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Over glasses of merlot in 2003, the journalist Jonathan Rauch was asked about his religious beliefs. He nearly answered “atheist,” then paused.
God never made sense to Rauch. As a child in Hebrew school, he went through the motions but was unable to believe. In his teens, he heard pastors on AM radio rail against gay people like himself, calling them “a stench in the nostril of God.” His atheism hardened.
But now, sipping wine in his early 40s, the idea of calling himself an “atheist” seemed to imply he still cared about religion one way or the other. He hadn’t for years. Then it hit him: “I’m … an apatheist!” he replied, getting a chuckle.
Rauch told that story in a 2003 essay published in The Atlantic. His essay celebrated the decline of religion in American life, pointing to falling church attendance and broad changes not so much in what Americans believed but how: with a shrug, increasingly. Calling religion “the most divisive and volatile of social forces,” Rauch was heartened that religion seemed to be losing its grip on American public life.
“I believe that the rise of apatheism,” he wrote, “is to be celebrated as nothing less than a major civilizational advance.”
Today, Rauch calls that essay “the dumbest thing” he’s ever written. His latest book, Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy, sets out to correct it.
Cross Purposes is no come-to-Jesus moment for Rauch. It is humbly meant to be one for, well, Christians — especially white evangelicals, who, Rauch argues, have become misaligned with the virtues of Christ, and therefore misaligned with the virtues that liberalism (in the classical sense) depends on.
The book is also intended to be a wake-up call for nonbelievers like Rauch who have underappreciated Christianity’s role in “stabilizing” America’s liberal democracy, a role the Founders wrote about centuries ago.
So, Rauch writes, secular America should greet religion not with apathy but arms wide open. “We should even, perhaps, cherish religion.”
Christianity’s crisis
Cross Purposes argues that Christianity is in crisis, both in numbers and spirit. Drawing on interviews with pastors and analyses from previous books on religion in America, the book diagnoses the problem in two broad ways: Churches are “thinning” (losing members and distinctiveness from the outside world), while some are also “sharpening” (becoming politicized, partisan, confrontational, and divisive).
The trouble started decades ago when Protestant churches made decisions that caused them to become more secularized and politicized. First, the mainline churches aligned themselves with the center-left progressivism of the mid-20th century, focusing less on theology and more on issues like poverty and civil rights. Then, in the late 1970s, white evangelical churches and the Republican party formed an alliance with each side believing it had something to gain: Christian-friendly policies and a loyal voting bloc, respectively.
These shifts had different motivations but a similar effect: Churches became more open to the influence of external culture as Christians focused less on scripture and more on worldly issues.
“The mainline ecumenical churches and the more conservative evangelical churches are, for different reasons, too secular to really distinguish themselves from the outside cultural and political world,” Rauch tells Big Think.
(Rauch has put it like this: People can do good deeds or talk politics on their own time, so why give up their Sunday mornings?)
As churches drifted away from theology, Christians drifted away from churches. From 2000 to 2020, the share of Americans identifying as “practicing Christians” dropped by nearly half. Today, “nones” — an amorphous group that spans from zealous atheists to the vaguely spiritual — account for nearly 30% of the American population, an all-time high representing a cohort larger than all American evangelicals.
Christianity’s rapid decline caught most by surprise.
“I don’t think in 2003 we had any idea how rapid and dramatic the next 20 years would be,” Rauch says. “It’s really unprecedented.”
The early 21st century saw another collapse, too: Americans’ trust in institutions, politics, democracy, and each other (a deterioration reflected in rising rates of affective polarization, where people view opposing political tribes with growing hostility while viewing theirs more favorably).
These declines happened concurrently but not purely coincidentally, according to Rauch. As churches became less able to provide people with a sense of meaning, transcendence, and identity, many Americans filled the void with politics.
“And that’s an absolutely terrible place to get your sense of identity,” Rauch says.
The apatheism argument assumed Christianity’s fall would make American society less divisive, and that the secular world would build something more stable and enlightened atop the rubble of churches.
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pozdeevvs / Adobe Stock / Jacob Hege / Big Think
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James' World 2 
May 31, 2025 @ 09:34:47
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May 31, 2025 @ 09:46:10
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