Commonwealth Club Of California Podcast

The crisis of American Christianity has become a crisis for democracy, says award-winning journalist Jonathan Rauch. A lifelong atheist, he is warning that the waning of the church in this country is tied to the waning of our democracy. What happens to American democracy if Christianity is no longer able, or no longer willing, to perform the functions on which our constitutional order depends? In his provocative new book Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy, Rauch reckons candidly with both the shortcomings of secularism and the corrosion of Christianity. Rauch says the mainline church—which he calls “thin Christianity”—isn’t able to inspire and retain believers. Worse, he says a “Church of Fear” has distorted white evangelicalism in ways that violate the tenets of both Jesus and James Madison. What to do? For answers, Rauch looks to a new generation of religious thinkers, as well as to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which has placed the Constitution at the heart of