KEY POINTS
  • Jonathan Rauch heralds The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' approach to civic theology as an example for American Christianity.
  • Though a non-believer himself, Rauch says the church's teachings should gain greater national attention for their potential positive impact.
  • Latter-day Saint willingness to compromise while protecting core values is an example of Madisonian pluralism, Rauch says.

In a remarkable address at Brigham Young University, a nationally respected public policy expert and journalist said that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has developed a modern civic theology desperately needed in American Christianity in an age of secularization, polarization and dechurching.

Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, believes strongly enough in what Latter-day Saint leaders are teaching that he, an atheist in a same-sex marriage, spent the past week in Utah asking church leaders and BYU students to amplify the message that he gleaned from the church itself.

“One of the reasons that I’m here,” Rauch said, “is that in all of Christian America, I can only think of one church that has worked out an articulated civic theology of how Christians should address politics and the public world, and you heard it here (Tuesday) from Elder (Gary E.) Stevenson” during a BYU devotional.

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Elder Stevenson called on BYU students to take up the flags of peacemaking and understanding others. It was built on landmark talks by church President Russell M. Nelson (”Peacemakers Needed”) and his first counselor, President Dallin H. Oaks (”Going Forward with Religious Freedom and Nondiscrimination”).

“I believe that the discipleship that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has embarked on has national civic implications,” said Rauch, from Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., and author of eight books. “I believe that it deserves an audience outside of the church, not just inside the church. I believe the work that it is doing is to articulate not just the conclusion, which is ‘be peacemakers,’ but how you reach the conclusion, why that’s what God wants.

“That theological element is crucial, because that’s instructing the world in what it actually means to be like Christ.”

White evangelical Christianity has suffered some of the biggest losses in church membership over the past 25 years,” said Rauch, who is recognized as one of the nation’s leading thinkers on public policy, culture, and government.

He said the problem is that many white evangelicals tried to combat secularization with politicization. That alienated pastors and drove away more believers, creating what he called a Church of Fear driving polarization instead of discipleship.

Elevating Latter-day Saint civic theology

Rauch, again a non-Christian, said the answers to America’s political problems lie in the teachings of Jesus Christ and James Madison, who like other Founders said the Constitution would rely on values undergirded by religious teachings.

“I’m here to advocate that the church preach President Oaks to the world and not just the church,” Rauch told the Deseret News on Friday. President Oaks gave his talk in 2021 at the University of Virginia, where he said he was speaking for the church’s First Presidency.

Credit: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

“I will say, as a secular person, if I can help spread the word, the gospel as it were, I will do my best,” Rauch said at BYU in an event sponsored by the Wheatley Institute on campus. “I have written a book for that purpose, and I hope I can elevate and magnify the work you’re doing.”

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Rauch spoke to two BYU classes Thursday and gave a lecture at BYU’s Hinckley Center that night that was attended by Elders Quentin L. Cook and D. Todd Christofferson of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, among other church general authorities, university president Shane Reese and faculty and students.

Rauch’s new book, “Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy,” is due out Feb. 4. The Amazon.com book blurb notes that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints “has placed the Constitution at the heart of its spiritual teachings.”

Rauch spends two-thirds of a chapter holding up the Latter-day Saints as example of an alternative path for Christianity for two reasons:

First, he said at BYU, the church’s message of constitutional pluralism is a way to avoid driving off believers who want to be like Jesus Christ and who are put off by religious politicization.

Second, America’s founders knew that believers were needed to provide the foundation of moral values necessary to undergird the Constitution they created.

“For a hopeful answer,” Rauch writes in his book, “we will look, perhaps unexpectedly, to (T)he Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; and then consider the prospects for a new entente which honors both Jesus and James Madison.”

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Why America is failing

Rauch said Thursday night that America is becoming ungovernable, and he blamed an erosion of the values the Founders anticipated would be lasting. He said those values come from the moral teaching of America’s religions, which the Founders said were necessary.

Instead, the United States has gone through a major era of dechurching. White evangelicals responded, Rauch said, not by following Christ’s teachings but by seeking more earthly power.

“In 2011 white evangelicals were the Christians in America who were most likely to say that character is important in an elected official. Only five years later, in 2016 they were the Christians who were least likely to say that character matters in an elected official,” he said, citing polling by the Public Religion Research Institute.

Rauch quoted Baptist theologian and Christianity Today editor Russell Moore, who said, “The frantic rage we can often display in supposedly protecting Christian values might feel like strength, but the world sees it for what it is, fear, anxiety and lack of confidence. They can also see that it’s nothing like the confident tranquility of Jesus.”

Moore said that fear can fuel the loss of the next generation of believers. He said Christians “cannot go into the political world and say, ‘You know, I know I’m a bit of (a jerk) on Twitter, but you should see me in the soup kitchen.’ That’s just not the way it works. You can’t cabin off parts of your life.”

Rauch agreed, saying Christianity is not meant to be practiced close to the vest.

“It’s meant to be a seamless garment. It’s meant to cover all your life,” he said.

He said he found the answer to America’s woes in the Christian idea that discipleship is spiritual formation.

A Latter-day Saint “chain of reasoning” that can heal American division

“We have this concept of spiritual formation, but it hasn’t been extended by Christians in today’s America to the public realm. It’s spiritual formation in your own life, but it hasn’t developed a civic theology,” Rauch said. “A civic theology is a doctrine, a fully articulated doctrine, of how Jesus would want us to behave — not just in our community, not just rebuilding the homes when the hurricane strikes — but how we behave, for example, on social media, how we comport ourselves in politics.”

The problem isn’t the positions some Christians take, Rauch said, but the way they address their fellow citizens.

“In politics, there has been an immense gaping hole in Christianity for lack of a fully articulated civic theology, and in the absence of a civic theology of how Christians should address our common culture and politics, there has been the inrush of all these other forces we’ve seen, such as toxic polarization and partisanship,” he said.

Latter-day Saint leaders, on the other hand, have provided “a fully articulated chain of reasoning,” Rauch said.

He saw it in the Utah Compromise in 2015, when church and LGBTQ+ leaders struck a stunning deal to protect each other. They created an agreement that was codified in Utah law that provides anti-discrimination provisions for LGBT people in exchange for carefully targeted exemptions for religious entities.

Rauch told the Deseret News then that the Latter-day Saints were “the first major, right-of-center religious organization in the United States to break with the culture-war strategy and to do so publicly.”

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Governor Gary Herbert holds up a copy of SB296, known commonly as the Utah Compromise, after signing it at the Capitol in Salt Lake City on Thursday, March 12, 2015. Applauding is Lt. Gov. Spencer Cox, Sen. Stuart Adams, R-Layton, Sen. Stephen Urquhart, R-St. George, Rep. Brad Dee, R-Ogden, House Speaker Greg Hughes, R-Draper, and Senate President Wayne Neiderhauser, R-Sandy. | Laura Seitz, Deseret News

He said the next major pillar in the Latter-day Saint civic theology that other Christian faiths should consider appeared in President Oaks talk in 2021.

What President Oaks said that Rauch wants all Christians to consider

“It is a remarkable speech,” Rauch said. “It is deeply conversant in the doctrines of Madisonian pluralism, as you might expect from a former state supreme court justice and legal authority. But he doesn’t just come to the conclusion; he works through the logic.”

President Oaks said the current climate is full of people who believe their position must prevail outright.

“We need to work for a better way,” he said, adding that “reconciling adverse positions through respectful negotiations is a virtue.”

“I advocate the moral and political imperative of reconciling existing conflicts and avoiding new ones,” President Oaks added. “The goals of both sides are best served by resolving differences through mutual respect, shared understanding and good-faith negotiations, and both must accept and respect the rule of law.”

Of course, this Latter-day Saint civic theology had historical roots. Founding church leader Joseph Smith said he was willing to die for the religious freedom of all faiths and codified his position in law.

Church leaders had signaled a willingness to compromise. The faith’s general counsel in 2016 gave a speech at BYU in which he said not all religious freedoms should be defended the same way. Elder Lance Wickman, who also was a General Authority Seventy, said the church was willing to compromise on freedoms outside its core principles.

President Oaks tacitly referred to that position.

“What I have described as necessary to going forward, namely seeking harmony by finding practical solutions to our differences with love and respect to all people, does not require any compromise of core principles,” he said in Virginia.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

President Oaks said it is rare that conflicts between civil and religious laws can’t be resolved by negotiation.

“The experience of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints suggests that a way can be found to reconcile divine and human law through patience, negotiation and mutual accommodation,” he said.

Rauch praises the Latter-day Saint position for being “countercultural”

Rauch said patience, negotiation and mutual accommodation is a virtue the Founders counted on because Christ taught it and Americans learned it. But he said some Christians are now more focused on politics than being Christlike.

“What I’ve been telling (BYU) students in two classes today is that it may be hard for people here within the church to quite grasp how countercultural that message is in today’s white Christian America,” Rauch said. “The Church (of Jesus Christ) has not only talked the talk, it has walked the walk.”

He said the church’s work in another negotiation was more remarkable than the Utah Compromise.

“The church put its back into the job of helping get through the 2022 Respect for Marriage Act, which enshrines my marriage to Michael in federal law in case the Supreme Court ever changes its mind,” Rauch said. “It did this despite the fact that homosexuality is a sin in Latter-day Saint doctrine and same-sex marriage is not allowed.

“I can tell you that the bulk of the evangelical community and the Conference of Bishops did not behave this way. They opposed that bill.”

Both chambers of Congress passed the Respect for Marriage Act, which also created significant religious liberty protections in exchange for LGBT protections, by overwhelming margins. Those religious liberty protections were crucial to the process.

Rauch said Latter-day Saint efforts to support the law were a statement that, “if we have the freedom internally to pursue our vision of what Jesus Christ wanted to do, it is incumbent on us to allow civil society to reach its own conclusions about the way other people behave, and it is our job as a church to work for Madisonian pluralism.

“If there’s ever been a better and clearer statement of Madisonian pluralism, I have never heard it,” Rauch added.

He said one of his breakthroughs was recognizing the similarities between the teachings of Jesus Christ and the ideas of James Madison.

Where Christ taught his followers not to be afraid, Madison wrote that American should share power, Rauch said. Where Christ taught people to follow his example of radical egalitarianism, Madison called for equality and civility. Where Christ taught people to forgive each other, Madison pled for pluralism and toleration.

What other Christians should do and are doing

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Rauch said Latter-day Saint leaders set an example for filling the civic spiritual formation gap.

“I am not here to say that other Christians have to become Latter-day Saints, that they have to use the same logic, the same theological assumptions, nothing like that,” he said. “But I do believe that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the teaching of Dallin Oaks and President Nelson and others, deserves the hearing of the country, not just the church, and I believe the theology behind it can inspire other Christians to begin filling the same gaps in their own theology, asking and answering the question of, how would Jesus Christ want us to behave on social media?”

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He said other Christians are beginning the work to “disciple” white evangelical Christians to talk about politics in different ways.

Rauch, who has made several trips to Utah, also spoke this week at the University of Utah and at a Braver Angels event. Rauch is a co-founder of Braver Angels, an organization uniting red and blue Americans in a working alliance to depolarize America.

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