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Jonathan Rauch is a senior fellow in the Governance Studies program at the Brookings Institution and a member of the Persuasion Board of Advisors. His latest book is Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Jonathan Rauch discuss the decline of religion and its impact on society, the long-term future of religion in America, and why patrimonialism is the best frame for understanding the Trump administration.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: You're starting to rank as one of the most frequent guests on The Good Fight. I've had you on at least twice before, I believe, perhaps three times.
Jonathan Rauch: Well, I think exactly twice. So this is number three. But I’m a regular member of your audience. I'm a charter subscriber to Persuasion. I’m a proud contributor to Persuasion. So I'm very much a part of the community and feel entitled to be on the show as a result!
Mounk: Well, I don't think there's an entitlement to be on the show, but you've earned it by consistently writing interesting books in a huge variety of approaches and genres, I have to say. For example, The Constitution of Knowledge, which is a really excellent book about some of the challenges to our ability to make sense of the world and to report it accurately, and your really excellent book called The Happiness Curve, which explores the very different topic about why our levels of satisfaction with life vary across our decades. And now a really interesting, in some ways personal, in some ways reported, book about religion.
One of the things that is interesting to me is that, like I did when I was younger, you used to think that religion stood in tension with democracy, that perhaps there was something worrying about religion, that it had an ability to impose a form of religious fanaticism on our society. And that perhaps a decline in religiosity would be a positive thing. I take it that you're now no longer so sure of that. You started to think that some amount of religious belief may be something positive for the stability of a democracy if it's the right kind of approach to what religious faith means in the secular world. Talk us through that.
Rauch: Well, I was born in 1960 and I realized all around the same time, around the age of five or six, that I was different in important ways, that I was first of all Jewish and that second, despite being Jewish, I couldn't believe in God. I would try in my early teen years and fail. And I started experiencing attraction to boys and men, which never went away, and turned into homosexuality. So I grew up feeling very much an outsider to Christianity and attacked by Christianity. I believe that Christianity was cruel and hypocritical and I saw evidence of that around me all the time. I began to think there was a different side of Christianity when I met Mark McIntosh, a true man of God, at age 18 in college. We were roommates and he didn't just talk the Jesus talk. He walked the walk and he opened my eyes to the fact that there are Christians who are not cruel and hypocritical. But I still remained very secular for many years. In 2003, I wrote an article for The Atlantic for which this book is the apology. I call it the dumbest thing I ever wrote. It was a tribute to apatheism, which was a play on, of course, theism and apathy. And it said, it's a wonderful thing that American society is secularizing. We're turning into Scandinavia. And since religion is a source of conflict and superstition, having less of it will make us less fraught and more happy. And boy was I wrong. We've seen two things since 2003. One is a collapse of Christianity, as we knew it, at staggering speed. I'm armed with statistics if you're interested.
Mounk: We always like statistics on The Good Fight.
Rauch: I'll load you up in a second. But second, at the same time, a collapse in trust in institutions, the radicalization and polarization of politics as people turn to politics for a source of identity and meaning, the rise of loneliness, deaths of despair, social isolation, all kinds of indicators went up. This isn't all just because of the decline of Christianity, but they're clearly related. So that leaves me in 2024 thinking you can't understand what's going wrong with our democracy unless you start worrying about the health of Christianity and Christianity's alignment with the values that underpin democracy.
Mounk: I'm very sympathetic to everything you've said. I had Sam Harris on this podcast about two years ago. And even though I'm a great admirer of Sam Harris, I was pushing him on some of those same points saying, look, isn't it the case that some of the things that you've ascribed to religion and to Christianity in particular as negative impacts on the world are better understood as a general outgrowth of tribalism, which can take all kinds of forms. And if it hadn't been for religion, humans would have found different ways to constitute an in-group and constitute an out-group and discriminate against those people who are different from them. And isn't it the case that when you look at the rise of a lot of forms of far-right populism, that's bred by a lack of social connection, by an anger, by a lack of a stable theology, all of which in the American case may be rooted in the decline of religion. Now, of course, you might say, well, hang on a second. What about other countries in the world? You discuss how the decline of religion seems to coincide temporarily with that anger, with that sense of social isolation. But it doesn't in much of Scandinavia and much of Western Europe, which secularized many decades earlier, which have those political problems to a lesser extent, and where the rise of those political problems doesn't seem to coincide in the same temporary fashion with the decline of religion. So is it that we need two kinds of ingredients for this disaster? Is it secularization in a context where there's no alternative source of social meaning and structure of society? Or do you think the same, that Europeans or East Asians should similarly be concerned about the lack of faith in their society?
Rauch: The first thing I'd say is I'd want to get your opinion on that. You're the first person I'd ask. The second is that we are seeing many of the same trends in Europe. The collapse of a sense of respect for institutions—seeing the German government has just collapsed. You're seeing the rise of the far right there. You're seeing in France the rise of Le Pen. You're seeing many places around the world showing the same tendencies and they're also showing, you could argue, delayed effects of not having religion to turn to. Now, that being said, I think America is different in that this is a country that has always been creedal and has never used blood and soil as the foundation for its sense of identity and nationalism. And thus it's turned to, over the years, religious identity as a key sense of where you get your social networks, your belonging. You know, when I was a kid, Yascha, in the ‘60s and ‘70s and on into the ‘80s, the introductory question you asked was not, so what college did you go to? Or what do you do for a living? It was, what church do you go to? It was just taken for granted that these were the institutions into which people bonded and which were sort of their entry point into the broader society for better, but sometimes also for worse. So I think America, which was founded as a white Protestant country and has relied on white Protestantism as the main anchor of its identity, has a particular problem when white Protestantism collapses. A bigger problem than Europe has. But I don't think we're the only ones with this problem. I don't know. What do you think? You look at Germany. Is religion figuring in all of that?
Mounk: I'm trying to puzzle through this as I pose to you the question and, as I listen to your answer, I guess I would say that societies to be cohesive and certainly democracies to sustain the level of trust that they need to work well have to have institutions that connect people to each other. And those institutions can't just be state institutions. They can't fully be private institutions. They have to be intermediary associations that connect individuals to some form of civil society, to some form of social embeddedness, and then in turn to the state. And I guess I would say that religion is one, but not the only one, of those intermediary institutions. So this can be a strong sense of civic belonging and responsibility in small towns that have an active civic life. It can be sporting clubs, it can be choral societies, it can be all kinds of different things. But religion certainly is one of the natural kinds of entities that provides that intermediary space. So I think that there's two problems.
The first, as you point out, is that in the United States, historically, religion has played an even bigger role in providing these intermediary spaces than in many European societies for complicated sets of historical reasons. And so I think America has a particular problem when those institutions go away. And so I do think that the timing of that retreat is not a coincidence in the American case. I think it is because religion was the main intermediary institution and, as religion collapsed, the intermediary institutions collapsed because religion institutions were the most important ones. I think in Europe, the story is a little bit more complicated. I think Europe has had a richer and more robust sense of belonging in society, in part because it is a place that moves around less, in part because I think some welfare state institutions make a difference. They're just places that have more belonging than America in general. I think religion really collapsed in Europe in the ‘60s and ‘70s in most places. And it didn't immediately lead to problems because there's other intermediate institutions to cushion the fall. But I think over time, those institutions have declined as well. And so now the combined lack of religious belonging and of these other intermediate institutions creates a real problem. So their religion is an important contributing factor, but it is perhaps not the sort of immediate cause of it.
Rauch: And Europe at the time when religion, specifically Christianity, my book and my thinking are addressed specifically to Christianity as the dominant and defining religion. It's not that there's anything wrong with Islam or Judaism, but they are minority faiths. They're not culturally defining faiths. At the same time as religion was fading and as Europe was secularizing, these were still much more homogeneous societies than America has been traditionally. So they could fall back on my identity as French or as German. Certainly, Scandinavia until fairly recently was pretty homogeneous. Now, of course, they're not. So they're facing the same double whammy we are. I just want to add to some of what you said, Yascha, which is right, something that I think is important and that I try to emphasize, which is I want to get myself and other people away from the purely instrumentalist view of religion as a sociological bonding agent in which people form into groups and do performative worship and develop social capital—all of that is true and very important, but I don't like just saying, well, religion is not true, but I'm glad other people believe it. I think that's both patronizing and misses the most important thing that religion (which means in the American context, what Christianity has done), which is that there are two questions that secular liberalism, I don't think, can answer. And we can talk about why and whether it's inherent. But one is, why am I here? Is there a transcendent purpose to my life? Beyond just being a chunk of protoplasm that exists for a few years and then vanishes from the universe. I don't think science will ever provide an answer to that. And the second is—
Mounk: You don't think being a podcaster is an answer to that?
Rauch: Not even being a charter member of Persuasion is an answer to that, though it comes very, very close. And the second kind of question is the question of morality, which is what is the basis for understanding good and evil as something other than just a competition between personal preferences? Of course, all the great liberal thinkers have contended with these questions. They've come up with some very strong and compelling answers, but they can't get the bucket all the way full. Now, I don't believe religion is true, but I also understand that for most people, including myself, my view of life is incomplete without answers to those other two questions, and that faith, and especially Christianity, provides those answers. So I have come to believe that secular liberalism, science and all of that, and faith, are in metaphysical, existential need of each other, not just instrumental need of each other.
Since the first live Q&A was really fun, we’ll try to make this a monthly feature! So please join me for the second iteration on Monday, March 31 at 6pm Eastern. I will once again try to answer any questions you may have—whether about my writing, the current state of the world, or what might happen next. Join us on Zoom here. —Yascha
Mounk: You're saying rightly, I think, that there is a kind of slightly patronizing attitude towards religion, which for political theory nerds in some strange way runs parallel to what Leo Strauss and his followers might say about democracy, which is that it's kind of a little bit false but I'm so glad that people believe in it because the world would be better off if they didn't. And I certainly agree with you that there's something patronizing and frankly icky about thinking about it that way. To me, as somebody who's agnostic and religiously unmusical, which is to say that I don't believe I know whether God exists or not, but questions of faith and religion don't actually speak to me and so for all intents and purposes I live my life as though God did not exist, it's hard to know the way around that. I mean, if you want to appreciate the role of religion and avoid that kind of patronizing attitude, does that mean that you yourself have to have faith? And so, Jonathan, I mean, have you yourself had a kind of religious evolution where you now believe in God or some form of divine in a way that you didn't earlier? Or if not, then what does it mean to say that we need those things, but you yourself don't have them, but we shouldn't talk about it in those sort of arm's length ways?
Rauch: So I think of an analogy I sometimes use of being colorblind or maybe tone deaf. I am unusual in that I have never been bothered by the question of mortality and the notion that I'm a clump of cells and an operating system called consciousness, which will come and go. But I'm very weird that way. And I've also been content to not have a foundation for my moral principles, even though I can't really defend not having a foundation for them. But as a result of that, this is a change for me. I am an atheist. I always have been. I can't believe in God. I think the idea of some giant human-like creature in the sky that created this inconceivably immense universe, yet is concerned about the comings and goings of people and of apes and this planet, I think it's all empirically silly, yet my view of the world is incomplete in a way that, for example, David French's or Pete Wehner's is not. And I think of myself as kind of colorblind in that I have come to see that people of faith can see the world with a deeper dimensionality in some respects than I can. I'm perfectly fine living as I do. I'm a happy person. I'm a content and fortunate person. But am I missing out on something important? I have come to think, you know, when Francis Collins, for example, a great scientist, but also a man of faith, looks at the world, he perceives a depth, a kind of color sense that I lack. And I have come to think that, well, that's really my problem.
Mounk: But is it, in your view, a correct depth and a correct range of colors? Or an imaginary one, right? Because I mean, I may go out in the world and I may be wearing sunglasses that make the world look really funky in a good and fun way. And there's nothing wrong with that. Sometimes it's nice to wear sunglasses that make everything look a little bit more red than it is. But if I lose track of that, if I believe that the world in fact looks the way it does to me through those sunglasses when it doesn't, we might start worrying that that might actually lead me astray in various kinds of ways. And it'd be a little bit strange for a sort of bystander to say, my God, I'm so jealous that you see the world through the sunglasses, unless you think that they reveal something real that you're incapable of seeing. So you're saying there's something sort of beautiful to how Francis Collins sees the world, to how other people of faith like David French and Peter Wehner see the world. But isn't there still something slightly self-contradictory here?
Rauch: Yeah, sure. At bottom, the only reason to believe a religion is that you think it's true. And I don't think any of the religions are true. And in fact, I think their answers for morality are basically bootstrapping, which is they say, we found morality in the word of God, and the word of God is true because it's the foundation of morality. So, no, I can't believe that these things are actually true yet. Yet the riddle to me, Yascha, is, I'll take the example of Francis Collins, who wrote a whole book defending his faith and with whom I've had this very conversation. I said to him, look, you're a scientist. You're one of the world's great biologists. You're the first decoder of the human genome. So you don't really believe, you, that Jesus Christ died and then was literally resurrected, came back to life after being dead three days later because that's inconsistent with everything you believe as a scientist? And he assured me that, no, he had thought about it up, down, and sideways and concluded that it was really true. And he furthermore said, If I didn't think that that was true, I could not be a Christian. And I said, Well, really? I mean, you can believe that Jesus was incredibly wise and a great prophet and maybe in some universal sense inspired? And he said, No, that wouldn't be enough. So I'm stuck where you are, which is, well, now you're a scientist who believes in miracles which can't possibly be true by any of the laws of nature. How they do that, Yascha, I don't understand. Somehow he's able to put his experimental scientist hat on, go to the lab and exclude miracles in one portion of his life, and yet have these spiritual commitments in another portion of his life. And it is empirically true that the large majority of Christians can and do do that. And if it's channeled well, they do it in a way that's rewarding and constructive.
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Mounk: And so what is it that you think they gain? And what is it you think that humanity loses if we have the rapid secularization that we've seen in the United States over the last decades, for example?
Rauch: Well, what they gain at an individual level is best left to them to describe. There's a wonderful article that David Brooks just wrote, a long article in the New York Times, which is maybe one of the best exegeses I've ever seen of coming to faith and what that means and the added dimensionality to life. What it means, what society gains, what liberalism gains is that liberalism doesn't have to answer the big questions, which it knows it can't answer. We knew that. John Locke told us, the founders told us, they said, look, we're setting up a process which allows you to be free and equal and to find your way in the world and to maximize your human potential. But we can't fill in what is the transcendent meaning of your life. You have to go and discover that with the freedoms that you now enjoy. They told us that again and again. And they took for granted, the founders, that there were institutions and theologies that were capable of doing that. They wanted those institutions and theologies to align with liberal democracy. And what's happened now is they're pulling in opposite directions. And that's why the wheels are coming off. But that's the good that they understood that faith institutions could provide.
Mounk: So tell me more about that. How is it that faith institutions in America used to provide that? Part of the reason is just that it declined, right? Part of the reason is just that fewer people go to church, fewer people are active members of religious communities and so on. But part of it in your telling is that a lot of these faith communities have become politicized and perhaps radicalized in ways that mean they can no longer fulfill that historic mission.
Rauch: I'll just—you agree it makes sense just to contextualize what I'm about to say by way of explanation. Just read off a couple of statistics about what's happened in the last, this is a very recent phenomenon. So in 2008, the number of Americans saying that they never attend religious services was 45 million. In 2022, that number is doubled. It's 85 million Americans. Church membership in the United States from 1940 to 2000, for 60 years, was around 70%, give or take. It started declining rapidly in 2000. By 2020, it's under half, 47%. You could, you can go on in this vein. The first thing that happened is the mainline churches starting in the ‘70s and ‘80s began to decline very rapidly. Then evangelicals got all smug and said, see, what they want is stronger medicine. a religion that's rooted in the Bible. But then they went into exactly the same decline. Why did it happen? That's above my pay grade. But the best answers I've heard are that both of those wings of Christianity made different versions of the same mistake, which is that they secularized. It's important that faiths offer something different from the surrounding culture. Different both in terms of the identity and community it gives you, but also different in terms of having a distinctive worldview, as it were, a theology and outlook. First, the mainline churches, Christian churches, got involved with the social gospel and salvation by works, and they got away from the gospel itself, from the Bible, and they blended into the surrounding culture, so people seemed to drift away. The change in white Protestant evangelical culture, which for a while looked so much stronger, was a different form of secularization, which is when they start getting involved in politics, in the late ‘70s with the Moral Majority and then on through the ‘80s. And they think that they can affect politics without politics infecting them. But that turns out not to be the case. They align firmly, by the post-Reagan era, with the Republican Party.
They thus become highly partisan. 80% of white evangelicals vote for Republican candidates. And in the last few years, in the Trump years, we seem to be seeing a diffusion out of white Protestant churches of people who are churchgoing and are there for Jesus and for the message of the gospel and an infusion of people identifying with evangelicalism as a political marker of their association with Trump and MAGA. So you get a church that's smaller and more political and more hard-edged and it's committed to the culture war and to what a pastor I interviewed called “a battlefield mindset.” So as Russell Moore says, if the Church becomes secular, if it offers people a choice between paganization and secularization, it's no surprise if they choose one or the other.
Mounk: That's very interesting. I'm sure I'm oversimplifying and summarizing your argument in this way, but some of the main line churches in the ‘60s and ‘70s kind of became progressive activists. so people decided that they could just be progressive activists without keeping the religious trappings. And now some of the evangelical churches have decided to become right-wing activists, so people thought, well, why do I need the religious piece? I can just go to the convention of Turning Point USA.
Rauch: Exactly, or it can be, you know, can be Wicca, it can be SoulCycle, it can be the kind of self-made religions, it can be what Sam Harris does, which is a combination of spiritualism and meditation. It can be all these things, but it turns out that the worst thing it can be is partisan politics, because politics is supposed to be about negotiation, coalition-building compromise. It's not supposed to be an apocalyptic vision of good versus evil. It can't bear that weight. And because politics can't answer the transcendental questions of morality and mortality, it just can't address those. So you get people migrating, you get people mixing politics and religion and getting the worst of both.
Mounk: So we come to a question I have trouble thinking through, which is, well, what does all of that mean for the long-term future of religion in America? And I think our prior about that probably depends on what we think the future of religion is in other countries as well. So there is a story of relatively simple secularization. It's a social scientific story that looked very appealing for a while, then after that I think both for some developments in the outside world and because of some methodological challenges came to be dismissed, perhaps it's now giving renewed credence by the recent changes in America. And that's that modern societies just aren't very hospitable to religion. That, you know, religious faith has passed down quite strongly from one generation to the next, and it can sort of sustain itself for quite a long time under modern circumstances, but, for various reasons, it effectively collapsed as a big political force and a big social force starting in the 1950s and 1960s in Europe for reasons that are difficult to account for. But you can make the argument that was delayed in the United States. It just happened a number of decades later in the United States. And so for a while it looked like America was just an outlier that is going to go into a very different direction.
But it now turns out with a rapid progression of non-religious people in America, with a weakening of ties between the faithful and their religious institutions in the United States, that America was just 30 years, 40 years behind Europe on these kinds of developments. And most likely America is going to end up as a pretty secular society in a while. And that's likely to sustain itself. Now, a different way of thinking about this is that perhaps you have these moments where incumbent religious movements lose their vitality and lose some of their adherence, particularly in free societies where nobody is forced to go and sit in the church pews on a Sunday morning. But that sort of instinct towards religiosity and the ability of religions to adapt to the needs of the moment will persist and what is being created at the moment is a kind of vacuum for religious revival. That might take the form of a renewed Protestant faith, might take the form of some kind of other faith, but most likely America and perhaps Europe and perhaps East Asia will go back to being more religious in the future. I know this is an impossibly big and difficult question to answer, but how are you thinking about this? Is this just the end of the role of religion in American life in the way it used to be? Is there any attempt to try and sustain it or to return to it is just doomed to failure? Or do you think that this is a kind of intermezzo and they will see a return of religiosity as a socially and culturally structuring force, possibly within the next decades?
Rauch: Well, I wish I knew. In this context, let's allow ourselves to narrow the conversation a little bit by substituting Christianity specifically for religiosity. It's a narrower term and easier to get our hands around. And let's also just in passing point out that in response to a point you made, which is there's a finger-pointing contest going on between people like me and post-liberals. Post-liberals say it's all my fault that Christianity has collapsed because you can't have a strong rooted faith in a society with smartphones and liberal social values, where people are free to do what they want. And I point the finger right back, which is I think that the decline of Christianity in America is okay. Sure, it's always hard to run a religion in a world in which you've got science. Nietzsche told us that. Tocqueville told us that. But I think that Christians in America in the last 50 years have made some tragic, if not outright catastrophic choices about the direction that they would go. No one said that Christians had to not only accept Donald Trump and the MAGA movement with all its cruelty and corruption and un-Christ-likeness, not only accept it, but embrace it and love it. Well, you know, if they're going to go down that road, where's the message of Jesus Christ? So I don't know if Christianity can recover. It is a very old religion. It has recovered in the past in very dire circumstances in countries around the world.
I do know that when I talk to Christians about it, they say that it is likelier to recover if it returns to the message of Jesus Christ, which is not a message of cruelty or corruption. It's not a message about power. You deserve power, which is the overriding message that Donald Trump and his MAGA movement have for Christians. He literally said, if you vote for me this time, you'll never even have to vote again. The promise of power. That's not a very attractive religious vision for someone looking to do good in the world and have meaning and morality in life. So I at least think the chances are better if Christianity returns to its own teachings. And I also think that we have examples of thriving churches that are doing essentially that. The big example in my book is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which not all Christians consider to be Christian, but which is a thick church. It's very demanding. It's very conservative. In America, it's very white. Yet it is developing a civic theology of patience, negotiation, and mutual accommodation grounded in the opposite of Christian nationalism. It's Christian constitutionalism, and it's doing this in the name of the teachings of Jesus Christ. So that seems to me to be a direction that's not only better for democracy, that's great thank you, but I think it's Christianity being more true to itself and maybe that has a fighting chance, I don't know.
Mounk: So tell us a little bit about both what you think faiths should do to renew themselves in a way that might attract more adherence and, more importantly, make them the kind of intermediary social institution that can actually sustain a healthy democracy and civic life in your mind. And why it is that Mormons are a good example of that in recent American history, a claim that I think will surprise some of my listeners.
Rauch: I would be awfully presumptuous of me to recommend what Christians should do in the name of Christianity. I'm not a believer. I'm a Jew. But the people I turn to on that question are themselves Christian. And they're people like David French, Curtis Chang, who's a minister, Russell Moore, one of the former leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention, Michael Ware. And I think people that you know and have had on this show are devout Christians, who say that what needs to happen, what they think will happen, is a less fearful version of Christianity. The Bible's most repeated injunction, or at least one of its most repeated, is don't be afraid. And the white evangelical church is a church of fear. It's fear of declining political influence, declining demographic numbers, turning into a minority, being culturally embattled, losing our country. It's all about loss. And they say the hope of the Church is what it's always been, which is to keep its eyes fixed on the next world, not this world, and approach the world with the same sense of calm and confidence that Jesus radiated and not the sense of fear and paranoia and loss.
And they say, second, that the Church needs to go back to being, as David French puts it, countercultural or as Mark Laberton, former president of Fuller Seminary calls it exilic. The notion that the Church should assume that it should have power is antithetical to the roots of the Church and to Jesus' own message. You know: we're supposed to be in charge around here. This is our country. Jesus would say, what? No, no, no, we belong to God. We belong to the next world.
So what they're saying is that what both the people hunger for spiritually and what the Church's mission is, is to present a contrast to politics, a contrast to the culture war and approach them with a civic theology of grace and forgiveness. And the hope and maybe even expectation is that that's an attractive vision to people. We know that the Church of Fear is losing people left and right. The Southern Baptist Convention is losing people to the tune of what, a million a year [sic]. It's just hemorrhaging. So we know what they're doing right now isn't working.
Mounk: So I see why those virtues would be appealing. Do you think that the Church of Latter-day Saints is living up to those virtues? Why is it that, to you, Mormons are an example of how a religious community can in fact practice some of these ideals?
Rauch: So a bit of storytelling here, if I may. This is a big surprise for me, Yascha. In 2015, seemingly out of nowhere, a big compromise was announced in the state of Utah extending non-discrimination rights to gay and lesbian LGBT trans couples with some targeted exemptions for religious entities like the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This was the result of several years of conversation and collaboration between Equality Utah, the state's gay civil rights group, and the LDS Church. It passed almost unanimously in the Utah state legislature with the full support of the Church. And I was gobsmacked, and so was everyone else. Where did this come from?
Mounk: And I should just say, as context for listeners who are not aware of this, that not only of course, as you mentioned earlier, are you gay and you've written very movingly about your coming out story and how long it took you to do that, but you are one of the first people in America and the world, as I understand it, who made an argument for the virtues of same-sex marriage at a time when that idea was virtually unheard of.
Rauch: That was, yes, same-sex marriage was the crusade of my life starting 1995. I wasn't one of the very first, but it's been a major commitment. Well, in 2015, that got my attention. It turned out that the church had tried the other path in 2008, got very involved in an anti-same-sex marriage ballot initiative in California. And the result was huge backlash and igniting the culture wars and they did a hard rethink and said, we don't think this is our job in life. The next thing that got my attention is in, I think it was 2022, first, the counselor, I may get this wrong, the first counselor to the First Presidency of the Church, in other words, the number two person in the whole Church began giving speeches saying that our role as Christians is to advance patience, negotiation, and mutual accommodation in the political sphere with a whole rationale behind that. And that got my attention. And they were not only talking the talk, they walked the walk. This church actually was one of the forces that helped pass the Respect for Marriage Act, which embodies same-sex marriage in federal law, in federal statute with some religious exemptions. So what's going on there? Part of it is sociological. It's a church that has felt oppression and persecution since its founding. I feel like when I went out to Salt Lake City, I felt, as a Jew, a strong kinship, a sense of exile. They're not in their promised land. Salt Lake City is an exile for them.
And also this sense of what it is to be a minority faith, that you can never take for granted that you own the culture. So that's a part of it. But it turns out it's more deeply rooted in their theological interpretation of Christianity. And that's complicated and super interesting. I won't get into it. But it's a kind of doctrine that's similar to free will, but it basically says we can't grow morally unless we have the ability to make wrong choices in life. So you don't want to try to curtail people's freedoms in the civic sphere. And that's embodied in turn in this commitment to constitutional values. They are the only church I know of that sees the US Constitution as a divinely-inspired document. (That's actually in their scripture.) For a lot of this, the theology is not replicable for Southern Baptists, but the inspiration is the idea that you can take a church and look for the elements of your theology that uphold the values of constitutionalism and democracy and patience, mutual negotiation, and you can elevate those and be countercultural in how you do it. They're very aware of being countercultural. They're fully aware that they're going the opposite direction of white evangelicals in the culture wars. They want to put out those fires instead of accelerating them. They've shown you can do it.
Mounk: This is a complete sidebar, but I've long been fascinated by both the similarities and the profound differences between Jews and Mormons in the United States. They're similarly sized communities in America. They're both about probably a little less than 2% of the population. They are both cultures that care a lot about family. Both Jews and Mormons are disproportionately successful in the United States and disproportionately represented among influential positions in the country. And then at the same time, there's profound differences, not just theologically, but of kind of cultural affect. To me, the cliché certainly is, and I have to say that it's been borne out by the Mormons that I've met in my life, that they’re very clean-living and very kempt, with a great emphasis on outward appearance, sometimes on athletic achievement. They tend to be overrepresented, for example, in the Secret Service and in other service professions that touch on things like the military and so on. Whereas certainly Jews, in my experience, tend to be, again, I'm terribly stereotyping, a little bit more disheveled, perhaps a little bit more attracted to the arts—high achieving but in other realms of American life. And so there's both this kind of similarity between these groups and this sort of quite profound sense of cultural distance between them, which I think is very, very interesting.
Rauch: If you force me to choose between keeping only Jewish humor and Mormon humor, I think I know what I would choose.
Mounk: I do have to say I have very fond memories of visiting Salt Lake City to give a talk about the people versus democracy a number of years ago and being shown around by a great political scientist and scholar of Europe, Wade Jacoby, who tragically passed away of a heart attack relatively briefly thereafter but who I think did combine some of the best virtues of both Mormons and Jews, though he was not Jewish.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Jonathan discuss Jonathan’s recent Atlantic article arguing that Trump’s approach is best described as patrimonial. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
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