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Jonathan Rauch believes Christianity can help fix what's wrong with the country.

We're polarized. We're deeply suspicious the country. We're polarized, we're

deeply suspicious of one another, but also we're just really crappy at performing the functions on

which he says our constitutional order depends. In his new book, he makes the case that Christianity

is an important part of fixing the crisis. And the book begins with a conversion story,

but not the one you might be expecting.

I was born in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1960,

at a very different time.

And I knew from an early age

that I was different from the people around me.

I was Jewish in an overwhelmingly Christian society. I also knew that despite my Judaism, the idea of God just didn't make sense to me.

You know, a supernatural being that creates this whole universe yet cares about us and performs miracles.

I just couldn't figure out why that made any sense.

And the third thing was that also from that very early age, I was experiencing strange

obsessions and attractions to boys.

I also knew something else, which is that Christianity had no use for me at all.

In those days, you couldn't turn on the car radio on a Sunday morning and twist the dial

without literally hearing a sermon preaching that homosexuality was God's curse.

And yet I saw the hypocrisy of the church when I got a little bit older.

So I came to think that as a Jew and an atheist and a proto-gay person, that Christianity

...