Civil Society Should Welcome Spirituality

The secular right is warming to religion. High time!

Jonathan Rauch, the co-inventor (with Andrew Sullivan) of gay marriage (which I opposed and oppose, not on homophobic but on humble taxonomical grounds, and for which Rauch advocated for honorable reasons), recently published, by Yale University Press: Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain With Democracy.

Therein Rauch repents of what he considers his greatest blunder: his condemnation of the influence of Christianity on politics.

Jefferson propounded the ‘wall of separation" to protect the church from the state. Not vice versa.

Rauch, a dear friend and occasional colleague, doesn’t quite see the trees for the forest. He virtually omits Catholicism (the largest denomination of those who consider Jesus God incarnate) while featuring the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints. Which isn’t Christian.

I’m an enthusiastic admirer of the LDS. Still, few Protestants or Catholics recognize LDS as Christian as LDS does not consider Jesus God, a fundamental Christian doctrine. Rauch reduces this prevailing distinction to be held by "some" Christians.

That said, Rauch, an emphatically self-proclaimed Jewish atheist homosexual, brings a valuable outsider’s perspective.

A feature, not a bug.

Rauch commences by repenting of "The Dumbest Thing I Ever Wrote."

In 2003, for The Atlantic, I joyfully celebrated what I called apatheism, which I defined as not caring very much one way or the other about religion. Because religion is a source of social divisiveness and volatility, I predicted that apatheism would tone down friction and represented "nothing less than a major civilizational advance." It was, I gloated, "the product of a determined cultural effort to discipline the religious mindset, and often of an equally determined personal effort to master the spiritual passions. It is not a lapse. It is an achievement." Ahem. Let’s just say that’s not the way things turned out. Instead we live in a society which, on both left and right, has imported religious zeal into secular politics, and exported politics into religion, bringing partisan polarization and animosity to levels unseen since the Civil War.

Rauch goes on to lay out "Thin Christianity" ("what happens to our liberal democracy if American Christianity is no longer able… [or] willing, to perform the functions on which our constitutional order depends’"), "Sharp Christianity" ("when a prevalent strain of Christianity becomes not only secularized but politicized, partisan, confrontational, and divisive"), and "Thick Christianity" ("for Christianity to align itself with constitutional pluralism—not just strategically but theologically and spiritually").

There has been respectful attention paid to Cross Purposes in the religious media, less in the secular conservative and mainstream media.

A lost opportunity. Yet perhaps all is not lost.

Rauch turns out to be a frontrunner, not an outlier. The New York Times reports, in Seeking God, or Peter Thiel, in Silicon Valley: When tech luminaries talk about their Christian faith, people listen:

Other tech and entertainment gurus also seem to be embracing religion. Last year, Joe Rogan talked about the importance of faith in multiple podcast episodes, saying he had at times been "pretty atheist" but became more spiritual after the death of his grandfather. "As time rolls on, people are going to understand the need to have some sort of divine structure," Mr. Rogan said in an episode last February.
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Elon Musk, in a recent interview with Jordan Peterson, a psychologist who has become a sort of manosphere guru, said he was a "big believer in the principles of Christianity."

Perhaps influencers such as Peter Thiel, Michelle Stephens, Ben Pilgreen and Elon Musk will take up and abundantly distribute Cross Purposes and its message through their channels in their mission to bend the arc of history toward justice.

As an aside, I confess that I may have opened the doors of the conservative movement to the Christian Coalition, long ago. Movement conservatism had locked out the Evangelicals.

Its leadership considered the then-top Evangelical movement leaders to be, at best, political amateurs. At worst loose cannons.

Not without reason.

I believed that if given a seat at the table they would, without compromising principle, become valuable allies rather than dangerous freelancers.

As then a member of the fusionist Frank Meyer Society, I selected the then-executive director of the Christian Coalition as the speaker at one of our monthly soirees.

The other members present, far more influential than I, recognized him as a politically adept principled pragmatist and a potentially valuable ally. The doors opened.

In swept the Evangelicals, to, at least for a generation, the conservative movement’s — and America’s — benefit.

Myself an (unorthodox) Jew, boringly theistic and a heterosapien, I too believe that civil society utterly needs to welcome spiritual voices, and enthusiastically. Cross Purposes presents as key to advancing the cause of restoring Christianity as a "load bearing wall" of our constitutional order.