In November 2021, an elderly man, thin and with a dignified demeanor leavened by an impish smile, traveled from Salt Lake City to the University of Virginia with an urgent message. Wasting little time on pleasantries, he launched straight into his theme. “I love this country, which I believe was established with the blessings of God. I love its Constitution, whose principles I believe were divinely inspired. I am, therefore, distressed at the way we are handling the national issues that divide us.”

In expressing his distress, he was not speaking merely for himself. This was Dallin Oaks, first counselor in the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Then almost 90, he had been a successful lawyer, a justice of the Utah Supreme Court and president of Brigham Young University. Called to the First Presidency in 2018, he is next in line to succeed Russell M. Nelson, the church’s president and prophet; and he has become the public voice of the church’s civic theology.

A civic theology posits that God expects his people to act in certain ways, and to follow his commandments, not only in our personal lives but in our civic lives. In that respect, it operates in the same space as Christian nationalism — though what Oaks proposed was antithetical to Christian nationalism and far more profound and promising. When I first read the text of his speech, I felt a frisson. Here was something I had been looking for in my own advocacy of religious liberty and liberal pluralism because it elegantly linked the two.

Oaks’ brief began where James Madison and the U.S. Constitution also begin: with the inescapable reality of disagreement and faction. “We have always had to work through serious political conflicts,” Oaks said, “but today too many approach that task as if their preferred outcome must entirely prevail over all others, even in our pluralistic society. We need to work for a better way — a way to resolve differences without compromising core values.”

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Liberalism is a permanent state of public negotiation. Oaks argued that religious communities cannot exempt themselves from democratic deliberation; they must participate in it and abide by the results according to “the principle of honoring both divine and mortal laws.” In other words, religious liberty is essential, but people of faith cannot simply enjoy it and walk away. It comes with obligations. “Rendering to Caesar in good faith,” said Oaks, “requires religious persons and associations to acknowledge what their government does for them and to be faithful in fulfilling the reciprocal responsibilities they owe to the government and their fellow citizens.”

But what are those responsibilities, and how are they to be carried out on occasions when God’s law and man’s law might conflict? Oaks’ example was a clash between antidiscrimination laws requiring merchants and adoption agencies to serve same-sex weddings and couples, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, religious businesses and nonprofits whose faith commitments forbid participation in what they see as sin.

Some Christians and their legal allies are quick to strike a confrontational posture when a conflict arises — or even when a conflict does not arise, as when, not long ago, a website designer sued successfully to refuse service to same-sex weddings despite not having been asked to serve one. Oaks took a different tack. “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, without judicial fiat or other official coercion.”

In other words, the first order of the day is not to claim supremacy for either religious or secular law, or to declare an existential clash, but to look — together — for ways to mitigate conflict. “The right relationship between religious freedom and nondiscrimination,” he said, “is best achieved by respecting each other enough to negotiate in good faith and by caring for each other enough that the freedom and protection we seek is not for ourselves alone.” Like Madison, he placed good-faith negotiation at the very center of the Constitution’s meaning, quoting another church official who said, “When we use our religious freedom to bring people together in unity and love, we are defending and preserving religious liberty and the Constitution in a most profound way.”

Cody Bell/The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Significantly, Oaks argued that seeking unity through patience, negotiation and mutual accommodation is not merely a stratagem for getting along with others; it is a charge from God. In remarks to the faithful earlier that year at the church’s general conference (a semiannual global gathering), he said, “Being subject to presidents or rulers of course poses no obstacle to our opposing individual laws or policies. It does require that we exercise our influence civilly and peacefully within the framework of our constitutions and applicable laws. On contested issues, we should seek to moderate and unify.”

Latter-day Saint scripture states that God “established the Constitution” of the United States; and in church doctrine, the Constitution’s underlying principles were decreed by God not only for Americans but for all God’s children. “I see divine inspiration in the vital purpose of the entire Constitution,” Oaks told the general conference. “We are to be governed by law and not by individuals, and our loyalty is to the Constitution and its principles and processes, not to any office holder. In this way, all persons are to be equal before the law.”

This doctrine places the church under certain obligations. In a speech in Rome in 2022, Oaks said, “Speaking from a religious perspective, I maintain that followers of Jesus Christ have a duty to seek harmony and peace.” This duty pertains not just to seeking harmony and peace in one’s own church and family and local community; it is a civic commandment, a requirement to approach politics and public debate in a particular way. As Oaks wrote in an article in the scholarly journal Judicature in 2023, “We should not expect or seek total dominance for our own positions.”

Here the italics are mine, because this is more than a tactical injunction to obey the law in order to stay out of jail, and more than “render unto Caesar” boilerplate. Oaks argues for an alignment between God’s moral constitution and Madison’s political one. Speaking for the church, he sees patience, negotiation and compromise not as means to some end, to be jettisoned if the results are unsatisfying, but as social and spiritual ends unto themselves. At the risk of exaggerating or oversimplifying (but only a little), one could put what he is saying this way: Never dominate, always negotiate — because that is God’s plan.

A civic theology posits that God expects his people to act in certain ways, and to follow his commandments, not only in our personal lives but in our civic lives.


My awareness of something interesting afoot in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints came in March 2015, with the announcement of what seemed like a miracle in Utah. Seemingly out of nowhere, at a press conference in Salt Lake City, conservative state legislators, leaders of the state’s LGBT rights community, and senior representatives of the church announced agreement on legislation extending nondiscrimination protections to LGBT Utahns while also providing targeted exemptions for religious organizations. The bill, SB296, passed the conservative Legislature with overwhelming support.

Madison put compromise at the heart of the Constitution because he correctly understood compromise to be more than a mechanical, difference-splitting approach to managing conflict. While it can sometimes be mere difference-splitting, compromise is more often a creative, generative, pro-social endeavor in its own right. If the parties in a disagreement deadlock, they gather more information, bring in new factions and voices, imagine innovations and workarounds. The result is often better than what anyone started with. And the legislative outcome is not the only product; just as important are the relationships built during negotiations, the habits of collaboration formed, and the feelings of goodwill and fellowship which arise among previously antagonistic groups. Simply by having to interact and do business, the parties to a negotiation develop the civic habits of peaceful coexistence and unlearn the habits of domination and distrust.

That happened in Utah. “To me the process here may be even more important than the legislation,” Troy Williams, the executive director of Equality Utah, the state’s main LGBT group, told me. “When I sit down with folks, I’ll never see them as an enemy or opponent. I’ll see them as a future ally, even if we’re not there yet.” When I asked him to name the downsides of SB296 from the point of view of Utah’s LGBT community, he couldn’t think of a single one. “The culture has changed here in Utah,” he said. “In every possible way, Utah is now a safer and more welcoming state for the LGBTQ community.”

I asked if the same change would have happened without SB296; he replied with a firm no. “It changed the dynamic forever in the Legislature. I’ve watched so many legislators open up their hearts in this process.” Capitalizing on the channels of communication and trust they had built, conservative legislators and Equality Utah were able to collaborate on subsequent hot-button issues such as gay conversion therapy.

The compromise of 2015 did not come out of nowhere. In 2008, the church had gone all-in to back California’s Proposition 8, which added a ban on same-sex marriage to the state’s constitution (ending a brief period in which same-sex marriage had been legalized by the state’s Supreme Court). The church called upon its members in California to contribute and canvass in support of the initiative; it even had local leaders read a statement over the pulpit in California, asking members to “do all you can to support the proposed constitutional amendment by donating of your means and time to assure that marriage in California is legally defined as being between a man and a woman.”

In the years after Proposition 8 won at the ballot box, the church opened lines of communication with the LGBT community in Utah. Eyebrows went up in 2009 when the church threw its support behind Salt Lake City’s ban on anti-gay discrimination in housing and employment. That led to several years of quiet, intense conversations between the church and the LGBT community, initially aimed at listening and learning, then turning more substantive. SB296 was only the visible tip of a larger, mostly submerged negotiation.

I was (and still am) a devoted advocate of both LGBT equality, especially marriage, and religious liberty. I believed there was room and need to negotiate pathways around conflicts. For me, SB296 was inspirational. And indeed, it inspired similar efforts in other states, as well as negotiations between a center-right LGBT group called the American Unity Fund and a coalition of religious groups (including The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) leading to a proposed federal compromise called the Fairness for All Act. None of those efforts bore fruit — until, unexpectedly, they did.

In 2022, concurring with the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning the Roe v. Wade abortion ruling, Justice Clarence Thomas included language suggesting that same-sex marriage, legalized by the court in 2015, might be next on the chopping block. In Congress, House Democrats responded with the Respect for Marriage Act, a bill establishing same-sex marriage in federal law. Seeing an opportunity, the Fairness for All coalition in the Senate added some significant religious liberty protections. By strongly stating that the federal government will not treat opposition to same-sex marriage as the equivalent of racism, and that the government will not use federal instruments like contracts and tax breaks to coerce acceptance of same-sex marriage, the bill squarely addressed the religious community’s two biggest fears. It passed with bipartisan support — and with the support of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which did not endorse the same-sex marriage provisions but worked to get the bill enacted and praised its religious liberty provisions as “historic and commendable.”

“We have always had to work through serious political conflicts, but today too many approach that task as if their preferred outcome must entirely prevail over all others, even in our pluralistic society.”


One needs to step back and appreciate why all this matters. Socially, the teachings of the church are conservative. Marriage is between one man and one woman; homosexuality is a sin, and a person who practices it unrepentantly cannot be a church member. For the most part, conservative Protestants and Catholics who share this view have assumed that America’s laws should reflect God’s laws. Reflect does not mean copy or embody. But because, for example, the Bible (purportedly) says that homosexuality is an abomination, conservative Christians have supported laws criminalizing consensual homosexual intimacy (“sodomy”).

To such conservatives, it makes no sense to oppose same-sex marriage as sinful and unbiblical while supporting a law enshrining that very thing.

One Latter-day Saint officer recalled to me a conversation he had with a Roman Catholic archbishop who was perplexed by the church’s willingness to compromise on LGBT issues. In its 2019 guide Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops calls participation in political life “a moral obligation” and emphasizes a long list of policy positions Catholics should support. Compromise is mentioned only three times in its 53 pages, and always in a negative context (as in, “We cannot compromise basic principles or moral teaching”). “We should work with others to advance our moral principles,” the bishops say, but that injunction is instrumental, a means to an end, not an end in itself. One Catholic commentator told me, “I think that Catholic teaching recognizes that compromise is legitimate on the application of principles to legislation, but the bishops are simply not interested in compromising on these (moral) issues.”

It was no surprise, then, that the bishops stridently opposed the Respect for Marriage Act, saying that the church “will always uphold the unique meaning of marriage as a lifelong, exclusive union of one man and one woman.” Similarly, Andrew Walker of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary voiced the prevalent view among evangelicals when he wrote on X, then Twitter: “Even if the Respect for Marriage Act had incredible religious liberty protections (it doesn’t), it still violates a basic principle of moral construction related to public policy: Law should always reflect truth. It is thus wrong to tell a lie about what marriage is.” In other words, the only morally acceptable compromise involving same-sex marriage is noncompromise.

Cody Bell/The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

So why was The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints defending my legal right to marry a man and, beyond that, endorsing compromise as a good in and of itself? When I asked Dallin Oaks, he acknowledged tactical considerations. “We’re doctrinally against it,” he told me, meaning same-sex marriage, “but we believe in living under the Constitution and laws of the United States. So we don’t think we give up very much by having Congress enact something that’s already the law under the Supreme Court, and what we gain in the Respect for Marriage Act as amended is important enough. What we lose by codifying something that already exists is insignificant.”

OK, fair enough. But there had to be more to it than shrewd maneuvering. The church could have sat on the sidelines, saying and doing nothing to help the bill pass, or it could have joined with many other conservative religious groups in demanding protections for religious liberty without protection for marriage equality — a purist posture which would have been cost-free. Yet here was the church actively supporting a compromise contravening a core doctrine, when doing so was not cost-free.

Oaks, when we spoke about it, was well aware that the church’s conciliatory approach is conspicuously countercultural in the conservative religious world. The search for a way in the middle “means we’ve left some evangelicals behind and we don’t have the Catholic support that we usually have, and our position does not track well with conservative Republicans. So there are quite a few points of strain on that.” He professed not to care about other churches’ reactions (“I’m only concerned about what I said being right”), and he seemed quite cheerful about coloring outside the lines. He told me:

“I have a professional lifetime interest in the Constitution of the United States, and how it could never have been adopted without compromise among groups that feel differently on powerful issues but found a way to realize that if they would give up on things that were less important they could achieve a common goal that’s most important of all. I think that’s an approach that has become less and less feasible during my lifetime. A different approach seems to be dominant in government and much public thinking, including among many religious people of different denominations. As I’ve prayerfully pondered and tried to see what God would have us do and what is good for our nation, I came to the position that I expressed in the lecture in Virginia.”

Religious liberty is essential, but people of faith cannot simply enjoy it and walk away. It comes with obligations.


So what is the broader lesson in all this? Is it applicable beyond The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints?

Fortunately, one need not replicate the church’s theology in order to learn from it. The Latter-day Saints’ example allows us to make some hopeful observations, however, none of which requires agreement with their theology.

First, it shows that a pluralistic civic theology is possible in America today. The post-liberals are wrong to claim that liberalism is inherently antithetical to conservative and communitarian varieties of Christianity. Christian nationalism is wrong to insist on a divisive, oppositional attitude toward politics.

You need not surrender your religious faith or identity in order to embrace Madison’s constitutional pluralism. You need not regard compromise as defeat and opponents as enemies. Better still, tearing down the wall of separation between personal and public Christian values strengthens both. Seeking to “moderate and unify” in civic life is both pious and public-spirited.

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Second, the church’s example also demonstrates that Christian civic pluralism is practical. You can apply it to public policy, get actual deals done and come out ahead. You can obtain more of what you need through patience, negotiation and mutual accommodation than by rioting in the Capitol or hollering about Flight 93 elections. While it is true that the fruits of the spirit should not be judged on the basis of whether they “work,” they often do work. And not just for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Others who participated in the negotiations leading to the Fairness for All proposal and the Respect for Marriage Act included the Seventh-day Adventist World Church, the National Association of Evangelicals, the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities, and the (Jewish) Orthodox Union. None of those faith groups supports same-sex marriage as a religious matter or is theologically progressive; but all saw their mission in pluralism, not purism.

Third, while other Christian traditions differ from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on theological particulars (and, it should be noted, some evangelicals do not regard Latter-day Saints as Christians), a church which makes an effort to notice and foreground the liberal elements of Christian teaching has plenty to work with. The church’s theology drives its approach to politics, not the other way around. The church is not compromising or deforming its doctrines to conform with contemporary exigencies; rather, it is teaching and modeling core doctrines which serve God and help us live together.

Excerpted from “Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy” by Jonathan Rauch, to be published February 4, 2025, by Yale University Press. Copyright © 2025 by Jonathan Rauch. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

This story appears in the January/February 2025 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.

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