Podcast #275: Christianity and the American Polity
Iona Italia talks to Brookings Institution senior fellow Jonathan Rauch about his latest book, Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy.
My guest this week is Jonathan Rauch. Jon is a senior fellow in the Governance Studies programme at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of eight books, four of which I have personally read and can highly recommend: Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought; The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better After Midlife; The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defence of Truth; and his latest book, which is the focus for our conversation today, Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Contract with Democracy.
Jon argues that Christianity is a load-bearing wall in the American civic polity, but that evangelical Christians have turned away from their core beliefs in favour of the kind of destructive, overzealous party political activism that is contributing to the pernicious polarisation of US society.
He offers some models for returning to a vision of Christianity more compatible with civic virtue, and urges Christian and atheist Americans to find better means of coexistence. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Jonathan Rauch.
Iona Italia: Let’s dive in. Your book really has two parts. The first part is about the way Christianity is an integral part of American polity. You talk about civic polity and religious institutions complementing each other. In the second part, you discuss how those religious institutions, particularly evangelical Christianity, could be reformed or returned to a reading of Christianity more compatible with US civic virtues, rather than being merely a political partisan affiliation.
I’d like to start with the first part because I wonder whether there’s a connection here between your earlier book on the Constitution of Knowledge and this book. One connection I see is that you have a lot of faith in the power and importance of institutions. Was that a conscious connection as you were writing this book? Were you thinking about the centrality of institutions in a similar way to how you discuss institutions that promote knowledge in The Constitution of Knowledge?
Jonathan Rauch
Jonathan Rauch: Yes. I see liberalism—what Australians understand as liberalism, which is what we sometimes call “classical liberalism,” not the US-style post-war left-wing progressive type—as the basis of modern civilisation. Most of the good things that have come into the world over the past 350 years, like our knowledge of the universe, the ending of most wars between liberal countries, remarkable freedom, the ability for me as a gay man to be open, to be married, women’s rights—all those forms of progress.
My focus has been trying to figure out why people in so many places are becoming sour on these institutions and endangering them to the point of a real crisis in the United States. Both books are efforts to understand what’s gone wrong, one with our epistemic order and the other with the Christian underpinnings we had relied on for so long to help hold the country together.
II: I’m quite interested that the US is such an outlier among developed Western nations in the number of churchgoers and believers.
I live in Australia—I’ve lived in seven different countries and this is probably the best governed, most harmonious country I’ve lived in. (Although, if you read Twitter you might think this is a dystopian hellhole where we’re at each other’s throats— living here has really brought home to me the gap between fights on Twitter and how real life feels on a daily basis.)
This is, like most developed countries, an extremely secular country. Most Australians aren’t religious. They don’t believe in God. They don’t go to church, possibly some at Christmas or to get married or baptised or buried, but it’s not a major part of people’s lives. The US is a strong outlier in that most other countries that are strongly religious are underdeveloped countries, theocracies, illiberal or totalitarian countries, like Pakistan, where I grew up. Why do you think the US is such an outlier in that regard?
JR: The US is significantly less of an outlier in 2025 than in 2020. Back then, the conventional wisdom was that America stood apart from the rest of the developed world in its religiosity. That’s not so true anymore. We have seen in the United States, just in this century, really in the past twenty years, a collapse of faith, especially Christianity.
That’s brought with it a series of social difficulties. I don’t believe in mono-causality—you’ve had mobile phones and fragmented media and failed institutions. But a significant part of the increase in depression, anxiety, loneliness, social isolation, anomie, and especially intense partisan polarisation, the substitution of partisan identity for what used to be more of a religious identity—all of those things have caused social pathologies.
The United States is becoming more like other developed countries in terms of being secular, but we relied more than they did on religion, specifically Christianity, which is the country’s majority faith by far. It was a load-bearing wall here in a way that it did not have to be in many other countries for various reasons. I think that means we’re suffering more for the collapse of that wall.
Jonathan Rauch
II: Why do you think it was so much more of a load-bearing wall in America than elsewhere?
JR: Sociologists will argue about that until the cows come home. But the standard story is that we are an immigrant society and a very diverse society and thus relied on creed. That included the Constitutional creed, the creed of the Founders, but it also included Christian creed to knit us together. When I was a kid in the sixties and seventies, often the first thing someone asked when they met somebody was not what do you do for a living or where did you go to college, it was what church do you go to? Seventy percent of Americans were churchgoers right through the last century. Today it’s under half. That’s a change of magnitude we haven’t seen before.
When a country goes through a change that wrenching, it’s not as if a substitute can spring up overnight for all of what Christianity has been doing. That includes providing a transcendental account of life’s meaning, something higher than ourselves that we live for, providing collective worship, connections to other people, a way to socialise and educate children into a person’s values. You don’t get those things from SoulCycle, and even less from MAGA and QAnon and these other radical political movements which people are looking to for a source of identity.
II: I was quite interested in this idea that religious people get their meaning from a belief in God. I’ve recently been listening to the statements from freed hostages who’ve come back from Gaza. Although Israel is also an outlier country in terms of religiosity—though I think many of the most religious people are not in the IDF and would not have been living in the border kibbutzim—this may be a slightly different group, a more secular group.
I’m struck by the fact that none of the hostages mentioned God as part of what was sustaining them. What they mentioned was not SoulCycle, but they were sustained by each other, by the presence of other hostages, and by hope for reunion with those outside, those back in Israel. I think maybe you overstate the case about the necessity for religion as a source of transcendental meaning, because many people take that meaning from relationships with other people.
JR: I agree. I should clarify. I am not a believer. I’m Jewish, but I don’t believe in God. I tried at one point. I just couldn’t. And I’m gay. So I am well acquainted, as all gay Americans of my generation are, with the cruelty and bigotry and hypocrisy of Christians in this country.
I have never held that America is a Christian nation or that if you’re not a believer, you can’t be just as good a citizen and just as moral a person. I think I’m a reasonably moral person and I don’t go around in a state of existential dismay because I don’t believe in God. But what I’m saying is that the substitutes that people have looked for—many people do look for transcendent meaning. They do look for a relationship with something higher than themselves. They do look for sources of social connection that are consistent and they do look for a foundation for values for right and wrong.
When Christianity fades, people go other places to get those goods. Those other places range from strange and ineffective—like witchcraft, Wicca, personal fitness movements, radical environmentalism—to downright poisonous and toxic. Toxic polarisation has become of such a scale that it’s effectively making America ungovernable. It’s not that everyone has to be religious, but Christianity was doing a lot of social jobs in the United States, and its weakening has not yet given rise to adequate substitutes.
