Jonathan Rauch, a prominent atheist writer and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, says that America needs to return to its traditional Christian values to get back on track. His new book, Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy, makes the argument that the church is failing in its role of representing Jesus and needs true faith.
In an interview, the author summarized his opinion. “What really needs to happen to get our country on a better track is for Christianity not to become more secular or more liberal, but to become more like itself, to become more truly Christian,” he said. Raunch laid out his view that the “three fundamentals of Christianity,” match up with “Madisonian liberalism.”
These three fundamentals are 1) imitating Jesus, 2) not being afraid, and 3) forgiving one another. “Those things are very much like how you want a constitutional republic,” he explained. “You can’t be afraid of losing all the time. Sometimes, you gotta 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.”
He went on to recount how ” … you can’t be so judgmental that you think if you lose the next election, everything is over, and the bad people win, and you’ve somehow got to drive them out of the country. And when I saw that, I thought, well, there it is. It’s in the Scripture. So why aren’t Christians doing that?” He says “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 … 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.” He explained how the basics of our constitutional order depend on Christian values.
He says that sometimes ” Christianity becomes secularized, and it becomes a consumer good, a commodity.” He added that “…the benefits of belief to the soul and to the republic come from taking it seriously and participating, joining with a community, giving of yourself to others, not just treating it as a consumer good.” Explained that you can’t benefit from religion without taking it seriously.
He said. “… When religion[fails] …people go elsewhere for their faith and for their sense of meaning in life. And they go to politics, and those are terrible sources of values. They don’t sustain the Republic. They undermine it.” Raunch was majorly influenced by late pastor Tim Keller. He expressed that “the so-called religious right, when they talked about family values, were onto something.”
“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,” Rauch stated. “I can’t see that any possible harm would ever result from that. And so what I come down to is addressing my Christian fellow citizens and saying: Why not give Jesus a try?”
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