Guest Post: Jon Resendez

For most of my 18-year teaching career, I have taught Religious Studies classes to high school juniors and seniors at a public high school in Irvine, CA. One of the many challenges in teaching a class like this is that students come into the course from all faith backgrounds, including non-belief. Creating a curriculum that all my students can see themselves in, and find relevant, can be difficult. This fact, combined with my own beliefs about the exigency of civic education, caused me to change the analytical lens of my course about 7 years ago. The course went from being a “Comparative Religions” course to being a “Religion and Society” course, and its purpose shifted from merely making students aware of what others believe and why they believe it, to emphasizing the impact of religion and religious thinking on all our lives every day. In short, I want to ensure that my students know how religion impacts everyone, not just the folks that “go to church.”

This newish framing of my course has prompted me to be on the lookout for new materials and texts that explain and analyze religion from a sociopolitical angle. It was this vigilant search that brought me to Jonathan Rauch’s Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy (Yale University Press, 2025).

Summary

Cross Purposes is a cogent and concise commentary on American political and religious life that makes an argument for the civic importance of Christianity in the United States. Rauch argues that Christianity must remain separate from government, in the way Thomas Jefferson and the Constitutional Framers intended, but it must also be “aligned” for the Republic to deliver wellbeing for its people. The Framers’ belief in the meaning-making and moral development aspects of religion is well documented. Good people make a well functioning republic, not the other way around.

Rauch is not an expert in religion and never claims to be. He is humble about his shortcomings on the subject throughout the work and approaches the enterprise of socio-religious studies the way many of us do — knowing a few things for sure and having to discover the rest.

Rauch’s personal identity is important to understanding the peculiar genius of this work. Besides being a fellow at the Brookings Institute, an award winning journalist, and a notable public intellectual, he’s also gay, a marriage equality activist, an atheist, and an ethnic Jew who has historically been pessimistic about religion in general. He famously wrote a piece for the Atlantic in 2003 called “Let It Be” where he declared that the “greatest development in modern religion is not a religion at all. It’s an attitude best described as “apatheism,” a disinclination to care all that much about one’s own religion, and an even stronger disinclination to care about other people’s.” For obvious reasons, I could not disagree more. 

Therefore, it’s surprising to read him maintaining that Christianity is fundamental to American political life — explaining that the moral foundations of Christianity underpin the U.S. Constitution and that there are essential teachings of Jesus that must be observed for America to work.

He focuses on what he believes are the three basic teachings of Jesus of Nazareth:

1) Don’t be afraid.

2) Imitate me.

3) Forgive each other.

Rauch critiques the praxis of American Christianity accusing both the politically-powerful Evangelicals and secular America for violating all three lessons to the detriment of our political culture and our ability to solve problems together. He wonders, as I do, why we use democracy only instrumentally, embracing it when it works for us and discarding it when it doesn’t. He accuses many Christians and secularists of seemingly redefining the “separation of church and state” to mean a separation of individual moral quality from public life, or the elimination of religion from society altogether, and thus doing whatever it takes to win. It is this zero-sum game that pollutes our political system with polarization, vitriol, and unfortunately violence. 

The work also critiques certain types of Christianity (which he calls “thin Christianity” and “sharp Christianity”) for not contributing to the wellbeing of the Republic the way we need them to. However, he also holds up many positive examples of Christians who do take responsibility for their role in underpinning American democracy. Special attention is paid to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (aka Mormons) and the many policy compromises their church has supported which have improved the conditions of both marginalized people (specifically the LGBTQ community) and the rights of religious people to act on their own conscience. 

Rauch wants Christians to adopt “an emotionally positive, doctrinally coherent, institutionally promoted civic theology which models a Christlike way to do politics.” He advocates for all in the American community to practice “pluralism, not purism.” Furthermore, he wants secularists to learn about religion and to develop the capacity to understand religious people. He specifically suggests building their religious vocabulary and strengthening their intellectual capacity so they are not simply tolerating religion, but also welcoming, and perhaps even cherishing, it. Along the same lines, he advocates for religious education in public schools, which, of course, I am all for.

My favorite quote was: “We should never, ever, pass a law because someone thinks Jesus said to; yet our laws might be better if we more often asked what Jesus might have said about them.” 

Teaching This Work

Cross Purposes is full of excerpts that can be close-read and analyzed. It begins with an updated overview of declining religiosity in America. Those data and the explanations he offers will be shared with my students, as well as with the parents who attend Back to School Night. The book is also full of pithy and cogent quotes. Analyzing them will make for great warm-up activities and will lead to powerful classroom discourse. Using a “Four Corners” or “Philosophical Chairs” strategy so students can demonstrate, discuss, and explain their agreement (or lack thereof) with Rauch’s provocative statements is a simple and powerful way to introduce instruction on secularism, pluralism, and the separation of church and state. 

The portions on the theology of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will also work great for discussing how that church has integrated Madisonian pluralism into their belief system. Rauch does an excellent job of contrasting Mormon beliefs about the story of Adam and Eve with mainstream Christian beliefs, thereby offering a useful comparative structure for understanding both. This is an example of a “silver bullet” in socio-religious instruction: texts that teach students about a particular religion in a particular context but also have other religious concepts embedded in them. Students learn at least two things at once, enabling them to make connections between ideas, to learn more deeply, and to retrieve the concepts later. 

This work will be particularly significant for my seniors who will be exploring topics like political ideology, moral development, polarization, political violence, authoritarianism, and pluralism in their Government classes. As we read and discuss this text, the students will be able to make connections between those concepts and their intersections with religion. This is what I call the “platinum bullet.” Not only will students be learning two religious things at once, they will be making connections across two disciplines at once. Along the way, they will have numerous opportunities to engage in critical thinking about their world and their place in it. 

In sum, Cross Purposes is a provocative tool to help students and teachers of religion think about the intersection between religion and society. Some will find things to disagree with in this text and that is the point. I think Rauch would concur when I say that it’s the discourse about the ideas, and not any particular conclusion, that really matters. A democratic republic is an “essentially contestable” idea. Therefore, we must continuously debate its meaning and purpose for it to continue to exist. Let’s keep the conversation going.    

About the Author

Jon Resendez currently teaches Religious Studies, AP American Government and Politics and Modern World History at Portola High School in Irvine, CA. He has recently been recognized by the California Council for the Social Studies as the state’s High School Teacher of the Year. In addition to his work as a K-12 Educator, he also is an Instructor of Social Studies Methods at the University of California, Irvine where he mentors future teachers in their Master of Arts in Teaching program.