THE FIRST 100 DAZE WITH JONATHAN RAUCH (054)
AARON BARTLEY: Hello, this is Aaron Bartley, owner of Fitz Books and Waffles in Buffalo, New York and you are at the Point of Learning with my friend Peter Horn. We’re all responding to this hard historical moment in different ways. This spring, I’ve started posting my analysis of the unfolding coup on Substack, and Pete and I have launched a new series of issues forums here in Buffalo to bring people together and hopefully recognize some of our collective power. I’m glad that on today’s show Pete is talking with Jonathan Rauch, a scholar of government who has spent decades thinking about what’s essential for democracy. Enjoy the show!
PETER HORN [voiceover]: On today's show …
JONATHAN RAUCH: Madison is a genius because he's the guy who sees compromise is a creative, constructive, dynamic force. That when people get together and they're forced to negotiate to solve a problem, they get creative. They come up with ideas that no one walked into the room with.
[VO]: That’s author Jonathan Rauch on James Madison, who figures into both books we discuss as we pull back from the headlines and think about some of the deeper currents flowing in the U.S. today.
RAUCH: This that we're contending with is a multidimensional campaign of disinformation, manipulating the media environment in order to deceive, disorient, divide, and ultimately demoralize a target population. Demoralize is the most important of the four because you can't necessarily deceive everyone, but if you can make people shrug and say, Well, they're all a bunch of liars, I don't know what's true, then they stay home. Demoralization is demobilization, and that's how you win without firing a shot. Trump is, I believe, the most innovative and effective propaganda entrepreneur since probably the “greats” of the 1930s.
[VO]: Rauch argues that a crucial ligament largely absent in the U.S. today is what he calls “thick Christianity.”
RAUCH: So what does a “thick Christianity” look like? And by “thick,” I mean countercultural and distinctive enough so that it asks a lot of its followers and gives a lot in exchange, so it doesn't just blend into the background and look like the rest of secular society; so that it has its distinctive beliefs in its moorings and scripture. And yet at the same time is, as the Founders hoped and needed, reasonably well aligned with the Constitution and the values of our liberal democracy.
[VO]: All that and much more coming right up!
[3:04]
[VO]: At some point during my video call with Jonathan Rauch on April 9th, 2025, it began to dawn on me that my planned release date for this episode would be on or around the 100th day of the second Trump Administration. It also occurred to me that I could not be speaking with someone better qualified to throw into vivid relief some of the dimensions of what this means. Jonathan Rauch is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, the nonprofit organization based in D.C. whose mission is to conduct in-depth, nonpartisan research to improve policy and governance at local, national, and global levels. Rauch is the author of nine books, and hundreds of articles and essays. Although much of his published work has been on public policy, he has also written on topics as widely varied as adultery, agriculture, economics, gay marriage, height discrimination, biological rhythms, number inflation, and animal rights. A contributing writer at The Atlantic, he has also written for National Journal, The New Republic, The Economist, Reason, Harper’s, Fortune, Reader’s Digest, U.S. News & World Report, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Post, Slate, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Public Interest, The Advocate, and The Daily. Rauch is the recipient of the 2005 National Magazine Award, the magazine industry’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize. I have wanted to speak with Jonathan Rauch since 2021, when I first read his masterful book The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth. The first half of our conversation centers on this book, with special attention to the propaganda and other cognitive warfare tactics Trump has adapted from the likes of Roy Cohn and Vladimir Putin. In the second half of our conversation, we discuss Rauch’s 2025 book, Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy, which marks a profound shift in Rauch’s own thinking, and makes the case, based on arguments advanced by the Founders as well as contemporary events, that the U.S. requires a healthier relationship with the kind of religious practice Jesus himself embodied in order to endure. So let's get to it.
HORN: The Constitution of Knowledge was a massive undertaking. Just in the first few chapters, you survey several thousand years of philosophical and scientific discussions of the idea of truth before dealing in the second half of the book with the dimensions of truth and half-truth and misrepresentations of truth most current at the time—this would be the late [20-] teens. I think an early version of the book was published as an article in 2018. What led you to undertake such a massive project?
[5:56]
RAUCH: Well, maybe we should go back to 32 years ago, if that's not excessive from your point of view!
HORN: Go for it, please!
RAUCH: So my common thread in life is how do we govern ourselves in liberal societies? And by “liberal,” I don't mean “progressive” or “left wing”; I mean what the Founders meant, where all people are free and equal and you rely on rules and things like elections and markets and laws to get things done. In 1993, I wrote a book called Kindly Inquisitors: the New Attacks on Free Thought. It might still be the best book I've ever written. And it was stimulated by the attacks on Salman Rushdie by Ayatollah Khomeini, and by the very, very weak and uncomprehending responses that we saw in the West. But this warned about threats to free speech, but principally not just free speech, but the whole system we use to develop knowledge, which I said is a marketplace of criticism. And if people say, Well, you can't criticize me if it's offensive, you shut down science, you shut down learning, and that means that we lose knowledge, which is our most precious thing. So I wrote that book and then went on to other things and it became a kind of cult classic. And then starting in about 2014 and 2015, we saw the rise of “cancel culture.” Suddenly out of nowhere it seemed like people were losing their livelihoods and reputations if they said something wrong. It wasn't government-enforced, it was socially enforced, but it was pretty rigid. And then in 2015 and 2016, we saw the rise of Donald Trump and his MAGA movement. And in Trump you saw someone who seemed completely indifferent to truth and falsehood, who was deeply steeped in the arts of public manipulation and propaganda. He’s very good at that—a master at that. So we began to see these new attacks on the systems that we use as a society and also as individuals to distinguish reality from fantasy and truth from falsehood. And I realized that I had to go back and revisit the subject, and I also realized I'd missed something very important the first time around. Maybe I kind of missed the most important thing. So Kindly Inquisitors was based on what a philosopher would call a Popperian model of where reality comes from.
HORN: As in Karl Popper—
RAUCH: Karl Popper, yeah, he's the great 20th-century philosopher of science, and he said it's trial and error; that people float millions of hypotheses every day, and then they criticize them as part of a vast network of criticism, and the ones that survive any given day are our best approximation of knowledge. And that's true and it's accurate, but I began to realize that it was insufficient because these new attacks, especially the ones coming from Trump and MAGA, but also online trolls and QAnon and Russian disinformation and bots and social media and all that were not about traditional censorship. They were doing something different. They were manipulating the rules of the system in a way that was making it very hard to know which way was even up. And so I realized I'd missed something important, which is you can't just have an unstructured marketplace of ideas where people say a lot of things and somehow automatically truth rises to the top. It's kind of the standard model, right? In the marketplace of ideas, truth will surface. I realized that you have to get a lot of settings right. It's an idea I got from the psychologist Jonathan Haidt actually. He gave a very important talk at the Manhattan Institute where he said that liberalism depends on a lot of delicate settings. It's like all those fine settings that have to be correct for the universe to be the right temperature so it can even exist. It's like that, and you have to pay attention to the settings. And I said, That's right. So what are the settings for creating knowledge and staying in touch with reality in a complicated society like ours? And that thinking led to the concept of the Constitution of Knowledge, which is not a metaphor, whereas the marketplace of ideas is a metaphor. It's a great metaphor. I love it. I use it. But there is no literal marketplace of ideas. There is a literal Constitution of Knowledge, and it's not written down in a single document in one place, but it is the norms and institutions that structure how we collectively build reality and stay in touch with truth in our society. And it's written: it's instantiated and written down in everything from the American Association of University Professors Red Book on academic standards to the American Society of Newspaper Editors Ethics Codes, the Administrative Procedure Act of the U.S. government, which explains the process the government has to go through to ascertain truth, in order to make rules and so forth. It's a real thing. It's actually out there and it's very important. It's our most important thing, in my view, and it's our most successful thing, but it's also vulnerable and it's under attack. And so I wrote Constitution of Knowledge, and I'm sorry for that very, very long answer.
[11:50]
HORN: Well, it was so interesting that I committed one of the faux pas of a podcaster, which is that as soon as you said Jonathan Haidt, I should have broken in to say “friend of the pod, Jonathan Haidt.” I was honored to have him as a guest several years ago. Would you consider the Constitution kind of a framing analogy though? What you do with the Constitution is that there is a comparison to the U.S. Constitution, of course, but then you are speaking broadly about how this process of how knowledge is constituted, that is, made up, in addition to these ways that you just mentioned where the rules are literally documented. Is it fair to say that it is kind of an analogy?
RAUCH: Oh yeah. Well, it's the same double entendre or at least I guess significance of the political Constitution that constitutes how we structure our politics and the Constitution of Knowledge constitutes how we structure our collective search for truth. So same basic idea, and they overlap very much. They're very similar social systems in their overall design. In the Constitution of Knowledge, I kind of invented Madisonian epistemology, which applies the same kind of rules that the U.S. Constitution uses in the realm of knowledge, and that's basically what we do.
[13:23]
HORN: Toward the beginning of the book, you quote an opinion column that I think was published in April of 2018 in The New York Times by former CIA director Michael Hayden. He wrote: “These are truly uncharted waters for the country. We have in the past argued over the values to be applied to objective reality, or occasionally over what constituted objective reality, but never the existence or relevance of objective reality itself. … In this post-truth world, intelligence agencies are in the bunker with some unlikely mates: journalism, academia, the courts, law enforcement, and science—all of which, like intelligence gathering, are evidence-based.” [The Constitution of Knowledge, p. 9] And so that was something for me to read the first time that I read your book, which was during the Biden administration, but I was struck rereading your book last week that these institutions—and you spend a lot of time thinking about the nature of institutions and how important the institutional aspect of the constitution of knowledge is. But these institutions of professional journalism, academia, the courts, law enforcement, science, these have already been systematically targeted in Trump 2.0, which we observed is only not yet 80 days old, arguably much more effectively than during the first Trump Administration. It kind of reads like a hit list as you go back. How are you thinking about these institutions today?
RAUCH: Well, first of all, I guess I should say that those institutions were targeted very effectively in Trump's first term. This is a president who took a Sharpie pen and changed the prediction of the path of a hurricane, and then went to the bureaucracy and they said, We're changing the science. And some of the career scientists resisted that, but as I recall, the senior officials went along with it. But it is true that the first time around when the President tried to impose an alternative reality on the government by, for example, ordering investigations that were not predicated in fact, that the career bureaucracy and the professionals in the government for the most part refused to go along with that. He was not able to, say, indict Hillary Clinton because I told you to. It does appear that he is getting much more compliance in the second go round because he is making sure to appoint people whose only credential is loyalty to him. And so he will be able to target Peter Horn on the basis of fabricated realities. We've seen that he's already done that in the case of, for example, Venezuelans and others. We see him targeting universities, he's targeting science. They have gone through government grants, and summarily canceled grants that seem to have anything to do with, for instance, race or class or gender, and in a pretty random way. So they're canceling stuff that really has nothing at all to do with being “PC” or “woke” or anything like that. So this is an effort to turn the government into a machine that's responsive, not to truth, but to Trump.
[17:15]
HORN: I guess I'd say that that, to me, is what's more effective about it. To go back to the Sharpie on the weather map example, at that point he wasn't trying to impound money from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and decide who's going to get accurate weather. I think this is already under consideration right now that that might be restricted or that accurate weather might become a premium service.
RAUCH: Yes, this go-round is an order of magnitude more intense and thorough going and broad in scope. There's no question about that. I would just also remind people how bad it was the first time around: the most significant attack on truth and reality that we have seen in this country since at least the pre-Civil War era, when secessionist forces led a massive attack—an epistemic attack, a propaganda attack, basically disinformation—to try to stimulate secession. And of course they succeeded. Most southerners didn't want to secede, but this disinformation campaign built a head of steam for it. The most successful Russian-style mass disinformation campaign that has ever been run against the United States people was run by Donald Trump, and it's the Stop the Steal campaign, which convinced two-thirds of Republicans to this day that the 2020 election was stolen. Now, this is false. There's no truth in it at all. But this administration, according to reports, is now requiring that in order to get an appointment to get a job in this administration, they'll ask you, Was the 2020 election stolen? And if you don't say Yes, you don't get hired. So this all, this is a continuation of a long-term and far-reaching propaganda campaign.
HORN: I don't know if you sit around reading your books that you've already published—you've got a lot of current projects! But again, for me, rereading this book in preparation for talking with you today, the things that popped for me, that jumped out—because you do note, you say that there were folks who observed his fascistic impulses or authoritarian leanings, let's say, but were glad that his incompetence limited them. And you noted, in a way that feels like a clarion warning now, that the people who focus on Trump's incompetence—and again, we were just talking about the first term then because this [book] is coming out in 2021—underestimate his skill and efficacy in the epistemic sphere—that is to say, changing the way the public engages with reality, which is my paraphrase of that. So he figured out how to adapt Russian-style disinformation tactics to American politics. And you have this note say, I think it's something like, for better or worse, to an extent, “we are all Russians now” [Constitution, p. 173] in the sense that we've gotten a taste of this. You quoted a Russian intelligence defector who was interviewed in 1983. His name was Yuri Bezmenov. He said: “A person who's demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him. Even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents, with pictures” [Constitution, p. 166]. That feeling of helplessness, it seems to pervade in this moment, and it seems to be part of the project to have us doubt that there could be any truth. What is real? What is false? I don't know. I guess, guess I'm asking, more or less: What would the update be for you? You feel that it was going on—I agree that it was going on in the first Trump term, but this is just—it's the public dimension of this that I'm so concerned about. How can we have tools to contend with it?
[22:05]
RAUCH: So first is what's the “this” that we're contending with? And the second part of that is what are the tools that can be used? The “this” that we're contending with is a multidimensional campaign of disinformation. There are people who have tried to stigmatize that term, but it is the right term: disinformation is manipulating the media environment, that is, what's said and reported in public, in order to deceive, disorient, divide, and ultimately demoralize a target population. Demoralize is the most important of the four because you can't necessarily deceive everyone, but if you can make people shrug and say, well, they're all a bunch of liars. I don't know what's true, then they stay home. Demoralization is demobilization, and that's how you win without firing a shot. This was what Putin tried to do with Ukraine, which is convince the world, and even some Russians and Ukrainians, that Ukraine was the aggressor. And then he tried to convince the world with more success that Russian victory was inevitable so we might as well just settle the war right now on Russian terms before more people got killed. I think JD Vance fell for that. A lot of people fell for that. So that's what you're out to do. Trump is, I believe, the most innovative and effective propaganda entrepreneurs since probably the “greats” of the 1930s. He understands the principle of the Big Lie, which is just don't worry about the plausible explanation, dotting the i's and crossing the t's—make a big claim and then stick to it, make it even bigger when you're challenged on it. He understands the importance of volume. This is what's called by Rand researchers the “fire hose of falsehood” technique. And that's when you spew so many lies, exaggerations, half-truths and conspiracy theories that people can't keep up; they can't check them fast enough. So the more the media tries to bat them down, the more they're overwhelmed and the point here is to make the target population feel like there's no truth. Who knows? It's all a bunch of crap. He's very good at trolling—that's attention hijacking. Hitler says in Mein Kampf, it doesn't matter if they mock us and laugh at us, as long as they cannot stop thinking about us. You want to occupy everyone's brain space 24/7 so that the opposition can't really get an effective purchase on the narrative. He's very good at that and we know he can do this, that he does this consciously. There's an episode in my book—this was reported—where he had some bad news that day and he said to his aides, Watch this! and he sent out some kind of offensive, trolling tweet, knowing that the press, everyone, would pivot and look at that instead. So the more outrageous, the better. You want to capture attention. You want them always talking about you. He's very good at repetition. This is a big one. This is Lenin and Hitler. All the greats talk about Repeat it again and again, and then get the other side to repeat it by debunking it. But the more people hear it, the more they'll think, Well, there must be something true about this. And there are many more techniques. We see these come together in the so-called Big Lie. The election lies, that campaign begins in April and May of 2020 when he begins to attack mail-in voting as fraudulent. And people like me, people at Brookings say, Well, this doesn't make sense. He's a Republican and there's a pandemic, and a lot of older people who are his voters will want to vote by mail. This won't help him. And what we didn't realize was he was targeting not Election Day, but the day after our election day: He knew he was likely to lose. He could read the polls and the mail-in voting campaign was creating and then testing the messaging network, which would go into full swing day after the election, which is Stop the Steal, which is using every possible channel—a bully pulpit from the White House, Republican officials, conservative media, and even lawsuits, massive numbers of lawsuits—with no coherent theory of the facts at all. These were purely about messaging and propaganda: use every channel to communicate every conceivable narrative—plausible, implausible, it doesn't matter. Something to do with Venezuelan interference with the election using Italian satellites and Chinese voting machines. It doesn't matter. Pump it out there. And this is the most effective attack on our democracy of its sort that we've ever seen. Audacious and brilliant and successful. Many people believe the election was stolen, and many others think we'll never know. So that's what we're looking at: these things. So the main way of dealing with mass disinformation is not to have it in the first place, and we were very successful at that for a long time. We stigmatized lying in politics, and if a liar was caught in politics, that would be embarrassing, and that person might even lose support for that. At least among Republican primary voters, that restraint now seems to be gone. They seem to feel that You say what you need to say in order to win. And by the way, if Trump says it, it's true, so that restraint is gone. Another restraint was mainstream media, people like editors who didn't print stuff if it couldn't be shown to be true. And mainstream media still mostly works like that. If you drop in a conspiracy theory, it'll tend to fall out of circulation in a news cycle or maybe two because it doesn't check out, so people don't repeat it. That's not true in conservative media, which is more based on ratings and eyeballs—and conspiracy theories and whatnot sell. So they tend to amplify these things. We see this with Fox News and Dominion voting and the—what is it, seven, how many hundreds of millions of dollars that they had to pay. So guardrails are gone, and the biggest guardrail, of course, is that the President of the United States is now a master Russian-style propagandist.
[29:20]
RAUCH: So what do we do? There's no one answer. It's all kinds of shoring up of all kinds of institutions, and it means that colleges and universities and newsrooms and schools need to get better about fact checking about teaching media literacy to kids pre bunking seems to work pretty well. That's what the Biden administration did to Putin at the beginning of the Ukraine war. It was a textbook example that will go down in history as very effective. They declassified enough information to tell the world, Here's what Putin is going to say, and it's going to be fake, and it'll involve actors pretending to be Russians who are being massacred by Ukrainians. And that worked so well that Putin didn't even do it because he'd been exposed. But pre-bunking helps fortify us. A big thing that you can do is depolarization, and this gets into your particular specialty. Propaganda and polarization are two sides of the same coin. The point of propaganda, as we mentioned, is to demoralize and to divide: to set people against each other. And when people hate each other, they'll believe anything about the other side. And then the more they believe terrible things about the other side, the more they hate each other. And this is the game Putin has been playing. This is why the Russian troll farm in St. Petersburg managed in 2020 to launch competing demonstrations of Muslim Islamic activists and what I guess white supremacist activists literally demonstrating across the street from each other. They did that twice and they were convened not by actual Americans, but by Russian trolls. So what they're trying to do is divide us. If they can divide us, they weaken us. Then we become more vulnerable to the propaganda, which divides us further. And that's the cycle we're in. And by the way, Trump plays the same game. He's very divisive and he'll tell you, They're out to get you. The other side is coming for you. You should be very afraid. Only I can protect you. So depolarizing is helpful. If you can get people to talk to each other a bit more and trust each other a little more, they'll be less likely to believe the propaganda. That's why I'm a supporter of, for example, Braver Angels, a national grassroots depolarizing movement. There's a lot being done on that score. There's talk about cognitive immunization. This is a new field, but this is looking at how can—you don't want to just censor stuff—that just backfires, but can you slow down the spread of disinformation? You create kind of firewalls in the form of trusted local institutions that'll say, Hey, wait a minute. We don't really think that's quite true. It might be local medical professionals or health professionals or, for example, ministers—could be all kinds of people. I could go on. There's no one thing that works. It's about shoring up the reality making and trust building institutions right throughout society. The problem now, Peter, is that those institutions are being placed under severe stress in the current political environment.
HORN: I'm tempted to double-click on a couple of the points you just raised.
[32:54]
RAUCH: I'll follow you. I'm not in a hurry, and I've been filibustering, so maybe I should let you talk for a minute.
HORN: No, it's all right. It's just that I think it's also a kind of undervalued dimension of how much Trump wears us down by his omnipresence. We can speak of—just for myself, the tax that it takes just to think about this guy because he's always in the news. He puts himself there. It's an underrated cost. I loved the idea of thinking about, especially just after the 2020 election—the fairly decided 2020 election—of thinking, Hey, starting on January 20th, we're going to have a President who just does his job, and we won't hear from him that often. We won't be reading about him all the time. We won't need to be thinking about him all the time—because I think that's part of the way that we do get worn down. There is an aspect of the—I wondered whether you were hesitating to quote Steve Bannon directly, but—“flooding the zone with shit” as a strategy for making us doubt things. That's true from an epistemic sense of just sorting out what's true and false. But then there's also the weakened state of just finding yourself having to spend a certain amount of time, if you're going to pay attention to any news at all. And maybe that's part of the strategy to keep us from, to keep us from doing it.
[34:33]
RAUCH: He's been a student and practitioner of these methods for a very long time, and he's very good at it. And this is something we've known about him. One has to say—simply from the point of view of cognitive warfare, which is what this is, that is to say political domination by manipulating psychology—he's a true master. And by the way, he knows he's a true master. We have him on record talking about some of the things he does in the book early on. I quote him in, I think it's 2004, for example—
HORN: Yeah, the Chris Matthews interview where—
RAUCH: Yeah, he's talking about how the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign took a guy who's a genuine war hero, John Kerry, and using a combination of lies and half-truths managed to convince a lot of people that John Kerry was not a war hero and may even have been a war shirker. Now, this was a funded campaign. This was a targeted political campaign designed to take out one of Kerry's big advantages, which he was running against George W. Bush, who had never served. And the people behind Bush and behind the Republicans had to take that down, and they did. And so Trump is on the record talking about this in an interview and speaking admiringly of it and saying what a good job they had done of inverting reality. So he knows he gets it.
[36:59]
AARON BARTLEY: I really hate to interrupt this movement of Dvořák’s 7th Symphony performed by Maestro JoAnn Falletta and the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, but this music is a good example of why I support Point of Learning. Pete spends a lot of time with each episode, not only writing nice things about himself for others to read in ads, but also making sure each episode sounds as good as possible, which includes musical flourishes and interludes. He found out that Jonathan Rauch was a particular fan of this performance, and then he got permission from Maestro Falletta to use it in the show. If you’re interested in his interview with JoAnn Falletta, it’s linked on the show page. But while you’re poking around the Point of Learning website, consider kicking in a few dollars as a one-time donation, or as a recurring monthly donation, which is what I do … or used to do, until my credit card information changed, but Pete is too soft-hearted to nag me about updating my payment details. Hey wait, Pete, is this why you asked me to do this ad? Pete—seriously? All right! Back to the show!
[38:11]
HORN: You begin the other book that I'd like to talk with you about, Cross Purposes, by mapping the journey you've taken with respect to religion, not so much in your own personal belief, but in your assessment of the civic importance of some level of some kind of Christianity, given the history of the United States, for democracy. The son of a preacher man myself, I found this fascinating, because I remember thinking as a young kid that it was probably good that so many people went to a church or synagogue or mosque every weekend, even if they didn't quite buy everything on offer, because there were some good messages about how people should treat one another. But that was really vague thinking about morality by a 10-year-old. And I don't think I ever considered democracy as part of a religious bargain. So could you sketch whatever elements of your journey you'd like to on the way to recognizing that Christianity and secular liberalism are in some ways accountable to each other?
RAUCH: So I am an atheist and always have been. I tried to believe it God at one point, when I was 14, and just failed. I'm a Jew. (You can be Jewish and not really believe in God if you're not too obnoxious about it.) And I'm gay. And being those three things, I was very much an outsider to Christianity. Growing up, I saw Christianity as cruel and hypocritical and bigoted—and I was not wrong about that: it's done a whole lot to persecute people like me—and me. So I come from a place of having a really bad attitude about Christianity. My journey toward understanding that there was a genuine side of Christianity began in college when my roommate was a real Christian, someone I deeply respect, who went on to become a very well-respected Anglican priest and professor who wrote many books, Mark McIntosh. I co-dedicate my book to him and Pastor Tim Keller. But even so, in 2003, I still didn't really understand why Christianity might matter to me. And in fact, the dumbest thing I ever wrote—including, by the way, my 2015 prediction that Donald Trump would never be president—in 2003, I wrote an article praising what I called cheekily “apatheism,” meaning secularization. Americans were just losing interest in God and religion. And I thought, That's a great thing because religion is divisive and dogmatic and we'll all get along better. And that turned out to be the greatest mistake of my career, because it turned out that starting around 2003, America embarked on the greatest wave of secularization of de-Christianization the country has ever seen, and all kinds of bad social indicators went haywire, loneliness and isolation, anxiety, depression, enemy unhappiness with politics. And it turned out that what I should have known all along was still true, which is that Christianity, our predominant religion—that's really white Protestantism, for the most part—in America is a load-bearing wall. So now we get to the bigger reason, the reason it's not about me, it's about the Founders. So they famously told us that they were giving us a republic—if we could keep it [Ben Franklin]. And they told us that in order to keep it, it wasn't enough just to have the structures of the U.S. Constitution. They said none of that would work if there's not virtue in the citizenry, what they called “republican virtue.” That thing meant things like behaving civilly and honorably: being truthful, being tolerant, being well-educated about civic matters so that you knew what was going on in the world and so forth. And they told us that the whole experiment would fail without republican virtue. And where did they expect us to get that? They said, It's not going to be provided right here in the Constitution. You're going to have to get that from civil society—by which they meant family and community and schools, but they very importantly [also] meant faith, which meant Christianity: a Christian country then and now. They were not saying you had to be Christian in order to be a good American. And they were not saying that America is a Christian nation. They deliberately refused to write any mention of Christianity into the Constitution. They were demanded to do so and they would not. But what they were saying is, Look, if this experiment's going to succeed, Christianity has a job to do, and that's to fill in the gaps that we can't fill in: by providing education in these core virtues, by providing a sense of transcendence in life, that life is valuable, and there's a foundation for good and evil that's larger than ourselves, by providing the kind of civic solidarity that people can have when they worship together, take communion together. So those things were there in the fabric of American civilization, and they stayed there for a very long time. Yes, there's a dark side of Christianity—believe me: I know. I was at the business end of that—very, very nasty—but through the 20th century, mostly Christianity did pretty much what the Founders wanted to when I was growing up. You might be old enough to remember this, Peter. I'm 15 years older, but when I was growing up in the ‘60s and ‘70s, if you met someone new (and you weren't Jewish), the first thing people would ask each other was often not What do you do for a living? Or Where are you from? They'd say, What church do you belong to? Seventy percent of Americans belonged to a church right through the end of the 20th century.
[44:51]
HORN: The question in Buffalo that I remember very clearly is What religion are you? And then we had so many Roman Catholics in Buffalo that when I said “Presbyterian,” they were convinced that I wasn't a Christian. They were like, Well, I'm a Christian.
RAUCH: Yeah, yeah. If you talk to anyone under 40 today, they have no idea that the Episcopal Church, the United Methodist, the Presbyterian Church—that these were the central pillars of American cultural life in the latter half of the 20th century. And now they're culturally irrelevant. So you had two waves of secularization, and the first was the mainline churches, those that we've been talking about. And their form of secularization was that they lost their cultural distinctiveness. They stopped being anchored in the scripture of—just the other day, I was talking to a retired Presbyterian minister who said it got to the point where in the Presbyterian group meetings, the church meetings, God was never mentioned. And so they lost their distinctiveness and blended into the surrounding culture and just faded away. People drifted off. If you want to do social justice activism, you don't have to give up a Sunday. And then there's a second huge wave of secularization, and this is the one that hit the white Evangelical church, which was thriving for a while. While the mainline churches declined, they picked up the slack. But in this century, they've gone off a cliff and their form of secularization was not to get absorbed into general kind of progressive, do-good stuff. It was to join at the hip with the Republican party and pretty much merged their identity with partisan politics up to the point where 80+ percent of evangelicals vote for the Republican presidential candidate, no matter who it is. And even if it's someone who is the least Christ-like figure you can imagine. So now, if I'm not filibustering too much, I'll tell you a little story, something that you didn't know, because no one knew this, including me when I discovered it and I was gobsmacked. So you probably have heard the quotation from Donald J. Trump that his supporters are so loyal, he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and they wouldn't mind. Do you know where he said that?
[47:32]
HORN: I think it was a church group. I don't know if it was the one that was where he was talking about the two Thessalonians [Note: “two Corinthians” was the January 2016 blunder at Liberty University I was thinking of—PH], but yeah, enlighten me. I'm not sure exactly.
RAUCH: Very good. Anyway, so he said that in January 2016, toward the beginning of his campaign, at Dort College, which is an evangelical school in Iowa. And here's the thing, it's in that very same speech half an hour earlier where he says something else that became his historic. He said, If you elect me, you will have power. Remember that? So he's offering a bargain to Christians. He's saying, I will give you power and in exchange you'll give me unconditional loyalty. That's the deal. Okay, so now your dad was a preacher, so I'll bet you do know the answer to this one. In Matthew 4, before Jesus begins his ministry, he prepares for it by going to the wilderness for 40 days and 40 nights. And there he encounters—
HORN: Donald Trump. Oh, right, sorry, Satan. Satan, right? That's the answer.
RAUCH: Ooh, ooh, little slip there! There he encounters Satan. And Satan takes him to the highest mountain top in the world, shows him all of human dominion and says, You'll rule all of this if you bow down and worship me. And as you know, Jesus rejects the offer. He says, Go away, Satan. And that launches his ministry. Christians are not supposed to want to rule this world. They're supposed to be fixed on the next world, not the next election. Trump offers the same deal to Christians that Satan does, and Christians take it. White Evangelicals take it. They say, This guy's going to give us power. We're living in a time of fear and danger for us. We're being culturally marginalized. Demographically, our numbers are shrinking. We're losing the culture wars. Our kids are trans. Same-sex marriage. Children are being slaughtered. We need power, and this guy will give us power. Initially they're reluctant, and then they're all in. And this happens over time—it's not just Trump. This begins actually in the ‘80s and ‘90s, but it really turbocharges in this century. The church's complexion changes. It becomes what I call “sharp,” which is to say it becomes partisan, divisive, confrontational. It becomes about the culture wars, and as it becomes sharper, it becomes smaller. People filter out. Again, if I want to do the culture wars, I don't have to give up a Sunday. And some people filter in and begin identifying as Evangelicals only because of the politics part. They don't go to church. The number percentage of white Evangelicals who never go to church has risen from negligible to about one in eight, according to Ryan Burge, a demographer. So the white Evangelical church becomes more like a culture war movement or a political movement, and it shrinks and it sharpens, and this is another form of cultural assimilation of secularization. So the church, these two great branches of white Protestantism, for different reasons, lose their distinctiveness. They lose their focus on the message of Jesus Christ, and they are less and less capable of, or maybe willing to do the work that the Founders needed them to do, which was not a political job. It's a very different kind of job. It's about giving us an account of the transcendent, and communities organized around that.
[51:34]
HORN: In your taxonomy, you explained just now what you're referring to as “sharp Christianity,” this church of fear, and the kind of mainline Protestants that faded toward the end of the 20th century in the book you described as “thin Christianity,” but there's also a “thick Christianity,” and I was a little surprised and delighted that the key example was the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which you took care not to refer to as “the Mormons,” because I know that's not a preferred title, but I'm just flagging that because—
RAUCH: Yeah, they don't actually mind. You can do it. It's okay. They told me the number two person in the church called himself Mormon, and I said, “President Oaks, I thought you weren't supposed to say that.” And he just smiled and he said, “Old habits die hard.”
HORN: Well, you start your chapter with an account of him. But I wonder if you could just give it, because I think the subtitle is “the church of compromise,” right? That they embrace a kind of Madisonian spirit of compromise, and you gave this example of how they contended with the political ramifications of homosexuality, how they dealt with it. I wonder if you have a short version of that that you could give, because I think it's a beautiful kind of hopeful example of how they thought through that and wrestled with it.
RAUCH: So we talked about the church being a load-bearing wall. So one of the things that went seriously wrong is the church is still pretty good at doing what it calls “discipling people” or “spiritual formation.” That's the term Evangelicals use for making yourself in the image of Jesus Christ. They're still okay at that in your local church community, or if the hurricane or fire comes, they're going to be there to help. But there's been a vacuum, a giant sucking sound around what's called civic theology, which answers the question, how did Jesus want us to behave in politics and social media, not in our media communities? And the church has had nothing to say about that. And as a result of that, secular society has rushed in to fill the gap. And you see Christians just behaving in often cruel and barbaric ways in their public discourse, and that doesn't really work if you're a Christian. As David French says, “That's like saying, well, I may be a bit of an asshole on Twitter, but you should see me in the soup kitchen!” Christianity is encompassing. It's not for just one part of your life but not the rest. So I look at this and I begin asking, so what does a “thick Christianity” look like? And by “thick” I mean countercultural and distinctive enough so that it asks a lot of its followers and gives a lot in exchange, so it doesn't just blend into the background and look like the rest of secular society—so that it has its distinctive beliefs and its moorings in scripture. And yet at the same time it is, as the Founders hoped and needed, reasonably well aligned with the Constitution and the values of our liberal democracy so that they don't have to be partners—that's asking too much, but at least it's aligned. They're not pulling in opposite directions, as is happening with the white Evangelical church and the constitutional order. And the answer to my prayers comes in the form of Dallin Oaks, and he’s the number two person in the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a distinguished lawyer and constitutional scholar, but now very senior in the church and under his leadership and that of the current prophet Russell Nelson, their church has developed a full-blown, articulated civic theology which says, so how Jesus wants us to behave in politics is to approach it in a spirit of patience, negotiation and mutual accommodation, what they call peacemaking, which doesn't mean you give up your values, or you compromise on your values. Their church is very conservative on values. They disapprove of homosexuality. You can be excommunicated if you're in a same-sex marriage. So it doesn't give up on its values, but it says, Christ wants us to approach politics in ways that reduce rather than sharpen conflict, in ways that increase the space for us to get along with each other—finding ways to do that. And that's the exact same mission as Madison and the U.S. Constitution. The Constitution is a compromise-forcing document. That's what it does. It forces compromise. That's why it divides power among levels and branches and makes sure that no one faction can take control without the consent of the others. And we're seeing right now how haywire things go when one branch and one person in one branch tries to lord it over all the others. So then they're not only talking the talk, they're walking the walk. And this is what really got my attention. This is one of the reasons I wrote the book. In 2015 the culture wars are really starting to take off. Yet the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints teams up with Equality Utah, the LGBT group in the state, and the conservative Republicans who run the legislature to pass a landmark anti-discrimination state law, protecting LGBT people, while also bolstering protections for religious liberty for churches like theirs who don't want to participate. And for example, Brigham Young University does not have to have same-sex married students in the married couple's housing. So this is a win for everyone. Everyone feels safer and more welcome in Utah. And Equality Utah will tell you to this day that this has transformed not just the law but the culture in the state, because working through that created the trust and the relationships that made the LGBT people feel more welcome. And those relationships have lasted to this day. In 2022, they do it again, even more strikingly—they, along with some other religious groups who deserve credit: Seventh Day Adventist, the Orthodox Union, the National Association of Evangelicals, the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities. Anyway, but with significant leadership from the Latter-day Saints, they put through Congress—helped put through—the Respect for Marriage Act that enshrines same-sex marriage in federal statute, in case the Supreme Court changes its mind now. That means that my marriage to my husband is going to be safe, for the most part. This was coupled with important landmark, new religious liberty protections that say that the federal government will never use charitable tax breaks, contracts, and grants to bully a faith-based organization into recognizing a same-sex marriage. And that takes off the table probably the single biggest weapon that conservative religious groups are talking about. This passes with unanimity on the Democratic side and a lot of Republican votes. And it's classic because again, you're increasing the space for us to live together, everyone away with more of what they really need. So what you see here is a fully articulated, theologically based doctrine of a Christ-like way of approaching politics. And what you also see is it turns out to work a lot better than throwing darts and arrows at each other in the culture wars.
[59:44]
HORN: And as you know, it's also very Madisonian: that we will refuse to look at this as a zero-sum game, that we'll recognize that if we come together and compromise, everybody will get something. We'll be able to move forward.
RAUCH: Yeah, that's right. People misunderstand compromise. This is a big source of frustration. President Oaks does not misunderstand it. He gets it. But people think compromise is about splitting babies: everyone walks away unhappy; everyone has to literally compromise their principles—and that's not true at all. Madison is a genius because he's the guy who sees compromise is a creative, constructive, dynamic force; that when people get together and they're forced to negotiate to solve a problem, they get creative. They come up with ideas that no one walked into the room with. Or they say, Hey, Peter and Jonathan can't figure this out. So we go, Well, why don't we add Susan over here? If she brings in her group or adds these dollars to the pot, then we can get somewhere. So compromise is the great dynamic innovation engine of our political system, because it forces us to bring in new ideas and new parties to the conversation and to find creative ways to do things. And it's very common in a compromise negotiation: to walk out with something better than anyone walked in with. Doesn't always happen, but even children understand this, right? Susie and Sally can't agree on whether to play chess or checkers. So maybe they invent a game and call it Chesters, or maybe they go out and find Sarah and bring her in and they decide to do something. So even children understand this, but too many of us Americans have forgotten it. My latest book—both of my books—all of my books, really, are about how to govern ourselves, how to solve the permanent problem of how you take a fractious, divided, very different group of people. And somehow we govern ourselves in a creative, constructive way. And both of these books are about that. One's about how we govern the process of finding truth and making reality, and the other is about the important role of Christianity. And I just want to say that the heart of this book on Christianity is that three great principles distinguish the teachings of Christianity. And they're same three principles that are crucial to Republican virtue. The first is Don't be afraid. That's core to Jesus' teaching. It's also core to Madison's teaching: You're going to lose some elections. That's okay. Don't panic. You can share the country. The second is Be like Jesus, who ministered to the least of these and believed in the fundamental equality of every person. That's our liberal democracy. That's “All men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.” Republican virtue says, Remember that even if you disagree with someone, they’re your equal. And they deserve civility and respect, and especially the marginal, the poor, the weak. You can't trample on them just because they're a minority. That's why we have a Bill of Rights. And then the third is Forgive each other in Christianity, which is really hard, but retribution, to use a term, is not man's province. It's God's province. So if a politician comes along—
HORN: Now, so I'm not your retribution is what we're saying. I'm not.
RAUCH: You’re not the retribution, and the Madisonian equivalent of that is, Look, sometimes you're going to win an election or you're going to pitch your supporters and what you're selling them, what you're trying to do, is not crush the other side and drive them out of polite society, salting the soil with the tears of their women and children. You're going to share the country even when you win because they are your fellow citizens. And someday they'll need to share it with you. That's a core Republican virtue.
HORN: Forbearance.
RAUCH: Forbearance, yeah, pluralism, toleration. It's really hard. And so what I try to leave people with is that I'm in a strange position, Peter, because I'm a secular, atheistic, homosexual Jew saying what America needs more of right now is what Christianity—what Christ's version of Christianity, not the secularized version—has to offer.
[1:04:39]
[VO]: That’s it for today’s show! My great thanks to Jonathan Rauch for joining me. More about him and the books we discussed today may be found on the show page. Thanks also to Maestro JoAnn Falletta for allowing me to sample the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra’s outstanding performance of Dvořák’s 7th Symphony in D minor throughout the episode. Thanks as always to Shayfer James, whose “Weight of the World” is used as always, with the artist’s express permission. (Yes, I’m talking to you, Spotify.) Thanks finally to you, listeners, for listening, rating (5 stars), reviewing, and sharing this episode with friends. If you can think of just one person who’d appreciate today’s discussion, share it up! It will mean most coming from you. Point of Learning is written, recorded, edited, mixed, and mastered by me here in sunny Buffalo, New York. I’m Peter Horn, and I’ll be back at you with an extra special episode to celebrate my 50th birthday at the end of June. I’m not 100% sure the form it will take, but I know it’ll have some connection to what and how and why we learn—even if it’s just how we learn to keep going through this madness. Till then, stay as strong and majestic as this Dvořák Finale!
