Why Christianity Needs to Help Save Democracy (with Jonathan Rauch)

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🗓️ 21 April 2025

⏱️ 80 minutes

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Summary

How does a nice Jewish boy who is also a gay atheist have the chutzpah to lecture Christianity on its obligations to democracy? Listen to author Jonathan Rauch talk about his book Cross Purposes with EconTalk's Russ Roberts as Rauch makes the case for what he calls a thicker Christianity.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:07.9	I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Sholem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
0:13.8	Go to EconTalk.org, where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links and other information related to today's conversation.
0:21.2	You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006.
0:26.7	Our email address is mail at econTalk.org. We'd love to hear from you.
0:36.7	Today is March 24th, 2025, and my guest is author Jonathan Rauch of the Brookings Institution.
0:43.1	This is Jonathan's third appearance on the program. He was last year in August of 2021, talking about the Constitution of Knowledge.
0:50.6	His latest book and the topic of today's conversation is cross purposes Christianity's broken
0:57.4	bargain with democracy Jonathan welcome back to e-com talk I'm always glad to see you Russ
1:03.3	well let's start with the chutzpah of this book if we might I don't think you use that word
1:08.5	explicitly but you could have why is this a book of Why is this a book of chutzpah?
1:14.3	Because I am an atheistic, homosexual Jew, or if you prefer a Jewish, atheistic homosexual,
1:21.3	writing about Christian America and writing to Christian America
1:25.8	and asking that Christians behave more in the spirit of Jesus Christ.
1:32.0	And I think on multiple dimensions, it is not clear to me that Christians want to hear from an atheistic homosexual Jew about the teachings of Jesus, much less preached at them.
1:42.5	But here I am.
1:49.2	What gives you that urge to do that preaching?
1:56.1	Well, so I work at Brookings and we're in governance studies, my department, and we spend a lot of time, in fact, all day, trying to understand how to defend the values and institutions of a liberal democracy.
2:03.8	And of course, you know all about that.
2:06.1	There is Shalom College in Jerusalem, similar missions and ideas.
2:11.5	And we're trying to figure out why Americans, and not just Americans, this is true of voters in Western democracies around the world, are so deeply discontent.
2:25.0	So polarized, so angry. We see indicators like loneliness and isolation rising, and we see that expressed in the trashing of institutions, the growth of
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