August 2025
These days, one need not be a pessimist to be distressed by conditions in America.
For much of the world, however, there is good news. A Gallup survey periodically asks residents of 142 countries to gauge where they see themselves on a scale of thriving to struggling to suffering. In the latest survey the portion who say they are suffering is down to 7% globally, equaling the lowest level since 2007. Strong gains are as widespread as Kosovo, Vietnam, Kazakhstan and Paraguay. There are a few notable exceptions: America, Canada, western Europe, Australia and Britain. Nations with some of the highest standards of living are feeling the worst. In 2007, 67% of Americans and Canadians reported they were thriving. That number is now down to 49%. As the U.S. economy has exhibited strong growth, our suicide rate has continued to increase, social isolation has worsened, and social trust is in the toilet. The American dream of social mobility, such as I have experienced in my lifetime, feels increasingly hollow. Novels such as The Great Gatsby (1925) and The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), or Arthur Miller’s 1949 play Death of a Salesman, each casting a cynical eye on America’s underbelly, do not look dust-coated these days. During a time of terrifying violence and social upheaval, the French mystic Simone Weil (1909-1943) wrote “Order is the first need of all.” At the moment, America’s social order is fracturing. Just ask any of the homeless people outside my door in downtown Seattle.
Instead of living the American creed of e pluribus unum (out of many we become one), hyper-individualism is now ascendant, propelled partly – probably a lot – by social media. Each to his own and to hell with everyone else. This is not the first outbreak of excessive individualism in America. Personal freedom and communal responsibilities have always been in tension here, and require continual recalibration. Some generations skew toward community (such as the 1950s); for others, such as today, atomization reigns. Hyper-individualism frays the social fabric which in turn spawns a further pathology – the appeal of a demagogue, a charismatic strong-man leader who incessantly brays that only he can fix all that’s wrong. Who needs checks and balances, or collaboration, committees, and compromise, when one’s leader is such a genius?
What is it that ails us so?
A new book by journalist and historian Jonathan Rauch takes on that question and offers, for my money, a penetrating diagnosis. The book is Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy. Rauch, who is based at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., also happens to be Jewish, gay, and atheist.
He presents a cogent, well-considered thesis that Christianity’s decline in America is imperiling democracy and the social contract beneath it, in a way that America’s Founders, especially James Madison, warned about. The Founders feared that liberal democracy, the form of government they gave us and encoded in our Constitution, is necessary but not sufficient. They recognized that our system of government needed to rest on a substrate of what they called republican virtue, which would have to come from civil society, meaning civic groups, family, and religion. That was the bargain our Founders made: We’ll give you a Constitution and a process of governance and you faith leaders and faith communities need to give us the values that will sustain us. New York Times columnist David Brooks has echoed this insight: “If you’re asking politics to solve our [need for] moral purpose and character and meaning, you’re asking more of politics than it can bear.”
Rauch confesses that early in his career he “should have paid more attention to the American Founders who, while opposing the admixture of religion with government, warned that republicanism would rely in part on religious underpinnings. John Adams, for instance, famously wrote: 'We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.’” Or as James Madison put it with more concision, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”
The keenest outside observer of early America, the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, saw clearly the tendency of democracy to unleash passions for physical pleasure, to push individuals toward shortsighted, brutish materialism. In his view, that drift made it all the more important that religious beliefs counter these democratic tendencies by drawing attention to man’s immortal soul and elevating his affections and mere natural reason toward what is majestic, pure, and eternal. Without the active presence of spiritual conceptions in society – the recognition that an integral part of each person is implicated in realities beyond this material world – human beings in the democratic age are in great danger of becoming degraded into something less than fully human. (Here, I paraphrase Rauch who paraphrases from Hugh Heclo’s 2007 book Christianity and American Democracy.)
As he claims a necessary role for religion in liberal democracy, Rauch recognizes the paradox he presents. Here we have an atheist asserting a need for liberal democracy to be reasonably aligned with Christianity in order to undergird moral behavior that cannot all be codified in a constitution. At times in his youth he tried to believe in God; it never took. As he got older, his view of spirituality evolved. “I came to see that people who believe in God have an ability I lack. They receive frequencies I can’t detect, which gives their worlds a dimensionality, a layer of meaning, that my world lacks.” He likens his atheism to color blindness; faith is a part of the human experience he does not share.
Is that a problem? “Not very much for me,” he writes. “I feel exactly the same way as Richard Feynman, the American physicist, who said, ‘I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. . . . I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose.’" Rauch understands that “Purely secular thinking about death will never satisfy the large majority of people. Most rely on some version of faith to rescue them from the bleak nihilism of mortality. Most believe that we are here for a reason; that our souls or essential beings transcend death; that the universe was up to something special when it breathed life into us. As William James argues in his seminal 1896 essay ‘The Will to Believe’, people have a perfect right to believe that we exist for a reason, even if that reason is not scientifically provable.”
Rauch took a further step in his intellectual journey when he began bending an ear to warnings that Christianity’s crisis is democracy’s too. He writes, “I came to realize that in American civic life, Christianity is a load-bearing wall. When it buckles, all the institutions around it come under stress, and some of them buckle too.”
He examines contemporary Christianity in America using three frames: Thin Christianity, Sharp Christianity, and Thick Christianity. Thin Christianity is what you get when religion stops nurturing and teaching the moral values that sustain us, and which our Founders were depending on the church to continue to supply, such as honesty, civility, lawfulness, truthfulness. When it fades as a cultural force, as has occurred in recent decades, people look elsewhere for spiritual values, such as pseudo religions like MAGA, wokeness, Wikka, SoulCycle, or Q-Anon. These shallow substitutes “only divide us and make us crazy.”
Sharp Christianity (“sharp” as in the point of a spear) is what you get when the Church becomes weaponized for politics and the culture wars. Churches shrink because congregants uninterested in a political agenda leave. Many pastors also walk away. This Sharp variety favors apocalyptic language, thrives on fear, and obsesses about power. It breeds a fearful church; alive to the politician’s promise that if you vote for me, you’ll have power. “I am your retribution!”
Thick Christianity is a church espousing different values than the surrounding culture (not unlike Jesus’s messages when he was preaching). It makes strong demands on its followers while giving them a lot in return, in the form of spiritual values and a sense of purpose (Why am I here on Earth?) and healthy community. Of all the religions and pseudo religions Rauch investigated for this book, he came to the conclusion that the faith that best represents this healthy strain in contemporary America is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, formerly known as Mormonism.
This claim near the end of his book gave me a charge because that is the religion at the center of my current writing project, titled Journeys to Zion. Some two hundred years ago the LDS religion helped motivate my ancestors to leave their homes in Scotland, England, the Isle of Man, South Africa, and the eastern U.S. and undertake perilous journeys to a new Zion. Every ancestral branch of my family happens to feature Mormon pioneers who participated in the settlement of the Utah Territory. My book interweaves a cultural history of religion in early nineteenth century America with biographies of these brave and hardy ancestors (publication anticipated 2026).
Jonathan Rauch’s new book performs a valuable service by showing just how deeply Christianity’s influence extends. And what a misfortune it would be for liberal democracy were its decline to continue.
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If curious to learn more about Rauch and Cross Purposes, you could of course read his book. I also recommend this video of an interview with him by LDS scholar and historian Terryl Givens, in Provo, Utah, January, 2025. Rauch was also interviewed on the Good Faith podcast, in February, 2025.
If you would like updates on the publication of my upcoming book Journeys to Zion, please join the email list here. Your email address will not be shared.