Faith Angle

Journalist Jon Rauch’s smart new book from Yale University Press, Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain With Democracy, offers three provocative and insightful essays. Though an outsider to Christianity—as he tells his long-time friend Pete Wehner of the Trinity Forum, Jon is a “gay Jewish atheist born in 1960”—Jon’s new treatise follows a dozen books, and hundreds of articles, covering topics from free inquiry to gay marriage, political realism to happiness, and the constitution of knowledge to matters of American political economy.  The book explores the history and implications of three modes of the Christian faith in America. The first Jon terms Thin Christianity, embodied by mainline Protestantism. The second is Sharp Christianity—really MAGA white evangelicalism, what Jon calls a “fear-based” church. But the third chapter, Jon makes a case for Thick Christianity, exemplified by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and other creative exilic religious minorities who have made peace with