Ross Douthat, a conservative columnist at The New York Times, and Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow in Governance Studies at the liberal Brookings Institution, have both written new books endorsing religion. Douthat is a Catholic, and his book is titled Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. Given Rauch’s former indifference to religion, his book’s title is more surprising—Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy. Rauch calls himself a Jewish atheist who happens to be gay. But he now regrets what he wrote twenty years ago about the triumph of secularism, something he welcomed at the time as “apathy-ism.” “I believe the rise of apathy-ism is to be celebrated as nothing less than a major civilizational advance. Religion remains the most divisive and volatile of social forces. Apathy-ism is not a lapse, it is an achievement,” Rauch wrote back then.

Earlier this month, Douthat and Rauch spoke at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington D.C., where Rauch was once a fellow. Each gave a detailed synopsis of his book before answering questions. Rauch lamented the “unprecedented experiment in secularization, or as it’s been called, de-churching” in the United States over the past twenty years. The result, he claimed, has significantly contributed to the social isolation, economic inequality, and fierce political partisanship that has made the United States increasingly ungovernable. In praising secularism, he had not understood something the nation’s Founders knew: “Christianity is a load-bearing wall in our culture. When it buckles, all the institutions around it come under stress, and some of them buckle, too.”

While insisting on the separation of church and state, the Founders nevertheless counted on Christianity to “inculcate the civil virtues, as would family, community, schools,” Rauch said. As traditional forms of Christianity have weakened, often by embracing secular values and downplaying distinctive Christian teachings, Americans have increasingly turned to politics to define their identity. This has had dramatic results among white Evangelicals, 80 percent of whom now identify as Republican. Rauch quotes the political scientist Ryan Burge: “Evangelism just means I’m a conservative Republican.” As Trumpism has taken hold among Evangelicals, Rauch notes, the church has lost “those counter-cultural, counter-political elements that define it.” The teachings of Jesus Christ don’t align with MAGA, and Rauch hopes the churches will return to emphasizing how Jesus wants us to behave in civic life. Christian teachings are reflected in liberal secular values regarding how we treat the poor and marginalized and why we must not treat others merely as a means to an end. If democracy is to survive, Rauch warns, secular people like himself must recognize that they have a stake in Christianity. 

Douthat’s book is about much more than the utilitarian case for Christianity as a load-bearing wall in our democracy, although he agrees with Rauch’s analysis on that point. “The New Atheists were wrong,” he said at the AEI event. “A more religious America had its flaws, and its problems, and its divisions. But all things considered, religion was doing something in American life that we miss.” Douthat makes an eloquent case for thinking religion is not just socially useful but also provides “very plausible descriptions of reality.” Given what science has revealed about the nature of the universe over the past seventy-five years, it is not unreasonable to think “the world [was] designed in some sense with human beings in mind.” Douthat claims that we are now experiencing a cultural moment in which a significant number of people are more open to religious possibilities, but his argument here is less persuasive than his apologetics for theism. He makes much of the current revival of interest in various ersatz spiritual practices and beliefs such as astrology, speculating that such interest may finally draw many people back to traditional religion. But that seems like wishful thinking based largely on his own family’s idiosyncratic experience.

Douthat takes issue with Rauch’s characterization of white Evangelicals. Evangelicals deserve more sympathy and understanding than Rauch offers because they have been the object of real “enmity” from secular elites. Over the past twenty years, Douthat said, American elites “went to war against the American past in profound ways, against their fellow elites who were insufficiently devoted to progressive orthodoxy.” That progressive orthodoxy involved “pretty striking metaphysical ideas about the nature of what it is to be a woman or a man. The nature of the human person and the human body suddenly being held up as defining views that are supposed to be adopted by all decent human beings.” Evangelicals (and many other Christians, including me) have found some of these developments to be deeply hostile to their faith and identity. Yes, Douthat concedes, the people who stormed the Capitol on January 6 deserve condemnation, but “it is important to recognize the larger dynamics at play.”

Perhaps. But claiming that the cultural oppression felt by white Evangelicals created a “dynamic” resulting in the violence at the Capitol seems like a stretch. The other dynamic on display was the sheer hatred the rioters felt for their perceived political opponents, including the Capitol police.

Douthat detects another dynamic at play in the Trump-inspired insurrection, and curiously it is a religious one. Asked to comment on the “strange parallels” between the spirituality of Abraham Lincoln and our current religious and political divisions, Douthat briefly discussed the providentialism of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. In that famous speech, Lincoln proposed that the slaughter of the Civil War was God’s judgment on both the South and North. “Both sides are at fault, and things happen that are sort of chastisements for not just one side or the other, but both,” according to Douthat. “You know, to be perfectly blunt, I think that’s a useful way to see the phenomenon of Donald Trump in our own time…. The resilience of Trump as a sort of agent of chaos in American and Western life should, from a religious perspective, prompt you to a theological reading of whatever God is up to by allowing this craziness to happen.” 

That pronouncement brought me up short. When it comes to this sort of theological reading of history, I belong to the school of the-less-said-the-better. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” and the story of Job are, perhaps paradoxically, more reassuring to me than the idea that Trump is actually an agent of God’s chastisement for liberal overreach. And I say that as someone who agrees with most of Douthat’s characterization of “wokeism.” In suggesting such a reading of history, Douthat tiptoes up to the Evangelical conceit that sees Trump as a figure like Cyrus, the Persian king sent by God to punish the wayward Israelites. And how does this sort of providentialism work when the victims are innocent of the crimes for which they were punished, such as the Jews at the hands of the Nazis? Of course, Lincoln knew his Bible, but his beliefs are probably best described as a “political religion,” not orthodox Christianity. He never joined a church. He was determined to preserve the Union, and casting one side of the conflict as righteous and the other as wholly culpable would have made an almost impossible task even more difficult. The judgments of the Lord may be just, as Lincoln wrote, but they are also unfathomable in this life. Trump is bad enough without the thought that his rogue regime has been sent by God as some kind of punishment.