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[00:00:00] Mark: Welcome to Reconciliation Roundtable. I’m your host, Mark Beckwith, retired Bishop of the Diocese of Newark in the Episcopal Church. I gather leaders who have a particular interest in religion and a particular insight into the spiritual health—or virus—that is affecting our country. I’m also the author of Seeing the Unseen: Beyond Prejudices, Paradigms, and Party Lines.

And with me today is Jonathan Rauch, who is the Senior Fellow at Brookings Institution and a contributing editor at The Atlantic, the author of several books, including The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America; and his most recent book, Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain With Democracy. Jonathan and I have met through our common connection with Braver Angels, which is a movement to depolarize America.

Jonathan, welcome. It’s great to have you here on this Reconciliation Roundtable.

Jonathan: I’m happy to be with you, Mark.

Mark: In your newest book, you have written that when you were a teen, I think shortly after you received your bar mitzvah, you indicated that you did not believe in God, could not believe in God. You called yourself an apatheist, meaning an apathetic person to religion. I think now you identify yourself as an atheist—a Jewish, gay, atheist—and yet you pursue religion; its claims and its origins with a passion and insight that is so helpful, certainly to me and I think to so many others. What is the urge, what compels you to pursue religion and spirituality with the energy that you do?

[00:02:00] Jonathan: Well, I guess a couple of things. In the short term, right now at Brookings, I and a lot of other people sit around all day trying to figure out why the United States and other Western countries are becoming ungovernable. People are just so unhappy and dyspeptic all the time. They don’t like any of their governments.

This is becoming a worldwide crisis in a lot of countries, and it’s hard to look at that and at the same time look at the collapse of Christianity in America over the past… well, it’s been a while, but especially 20 years… and not see that these things must be related. That people are looking for spirituality now in all the wrong places like politics and strange secular movements.

So that’s a proximate cause, but I guess a deeper cause is that after being kind of the militant, proud sort of atheist in my youth – thanks to getting to know some Christians, starting with my college freshman year roommate, a wonderful Episcopal priest and scholar named Mark Macintosh, I came to see that it was I who was missing out. That people with a spiritual dimension in their lives had contact with a part of the human experience that I do not.

So I traded in my attitude of a kind of militancy, and sometimes – I hate to say this, but kind of contempt in some ways, “who needs that silly crutch of religion” – I kind of traded that in for a sense of curiosity and trying to understand what it was they were tuned into that I was not hearing.

[00:03:39] Mark: Well, as I was reading some of your writings and your biography, I understand that you lived in Japan for a while. Do I have that right?

[00:03:48] Jonathan: Yeah, a long time ago. In 1990, I did an intensive fellowship there for six months and really did a deep dive.

[00:03:57] Mark: The reason I ask is that I lived in Japan for two years after college, ‘73 to ‘75. I lived in Kyoto at Doshisha University. I was the fellow there., and it had a profound impact on my spiritual journey. Particularly in my association with Zen, which I studied and practiced.

This is almost an aside, but your experience in Japan, how did that help you frame the world either in the same way or in a different way?

[00:04:24] Jonathan: It’s not an aside at all, but what an interesting time to be in Japan. Almost right on the cusp of joining fully the Western industrial Revolution but still had that old post-war Japan quality.

Well, Japan challenges a lot of assumptions. One, for example, is that religion needs to look the way it does in the West. Japan is a spiritual society and no one who goes there doubts it because there are temples everywhere and many of them are profoundly beautiful places, but many are just tucked into pockets of the big cities. You turn the corner and right there between that teriyaki stand and the noodle shop is a small temple, and you’ll see the incense, you’ll see the candles, and so you learn that spirituality can be intense, yet not necessarily one of the big monotheistic religions. It has more to do with traditions, ancestors, spirits, that kind of thing.

I think it was just part of my sense that religion is a human universal, a cultural and psychological universal, to which I’m not a party.

[00:05:29] Mark: When you’ve said and written that religion is a constituent human trait, that it’s part of our DNA, where and how do you see religion working in a helpful way? Then, the corollary to that is – where do you see it hurting?

[00:05:45] Jonathan: There are a lot of sociologists and a lot of professors who’ve come at that question… I should say, just by way of preface – to be clear, my book isn’t about religion generally. It’s about Christianity in particular, so that’s where I wind up going. That’s where my current interest is.

But there are all kinds of needs that religion seems particularly well suited to. I focus on two in the book. There are lots, you know. There are social ones like providing a locus for pulling communities together, providing cultural transmission of values to kids through Sunday school instruction and youth groups, and many others. And there’s lots of evidence that being religious is correlated with or associated with being more connected, being more happy, being more grounded. Now, it’s not always clear which way the causality runs there.

There are two big questions that I focus on in the book that I think religion can answer and that secular materialism, which is what I am basically – I’m a scientific materialist, cannot.

The first is a big question, “why am I here and what purpose does my life serve?” Or “am I more than just a random agglomeration of cells, which will wink in and out of existence?” In the secular world, we don’t really have an answer to that question. We’ve tried very hard. The Great thinkers have all tried. We come up short.

The second big question is, “what’s the basis of morality distinguishing between good and evil?” That’s more than just, say, the preferences of individuals – the things we like and don’t like, or the imposition of the will of the strong over the week. There have been some very profound minds that have tackled that: Adam Smith, David Hume, Immanuel Kant. The greats. And they’ve done a lot of work on it, but they just don’t get you the whole way there. So those are things that faith does well.

The things faith does poorly – the reason it needs to be in a society where it can intermingle with and be in tension, productive tension, with secular materialism, science, liberalism (not progressivism, I mean like what the founders were – equality and basic human dignity, freedom). Left to its own devices, it can be very dogmatic and oppressive. It can become irrationalistic, superstitious, and it can make some very bad moral choices.

I grew up gay. I knew that I was different from about the age of five. I knew that I was attracted to, you know, boys and men in comic books for a different reason than the other kids. I was Jewish. I did not believe in God, and I understood that there was no place for me in Christian life. We were, gay people were the objects of a 60 to 70 year reign of terror in the United States – aided, abetted, and driven on by Christians, and they’re still doing it in a lot of the world. So I know all about the dark side of faith as well.

[00:08:57] Mark: Yes. The root of the word religion is Latin religio, which refers to the stories, symbols, and practices that bind people together. In my experience, there’s been a lot that has bound me to others through religious practice. At the same time, that binding can become so constricting and so sort of wedded to certainty that it has just the opposite effect.

So I appreciate your identifying those two related, but different threads that religion engages in, particularly Christianity, which is certainly the faith that I profess and I’ve had moments of closeness and distance in that journey, which is often the case.

You have written that Christianity is “a load bearing wall for democracy.” What load is it holding?

[00:09:59] Jonathan: Well, this gets to the core ideas of the book. So, the founders told us that they were giving us a republic “if we could keep it.” And they told us that they were giving us a constitutional system that would give us processes to work out our differences live together. But they also told us that those processes were not sufficient by themselves, The Constitution and The Bill of Rights. They said, you are going to have to have Republican virtues in order to sustain this system, by which they meant things like integrity and honor, civility, toleration, truthfulness, being a well-informed citizen. It’s really hard to have a republic. And they said, in order to get those civic virtues, those Republican virtues, the Constitution won’t supply those. You’re going to have to bring those in from the outside.

Where’s that? Well, it’s civil society, by which they meant family and community and education, but they very largely meant Christianity, white Protestantism, which is the founding faith of America. And so, what they were implicitly saying is, look, we have separation of church and state. They specifically rejected Christian nationalism and efforts to write Christ into the Constitution and the founding documents, they didn’t want that. But they did say that, implicitly, the church plays an important role in upholding and promulgating the values that our country depends on. So, it has a role to play, and if it doesn’t do that role again, they warned us that without Republican virtues, the Constitution is just a piece of paper.

[00:11:46] Jonathan: We go through it, as John Adams said, like a whale through a net. So that’s the load bearing wall. Christianity has a lot of work to do, and we relied on it for many generations, and despite its dark side and its flaws and the fact that Southern Baptist got slavery very, very wrong – for the most part, it did pretty well at what the founders wanted it to do.

From the beginning of polling in the 40s right through the end of the 20th century, 70% of Americans were affiliated with a church – a few synagogues and mosques, but mostly churches. And you probably remember this, but when I was growing up in Phoenix in the sixties and seventies, possibly the most common question people asked when they got to know each other wasn’t “where are you from?” or “what do you do for a living?” – it was “what church do you go to?”

[00:12:37] Mark: Yeah.

[00:12:38] Jonathan: So these were the social institutions that grounded us in our communities. They help teach our kids, they transmitted these values, and it turns out… this is what I got so wrong, Mark. I really, really messed up on this. It turns out that if you neglect the health of the church in our society; if it weakens, if it either is no longer able to or willing to do the job the founders needed it to do, everything else just gets much, much harder.

[00:13:12] Mark: I grew up a little bit earlier than you. In the fifties and sixties, if the church door was red, the music was on key, and the sermon was 15 minutes or less, people just kept coming to church. Those days have been gone for my whole ordained life, which is almost 46 years, and they’re not coming back.

My experience in the Church is people still harken to those days, and I think it’s a real opportunity for the Church to claim its role around values and engaging in community and joining where God is already working. So if Christianity is the load-bearing wall for democracy, what is holding up Christianity from your perspective?

[00:13:59] Jonathan: Well, you tell me Mark. I’d love to hear your account of what happened in your church and the other so-called mainline and ecumenical churches, but the white Protestant church in America is not holding up well. It’s in fact in a process of crisis. And that seems to have gone in two waves. The first, in the latter half – especially the latter third of the 20th century, was the near collapse of the ecumenical church.

And that’s a story that you can tell better than I can, if you agree with it. You know, just a couple weeks ago I was talking to a retired PCUSA minister, that’s a Presbyterian minister, who was saying that it got to the point where the church groups never talked about God. So the mainline church got away from being grounded in the Bible, being counter-cultural. It moved in the direction of a general, sort of left-leaning progressive activism, social justice, that sort of thing. And the story that scholars tell is that it kind of lost its identity. In the midst of all that, it stopped being countercultural and demanding and different from the surrounding culture, and people kind of drifted away saying, “well, if I’m doing social justice, I don’t have to give up a Sunday morning to do that.”

[00:15:17] Jonathan: The story in the late 20th century was, people who looked at this said, well okay, the mainline church is fading, but the evangelical church is picking up the slack. And the evangelical churches were going gangbusters. And they were countercultural. They were very much against the sexual revolution and homosexuality. I disagreed with them on all that, but they did maintain their cultural and social distinctiveness, and they were rooted in the Bible, and they were growing and thriving. Until this century, and then a second wave of secularization hits, in this century. But this time it’s not kind of fading into a general political progressivism. It’s the opposite. It’s becoming politicized, and aligned, and really joined at the hip with Republican party politics. That’s another wave of secularization, and it leads to the dramatic downsizing of the evangelical church that’s still going on.

According to the latest pew numbers, the percentage of white Americans who belong to a mainline church is 13%. White evangelicals down to the same low level, 13%, and you add them up and there’s still not as many of those people as your so-called “nones” – people without any religious affiliation at all.

[00:16:38] Mark: Well, it is interesting that you mention that. I’m looking back a hundred years and my tradition, the Episcopal Church, made a bargain with the culture in the National Cathedral, which was finished in 1916 and declared itself on its own to be the “National Cathedral.” It could do that because the Catholic Cathedral wasn’t going to be a National Cathedral, because they had all sorts of restrictions as to who could be a legitimate part of it and other mainline traditions didn’t have cathedrals… So we became a National Cathedral. Shortly thereafter, we moved up to our headquarters to New York City, the corporate center of America.

We aligned ourselves with corporate America. I remember reading a book when I was in high school, I think it was called The Status Seekers. If you wanted to advance yourself in the culture, join the Episcopal Church. That bargain is no longer the case, and we in the Episcopal Church, and I think other mainline churches for similar reasons, are trying to recreate, reframe themselves. Which I think is an extraordinary opportunity. But we still worry about how many people are coming and how much money we have, which are important issues, but often they shroud over the more important issue, which is “what is God calling us to do?”

[00:17:57] Jonathan: Well, that’s exactly right. Do you think that the story that I just told is more or less accurate in terms of what you saw happen in the church?

[00:18:03] Mark: Absolutely, and I think the Evangelical Church has made a similar bargain with the Republican party. The Episcopal Church made a bargain with corporate America. The Evangelical church has made one with the Republican Party. I think, if history is any guide, it will suffer the same kind of decline.

Again, there’s this great opportunity to engage the meaning of the gospel and be that load-bearing wall.

Moving on – you write about a lot about the LDS – The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and that’s a unique American religion and it is sort of has always been looked at a little bit differently. It’s sort of brought in, but not really.

Actually, my feeling (and interested to get your take on this) is that there are lots of LDS people in Braver Angels, an organization that we’re both connected with. They’re deeply involved in it. They tend to be very red, rather conservative, but deeply moral.

I see the LDS community as being, I call them the Cappadocians of the 21st century. The Cappadocians were the ones who solved the tension in the Council of Nicea between “is Jesus fully divine or is Jesus fully human?” And the Cappadocians said, “Stop. You’re both right.” And we ended up with [the doctrine of] the Trinity.

But say more about your connection, your insights, what you’ve learned from the LDS community.

[00:19:31] Jonathan: Well, I’d, I’d love to. I just have to ask, curiosity-wise, do you believe that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is Christian?

[00:19:42] Mark: Yes, and I do that out of a relational desire to be in relationship. You know, I don’t challenge people on the origins or the framework of their faith. I have had many, many people over the course of time tell me that I’m not a Christian. I don’t embrace Jesus the same way they do, and it’s painful. It irritates me. It’s frustrating. So, I have an expansive notion of what it means to be a Christian and have been working more through my connection with Braver Angels with LDS people. Their commitment, once it’s made –

oh my goodness.

Jonathan: It’s kind of Christ-like.

Mark: Yeah. I think there’s a lot that we have to learn from them. We in the mainline church, we as American culture. And you have been pursuing that, that relationship – learning about them. What do we need to know?

[00:20:38] Jonathan: Well, there’s a lot to say here. I’ll try not to filibuster, but this might take a minute.

The amazing countercultural work that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is doing right now was a major impetus in writing this book. I’ll just back up a bit and maybe talk about the hole that they’re trying to fill. So, my book talks about three kinds of Christianity, two which are deficient, and a third, which is the solution to those deficiencies.

The first is “thin,” and that’s what happened to the mainline churches. They just blend into the surrounding culture and kind of disappear as a cultural and religious force. The second is “sharp” Christianity, and that’s when the church becomes angry, partisan, divisive, political, begins to shrink and begins to harden, begins to turn away people who don’t have a particular political viewpoint. That’s what’s happened. But the third is “thick,” and that’s when a church is counter-cultural, demands a lot from its followers, gives them a lot in exchange for that, does not just go along with the ordinary culture around it in terms of its beliefs and its teachings, but is a part of our pluralistic social fabric. It is a load bearing wall and does help uphold our democracy.

I call that thick Christianity, and when I look around for models of that, they just pop out. So, a little background here. I’m gay, as is pretty clear by now. In 2015, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints worked with Equality Utah, that’s the LGBT group in Utah, and conservatives in the legislature to do something radically counter-cultural. No one else had tried this. And they passed a big statewide bill that created non-discrimination protections for LGBT people and paired those with important new religious liberty protections for the church, which is very conservative and for all churches, for all religious organizations. And this transformed the environment in the state for LGBT people, not just the law, but the whole culture. They’ll tell you that to this day.

So that got my attention, big time. In 2022, in Congress, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, along with some other actually conservative religious groups, the Orthodox Union National Association of Evangelicals, Seventh Day Adventist – but Latter Day Saints played a big, big role in this – they helped pass the Respect for Marriage Act, which enshrines my marriage to Michael in federal statute in case the Supreme Court changes its mind while also, again, providing very important new protections for conservative faiths that don’t want to participate in that.

So they’re not just talking the talk, they’re walking the walk.

So, okay, what is that walk? A big gap in Christianity – it’s caused all kinds of mischief, has been the absence of a civic theology, which answers the question “how does Jesus want us to behave, not just in our personal lives, community lives, the soup kitchen, but in social media and politics?” The Church – mainline church, the evangelical church – have not answered that question, and into that space has flooded some really terrible behaviors by Christians.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has taken it upon itself to answer that question theologically. Not strategically, but theologically, and their answer is “What God wants of Christians in public life is to exemplify patience, negotiation and mutual accommodation,” which, by the way, are the core values of our Madisonian Constitutional process.

They root this deep in the theology. It goes back to their theology around the Garden of Eden, concepts like free will and agency. And what they’ve done is articulated a civic theology of a different attitude that Christians can bring to public life. It’s not so much about the results or the outcome, but it’s “suppose we approach public life, not in a posture of partisanship, fear, threat, apocalyptic danger – but in a spirit of reconciliation, looking for creative solutions, and deconflicted?” I look at that and think that’s got to be a lesson for other Christians.

[00:25:05] Mark: I think of the evolution of the concept of mission, which is sort of core to Christianity. For a long time in the West, mission was “bringing God to places where God is not…” and the arrogance of that. Then it moved, I think in a helpful way, to “doing for.” People don’t have a place to live. We do for them. We provide them with a place to live. They don’t have food. We give them food. But what ends up happening is that mission becomes “doing for,” which just reinforces the gap between those who have and those who don’t.

And what you’re describing about the LDS community, and where I think my interpretation or reading of the gospel is “being with.” Jesus said “the poor will always be with you.” Well, we call them “the poor,” which means they don’t have names or stories, so it just continues to reinforce that division, as opposed to “being with” – how can we learn from each other? And what you’re describing is the essence of mission and I really appreciate that.

[00:26:03] Jonathan: I’m glad you used the term mission. You know what, one of the things that sticks in my head is – among the people who are most unhappy with the direction of the white Evangelical Church, are a lot of Evangelical pastors. The first wave of politicization came from the top down, you know, Falwell, Pat Robertson, Lou Sheldon. But the current wave is coming from the bottom up. It’s coming from the pews, from people who are being radicalized and made angry and frightened by what they see on cable news, and bring that to church, and demand that the church get involved in the culture wars and that’s not what the pastors are there to do.

They’re finding it harder and harder to preach the gospel against this incoming tide. And I remember, one of my friends who’s an evangelical Southern Baptist pastor, was looking at this and told me, he said on a blog actually, that he thought the next mission field of the Church was American Christians. It was the church itself. Then I went to Salt Lake City after the book came out a couple months ago, to Provo, and I talked to Latter-day Saints, both leaders and community members, and my message was inspired by that and I said “Look, you guys have a theology here, which I’m not saying you should convert everyone to be Latter-day Saints or anything like that, but you have something to teach. You have a mission here. You have a message that the country needs to hear right now.”

[00:27:29] Mark: You refer in you’re writing, certainly in your book, to Tim Keller. Who died recently, [and was] the pastor of Redeemer Church in New York City. I remember when I served as Bishop in Newark, a bunch of us went to meet, not with Tim, but with leaders of that congregation and to sort of learn from them, “how have you come to where you are?” They said their mission as a church was to help New York City become a better city. And that surprised me in some ways, because it was a conservative Christian congregation. I thought they would say, “we’re here to bring everyone to Christ.” Well, that’s not going to work in New York City. And they had this mission to help the city become a better city and the church has flourished. I think their impact has had a very positive effect on the church. It certainly did on me. Again, it’s building relationships.

[00:28:23] Jonathan: It is. Well, and those things are consistent. The core idea of this book, we haven’t quite got there, so I’ll just go there now. This is a book about Christianity, addressed to Christians, and it’s saying to Christians what I just told Latter-day Saints, which is that the actual message of Jesus, what’s right there in the Gospels, are the very messages our country needs right now to begin moving our politics in a better direction and strengthen our democracy. And there are three principles that are core to Christianity. The first is “don’t be afraid.” The second is “imitate Jesus.” And the third is “forgive each other.”

And those map very well onto the core principles of Republican virtue. Don’t be afraid means sometimes you lose an election, you’re going to give up power. It’s not the end of the world. Imitate Jesus means all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. Everyone deserves civic respect and protection of their rights. And forgive each other translates into, when you win an election, you’re not there to crush the other side and drive them out of our country. You’re there to share the country and expand the space to live together.

So my message to Christians – it’s presumptuous coming from me, I’m not a Christian, but my message to Christians is – we need more Christianity from Christians right now and less of the other things that Christians seem to be doing.

And that’s to go back to the point you just made, Mark – isn’t that “making the city stronger”?

[00:29:53] Mark: Yeah. I think that’s absolutely right.

You have described yourself in various interviews as a “radical incrementalist,” meaning that things need to move slowly if they’re going to have ongoing impact and change that will hold. Given what we’re facing now in our country ,where so many things are happening and being dismantled and people are confused and distressed – how does radical incrementalism apply now?

[00:30:26] Jonathan: You mean right now? At this moment when lots of norms, institutions, arrangements in Washington are just being uprooted and thrown out the window at an unprecedented speed?

So radical incrementalism is, you know, it’s lighthearted, it’s a bit of a joke, but it’s the idea of fomenting revolutionary change on the geological timescale. But it’s based in a kind of conservatism, which is – very often things are the way they are for reasons that might not be instantly apparent. So you do need to be careful when you’re looking at institutions and values that have been around for a while. You don’t just tear them up. So yes, good can come of radical change sometimes. Sometimes that is necessary, but it’s very, very easy to make mistakes when you’re not being careful with time-worn institutions. When you’re walking into the IRS or the CDC or the Justice Department and you’re simply firing tens of thousands of people without really knowing what they’re doing and then saying, “well, we can always hire them back.”

No, you can’t always hire them back. You don’t even know what they did! The best of them are going to get private sector jobs and then they’re gone. Or uprooting norms like, I mean where do you begin? Tearing up alliance structures. I’m not saying that all of these are bad policies necessarily, but I am saying that just throwing caution to the wind is usually something that people wind up regretting.

[00:32:00] Mark: When Jesus is arrested at the end of John’s gospel, he’s brought before Pilate, and Pilate really doesn’t know what to do and doesn’t want to be in this situation. Perhaps in anxiety or frustration, he asks Jesus “what is truth?” I think he really wants to know. And what, for you now, is truth? I mean, existential truth. How are you pursuing that? Because I need to say, Jonathan, as you write, as you engage these issues – for me, and I think for many others, you are pursuing truth by exposing what truth is not and leaving more narrow space to sort of look into truth, and I’m just so grateful for that.

Jonathan: Well, thank you. Am I right to recall that Jesus does not answer Pilate?

Mark: He does not answer Pilate. He gets flogged and that’s the answer. That’s it. Earlier times, he gives some cryptic answer that scholars have debated over for God knows how long, but he doesn’t answer the question.

[00:33:09] Jonathan: You know, it’s a cryptic passage in the Bible, and like so much in the Bible, I read it with a sense of mystification, but part of how I’ve understood Jesus’s silence is “I’m not going to dictate the truth to you. You’re going to have to find it, and that’s going to be through a process.”

The process that I find truth through is very much the one you mentioned, and that’s broadly defined, the scientific process. You float hypotheses and so do many other people, and you test them in all kinds of ways, but critical ways. And on any given day, the few that have held up are our closest approximation to the truth.

So it is a process of trial and error detection. And that means we never find ultimate truth. This in a way, is why Jesus doesn’t answer the question. He could have just flatly said, “here’s the truth.” But we get closer to it. We approach a little closer to it every year.

[00:34:01] Mark: Some of the great conversations that I occasionally dive into are between theologians and astrophysicists. The astrophysicists are asking the questions of cosmology. “How did it start?” All of those, and typically, at least as I read it, they come up with mystery. Because there’s some things – they get closer and closer – but as they get closer, it still seems further away. You get halfway there. It’s just interesting how this dynamic plays out.

[00:34:36] Jonathan: Well, there are questions science can’t answer, maybe some it never will answer, and there are questions faith can’t answer. Something that you understand that I don’t really, but something that the truest Christians and people of faith have told me again and again is that part of faith is doubt.

[00:34:52] Mark: Mm-hmm.

[00:34:53] Jonathan: And that if you’re a dogmatic, certain person – that’s not a Christ-like faith. That’s always interested me because doubt, of course, is the foundation of science also.

[00:35:04] Mark: Yeah. Frederick Buechner, who was a gifted novelist and a sometimes-theologian, he died several years ago. He called doubt “the ants in the pants in the life of faith.” They keep us moving. I remember reading that or hearing that from him like 45 years ago, and it still sticks with me. Doubt is a gift. Doubt is a gift.

When I was in college, I was a religion major, and what was so important to me was learning and reading Freud and Marx, because they were able to sort of display what religion is not or how it gets in the way or takes us to different places.

So that was just very, very helpful. And I mention that because your insight, wisdom, and passion of pursuing religious questions, particularly in the Christian Church where I reside, just helps reframe the questions that we need to be asking and the issues we need to be pursuing. It’s just an enormous help. So I want to thank you for that.

[00:36:07] Jonathan: Well, that’s a very high compliment Mark, because I come to Christianity very much as an outsider from a background of originally having a very bad attitude toward it. And it’s still been a journey of discovery. There are two groups I’m trying to reach with this book.

The first is secular people like me. At best, we took Christianity for granted in America. Did not realize that it was a load-bearing wall. At worst, we were openly hostile to it. And we need to change our attitude. I think that’s maybe starting to happen, but we need to be welcoming of Christianity in public life. We need to do what we can to help the church thrive. Because we need it.

Then the second audience for this book is Christians. I’m very much an outsider, but I just hope that I can help call the church back to its own fundamentals. You don’t have to believe that Jesus Christ was God to believe that he was right.

And in those three crucial pillars of Christianity, also the pillars of James Madison and our Constitution and government. Those things are things that we have in common and that we need more from in the church. So if my book can help call Christians back to their core, that will be, I think, maybe a contribution.

[00:37:26] Mark: Thank you, Jonathan. Besides getting your book, Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain With Democracy, how else can people follow you?

[00:37:35] Jonathan: I’ve got a website where I post my bigger articles, not all of them, but it’s called jonathanrauch.com, and you’ll find my work there and in The Atlantic. You know, just Google me. I’m on Bluesky. I’m off Twitter.

[00:37:48] Mark: Good. Again, thank you.

I’m Mark Beckwith, the host of Reconciliation Roundtable, author of Seeing the Unseen: Beyond Prejudices, Paradigms, and Party Lines. Jonathan, thank you for this time. Blessings on the journey that we share and the journey that’s uniquely ours.

Jonathan: Thank you, Mark.

Mark: Thank you for listening to this episode of Reconciliation Roundtable. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite platform, and visit mark beckwith.net to stay up to date with new episodes, log content, and other news. Please, if you could, rate and review this podcast on iTunes [Apple Podcasts]. It helps new listeners to find us.

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