Why Democracy Needs Christianity, with Jonathan Rauch

Does democracy need Christianity to survive? Jonathan Rauch — a gay, atheist, Jewish journalist at Brookings and The Atlantic — has concluded that it does. His 2025 book, Cross Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy, argues that Christianity is a load-bearing wall in the American experiment, and that two decades of de-churching have left the whole structure sagging.

As an outsider who once celebrated secularization as progress and watched what filled the vacuum, Rauch now claims that democracy needs Christianity. What he found is that when the church stopped carrying its load, toxic partisanship, tribal politics, and substitute religions rushed in to take its place.

Host Doug Stuart talks with Rauch to work through why the founders counted on Christian virtue, which three teachings of Jesus underwrite liberal democracy, why compromise is a Christian act rather than a betrayal, and what the church has to recover to be worth listening to again.

Chapters:

0:00 Intro

0:22 Guest Intro and Book Origins

4:03 Christianity’s Civic Role

7:28 Churches, Decline, and Politics

12:23 Liberalism and Democracy Defined

13:56 Founders on Virtue

18:52 Jesus and Liberal Democracy

25:10 Compromise as a Creative Process