Cross Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy

By Jonathan Rauch

Jonathan Rauch begins Cross Purposes with a confession. Decades ago, he shared a college room with a devout Christian who would go on to become a renowned professor of theology. Rauch, at the time, was barreling full speed ahead into secular liberalism. They disagreed often. But his roommate's kindness and seriousness stuck with him. So did the quiet conviction. This book is, in some ways, a long-overdue letter to that friend — and to a country that seems to be forgetting how to believe without burning down the house.

Rauch walks the reader through the slow-rolling decline of American religious life: shuttered churches, pews emptied out, "For Sale" signs on steeples. Once, the first question you asked someone new was which church they went to. Now it's where they work.

At first, Rauch admits, he welcomed the change. As a young journalist, he advocated for an increasingly secular public culture. But he's come to believe that in pushing religion out of politics, we've started amputating virtues that religion once carried into public life — virtues that our democracy was quietly counting on.

He lays the bulk of the blame at the feet of white Evangelicals. In Rauch's view, they didn't just lose their way — they traded it away. He calls it a Faustian bargain: the religious right exchanged the ethics of Jesus for the power politics of Caesar. Eighty percent of them justified their vote in 2016 as a one-time emergency — a firewall against Hillary Clinton. But then, 75% stayed the course in 2020. And 2024.

In Rauch's telling, the Evangelical church didn't just become politically involved; it became addicted to fear. Every election now is an apocalypse. Every loss, an existential threat. What began as moral clarity has calcified into political absolutism.

But Rauch isn't content to scold the right. He saves his second sermon for the secular left. Liberals, he argues, took the separation of church and state — a legal doctrine — and mutated it into a cultural scorched-earth policy. Religion wasn't just removed from government; it was pushed out of polite society. Derided, mocked, written off.

Into this mess, Rauch brings a surprising contrast: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Mormon church, he says, has managed to preserve a thick, demanding religious life — early morning seminary classes, deep communal ties, moral discipline — while largely avoiding the temptation of the political pulpit. And even though it doctrinally opposes gay marriage, it found ways to compromise and support civil protections for same-sex couples.

Why highlight this? Because, Rauch argues, American democracy depends not on religion as a voting bloc, but on religion as a character forge. He quotes Madison and Adams, who both assumed a self-governing people would be self-governed — in other words, virtuous in both public and private life. Take away the moral formation religion once offered, and the whole system begins to wobble.

His final plea is paradoxical: he wants Christians to get more religious — not more performative, not more partisan — but deeper, thicker, more committed to the teachings of their faith. Not because it helps them win elections. But because it helps hold up the roof. He pleads Liberals to welcome religion and help religious help them.

Its a thought provoking book. I loved it.