easy to find on the web, we'll put a link up to it. "The whole world is a narrow bridge. The most essential thing is not to be afraid." It's the Jewish version of that.
54:05 Speaker 00 I want to, first, just in passing, I want to mention that you say your book is written to two Christians. Your friendship that you opened the book with, with a devout Christian and your memories of him at the end of the book is deeply moving. And before we get to something else I want to talk about, I want to ask you if in writing this book you became more open, not to tolerating the faith of others, but to be more open
54:43 Speaker 00 to your own potential interest in religion. Because it comes out in that conversation, in that when you write about it, it's quite moving.
54:59 Speaker 01 So we get into personal territory here, and sometimes I get a bit emotional, but you know, that's a good thing. The person you allude to is my freshman year college roommate, Mark McIntosh. And when I was 18, I had a very bad attitude toward religion generally and Christianity specifically, because you know, as a gay person, not even knowing it at the time, but, and as a Jew, I understood Christianity to be bigoted and hypocritical and cruel. And I had ample reason to believe that. I was not wrong.
55:40 Speaker 01 Mark was the first person who showed me that Christianity could mean what it says. Now, he's flawed, and he got angry, and profane, and whatever, but that this was someone whose every action was deeply informed by Christian witness, and who showed me a grace that I did not deserve, because I was obnoxious as hell. You know, as your cliche militant atheist kid. And that's what first opened my, my eyes to the possibility that Christianity could mean what it says. And it's that, that was a long journey. I was still, you know, pretty, pretty militantly secular 22 years ago.
56:22 Speaker 01 I didn't think I was hostile to Christianity, I just didn't think we needed it. But getting to know Christians and seeing our country start falling apart, that reoriented me. So you asked me about, about my faith. So this is, this is a little hard to describe, I'll do my best and maybe you can help me. I knew from three things about myself from like age of five or six, Russ. One was this unaccountable, very deep and disturbing, at the time it seemed, attraction to boys and men. Even cartoon characters like Superman.
57:02 Speaker 01 Another, and I knew that that was something I needed to hide and be afraid of. The second thing was, of course, I knew I was Jewish. Phoenix, Arizona, had a, you know, pretty tight Jewish community. I was a member of a shul, I was bar mitzvah, Hebrew school, all of those things. And that made me very different, you know, Christmas would come every year and, you know, that, that would mean we'd go to Katz's Deli. And the third thing is I understood from very early that I could not believe in God, that it all just seemed silly, you know, this big daddy in the sky figure who works miracles and creates this fantastically huge cosmos and yet somehow finds time to dote over our every, every deed and misdeed.
57:47 Speaker 01 I just thought it was silly. I tried at one point, I was 14, I was at a Jewish summer camp, you've probably heard of it, Rauch. Russ, for those of you who are not watching, Russ is nodding. And people around me were, were performing the rituals of faith and I tried to believe and I found I couldn't, so I, I gave up. What, what changed over time is that as I got to know people of faith, Jews and Christians, especially Christians, I came to see that it's not that I'm the smart one who doesn't need the crutch of religion to go about my life and be virtuous.
58:31 Speaker 01 Es que soy el que está perdido. Que tienen una dimensionalidad, una profundidad en su vida. Calla la espiritualidad, calla la fe, o calla lo que para ellos es, que es la creencia en Jesús Cristo como su Señor y Salvador, y todo lo que fluye de eso. Pero eso les da acceso a un lado de la vida humana y a una forma de ser, y algo muy profundo en nosotros mismos que no tengo acceso a. Simplemente no lo tengo. Así que siento que estoy en la posición de alguien que puede ser colorblind. Sabes, funciono perfectamente bien, estoy feliz siendo quien soy. Por favor, cristianos, no se junten tratando de convertirme, no funcionará.
59:16 Speaker 01 Y sin embargo, estoy consciente de que estoy perdido en algo. O sea, no soy un padre. Lo mismo. Tengo una vida completa, rica y feliz, y sin embargo, estoy consciente de que hay una parte fundamental de la existencia humana que no comparto. Siento... Intentaré una analogía aquí, esto no está en el libro, es algo personal, pero... Pero siento que hablando, conociendo a personas como Mark McIntosh y el último Tim Keller, gran, gran pastor, murió recientemente, hace un par de años, co-dedicado al libro, Pete Weiner, Francis Collins, getting to know them
59:58 Speaker 01 and learning about their world and the theology. ¿Alguna vez has estado en un tren y has estado un poco estancado? Y te despiertas y algo se ilumina por fuera. Tal vez una tarjeta de billete, tal vez un edificio interesante. Y te sientas y lo miras, y tienes que mirarlo, pero luego está detrás de ti. Ese es el espejo que siento que tengo de espiritualidad, que puedo espejarlo, y durante esos espejos tengo una sensación de ello, pero no puedo vivirlo. Así que no, por favor, no seate enojado por mí, pero entiende
1:00:42 Speaker 01 este libro como un tributo, un tributo a la cristianidad en su mejor y una plegaria de admiradores a cristianos para vivir a su fe.
1:00:59 Speaker 00 That's really beautifully said. You use the metaphor of being colorblind. I think of it as tone deaf. Sometimes, music doesn't speak to people. And, as you say, you could have a beautiful life. What moves me — many things move me about what you just said and what you write in the book — but what I find especially moving is that, as you say, you get a glimpse that there's a terrain that many people spend their lives exploring that you were unaware of. And rather than just saying it's a nasty land that no one would want to visit, you
1:01:40 Speaker 00 understand that there's some special pieces to that.
1:01:46 Speaker 01 Yeah, and I understand, if I could add to that, the premise of this book is I also understand that I'm weird, and that most people have — not everyone, but many people — most people have a deep need for meaning in life that you're not going to get from SoulCycle, or, you know, God help us QAnon, or environmentalism, you know, answers to core questions. Why am I here? Am I more than just a random agglomeration of molecules that's here one day and gone the next? What's the source of morality? What's the difference
1:02:26 Speaker 01 between good and evil? The greatest liberal thinkers, you know, Kant and Hume, towering intellects, have done their best with that. Adam Smith and the Theory of Moral Sentiments. And they've made huge gains, but ultimately, they cannot find a grounding for morality that is deeper than human preference. And so, I also, at a deep level, understand that the human society needs what religion can offer, and not just instrumentally, but existentially. You know, we need answers to those questions. I don't think that the divinity of Jesus Christ is the right answer. I don't believe that.
1:03:13 Speaker 01 But I do believe that it's a profound answer. And then 2,000 years of thinking, to say nothing of Judaism, which is another set of answers, 3,000 years, it's articulated some very deep and important moral concepts, which you don't have to be Christian to believe.
1:03:30 Speaker 00 Yeah, I guess the question came up in a recent episode with Jeff Sebo, which again has an air to it, but well, by the time this, our conversation is out, you know, a lot of our morality, I worry, is left over from Judeo-Christian beliefs, values, and if those underpinnings aren't there, aren't believed, how long will that last? And we'll see.
1:03:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's Nietzsche's critique, of course.
1:04:02 Speaker 00 Yeah. I want to close with this, maybe some, a little bit surprising place. I want to talk about Europe. And I want to talk for a minute about a trip I took to Prague.
1:04:17 Speaker 00 If you go to Prague, you're haunted by Kafka. He's everywhere. His face is everywhere. It's kind of depressing. He's on tote bags and it's just a little weird. And, you know, Prague is pretty Jew-free. There's still a few Jews there now, but, you know, most of them were murdered. Kafka dies young of tuberculosis, I think, and his three sisters are all murdered by the Nazis. So you have this weird, and the Jewish stuff there is all huge tourist attractions, cemeteries, Holocaust memorial, old synagogues, hundreds
1:04:58 Speaker 00 and hundreds of years old. But there's nothing Jewish about Prague. It's just, there's some things in Prague that are Jewish. It's really quite weird. So I'm thinking these thoughts, and I end up one evening in a church, not the fanciest church in Prague, but there's a lot of pretty nice ones that aren't fancy, and they're playing classical music. There's many churches in many places offering this in European cities. And they're playing Bach and others. And I realize that there's nothing Christian about Prague either.
1:05:32 Speaker 00 It's a particularly secular city. But once, just like there was this Jewish flavor to it culturally from writers like Kafka and others, Christianity built Prague. It built those churches, it built that music, it built the sculpture that about human yearning and imperfection. And you wonder, and Prague's a very secular, Czechoslovakia's a very secular country in it these days, much stronger than the trends that you talked about earlier in America. And you think about Europe generally. They gave up on Christianity a couple decades before America did. America's a complicated place, it may swing back. But I want you to talk about two things.
1:06:16 Speaker 00 One, is there anything to be learned from European democracy and Christianity from that trend hitting there earlier? And secondly, a question I asked Ross Douthat, which is, is there a justification for deducting religious expenses? Is it membership in churches? Is it fair to ask nonbelievers like Jonathan Rauch to support the churches, the beliefs, and you could call it even a hobby of mine or other religious people? And of course, your answer in this book is, yeah, you're damn right. It's worthwhile to subsidize. There is a public good element to this.
1:07:01 Speaker 00 Now, a lot of listeners would disagree. I'm encouraging them to write us a comment. But I'm curious about those two things. You've made a case in this book for the profound importance of religious belief. And you close your book with some recommendations, mostly adjurations, adjuring Christians to take their faith seriously, as you have throughout our conversation. Are there any public policy implications of this? And what do you think about a place like Europe where, at least on the surface of Christianity, it appears that there's no pendulum swinging back the other way?
1:07:39 Speaker 01 Bueno, en orden contrario, el primero que voy a enviar bastante rápidamente porque mi libro es principalmente sobre política privada, no política pública. La idea central es que Estados Unidos se está volviendo incontrolable porque el cristianismo está fallando. Y, aunque me gustaría poder arreglar el cristianismo con un programa gubernamental o un Libro de Roxanne de cinco puntos de Brookings, no puedo. Tendrán que hacer ese trabajo, y la buena noticia es que muchos de ellos quieren hacerlo, muchos de ellos ven lo que ha pasado. Las personas con las que he hablado que están más descontentas con la dirección de cristianismo son cristianos.
1:08:17 Speaker 01 Y hay movimientos a la mano para tratar de reformarlos, para tratar de construir una teología cívica que sea más como Jesús y menos como X, como se llama Twitter ahora. Pero no, quiero decir, ustedes pueden argumentar sobre la deducción charitable, y yo diría, mira, si le estás dando a todos los demás que hacen cosas charitable, mejor dale a cristianos y judíos. Esa es una llamada bastante fácil. Y si usted decide no hacer ningún trabajo charitable, es deductible, entonces podemos tener una conversación sobre el papel especial de la religión.
1:08:52 Speaker 01 Así que, por lo tanto, deshago de ese aspecto de su pregunta, sin duda en una forma insatisfactoria.
1:09:03 Speaker 01 La otra mitad de su pregunta es más difícil y más profunda y interesante, que es, ¿qué decimos sobre Europa? La historia estándar sobre Europa es que es parte porque, perversamente, tiene estas religiones estatales, que es menos religiosa. Y esto se ha hablado durante años, la distintividad de Estados Unidos y la vibrancia de la cultura religiosa estadounidense, que se refiere principalmente a la cultura cristiana. Así que, pocas cosas para decir sobre eso.
1:09:35 Speaker 01 The first is, am I saying that it is absolutely impossible to have a liberal democracy without a healthy faith sector? I don't know that it's absolutely impossible. I only think that it's harder. That everything else will be more polarizing and more different if, instead of a faith tradition that's reasonably well-aligned with your democratic values, as most of the European mainline churches are, you have either the collapse of a faith tradition or faith traditions which are aligned against liberal democracy. That's where we are in America. I'm not sure you would say that that's where Europe has been. Because as weak as some of its institutional religion has been, those have been fairly
1:10:18 Speaker 01 closely aligned with democratic norms. Second thing. America's a very different kind of place than historic Europe. We'll set aside modern Europe, we'll come to that. But of course, it's a land of great ethnic, cultural, national diversity. It is a creedal country in a way that, you know, traditionally the Netherlands or Britain was not. And that meant that the job of bringing people together and socializing them into a common culture is a lot harder. And that means that the load—I mentioned that Christianity is a load-bearing wall in America.
1:11:02 Speaker 01 The load that it has to bear is a lot more challenging, just because you've got to do all that extra work. You can't just assume that everyone's a Lutheran and everyone's white. And so that makes it more critical in the United States and more damaging when a key institution that did that work of socializing fails. It turns out, everything else just has harder work to do and doesn't do it as well. And so, given the difference in composition of the countries, I think you would expect America to have a harder time with the collapse of Christianity. And by the way, the collapse is much more recent here than the changes that we've seen in Europe.
1:11:45 Speaker 01 And very sudden, there hasn't been time to adjust. So here's a third thing, and I would love to get your reaction to this.
1:11:55 Speaker 01 But this challenges the premise. So Nietzsche in the 1880s and 90s says God is dead.
1:12:04 Speaker 01 And what he says, people don't understand this, is he hates Christianity, but he also recognizes it's important and that without it, secularism and modernity are going to struggle to offer any account of life. And basically says, people will have to go out and build their own. That may work for Friedrich Nietzsche, doesn't work for anyone else. And it turns out he's right, because in the 20s and 30s, everything falls apart in Europe, it falls apart in Russia. We get the rise of fascism and communism and their false gods. And Nietzsche's vision comes nightmarishly true. And I think that can be attributed, as Nietzsche said, partly to the decline of the faith in Europe and the rise of secularization at a rate that people couldn't accommodate. Okay, so then you get the post-war period,
1:12:47 Speaker 01 and we get the American security umbrella, and you get the rebuilding of institutions, and everything looks hunky-dory, and we all say, look, secularism works in Europe. Except, in the last few years, you get waves of migration of a kind we've never seen before. You get a city like London, where I'm told
1:13:14 Speaker 01 British Anglo-Saxon whites are a minority. I'm not quite sure if that's true, but I've heard that said.
1:13:21 Speaker 01 You get places like Scandinavia, which take big inflows of people like Syrians to say nothing of Germany.
1:13:31 Speaker 01 Mass migration becomes a thing in Europe,
1:13:35 Speaker 01 and you start to see the same kind of collapse that you're seeing here. Polarization, ennemi, anger at the democratic institutions and across Europe, the right of these far-right parties. Christian nationalism is a big thing in Europe. Remember, it's nationalistic, that it's not Christian. It's a secular movement that
1:13:57 Speaker 01 appropriates Christian symbolism.
1:14:01 Speaker 01 In other words, maybe Europe's not so special. Maybe when it comes under the same kinds of strains that we're seeing, you know, everything from media fragmentation to mass migration, you see exactly the same things there as here. So maybe we're talking about a global problem.
1:14:17 Speaker 00 No, I think we are. I don't, you know, I think if you're a narrow person and you focus on your own country, you'll feel that there's something going wrong with it, but you're not alone. It's, you and I are blessed and cursed to have grown up in a time mostly where things were pretty stable. And it looked like, you know, things were getting better slowly in material ways and other ways, tolerance.
1:14:56 Speaker 00 And yet, you know, I like to say the veneer of civilization is thin. And I think times like these remind you of that. You're forced to recognize it. And the worst things that human beings are capable of, which describe the middle of the 20th century, don't seem as far away as they once did. So I'm very concerned about the future. It's hard to see how it's going to go well, but I'll quote James Buchanan, The Economist.
1:15:36 Speaker 00 He once, I once heard him say, "If I look to the future, I'm a pessimist, but if I look to the past, I'm an optimist." And what he meant was, you know, boy, 1933, it looked pretty dark. And the world survived, got better, a lot better for a long time. So sometimes when things are very dark, like they seem now, sometimes they turn out surprisingly well. We somehow muddle through. But I think the thing that's disturbing, and your book has this, I think, is an undercurrent, is that the institutions and the sense of what Lord Moulton called obedience to the unenforceable.
1:16:19 Speaker 00 The respect for certain norms kind of help get things taken care of without anyone having to explicitly solve them. We muddled through. Those things are institutions are not strong. The unenforceable norms are being ignored and people are much more opportunistic and self-interested. They want to wield that sword that and they're not worried with that their enemies are going to get a hold of it someday. So I think these are incredibly scary, concerning times, but there's a lot of optimism in your book and hope for better times, which I appreciated and enjoyed. You can close this out. We've responded to that in any way you want.
1:17:03 Speaker 01 Well, there's I wouldn't go quite as far as optimism because I'm in a dark place right now. And because Christians themselves are deeply concerned about the church's ministry. But I would say hope. I would say hope for sure. To me, it is a source of hope and even inspiration that the teachings of Jesus have within them the core ideas that would help restore governability to our country. And that those teachings, whether you believe
1:17:48 Speaker 01 in his divinity or not, have survived for 2,000 years and prospered for 2,000 years. Christianity is the world's biggest religion. And something that Christians themselves forget, but that other Christians remind them of with this, that Christianity is at its worst when it's seeking dominion, domination, when it wants to be the big man on campus and the big force in the culture. And that's what it's tried to be, what white evangelicals have tried to be. And that's what they're afraid of losing. And that's what seems to be driving.
1:18:32 Speaker 01 Their wedding to the MAGA movement and the Republican Party. And yet, if there's one thing we know about Christianity, it's that it's at its strongest and most appealing when it is countercultural and exilic, as Jesus was. When it is coming to society not from the point of view of, "We ought to run this goddamn place," but from the point of view of, "We have a message that's very different from what you're hearing around you." That is, as David French put it, "shiningly countercultural." It's a beacon of something different in life that's on offer for you. And so, the very weakness that we're seeing in both the evangelical and the mainline
1:19:16 Speaker 01 churches may hold within them the key to restoring some of Christianity's core appeal and core message. And that's the hope.
1:19:26 Speaker 00 My guest today has been Jonathan Rouse. Jonathan, thanks for being part of Econ Talk.
1:19:33 Speaker 01 Thank you.
1:19:41 Speaker 00 This is Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more Econ Talk, go to econTalk.org, where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's conversation. The sound engineer for Econ Talk is Rich Goyette. I'm your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.
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