David Brooks once remarked that, when he let it be known he considered himself a religious seeker, he was bombarded with helpful books. He received more than 700 unsolicited volumes from evangelical readers, he says, “and only 500 of them were Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis.”
This remark comes to mind when I consider the odd case of Jonathan Rauch.
Alan Bean
A public intellectual who has written for highbrow publications like The Atlantic and The Economist and currently serves as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He also is a gay man who led the fight for same-sex marriage, an avowed atheist and a Jew who likes to hang out with Never Trump evangelicals like Russell Moore, David French, Peter Wehner, Curtis Chang, Francis Collins, Mark Labberton and, until his death in 2022, the late Tim Keller.
I’m sure Rauch has received several copies of Mere Christianity from his evangelical friends. He remains unconvinced.
C.S. Lewis Christians
I like to call Moore, French, et al, C.S. Lewis Christians. By American standards, Lewis never was a proper evangelical. His God was the source of beauty and joy. The key features of Christian morality, he believed, could be found in all the great religions of the world. Like his mentor, George MacDonald, Lewis downplayed the traditional doctrine of hell and damnation.
“By American standards, Lewis never was a proper evangelical.”
In little books like A Pilgrim’s Regress, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, his Narnia children’s books and works of science fiction like That Hideous Strength, Lewis recast the grand Christian narrative in novel ways. Originally published in 1952, Mere Christianity has sold more than 3 million copies — just since 2000.
Lewis appealed to American evangelicals because he was an Oxford professor who, after a series of long conversations with J.R.R. Tolkien, traded in his atheism for Christian faith.
Rauch, by contrast, doesn’t believe Jesus is the Son of God, that Jesus performed miracles or that Jesus was raised from the dead.
But Rauch loves Jesus all the same. Or rather, he loves the core teaching attributed to Jesus in the Christian Gospels. He thinks Jesus got it right.
Jesus and democracy
In his recent book Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy, Rauch reduces the core teaching of Jesus to three bullet points: Don’t be afraid, imitate Jesus, forgive each other. Asked to summarize his argument, Rauch invariably begins with a 2003 Atlantic essay in which he celebrated the rapid secularization of America. This was, he now says, “the dumbest thing I ever wrote.”
In America, Rauch now believes, Christianity has served as a “load-bearing wall.” Unfortunately, the Christian church is collapsing as an institution, and American democracy is collapsing with it.
The Founding Fathers of American-style democracy realized political debate and sound public policy were no substitute for a broad-based moral consensus. Healthy churches, Rauch says, functioned as training grounds for republican virtue by applying the core teaching of Jesus to every phase of life.
In a political setting, “Don’t be afraid,” means losing an election isn’t the end of the world. You dust yourself off and give it another go. You realize the nation will survive whether or not your party is in power.
“Imitate Jesus” means treating every American citizen as a person of infinite worth, not as a means to an end. It means measuring your moral stature by the way you treat society’s most marginalized and vulnerable members.
“Forgive one another” translates into working cooperatively and respectfully with people who think you’re an idiot. You don’t set out to annihilate the opposition, and you certainly don’t try to overturn the result of an election.
A call for thick Christianity
Rauch blames the demise of white Protestant Christianity on the “thin Christianity” of the Protestant Mainline denominations, and the “sharp Christianity” adopted by the evangelical tradition.
After 1950, thin Christianity stopped talking about the centrality of Jesus, public virtue, the life to come and the great biblical drama of sin, judgment and redemption.
Sharp Christianity feeds on fear and resentment and wields Christianity like a cudgel.
Thin Christians and sharp Christians, Rauch believes, have swapped the teachings of Jesus for mirror-image versions of secular politics.
“Rauch wants to see a ‘thicker’ version of Christianity. He wants Christians to become more like Jesus.”
Rauch wants to see a “thicker” version of Christianity. He wants Christians to become more like Jesus. More loving. More forgiving. More merciful. More believable. We don’t need churches to tell people how to vote, he says, but we do need to teach Christians how to comport themselves in the political arena.
Strange bedfellows
If Roach sounds a lot like Never Trump evangelicals such as Moore, French, Keller and Wehner it’s likely because he has spent the last few years listening to them. He likes them, and they like him.
Which is odd, when you think about it. Unreconstructed American white evangelicals shouldn’t be palling around with an unrepentant gay Jewish atheist, should they?
It wasn’t so long ago that the Ku Klux Klan spoke for mainstream American evangelicals.
It wasn’t so long ago that homosexuality was considered too dreadful a sin to be mentioned in polite society.
And it wasn’t that long ago that mainstream evangelical Christians were denouncing Jews as Christ-killers who used communism, Hollywood and the big banks to control world events.
And since Jesus Christ was the only path to salvation (John 14:6), atheism was a one-way ticket to hell.
But Never Trump evangelicals like David French, Russell Moore, Curtis Chang, or Peter Wehner don’t appear to be hanging out with Rauch out of a concern for his soul. They genuinely like the guy.
Can atheists follow Jesus?
If Rauch builds his personal and political vision around the teachings of Jesus, doesn’t that make him a Christian? Rauch doesn’t think so. He wishes he could believe in God, miracles and the coming kingdom of heaven. But it’s as if he lacks the God gene.
That said, the C.S. Lewis Christians I have identified are much closer to Rauch, politically and spiritually, than they are to fellow evangelicals like Franklin Graham, Paula White or Robert Jeffress. It is likely, in fact, that Jesus-loving atheists like Rauch are better able to identify and affirm the core message of Jesus than most orthodox Christians.
When inerrancy silences Jesus
If American Christians want to retain their place in the evangelical tribe, they must affirm the dogma of biblical inerrancy. Reject that teaching and the evangelical tribe will reject you. You go along to get along.
“The doctrine of biblical inerrancy is also prized by bullies and would-be tyrants for equally pragmatic reasons.”
The doctrine of biblical inerrancy is also prized by bullies and would-be tyrants for equally pragmatic reasons. If you believe men should dominate women, white people should dominate people of color, LGBTQ people should be driven to the margins of civic life or only Christians should govern society, the Bible is awash in promising prooftexts.
Jesus-loving atheists like Rauch respond to the core teachings of Jesus without being distracted by dogma or institutional dynamics. Orthodox believers, by contrast, are tempted to downplay the sheer radicality of their own gospel.
Only Jesus remains
This tension between continuity and discontinuity animates the story of the Transfiguration in which Moses and Elijah consult with Jesus on a mountaintop. Moses and Elijah represent the two primary components of the Hebrew Scriptures — the Law and the Prophets. Jesus is portrayed as the culmination and fulfilment of these ancient traditions.
But then a cloud descends on the three men and the voice of God thunders from heaven: “This is my beloved Son, listen to him.”
And when the cloud lifts, only Jesus remains.
Redemptive violence in the Bible
The Transfiguration story grounds the Christian gospel in the Law and the Prophets; but it also highlights the singularity of Jesus. Jesus rejected what scholars call “the myth of redemptive violence.” He taught his disciples to turn the other cheek, to forgive their enemies, to love the sinner and the outcast.
By contrast, Moses and Elijah believed in redemptive violence. Moses famously descended from his mountaintop encounter with Yahweh to find his people worshiping a golden calf. He responded by ordering the slaughter of 3,000 idolatrous Israelites.
In like fashion, Elijah celebrated his victory over 450 prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel by putting his ideological enemies to the sword. The biblical text is rife with incidents of this sort. So is the history of the Christian church. If every aspect of the biblical witness is equally inspired, we can use the example of Moses and Elijah to justify our latter-day massacres.
The myth of redemptive violence lies at the heart of MAGA religion.
C.S. Lewis
C.S. Lewis and the Bible
C.S. Lewis never was confined by the distinctly American dogma of biblical inerrancy.
“It is Christ himself, not the Bible, who is the true Word of God,” Lewis believed. “The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers will bring us to him.” (If you’re interested, a more nuanced account of his views on biblical inspiration can be found in Reflections on the Psalms.)
American Christians who venerate Lewis would be wise to follow his advice.
How many C.S. Lewis Christians are there in America? Not a lot. After a decade of steady numerical decline, white evangelical Christians comprise just 13% of American society, and 81% of them voted for Donald Trump. So, at best, we’re talking about 2% of the American population.
But French, Moore, Wehner and company punch above their weight. They write for mainstream publications like The Atlantic and The New York Times, and they keep popping up on cable news shows and prominent podcasts. They are A-list performers on the lecture circuit. And when secular pundits and podcasters want help analyzing MAGA religion, they call up C.S. Lewis Christians like French, Moore and Wehner.
On any given weekend, only 30% of Americans attend religious services; 10 years ago it was 42%. This secularizing trend may level off, but I am not expecting a resurgence of American religion in my lifetime.
But might we see the emergence of the kind of a pared-down, ecumenical, exilic, Jesus-centered Christianity Jonathan Rauch is advocating. That is my prayer.
Alan Bean lives in Fort Worth, Texas, and serves as executive director of Friends of Justice.
Related articles:
The enduring legacy of C.S. Lewis 60 years later | Analysis by Todd Thomason
Stuck in the middle with Jesus: The future of C.S. Lewis evangelicalism | Analysis by Alan Bean
C.S. Lewis ‘claimed by everyone’