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NY Times Op-Ed: What If Our Democracy Can’t Survive Without Christianity?

Paul Caron
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New York Times Op-Ed:  What if Our Democracy Can’t Survive Without Christianity?, by David French (Author, Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation (2020)):

Cross Purposes 3The New York Times Opinion columnist David French, a lifelong evangelical, speaks to Jonathan Rauch (Author, Cross Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy (2025)), a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and an atheist, about the role of Christianity in redeeming and supporting American democracy.

David French: … You’re an atheist. You don’t believe in God, but one of the points to your book is for American democracy to flourish, you argue that we need better Christianity. You’re not trying to say that the solution to the crisis in American democracy or problems in American democracy is becoming an atheist. You talk about a solution that is actually about a better version of Christianity, or Christianity living up to its ideals.

I found that fascinating. Why is it that you took this approach that said a better Christianity is the answer, not no Christianity?

Rauch: Well, I wouldn’t even say “better.” The way I think of it is: 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.

I came to that for a few reasons, but one of them is knowing people like you and other Christians who showed me that 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 when I saw that, I thought, well, there it is. It’s in the Scripture. So why aren’t Christians doing that?

French: How does the failure of American Christianity translate into a failure of American democracy?

Rauch: 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. …

French: Your book divides American Christianity into three chunks. There’s “thin Christianity,” there’s “sharp Christianity” and then there’s “thick Christianity.” Thin Christianity and sharp Christianity are deficient in their own ways, and thick Christianity is what we’re aiming toward — thick Christianity is healthy within our democratic republic.

What is thin Christianity, and why is that a problem?

Rauch: Thin Christianity is my term for when Christianity becomes secularized and it becomes a consumer good, a commodity — people just shop for churches and they like what they hear and they’re not really challenged in church. And the problem with that is that a lot of 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. …

French: So you go from thin Christianity, this idea that Christianity is watered down to the point where it becomes kind of indistinguishable for the rest of the culture, to something very different, but also destructive. And you call this sharp Christianity. And this is the element of modern American evangelicalism that I’ve encountered the most. What is sharp Christianity?

Rauch: Well, you can attest, of all people, how sharp “sharp Christianity” actually is. So this is a kind of Christianity that perceives itself increasingly as being at war with the culture around it.

This is the Christianity that’s afraid that it’s losing its predominant cultural role in American society and the next election is the one that will end Christianity as we know it. And so it becomes smaller, and more and more paranoid and frightened about its future. And as it does those things, it also becomes more political. …

French: There is this really fascinating turn you make in the book. So we’ve talked about thin Christianity, we talked about sharp Christianity, and then you talk about thick Christianity.

And your argument about thick Christianity isn’t that people need to be less Christian; you argue they need to dive more into the teachings of Jesus. And you talk about the Latter-day Saints, the L.D.S. church. For listeners who are not familiar with some of the distinctions between the L.D.S. church and evangelicalism, a lot of evangelicals would say, no, the L.D.S. church is heretical. It’s not even Christian.

How is it that you came into this concept of thick Christianity through the L.D.S. church? And explain what that all means.

Rauch: I should say I’m not asking evangelicals to become Latter-day Saints or anything like that. I’m asking us and Christians to look at what the Latter-day Saints are doing as a source of inspiration for a very, very different Christian social compact.

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Other op-eds by David French:

About the Author

Paul Caron Avatar
Paul Caron
Paul Caron was named Duane and Kelly Roberts Dean of Pepperdine University School of Law on June 1, 2017. Dean Caron joined the Pepperdine faculty in 2013 after serving as the Dorothy and Leonard Straus Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law in the spring semesters of 2010 through 2013. He served as Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development at Pepperdine in 2015-2017. Before coming to Pepperdine, he was Associate Dean of Faculty and Charles Hartsock Professor of Law at the University of Cincinnati College of Law.
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