Jon Rauch On Evangelical Christianism

Jon and I go way back to the early days of the marriage movement. He’s currently a senior fellow at Brookings and a contributor editor at The Atlantic. He’s the author of many books, including Kindly Inquisitors, The Happiness Curve, and The Constitution of Knowledge — which we discussed on the Dishcast in 2021. His new book is Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy.

For two clips of our convo — on fear-based Christianity, and the growing tolerance of gays by the Mormon Church — see our YouTube page.

Other topics: how Jon tried to believe in God growing up; his Christian roommate in college, Rev. Mark McIntosh; how I kept my faith through AIDS crisis; the doubt within faith; Fr. James Alison; parallels between Christianity and liberal democracy; the Reformation; Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration; Christ’s aversion to property; church/state; the federal persecution of Mormons in the 19th century; American Primeval; Vatican II; Catholic toleration of divorce but not homosexuality; Anita Bryant; Prop 8; the gay wedding cake controversy; wokeness as a religion; Biden’s DEI as a kind of religious indoctrination; left-wing Christianity; Bishop Budde; her shrine to Matthew Shepard; the Benedict Option; the Utah Compromise; whether the LDS is truly Christian; the Respect For Marriage Act; Dobbs and Obergefell; authoritarianism abroad; the J6 pardons; Trump firing IGs; Don Jr against “turning the other cheek”; Pope Francis against proselytism; eternal truths vs. political compromise; declining church attendance; and the loss of enchantment in Christianity.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Evan Wolfson on the history of marriage equality, Yoni Appelbaum on how America stopped building things, Chris Caldwell on the political revolution in Europe, Nick Denton on China and AI, Francis Collins on faith and science, Ian Buruma on Spinoza, Michael Joseph Gross on muscles, and the great and powerful Mike White, of White Lotus fame. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

From a fan of last week’s episode with Ross Douthat:

I’m a happy paying subscriber from Warsaw, Poland. I love your weekly podcast, but I have to say that two recent episodes — one featuring John Gray, the other Ross Douthat — absolutely exceeded what came before. Both episodes are so rich and insightful, with both you and your guests going into such beautiful depth with grace and enjoyment of each other’s company (as well as one another’s minds). I will certainly revisit both those episodes often and I urge folks to subscribe in order to be able to enjoy both of these podcasts in full.

I have one comment to make regarding your disagreement with Douthat’s take on the fine-tuned “jackpot universe” as a proof of God’s existence. You seem to find it jarring that the gnawingly local existence of sentient beings is encased, as it were, by a universe of incongruous vastness and emptiness. I take your point. However, similarly to Douthat, I find it to be basically an unconscious voicing of an aesthetic preference, instead of a valid ontological intuition.

To counterpoint your skepticism, I would offer this: when I see a Tiffany diamond encased against a pillow of black velvet, am I supposed to diminish the value of the diamond simply by observing how incongruously large the pillow is when compared to the diamond’s size? Or how incongruously black the cloth is when compared to the diamond’s bright shine in its middle?

If we recognize that it’s by the jeweler’s very design that the velvet pillow serves as a canvas highlighting the special quality (and beauty) of the diamond, we can perhaps consider the great vastness of the empty universe — if not as a proof of the existence of a transcendent jeweler, then at least as a potentially excellent way for human life to be displayed.

By whom? That’s another 90 minutes of a potential podcast right there.

Another writes, “Your interview with Ross Douthat was really good”:

You did a good job of pushing him on the fine-tuning argument, even though I find it more convincing than you do. To address the point about the universe being too large and our existence taking too long and being too brief: a good point, but I think it’s grounded in a flawed understanding of God. It seems to assume that time and space cost God something, but in the classical understanding of God, He is the source of all things and is not bound by time, so to Him there was no effort in creating the universe and no delay in awaiting our evolution.

On the point that we occupy such an incredibly small part of the universe … well, this may be a just-so story, but given the climate-change inducing mass-extinction event that is humanity’s rise, would you let us run amok with even a little bit of the universe?

On to another point, Alvin Platinga formulated the highly influential Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism (see Where the Conflict Really Lies, 2011), which I will now butcher for your delight:

The real problem with materialism is that it throws reason itself into doubt. There is only one way a mind can appear in materialism other than through a Boltzmann brain, and that is by evolution. Evolution is a material system and blind to immaterial things, if they exist at all. Your thoughts, however, are immaterial. Nonetheless, they correlate to a particular neural structure, which is material.

Therefore, the relevant aspect of your mind from the perspective of selection for reproductive fitness is the neural structure, not the thought — so there is no necessary connection between your thoughts and your actions. At best, they are epiphenomena that have no causal effect and so provide no survival advantage.

Here’s another clip from the episode:

From another listener:

Kudos on your Oscar-worthy performance playing The Skeptical Atheist. As the genuine article, this former Catholic appreciated your respectful but forceful pushback, especially against Douthat’s most dubious proposition. The first time I ever heard the “fine-tuning” argument, it immediately reminded me of the old “eye complexity” argument made by theologists of yesteryear — i.e., the human eye is so complex, it serves as proof of a Creator.

Arguments like that were long ago compelling because they were made at the limit of human understanding and thus attempted to fill uncomfortable gaps in knowledge with comfortable explanations. Today, we understand the eye rather fully through the paradigm of evolution, making it less fertile ground for proselytizers to sew ideas.

But the very unsettled territory of cosmology? Into the uncomfortable gap swoops the “fine-tuning” argument.

Indeed, despite Douthat’s claims of consensus, plenty of physicists will be happy to caution against fine-tuning. But ironically, modern scientific institutions sometimes share theology’s propensity to claim possible explanations as actual explanations. So to extend Douthat some charity, his overconfidence that God is real is probably matched by similar overconfidence in any given cosmological model.

Nevertheless, I find his argument insidious. Belief in a god, while irrational to me, isn’t bothersome. The problem is the arrogance, be it from theologists or overeager physicists, of answering the uncertain with the unprovable — and doing so under the guise of it being a rational thing to do.

Forcing religious answers to genuinely open questions felt like a theme through the whole Douthat discussion — on consciousness, on near-death experiences, on the Gospels (you’ll be pleased to know I’ve read them all several times). What I didn’t hear was an explanation of why Douthat wrote his book. But I did recall a piece he wrote that mentioned his book and others in the context of a rebuttal to the New Atheists:

Existential anxiety and civilizational ennui, not rationalist optimism and humanist ambition, are the defining moods of secular liberalism nowadays. The decline of religious membership and practice is increasingly seen as a social problem rather than a great leap forward.

Were it the case that the decline of religion was the only meaningful societal variable over the last 30 years, he might have a point. Instead, we have the recurring pattern of the “eye complexity” or fine-tuning argument: humanity can’t be 100% sure what has caused our societal woes, and into that uncertainty, Douthat confidently drops religious answers.

However, there are many credible explanations for our existential anxiety, several of which you’ve discussed: the peak of neoliberalism, the advancing Doomsday clock, the corruption of our government and other institutions, the invention of the attention-stealing iPhone, the advent of social media, fentanyl, the rise of helicopter parents, the speed of the modern news cycle, and so on.

Religious answers are more comfortable for Douthat than accepting that for a range of topics from consciousness to social anxiety, many disciplines are pre-paradigmatic and our best experts don’t yet know. But much like the human eye, there may someday be satisfactory answers.

Another atheist:

I just spent 30 minutes wincing my way through the first part of the Douthat episode, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt more resolute in my atheism — nor more convinced that religion has no place in scientific discussion. The conditions that gave rise to life in our universe are indeed still mysterious to us, but all this shows is that our three-dimensional, carbon-based brains are not (yet) up to the task of making sense of them. To take this, with no other evidence, as proof of a conscious creator — and in Douthat’s case, a creator of the Abrahamic, omniscient, disapprovingly-watches-you-masturbate variety — is such a profoundly absurd leap of God-of-the-gaps illogic that I’m frankly stunned that “America’s best columnist,” as you put it, can make it with a straight face.

Might I suggest a future episode with an actual cosmologist as a palate cleanser?

The cosmologist Lawrence Krauss edited an essay collection coming out this year, so maybe we should have him on. Another writes, “Please bring on Sean Carroll — the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins and a very experienced writer, interviewee (he was on the old Colbert show multiple times), and podcaster — to explain the atheist materialist physicist point of view.”

Here’s more praise for the Christian Wiman pod:

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that your episode with Wiman has been hugely important to me. I listened to it the week it came out, mere days before my father died. I have returned to that episode and Christian’s writing several times in the past nine months of grief. It is simply amazing to me how it arrived in my life exactly when I needed it most.

I’m so glad. You never know who hears these conversations or how they make a difference. It’s one of the joys of broadcasting.

On to more fleeting matters: some fact-checking on our citing four examples of USAID over-reach last week, continued from the main page, where we addressed the Sri Lankan and BBC claims. The “western Balkans” grant has more specifics here, on USAspending.gov: “Strengthening human rights, information integrity, equality, and democracy for the LGBTQI+ population in the western Balkans.” For the $8.3 million grant, the USAID spending description is simply “USAID Education: Equity and Inclusion,” but a reader points to a page on TripleFunds providing a more detailed description:

The purpose of this USAID Education: Equity and Inclusion activity is to improve equitable education outcomes for marginalized youth in grades 6-10. The activity will support local governments to bring out-of-school children into school, increase retention of learners through grade 10, and ensure equitable and quality learning opportunities for marginalized youth.

A dozen other examples of USAID grants lampooned by the White House are fact-checked here by Glenn Kessler, who concludes, “Eleven out of 12 claims about the agency’s work are misleading, wrong or lack context.” As usual with Kessler, this is over-stated, but check it out.

The editors of National Review take a broader view:

Through poverty-reduction programs, public-health initiatives, and humanitarian assistance [via USAID], America has at times burnished its reputation abroad, while also doing good at a relatively affordable price. But, in practice, USAID has been a problem for decades, as it asserted itself as its own power center, rather than a federal bureaucracy accountable to Congress and the president. […] It’s unsurprising that USAID constructed its own DEI bureaucracy during the Biden administration — a waste, at best, and ideological poison at worst.

Here’s a broader indicator of the political culture at USAID: “97% of political contributions from USAID employees went to Dems” last year. And here’s a defense of USAID in The Atlantic, written by a former head speechwriter for USAID:

Marco Rubio used to be one of the agency’s biggest supporters; now, as secretary of state, he’s maligning its staff and abetting its demolition. A more compelling message lies in the fact that Trump and Musk’s foreign-aid freeze could be one of the cruelest acts that a democracy has ever undertaken. In 2011, when Republican members of Congress proposed a 16 percent cut in annual foreign aid, then–USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah conservatively estimated that it would lead to the deaths of 70,000 children. That is more children than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Depending on how thoroughly Trump and Musk are allowed to dismantle USAID, the casualties this time could be worse.

The Atlantic also published an outsider’s defense of USAID from Pete Wehner, the former speechwriter for three Republican presidents:

Founded in 1961, USAID has, until now, worked in more than 100 countries, promoting global health, fighting epidemics and starvation, providing treatment for people with HIV/AIDS, educating children and combatting child sex trafficking, resettling refugees and supplying shelter to displaced people across the globe, and supporting programs in maternal and child health and anti-corruption work. […] A humanitarian worker in Sudan told The Washington Post that their organization received a stop-work order for grants covering hundreds of millions of dollars. “It means that over 8 million people in extreme levels of hunger could die of starvation,” said the aid worker. “What’s next? What do we do?”

Again, you could make an argument that foreign aid is consistently unpopular with the American public, and go to Congress and propose various cuts. Abruptly cutting off vital health, food and drugs — with no warning — is pure performative sadism. It’s not reform; it’s revenge. But it isn’t lefty USAID workers who are the ultimate victims. It’s children, babies, the sick, and the starving.

If you’ve worked for USAID and want to defend the agency’s work, please email us: dish@andrewsullivan.com. Two weeks ago we published two passionate emails from readers involved in foreign aid, and we’re very happy to publish more.

Another dissent over USAID:

Seeing Musk this week claiming that dollars spent by the federal government are fraudulent and criminal makes me really need to quibble with the end of this statement from you: “Exposing this is fantastic — and could lead to real reform.”