Bits from the transcript of a conversation between NY Times columnist David French (religious, evangelical Christian) and Jonathan Rauch (self-described as "gay and atheistic and Jewish") titled "What if Our Democracy Can’t Survive Without Christianity?". Rauch has a forthcoming book (Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain With Democracy) and the dialogue relates to some of its key points. In Rauch's judgment:

... the three fundamentals of Christianity map very well onto the three fundamentals of Madisonian liberalism. And one of those is don’t be afraid. No. 2 is be like Jesus. Imitate Jesus. And No. 3 is forgive each other. And those things are very much like how you run a constitutional republic.

You can’t be afraid of losing all the time. Sometimes you’ve got to let the other team win. You have to trust in the system. You have to believe in traits like the basic dignity and equality and humanity of everyone, even the people you oppose. And you can’t be so judgmental that you think if you lose the next election everything is over, and that bad people win and you’ve somehow got to drive them out of the country."

and

It turns out that Christianity is a load-bearing wall in democracy, and the founders told us that. They didn’t specify that you have to be a Christian, per se, but they said that our liberal, secular Constitution, it’s great, as far as it goes, but it relies on virtues like truthfulness and lawfulness and the equal dignity of every individual.

And they understood that those have to come from an outside source. The Constitution won’t furnish them. And the source that they relied on principally was religion to teach those things and to build and transmit those values. And it turns out that for most of our history, Christianity has been pretty good at that. I mean, lots of exceptions, of course.

But what I didn’t realize 20 years ago is how right they were. And that once Christianity begins caving in, people begin looking other places for their sources of values. They go to “wokeness” or QAnon or MAGA. And those turn out to be not the kinds of values that you can use to underpin a democracy. And that’s the situation that we seem increasingly stuck in.

Rauch contends that Christianity fails if it becomes "thin" (a secularized consumer good) or "sharp" ("at war with the culture around it") — and that, to be a support for democracy, Christianity needs to be "thick" (committed to the teachings of Jesus).

Rauch concludes:

... I have learned that there are teachings at the core of Christianity which are beautiful and true. You don’t have to believe in Jesus to believe them. You can believe in James Madison to believe them because they’re similar, and that’s not coincidental.

And I think it can only do good and not harm to the country and to Christian witness, if Christians can do the work of rediscovering and elevating those elements of the Christian faith which uphold our democracy and which uphold the teachings of Christ. I can’t see that any possible harm would result from that.

And so what I come down to is addressing my Christian fellow citizens and saying, why not give Jesus a try?

_{(cf Foam on the Ocean (2000-07-13), Christmas Faith (2000-12-23), Passage to India - God Is Love (2017-09-23), ...) - ^z - 2024-12-21}