By Jim Heffernan
As soon as I knew this book was out, I had to have it. Jonathan Rauch’s book “Constitution of Knowledge” will always be one of my very favorite books. I think this later book is just as good.
Jonathan starts out the book by admitting that it’s a little strange for him to be talking about Christianity as he is a Jewish born atheist and is in a same-sex marriage. His intellectual humility and honesty allows him to treat the subject fairly and objectively. Best of all, he treats the subject tenderly.
Early in the book he characterizes Christianity as a “load-bearing wall” of democracy and quotes what John Adams had to say when the ink on the Constitution was barely dry, “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution is designed only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for any other.”
The book opens and closes poignant letters that Jonathan writes to his good friend, Mark Macintosh. They met as students at Yale and formed a friendship that lasted Mark’s whole life. Jonathan went on to become a high-level journalist and author. Mark went on to become a prominent Episcopal Priest and Theologian. He died of ALS at the age of 61.
It’s a short book of 3 chapters and 141 pages, not counting notes and index. The three chapters are, Thin Christianity, Sharp Christianity and Thick Christianity.
Thin Christianity is religion beset with a secular influence and apathy. Sharp Christianity is religion that takes on political aims and postures. Thick Christianity is religion that focuses on theology and spirituality.
He talked to and quotes a lot of people in writing his books. The two people he talks about the most are Russell Moore, who resigned from a leadership position of the Southern Baptists, and Dallin Oaks, First Counselor to the President of the Church of Later Day Saints.
Here’s a couple of excerpts that I liked. I found it hard to hold myself to just these two.
From page 3.
“You were not a saint, to be sure. But you were something the 18-year-old version of me found oxymoronic: a good Christian.
I didn’t convert. I didn’t change my mind. You were the portal, though, to a change of heart.
Once I had seen what Christianity could be, it became a subject of curiosity for me, instead of contempt-something I had to know more about. I imagined that one day might even write about it.
Later in life, with your example before me, I came to cherish close Christian friends, some of them-such as the late Pastor Tim Keller, the co-dedicatee of this book-among the wisest and deepest people I have known. I came to see that the confrontational, contemptuous style of my youthful atheism, and later of the so-called New Atheists, had it backwards. Yes, religion can be stupid; but people make religion stupid, not the other way around.
In the years after our student days, my politics evolved in your direction. Ralph Nader and Bertrand Russell were replaced in my pantheon by John Locke and James Madison, William James and C. S. Peirce, George Orwell and Karl Popper. My view of spirituality evolved, too. I came to see that people who believe in God have an ability I lack. They receive frequencies I can’t detect, which give their worlds a dimensionality, a layer of meaning, that my world lacks. This does not make their view-your view-better or truer than mine. But I am not defensive about likening my atheism to color blindness, because faith is a part of the human experience in which I do not share.
My career in journalism led me deeply into politics and government. For a long time, I barely gave religion a thought. It seemed to have receded into the background of American life, except when the latest priestly or pastoral scandal flamed into view. Newspapers didn’t cover religion much, except in the Sunday church pages which no one I knew read.
When I did dip into religion, my view was superficial. In 2003, for The Atlantic, I joyfully celebrated what I called apatheism, which I defined as not caring very much one way or the other about religion. Because religion is a source of social divisiveness and volatility, I predicted that apatheism would tone down friction and represented “nothing less than a major civilizational advance.” It was, I gloated, “the product of a determined cultural effort to discipline the religious mindset, and often of an equally determined personal effort to master the spiritual passions. It is not a lapse. It is an achievement.”
Ahem. Let’s just say that’s not how things turned out. Instead we live in a society which, on both left and right, has imported religious zeal into secular politics and exported politics into religion, bringing partisan polarization and animosity to levels unseen since the Civil War.”
From page 93,
3- Thick Christianity
The Gospel of Compromise
There are many ways to reconcile Jesus with James Madison
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 state supreme court, and president of Brigham Young University. Called to the First Presidency in 2018, he was next in line to succeed Russell M. Nelson, the church’s president and prophet; and he had 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 (thrill). 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’s 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.”
141 pages (plus notes and index), Published January 28, 2025
Available Cloud and Leaf Bookstore, Manzanita coming soon to Tillamook County Public Library
As always, discussion welcome at codger817@gmail.com
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