REVIEW: ‘Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy’ by Jonathan Rauch
Jonathan Rauch is asking all the right questions. "Why should secular Americans, including many who feel they have a beef with organized religion, care about the state of Christian America?" for one. For another, "What happens to our liberal democracy if American Christianity is no longer able, or no longer willing, to perform the functions on which our constitutional order depends?" These questions, and the paucity of answers currently available to them, worry Rauch, a self-described secular gay atheist Jew. And if they are troubling enough to move Rauch to write Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain With Democracy, that should set off alarm bells. Christianity’s decline matters to all of us, he writes, because religion is a "load-bearing wall," a source of purpose and a mechanism for transmitting the virtues necessary to use freedom responsibly. Secular democracies don’t provide those things but do rely upon them. We need Christianity to flourish.
Of course, Rauch is hardly the first to recognize this. He quotes President John Adams, who famously wrote, "We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net." Without religion to ensure that citizens answer to a higher authority for their actions, our constitutional republic, which takes a more laissez-faire approach to interpersonal relations than the monarchies of Europe ever did, would descend into a state of nature. Our experiment in self-government demands that citizens govern themselves, not just as a polity but as individuals. Thus, wrote Adams, "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Washington Free Beacon
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Tal Fortgang is an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He was a 2023 Sapir Fellow.
Photo: Douglas Rissing / iStock / Getty Images Plus
