Faith, Fear, and the Future of Democracy with Jonathan Rauch

Episode Transcript

John Tomasi: Jonathan Rauch, welcome to Heterodox Out Loud.

Jonathan Rauch: Nice to be here. It's a privilege.

John Tomasi: It's a privilege for me to be here because we're here actually this time not in our studio in New York, but in your world, Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., where I suppose you do a lot of podcast recordings.

Jonathan Rauch: Well, we do a lot of everything, but the hour we're about to spend is an hour of sanity in a very chaotic environment. So we're glad to be here.

John Tomasi: Well, we'll see if it's sanity or not because we're going to be talking about universities and what's happening on universities. John recently joined the board of Heterodox Academy, which is a great honor for us. It's been wonderful having you, having your intellectual insights, but also your procedural insights added to our conversations. It's been really, really been something. So we're going to be moving to...

Jonathan Rauch: In other words, translation for the audience, I'm a troublemaker.

John Tomasi: So we're going to move to issues of university life. There's a number of questions I want to ask you about our current state of play in the university space. But I want to begin by talking about your fabulous new book, Cross Purposes, which I started reading just three days ago. And it's a short book, and it's a great read, and I really enjoyed it. Can you just give us some of the main themes? There's this idea, I think, in the background, in American political civic life, that liberty and self-governance requires something like virtue and character. And you tell a story about that from the perspective of Christianity. Can you just tell us a bit about the book first?

Jonathan Rauch: Well, I'd love to. It's close to my heart and a bit of an adventure because I am a lifelong atheist, lifelong gay, Jewish. So I'm very much an outsider to Christianity. And this book is, to a large extent, an apology for the dumbest thing I ever wrote. 22 years ago, an article for The Atlantic celebrating secularization, saying, isn't it great that America is becoming less religious?

John Tomasi: And what was the word?

Jonathan Rauch: There was a neologism. There was apatheism, which is, you know, a joke, but we're becoming more apathetic about theism. And I thought religion's a force for dogmatism and divisiveness, and without it, we'll just all be happier and calmer and we'll be like, you know, Scandinavian-style utopia.

John Tomasi: Well, instead of the end of history and the last man, this is the end of religion.

Jonathan Rauch: Yeah, we were still kind of in that period. What I didn't realize was in 2003, we were on the verge of the biggest wave of de-churching, secularization the country's ever seen. And meanwhile, every kind of social indicator has gone south in the past 20 to 25 years. You know, everything from depression and anxiety and loneliness and lack of social connectedness to extreme polarization and the turning of religion into, of politics into a kind of religion. So we here at Brookings think all day about why is America, in fact, much of the liberal West, becoming ungovernable. And I came to think that part of that story is that Christianity is no longer able or perhaps no longer willing to do some of the job that the founders expected of it, of creating the substrate of values that our republic depends on.

John Tomasi: And can you say something more about what those values are?

Jonathan Rauch: I can say yes. I can say, funny you should ask. I could say a lot about that. Yeah, so the founders were very specific in saying that they could give us a form of government, but that they could not give us what they called Republican virtues on which those forms rested. And that that would have to come from civil society, by which they meant family, community, schools. And they very much meant Christianity. Isn't to say that this was a Christian nation. They believed in separation of church and state. They rejected efforts to try to mention Jesus and Christianity in the founding documents. But they did believe that religion was one of the places that gives us these core virtues. So there are, according to theologians and pastors and everyone else, there are three core ideas of Christianity, which to a large extent set it apart. And it turns out they all have close analogs in the world of secular liberal democracy. The first is don't be afraid, the most frequently repeated injunction in the Christian Bible. Some say in the whole Bible. And be afraid of God, for sure. But don't live your life hunkered down in constant fear. Keep your eye on the next world. God has a plan for you. So have some confidence in that. Panic and fear are the enemy of good judgment and wisdom. And that translates into the injunction that sometimes you lose an election. And in a liberal republic, it's not the end of the world. Don't panic. Trust the system. You'll come back wiser and probably better for that. And meanwhile, you'll share the country. Second great Christian idea, imitate Jesus. And Jesus' ministry is remarkable for its egalitarianism. And it judges that egalitarianism by its focus on the least of these. Society is judged. All people are made in the image of God. You never treat people as means to an end. They're an end in themselves. And you judge how you're doing, not by how you treat the strongest, the wealthiest, the most fabulous, but how you treat the most marginal, the poor, the weak, the sick, the vulnerable. That translates directly into Madisonian liberalism as the idea that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. And there are things that majorities in a liberal republic just can never do to minorities. Like, for example, suspend habeas corpus, lock them up without a trial, and send them to a foreign dungeon. Third big principle of Christianity that the founders relied on, forgive each other. This is a really hard one, but judgment and retribution belong to God, not to man. Each of us has committed enough sin and have enough to be forgiven for so that we can't be in the business of judging others. That translates into Madisonian liberalism as sometimes you win an election, but the goal of politics is not to crush the other side and drive them out of the republic and salt the soil with the tears of their women and children, which is how so much of politics is spoken of these days. You're going to have to share the country. These are still your fellow Americans, your fellow citizens. So you're going to make room for them and treat them the way you will want to be treated someday when the tables are turned. The founder said, you can't run a republic, democratic republic, without those ideas. And they're there in Christianity, so in this book, I am the gay, atheistic Jewish guy saying, we need more Christianity in America right now. We need Christianity to get back to those principles because it's strayed from them.

John Tomasi: And there's a wonderful section of the book. I think it's the introduction that you come back to by the end, I believe, talking about your college roommate. Can you just tell the audience a bit about that?

Jonathan Rauch: I grew up with a bad, bad attitude toward Christianity. You know, as you do, if you're born in 1960 and by about age of five or six, you realize you're different and you can't spin the radio dial on a Sunday without hearing some preacher talk about homosexuals undermining the country, seducing children, bringing down the wrath of God, being a stench in God's nostrils. I perceived Christianity as cruel and bigoted and hypocritical, and I was not wrong about that entirely. But in college, I was paired with a freshman year roommate named Mark McIntosh, who was the first, I think, Christian I met who walked the walk, didn't just talk the talk. He was, you know, not a plaster saint. He had a sense of humor and got angry and everything like that. But his life was infused with that question of what would Jesus do and his effort to comport himself in that way. And that became my first inkling of what became gradually over the years, opening myself up to thinking, okay, there's a side of Christianity which you don't necessarily see in Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson, which is profoundly important, both in the way it's influenced our secular lives together, but also in the deep truths of its doctrines, among which the three I mentioned are, for me, paramount.

John Tomasi: Institutions require virtues. And in the early American context, you're describing a set of virtues that the founders felt that these institutions, the institutions of a free democratic society, would need. And you're describing those virtues that are needed, the needed supplement to the political institutions, as being deeply religious. Can you just say a little bit more about that? I want to push you on that a little bit more because we're going to go to universities soon, but I want to just be sure I understand what the mechanism is in there. There's a line that I'm struck by, or an idea that I'm struck by, and that's that some political institutions, they corrupt the culture in its own image, or they remake a culture in its own image. There's a conception of cultural liberalism, where liberalism is not just a way of negotiating political context in the public sphere, rather that way of being, that sort of outside of our thick identities, entering the realm of a thinner conception of a citizen, becomes the way that people live in their personal lives as well. And does that, and somebody will describe the corrosion of religious belief and the decline of religious belief in religiosity in America as being connected to our liberalization of our culture more widely. Do you have anything to, I mean, the founders talked about this too. They talked about the dangers that the society will generate its own form of corruption, tied to liberty itself. Liberty would become licensed. It wouldn't be property of liberty anymore. Do you have anything you want to say about that?

Jonathan Rauch: Well, there's so much to say about that, John, and your work at Brown partly focused on these issues. So, there is some material in the book which is rather critical of the so-called post-liberals, and these are mostly Christians, though not all Christians, who say that liberalism has become an ideology that is mowing down faith, family tradition, patriotism, nationalism, all the things that society is based on. Liberalism is, it's an acid, it's corroding all of that and destroying itself. Patrick Deneen, for example. Patrick Deneen, Adrian Vermeule. That's right. Yoram Hazony, and so forth. And for the most part, I think they're wrong. But where they're wrong is, as Charles Schultze, formerly of Brookings, used to say of supply-side economics, there's nothing wrong with what they're saying that you couldn't fix by dividing it by 10. So, they're way overstating the problem. But it is true that unbridled, individualistic, strongly libertarian liberalism can be atomizing. It can be ultra-competitive. It can lead to a world in which people begin to feel the sorts of things that Nietzsche pointed out, now what, almost 150 years ago, this kind of anomie, this sense of valuelessness. Right. And one of the things that I think the founders understood, and that I think I forgot until comparatively recently, was liberalism is not designed to answer those transcendent questions of, why am I here? What purpose and meaning does my life have? Or, what's the ultimate foundation for right and wrong that's larger than just my preferences? I mean, it's tried, and some very great minds have made some headway on that, people like Kant and Rawls, but it really can't. And so, I view secular liberalism and, in America, Christianity, our prevalent religious traditions, specifically Protestant Christianity, as like two planks that won't stand up by themselves but need to lean on each other. Liberalism can't provide those fundamental transcendent values questions. Religion, by itself, can't do the job that science and politics does to organize a very big, diverse, constantly bickering, disagreeing society. But they can influence each other positively. And when that works, a lot of other things work. And when that fails, a lot of other things fail. And one of the things that we see, I think, that's failing, is when Christianity is abandoned by large numbers of people and allows itself to get politicized, as has happened. Religion seeps into politics. Politics becomes a religion. Neither one is really doing its job. They're doing each other's job, but badly. And you get the mess we're in.

John Tomasi: Something uncompromising about that. Can we nerd out? I want to invite you to nerd out with me for a minute.

Jonathan Rauch: I'm your man.

John Tomasi: I know you are. I'm here for that. So, my favorite line from Democracy in America, I think I can quote it. Tocqueville says, The Americans have used their liberties to combat the individualism born of equality, and they have won. What I like about that line, I think it summarizes the whole book. So, he says the Americans have used their liberties to combat the individualism that's born of equality, and they have won. And what he means is, in an age of equality, and before the age of equality, there was a great chain of being. Everyone was given a side, a thick place in the world of obligations of family and friends and careers, all just what they were assigned. But in an age of equality now, people are broken from that chain. And at one point, he says, the chain is broken and scattered across an egalitarian plane. I didn't use that phrase, but that's the idea. So, everyone's now broken. Every chain link is now broken and scattered across this egalitarian plane. That's individualism, which he sees as a corrosive, anomie, Nietzschean emptiness. We're there on this plane now, broken from your chain, free, but you're just there. And then, so, the Americans, he says, use their liberties to combine with one another, to rebuild a social structure of their own devising. And a lot of the social structures that they're devising, as he took, fill the charts, are religious organizations, the art of association, these ways of being together that are thickly connected. People build thick connections with the way they choose to use their liberties. So, he says, as I understand him, that in America, there is civil society growing up and religiosity is a huge part of this, that people are using that to combat the individualism that otherwise be saddled with, if they're just simply enjoying the benefits of the rise of equality. So, that's kind of a long, complicated, maybe overly nerdy element. But, when I was saying before about the corrosive elements, that's the Tocquevillian take on that, that the age of equality, which is a wonderful thing in all kinds of ways, as you described from the Declaration, nonetheless generates these forces. That are dividing and separating and freeing. But then they raise the question, what's the meaning of your life? What are you going to do with it? What is this place for? Why are we really here? Which I think has parallels in the university case, by the way. But, for now, stay with America. The broad broad... Do you want to... Does that Tocquevillian line ring familiar to you? Do you see religion as something people are using to combine one another? If that becomes weakened, they become less able to develop lives of meaning? What do you make of all that?

Jonathan Rauch: Well, again, so much there, and Tocqueville is so rich. And one of my reflections on it is, you know, that the post-liberals keep crowing about how liberalism, if left strictly to its own devices, will undermine itself. And my response to that is, yeah. And you know how you know that? Because we told you. We've been telling you that since John Locke. You've been saying there is an assignment in liberal democracy for civil society in general. And that includes faith organizations. In particular, you've got a job to do. We can't provide meaning in life. That's not why we're here. That is not our assignment. Our assignment is to create space in society, civil organizations like faith organizations, to do that work of giving people purpose, identity, bringing them together in collective projects. And we all need to worry when that doesn't happen. And that's why we all got so worried, rightly, when Robert Putnam published Bowling Alone, I think, what, 25, 26 years ago?

John Tomasi: Yeah.

Jonathan Rauch: So I don't think that religion is the only possible source of identity, collectivity, transcendence, morality, any of those things. But I'll say two things. First of all, the great faith tradition, specifically in the United States, Christianity, which is our founding faith, Protestantism specifically, is different from neo-substitutes like wokeness, environmentalism, MAGA, SoulCycle, or what have you. Because it's a rich teaching that goes back 2,000 years, has a deeply developed sense of ethics, has whole systems in place for transmitting itself to future generations, for bringing people together in an act of worship, the powerful literature, all of those things. You can't just go out and invent those for yourself. There's lots of DIY spiritual groups, but they can't do that. That's really kind of special and hard to replace. And the second thing is that although maybe in 50 or 100 years, people in America will have figured out substitutes for Christianity in upholding its part of instilling Republican virtues. Right now, at a minimum, it has to be true that if Christianity and secular democracy are pulling in opposite directions, if they're tearing each other apart, which increasingly is what's happening, that makes everything else in our civic life more difficult. So the real, the nub of my book is to try to say to Christians and to secular people, look, we all have a stake in helping Christians, encouraging Christians to elevate those core principles of their own teaching, which aligns so much more with James Madison than with MAGA.

John Tomasi: In Cross Purposes, you describe, I counted three different forms of Christianity, thin, sharp, and thick. Can you say a bit about the first two? What's thin Christianity as you use that term? And what is sharp Christianity?

Jonathan Rauch: So thin and sharp both describe ways in which Christianity secularized. By secularized, I mean that it took on the coloration of the outside society, stopped being countercultural and different and distinctive, and basically became like everything else, at which point it loses its ability to transmit those values. Thin Christianity is what happened to the mainline churches, the ecumenical churches. These were, I think we're both old enough to remember, in mid-century America, these were titanically important institutions. You know, the United Methodist Church and the Episcopal Church and Presbyterian Church. These were the cultural binding posts. You know, people would routinely ask when I was a kid, first question would often be not where are you from or where do you work or where did you go to college? It was what church do you go to? Those churches, for reasons both good and bad, became involved in sort of, they got away from scripture, from the countercultural teachings of Jesus, and drifted into a kind of general all-purpose do-goodism with a kind of focus on general left-wing stuff. They lost their distinctiveness and people began saying, well, I don't have to, you know, if I'm going to do that, I don't have to give up a Sunday, and became almost irrelevant culturally. So for a while, late 20th century, people were saying, well, the evangelical church, white evangelical Protestantism, has taken up the slack. It's very culturally distinctive because it's conservative. Ideologically, you know, that's homosexuality and abortion. It's rooted in scripture. It proselytizes. It is evangelical. What we didn't realize would happen was in this century, those churches begin to lose numbers very quickly. And as they do, they become more politicized. So they become both smaller and more partisan. The white evangelical church becomes very closely aligned with the Republican Party. It starts by margins of greater than 80% supporting every Republican presidential candidate, no matter who that is. And then it makes a deal in 2016 with a guy named Donald Trump, who goes in January of 2016 to Dordt College, an evangelical university college in Iowa. And he says two things. And I'll bet you didn't know he said these two things in the same speech.

John Tomasi: I don't know the speech, so I'm very curious.

Jonathan Rauch: He says, first, if you elect me, you will have power. Remember that. It's an almost exact quote. It's a paraphrase, but very close. In the same speech, a little while later, he says, and you've heard this one, I have the most loyal followers in the world. My followers are so loyal, I could probably shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and they wouldn't mind. Now, look at what he's doing here. This is a bargain he's offering. He's saying, I will give you power. You will give me unconditional loyalty. And now we're getting to the sharp church. I hope I'm not filibustering, but to me, this is one of those important moments in American culture. If you go to Matthew 4, Jesus has been baptized. He prepares for his ministry by going to the wilderness for 40 days and nights. And there he encounters Satan. Satan tempts him by taking him to the highest mountain in the world, showing him all of human dominion and saying, you can rule over all of this if you bow down and worship me. Jesus, of course, declines the offer. He says, go away, Satan. Get thee behind me. That's the foundational moment for the Christian church, which is founded as not political, but counter-cultural. Exilic on the outside looking and correcting what's going on in politics, not having, not wielding power, but having the greater power of God. By making this compromise with politics, the white evangelical church loses a ton of credibility, begins to look hypocritical. It behaves in very unchristian ways online and in politics. There's only one religious group in America, of which a majority agree, for example, that immigrants, illegal immigrants are, quote, poisoning the blood of our country. And that's white evangelicals. And that's the sharp church. Partisan, polarized, culture-warring church.

John Tomasi: And tell us about the thick church as well.

Jonathan Rauch: Well, the thick church is what we hope for. That's a church which manages to do two things at once. First, it's sociologically thick. It's where I got that in, which means it ties people together with a lot of bonds. It asks a lot of people and gives a lot in return. So, it has a rich community life, a rich worship life. It is countercultural in the sense that it says, you know, there are things you're required to do as part of this church that are different from the things you might do in your day job. At the same time, it aligns itself with liberal democracy by saying, we're not going to try to run the country our way all the time. We're going to try to, we're going to be one of a pluralistic environment. And that's hard to do. But I think that's what Tocqueville, when he came here and when he talked about the uniqueness of the American experiment, how in the U.S., Christianity worked with democracy, whereas in Europe, it always worked against it. I think that's kind of what he was talking about.

John Tomasi: So, virtues are required for institutions to function well. And one example you gave early on in this conversation was the kind of understanding that one has, that one acquires through Christianity, say, that if you lose an election, it's still going to be okay. Your enemies are not going to be salting the earth with their tears of your children and so on. You'll have a chance. It'll be okay. We're all in this together to some degree, even when we disagree profoundly about the issues. And I'm trying to understand that, how does the decay of Christianity in the direction you described lead the institutions to be left vulnerable so that people no longer have that kind of faith when they lose an election? They think, in fact, they're going to have their earth salted and they're going to do some salting, perhaps. Can you just say a little bit more about that connection? What's the connection, more closely, if you could, between this Christianity adopting the political viewpoint, if that's the right way to say it, and this failure of our ability to accept election losses, for example?

Jonathan Rauch: So, let's go back to the big three that I mentioned earlier. Don't be afraid. Imitate Jesus and forgive each other. In very specific terms, what we've increasingly seen from white evangelical church is what I call in the book the church of fear, what pastor I talked to called the battlefield mindset. There are lots of phrases for it. But this is people watching cable news and thinking, you know, it's an apocalyptic moment in American history, Christianity may not survive the next election. The other side takes, we're just, we've been taking a knife to a gunfight. We've got to start getting tough. And they want to bring that to church. And increasingly, churches are following in that direction, though many pastors really don't want to. When you heighten fear like that, you become vulnerable to the demagogue. That's the person the founders most feared. The person who would exploit fears to say, only I can save you. That's when you lose your liberties. We see some of that now. So, that's one connection. Church of fear, instead of Christianity saying, focus on the next life. God has a plan. Don't panic. That's number one. The second thing, all men are created equal. That's Jesus' teaching. That's Jefferson's teaching. So, when you have a political figure who says that an entire class of human beings are, and I quote, vermin, that's very, very un-Christlike. And it's very, also very un-Republican. And it's very hard in a liberal democracy. If that becomes a message that the church is promulgating instead of resisting, encouraging you to think of people as your enemy, that becomes a deeply polarizing, potentially tragic situation. And then the third, forgive each other. I am your retribution. That may be the most un-Christlike statement I have ever made. For a human being, a politician, to say, I am your retribution is profoundly blasphemous in Christian terms. God makes those decisions. Not, for example, a political candidate. If Christians follow a person who says that person is their retribution, they are substituting that person for God. And that's not going to end well for either Christianity or democracy.

John Tomasi: There's a broader question here about whether there's an equal diagnosis or a parallel diagnosis about the politics on the left. And what would you say about that? Is there a parallel diagnosis that's yet to be fleshed out? Or do you see this as an asymmetrical situation where it's really one side that's vulnerable now to these kinds of calls?

Jonathan Rauch: No, I think the whole society is suffering from the collapse or semi-collapse of Christianity. And then on the left, we're seeing, instead of politics infecting the white evangelical church in the way I describe, we're seeing the substitution of pseudo-religious movements like wokeness, which bring religious zeal to social reform and bring in with that some pretty harmful illiberal ideas. So I think you see across the board what's been called the God-shaped hole. And that when people don't have the great faith traditions to fall back on, yet still feel these deeply religious impulses, they tend to turn to substitutes, which can be, at best, inadequate, you know, SoulCycle. That's not going to be something that's going to teach profound values to your kids. But at worst, toxic. And yeah, for sure, we're seeing that on the left.

John Tomasi: Interesting. Let's turn to the universities. And there's a number of ways we can build a bridge from what we've just been saying to the university system. And I'll probably try to build a bridge in more than one way. Let me just try the first way that's on my mind. And it's connected to a chart that I was showing you before we came into the studio. I gave you just a quick glance at a chart that I've been fascinated by. And it's some data about the number of Jewish day school students enrolled in the, across the Ivy League universities. And it's a 10-year study. And what the data shows or suggests that there's been a sharp decline in the number of Jewish day students who attend the Ivy League schools right across the board. The only exception is Brown University. At Brown, as I understand it, people were aware of this trend about 10 years ago and started thinking, well, is there something that can be done to counter that trend at that particular university? It's the only school in the Ivy's where there's been a sharp increase in the number of Jewish day school students who go there, attend. And here's the bridge that I wanted to sort of try out this way of doing it. When I think about the Jewish day student population, there's two characteristics of that group, I think. And we could probably run a parallel things with some other religious groups. I'll stay with the Jewish case for a moment. On the one hand, these are people who tend to be very religious. So they attend to other worldly things in their lives. There might be, it might be thought that having students who are not only thinking about the current contemporary battles on campus, but thinking about some deeper things about the place of people in the world and why we're here might provide a kind of a salve to some of those problems. But there are also in Jewish day schools, it was students typically very scholarly. They tend to be focused on academic and scholarly things. So they're focused on deep things, deep questions about life that may cut, may burrow beneath the political divisions on campuses in a society. But they're all, and they're also attending, attending to scholarly things, which are in many ways, the lifeblood of universities. So that's just a graph that I just showed you at a glance before we, before we came in here. I just wonder, you have any thoughts about, is there, is there a religious, is there a religious analog with respect to our university systems? Is there a virtue that religiously minded students and faculty might bring to universities that's not currently being brought? Is that something you've thought about before or you might want to say anything about now?

Jonathan Rauch: Well, I've certainly thought about a generalized version of that question very much on my mind. And it's where I almost end the book, actually. My book has a lot of unkind things to say about what I think are some mistaken choices that the white evangelical church has made. And I do that on the basis of what Christians themselves are saying and what Jesus says in the Bible. We, on the secular side, cannot let ourselves off that easily. I think, at best, we forgot how important it is to have a healthy faith portion of society. I think we took for granted those substrates we talked about earlier on which liberal democracy depends. We just assumed that they would all be there, that they would take care of themselves, that we didn't have to care about, for example, Christianity. But often, I think, John, it was worse than that. I think often we were not just negligent, but we were hostile, at least culturally, to the faithful among us. People would say, they've told me, they may have told you that, you know, they're a little bit on the down low in their professional environment about being regular churchgoers or being born again, because, you know, they're not persecuted, but they don't really feel that kind of discourse is welcome.

John Tomasi: My sense, you would know better than I, but my sense is that on a lot of our college campuses, especially the elite ones, religious students are a bit in their own orbit. Religion is not something that is foregrounded in everyday life. And I've had students, of course, since October 7th, Jewish students say, you know, I'm careful about how I talk about religion. It's divisive. A lot of people won't understand it. We at Heterodox Academy, we center the value of viewpoint diversity. And how often do universities think about making their campuses completely welcoming? To religious diversity, to people who are in fact faithful, do they actually know if people are faithful? Of course, you'll have your Hillel, you'll have your campus ministry, but couldn't they do a lot more to make people of faith feel welcome on these campuses and to use that as a way to start the conversations we need to be having about our values? I remember when I was in college, this is years ago, but we had this rather unkind term. It was God squad. You know, someone went to church on a Sunday morning, instead of hanging out at the library or, you know, sitting with friends, we'd say that's God squad. And I'm embarrassed about that in hindsight.

Jonathan Rauch: Yeah, it's very interesting.

John Tomasi: I do wonder about this, the culture of university campuses. And I would, I think it's, I think it's not unfair to say it's been something of a hollowing out about the meanings and the purposes that people have when they're at the university. I'm not sure if it's completely connected to religion. That might be one pathway towards this phenomenon that I'm going to briefly describe. But I think that among many young people who I talk to and around the country, and not just the students, but professors sometimes to some degree too, there is a displacement of thick understandings of what it is they're there for, what the meaning of life is, why they're there to learn about the meaning of life, how they might enlarge themselves beyond their current understanding of things to have a new framework to understand the world more broadly, more deeply, see the questions more clearly, perhaps. And instead, there's a kind of a going through the motions-ness about a lot of student experiences. There's something, it's not quite an analogy with thin Christianity, but there's something like thin scholarship or thin studenthood where they show up. And there's some data about this. I mean, there's a study I read a few weeks ago, you may have seen about the rise of the percentage of Harvard undergrads who choose their concentration for economic reasons, that they're thinking about this as a way station towards a lucrative economic career, which people have always done through universities. But the data that I read suggests that there has been a sharp increase in that way of thinking among Harvard undergrads. Whereas before, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, there was a higher percentage of students who would choose a major because they became passionate about the questions in that concentration. They became passionate about understanding the world through that particular disciplinary lens. And I just sort of wonder about that. Is there something that, is there a hollowing out on the university campuses that has led us in this direction? I'm going to add one more thing, if I may, if you don't mind, thinking more about the faculty now. You know, in 1915, there's this classic statement by the AAUP about academic freedom. And there's a section in there where they talk about virtue or responsibilities, values, you might say, of the profession. And those values include these very thick elements that one should be very aware of the power imbalances within the classroom. One should be very cautious not to run roughshod over your students' beliefs and hopes and aspirations and dreams and curiosity because you know so much more than them that means you have a special obligation not to tell them what you think or not to let them think that you have the answers and they're just sort of learned from you, the sage on the stage. And that ideal of the university is a place where, with humility, professors teach what they know. But with humility, humility of the sense that we're learning together, I haven't got this all figured out and neither do you. Let me show you what it would mean to be more sophisticated in your thinking than you currently are. And that conception of the thick responsibilities of the profession, the academic profession, seemed to have weakened dramatically in the hundred years since that AAUP statement. Do you have any thoughts about that internal feature of university life? Just say one more thing about that.

Jonathan Rauch: So you think professors as a class are less committed to that kind of humble teaching? Or do you think that there are pressures, structural pressures, and pressures from, you know, students as customers and these heavy overlays of bureaucracy and so forth, which are making it difficult for them to teach that way?

John Tomasi: Yeah, I'm not sure how to diagnose the causes of it. But I would just say this as a sort of a marker. At the Heterodox Academy, we talk about scholarly virtues. We talk about the HxA way, which includes things about make your case with evidence, be intellectually charitable, be intellectually humble, steal men your opponents don't straw men, them, all this kind of be yourself is also one of our virtues. And those virtues are still considered quite countercultural in today's academy, which is bizarre. In many ways, HxA is standing for the most obvious things that there could be. Make space for your students to think for themselves. Present your students, respect your students enough to present them with a range of viewpoints, including, for example, religious viewpoints. Those are very obvious things you would think. But the fact that Heterodox Academy is still thought of as like a revolutionary group trying to bring this change to universities is a sign, I think, of where we are in universities, that those virtues are not just, well, duh, but they're also like, well, are you sure about that? What are we losing if we do that? I think what's being held up as a rival is something like thick engagement and substantive political causes. You come to the university to engage in that cause and you'll depart a better warrior, as it were, for that cause rather than a more curious, thoughtful, creative person. You can be thoughtful and creative and be a warrior. I understand that for sure. I know many students who are like that. Nonetheless, there's something fundamentally different. If you're at the university to receive your marching orders and be a better soldier than if you're there to be an individual who becomes more individuated, sees the world differently, leaves with more questions than answers when they leave the university. And that's an ideal that's changed a lot, I think, in our society and on our campuses.

Jonathan Rauch: Well, here I may be a bit heterodox and I'm certainly not as well informed as you are, or in fact, as many of the listeners to this conversation are. When I talk to professors, they say that they are working hard to lead the kind of classroom conversations that you describe. And when students are polled on what professors are doing, they're generally not saying that they're being indoctrinated by professors. What they are complaining about, more prevalently, is other students who call them out. The first time that one student in the class says during a conversation, you're a white male, what would you understand about that? That'll shut down the conversation on that subject for the whole semester. And it's driving the professors nuts. My impression is that there's still a lot of people who are there to do that thick job of teaching. But that structurally, it's getting harder. Part of the thing, there are a lot of things that are going on at once. It's not monocausal. But yes, you do have some of the social justice warrior faculty who are doing their thing over in certain departments. That happens. But another thing that happens is that you've got this heavy overlay of bureaucracy, which is pressing the professors to move the students through and pass them with high grades. You've got the student reviews of the professors, which complain if they're assigned too much reading or asked to do too much. You've got the conformist culture of a lot of the students themselves. They're just worried about not fitting in. So a lot of them will just keep their head down. You know, every class, there'll be that one or two adventurous student. You can't shut up, but a lot of the rest will kind of hide for the semester.

John Tomasi: That's right. That's right.

Jonathan Rauch: To the general frustration of everyone. And so I think what we're talking about here is, can universities, it's kind of the same question that we were asking about Christianity earlier. So maybe here's your bridge. Can universities recover and reassert those core values that are about growing through inquiry? And that's hard to do when you've now got large numbers of bureaucrats, many of whom are telling professors what they can and cannot do, yet have probably never set foot in a classroom as a teacher. When you've got that going on in the consumer mindset and all these other pressures happening. And I think that's our challenge.

John Tomasi: I want to push on that a little bit because I'm so interested in exactly the place you're describing right now. And this will also open the conversation to current events and reforms happening in higher education, Trump administration running roughshod over university budgets among other aspects of the university. I sometimes think that what universities are having an opportunity to do right now is to return. This is not going to be quite a Christian take, but you'll hear some echoes, I think, in the way I describe it. But universities have an opportunity, perhaps, to return to a quieter, more humble understanding of their role and their purpose by trying to deliver to students something like an experience of open inquiry. Rather than delivering yet more endowment money, rather than delivering yet more large scientific buildings that will bring in more government money, there's an opportunity in many ways, as many of the university presidents begin looking at the campus cultures that have gotten away from them. There's an opportunity for them, perhaps, to start with humility, thinking, well, what we're really here to deliver at the end of the day is a certain kind of experience to people, to the students, to the professors, to the students talking with the professors. And that's the experience of an open-minded discussion about ideas. Whatever it might be, it can be Egyptology, it can be plant biology, it can be all the kinds of crazy, interesting, bizarre things that happen on university campuses. But that's really what we're about at universities. It's not empire building. And the days of empire building are...

Jonathan Rauch: And it's not social justice, either.

John Tomasi: And nor is it social justice. That can be an element in some places, perhaps. But the core is that quiet thing. Do you want to say something about that and where we are regarding the government's responses to universities?

Jonathan Rauch: Well, I'm worried, John, because I'm worried that what the Trump administration is doing will make it harder to be quiet and humble because it will foment so much anger and fear and backlash. For a couple of years now, a year ago in New Zealand, in January, in Los Angeles, wherever I could, in the higher education context, I would give a speech and I'd put a slide up showing the 20-point drop in American confidence in higher education that's occurred over the past 10 years or so. Now, that's seismic. Very few social indicators change by 20 points in 10 years. And a lot of that's Republicans, but it's also Democrats and Independents. And this strong sense that I think that goes to what you were saying, that universities have lost sight of their mission. And with that, they've lost the public's trust that they're going to do what they're chartered to do as opposed to these other things.

John Tomasi: Yeah, that social bar.

Jonathan Rauch: And what I was saying in those speeches, also, I think what you and many others have said is, look, these are really bad numbers. And if we in the world of education don't fix this ourselves, someone from the outside is going to come in and try to fix it for us. And we won't like that. I had no idea when I said those words how true and how radical and how traumatizing that would prove to be. So the challenge now is, can we still have self-impelled reform, reformed by people who have the good of higher education fundamentally at heart? And I have to ask you that. You're the president of Heterodox Academy. I don't honestly know the answer to that. One answer is we've got an opportunity right now that's the opportunity of a lifetime. We finally got their attention. They understand there's a problem. They understand they're on an unsustainable course with the public. They got religion. But another view is the opposite.

John Tomasi: That's right.

Jonathan Rauch: Which is they're just going to hunker down and put up maximal resistance and see every effort in these directions as an outside imposition.

John Tomasi: That's right.

Jonathan Rauch: What do you think?

John Tomasi: We're charting it all very carefully, as you can imagine. And we're seeing a real division already beginning between those university presidents who are really trying to think about campus cultures that get out of their hands and to think, well, how do you restore it? And they often focus on viewpoint diversity as one of the first steps they need to take, which is a politically freighted phrase with all kinds of pyrotechnics that come in its wake. But there's also, as you just alluded to, a number of presidents who are being the resistance. And they often resist in terms that don't fully seem to acknowledge that there's a problem at all. Chris Eisgruber at Princeton has sometimes made some statements along that way, is that those lines that at Princeton, there's never really been a viewpoint diversity problem, even though the data suggests that there are some massive imbalances there. To some degree, Alan Garber at Harvard has made some similar kinds of statements. So there's still a sorting out going on. I'm not sure we know quite yet how it's going to work out. And the question is, will university presidents recognize that there's a kind of reckoning of their own devices? And to what degree would they just be riding the wave? And something you said a moment ago is very much on our minds around HxA. And we're just trying to anticipate and prepare for backlashes of various sorts. We see backlashes potentially coming against Jewish students because of these cuts being made in the name of anti-Semitism, at least supposedly, and perhaps backlashes against people advocating viewpoint diversity. Because now those people who advocate that are being used the word heterodox. The Trump administration uses the word heterodox, which concerns us somewhat greatly because we're here for the long term, we care about universities and we love them for the long term. Not for this cycle, not just for the next cycle, but for all these different cycles. As we're winding down our conversation now, I wonder if you, I know you're not thought of as a person who puts on a prognosticator hat and tells us how you see the future, but you are a very thoughtful observer about these things. Do you have any thoughts or you want to share with our listeners as we end about where we are in higher ed, where we might be going, your greatest fears, your greatest hopes, anything you might want to share as we end?

Jonathan Rauch: Well, there have been two big elements of this conversation and this is where they come together actually, which is the common theme is can these fundamental institutions that undergird our liberal democracy, can they find and restore their central values? Because we need them to do that. We desperately need them to do that. Can they get back on mission? Do they have the wherewithal internally to do that work? And that's very much an open question. In the domain of Christianity, people like Russell Moore, the editor of Christianity Today, who's thinking I draw on very heavily in my book, say that Christianity has made mistakes, gone off course many times in history, often much, much worse than at present. And the way that changes is not some big apocalyptic contest at the top level, you know, between like, I don't know, the MAGA church and the anti-MAGA church. It comes from the bottom up, from an upwelling of interest in organized religion and Christianity, which may be their indications we might be starting to see among the young. A new generation of pastors who are more interested in a Jesus-like message. Church plantings, the small groups. And it'll be people voting in with their feet to these new values and gradually displacing the old ones. In higher education, I don't know that that'll happen. If God hears the prayers of an atheist, I'm praying that it will. But Christianity historically has been at its best when it's been the outsider, the prophetic voice, not the voice of power. And that's the hope. In higher education, it's such a volatile environment, John. I don't know my proverbial rear end from my elbow at this point. I don't know what will happen tomorrow. I am feeling fear because of the illegality, I think is pretty blatant, of what the Trump administration is doing. I don't believe that they have the interests of higher education at heart. I don't really think this is ultimately about anti-Semitism. Members of advisors, not members, but advisors to that administration have said, this is about setting back universities a generation or two. And I think that might be right. It's about crushing the avenues of resistance. So I'm very fearful right now.

John Tomasi: And salting the earth.

Jonathan Rauch: And salting the earth.

John Tomasi: That's right.

Jonathan Rauch: The things I'm investing in personally are HxA, which I think after, I think, what, 10 years now, I think is in a position to get the kind of hearing that we haven't in the past. And because we're academic insiders, for the most part, I think we have a position of trust, which we can use. But I'm also an advisor to the University of Austin, which is a startup university based in, obviously, Austin, dedicated to the principles of the fierce pursuit of truth and nothing else. It's a university about that. Just admitted our second class. It's small, but the hope is that this can become the seed of a different way of approaching things. The admissions policy is completely merit-based. If your scores are above a certain level, you're guaranteed admissions. If they're under that level, there's a simple process. But none of the nonsense about, you know, all the extracurriculars you have to show. And the point isn't that that'll work. It's that it's the spirit of experimentation, which might carry us forward. My ultimate hope, and you're about to tell me if I'm smoking weed here, but unlike a lot of people on the cultural right, I still think that there are large reservoirs of integrity in American academia. A lot of scholars who are there to do science, research, learn, teach. That is what they want to do, even if there are obstacles. And I still think the know-how for doing that and the infrastructure in America is the best in the world. So I think we have a lot to work with. But if you ask me right now, you know, it's the little ball at the top of the sombrero shape. It could go one way or the other, and they're two very different worlds. Which one it goes, I don't know. You tell me.

John Tomasi: I'll say one thing. I think the bottom-up hope you described in the religious case, I do see something similar in the educational case. I think there is a reservoir of, frankly, nerdy professors who got into this business because they loved ideas, and they remember that. But even more important, I think, than that is that there is this eternal thing that happens on campuses every fall when a whole new cohort of 18-, 19-year-olds stepped foot on those college greens across the country and all through North America. And they hoped for something epic. They had this idea dimly formed in their mind. Even those who were just there to make money, or they say they're there to make money, they had this idea that this is a great adventure. And our universities have not been delivering that adventure to them in the way that they might have. We've delivered all kinds of the wrong adventures to young people in the last few years, especially on some of our best campuses. But nonetheless, that idea deep in the heart of the 18-year-old student stepping on campus for the first time, that's an eternal longing. And we never do well enough to nurture that, to make ourselves, make our campuses worthy of that ambition and that longing on the part of young people. But that's the eternalness of that longing and that hope, that kind of desire that we, the adults in the room, will do something about it. That's what really gives me great hope.

Jonathan Rauch: That's so beautifully said, John. And would it be fair to say that we still have the technology to instill that kind of transformative experience? Even if we don't always succeed, we still have the means to do that.

John Tomasi: I think there are lots of obstacles to getting our institutions right on the campuses. But I think that the fact that that longing is there and the fact that the professors who had that longing once upon a time to themselves can recognize it in the young people, that gives me hope that reforms of various kinds, UATX-style reforms, HxA-style reforms, that these reforms can find a way through the political headwinds and storms towards a better place.

Jonathan Rauch: I think that's got to be right. You know, I went to college a very long time ago, in the late 70s and early 80s. And I was fortunate enough to get into Yale when it was, I think, the best educational environment in the world. And I had exactly that kind of transformative experience that you described. It was an awakening, and I'm still drawing down the intellectual capital for that. And the materials that were provided for me, then, are timeless. They're still there, you know. They're at Tocqueville. We've been talking about them. So those are still there for the taking. And I guess I'll just add one other thing, which is, on so many campuses, we know this through, I think, just anecdotally, but also through surveys and other campus evidence that the modal member of a faculty is not some social justice warrior with an agenda. that there's been a lot of fear and a lot of intimidation, but there's still a lot of locked-in potential for people who want to just do what higher education is best at. And that our job at HxA and UATX and elsewhere, the centers now that are springing up for civic education in a lot of universities, which I think are very promising, and other innovations, the movement for campus debate, including that in curriculum, which University of Denver is doing, and many universities are now doing. These are all different ways of trying to re-energize and re-inflate those people on the campus who still want that. And I think they're still there. I think there's still a lot of them.

John Tomasi: Jonathan Rauch, it's been a great pleasure having you on Heterodox Out Loud.

Jonathan Rauch: Thank you.

John Tomasi: Thank you. And you probably don't know this, but I'll mention it to our audience. This is our concluding episode of this season of Heterodox Out Loud. We'll be taking a break for the summer, taking a break in the sense of not producing regular videos, but we will be working, as always, figuring these things out, preparing for next season. So thanks for listening to this season. Enjoy your summers. We'll see you in the fall.

S2 Episode 38: Faith, Fear, and the Future of Democracy with Jonathan Rauch

Why does a self-described “gay, atheistic Jewish guy” argue that America needs more Christianity right now?

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