As a lifelong proponent of the First Amendment, writer and scholar Jonathan Rauch had spent much of his life working to reconcile LGBTQ+ rights and religious liberty, believing it was hypothetically possible through negotiation.
Then he learned about a real life working example, Rauch said in an interview Friday, “in the last place I would ever expect to see it: Utah.”
Indeed, in 2015, Utah overwhelmingly passed its first statewide nondiscrimination protections for the LGBTQ+ community, while providing safeguards for religious liberty.
The nonreligious journalist wondered, “What the heck is this all about?”
Rauch was even more amazed when The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — which views homosexual behavior as sin — signed off on the Respect for Marriage Act, enacted by Congress in 2022 and which codified same-sex marriage while preserving some religious freedoms.
Catholic bishops stridently opposed the federal legislation, he noted, as did evangelical Christians.
“That legislation,” Rauch said, “is an exercise in cultural peacemaking — which was a very big deal.”
So the senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution and a contributing writer for The Atlantic did a deep dive into the teachings and practices of the Utah-based faith, making a lengthy research trip to the Beehive State.
Rauch has been in the state again this week, speaking to audiences at the University of Utah and church-owned Brigham Young University about his new book, “Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain With Democracy.”
(Brookings Institution) Jonathan Rauch is a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution.
The approach of Mormonism and what he calls its “civic theology” is featured prominently in one chapter.
Civic theology is the way Christians behave in a pluralistic society. Many of them believe the best way is to impose their moral stances on the whole American public.
While having similar positions on some social issues and a similar demographic, Latter-day Saints have gone in a different direction, Rauch said. “They don’t want to use the law to prevent people from sinning.”
The church could have “sat on the sidelines, saying nothing and doing nothing to help [the marriage] bill pass,” Rauch writes in the new book, “or it could have joined with many other conservative religious groups in demanding protection for religious liberty without protection for marriage equality.”
Yet, here it was, he writes, “actively supporting a compromise contravening a core doctrine, when doing so was not cost-free.”
Apostle Dallin H. Oaks, first counselor in the church’s governing First Presidency and a former Utah Supreme Court justice, recognized that the Latter-day Saint approach was “countercultural in the conservative world,” according to Rauch’s book, but the religious leader seemed “quite cheerful about coloring outside the lines.”
(The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) President Dallin H. Oaks of the First Presidency speaks at the University of Virginia in 2021, calling for compromise on pressing cultural issues.
Madisonian pluralism
The bargain the church is making is similar to what is enshrined in James Madison’s view of American pluralism, Rauch said. “Society will give us the space to pursue our religion, in our way, in our community, and we will not try to impose those values on the country as a whole.”
In fact, the church took a step further with the Respect for Marriage Act: Actively supporting measures that protect other ways of doing things.
The church is the “only one that has developed and articulated a civic theology based on Madisonian pluralism and the constitutional values of patience, negotiation and mutual accommodation,” Rauch said. “To me, that’s exciting. It’s unexpected.”
As a married openly gay man, the writer was somewhat worried that “this Supreme Court might yank the rug out from under Obergefell [the ruling that legalized same-sex marriage],” he said. “It was extremely meaningful to me and my husband that Congress, by an overwhelming margin, voted to inscribe our marriage into federal statute. That’s a huge safety margin for us.”
He got a bit emotional describing how Latter-day Saint leaders agreed to help people “commit sin outside [their] church,” Rauch said, “because we want to share the country.”
It is “a model for a different path for American Christianity,” he said, “one which is the opposite of Christian nationalism and…the opposite of [spreading] fear that you’re losing the culture war.”
Keep repeating the message
Rauch’s ideas have found a ready audience among the top Latter-day Saint hierarchy, including Oaks and apostles Jeffrey R. Holland, D. Todd Christofferson and Quentin L. Cook. He gave them a copy of the book and asked if it was “a good reflection of what they’re trying to teach.”
They said it was “accurate,” Rauch said in the interview, “and they liked the fact that it was told in a secular voice.”
The church’s history as a persecuted minority also may have contributed to Latter-day Saints’ reluctance to impose their vision on others.
“I felt very much at home out here also, because [the church] is an exilic faith, as is Judaism,” he said. “Christianity is at its best when it is an exilic faith, when it doesn’t think it’s in command of the culture and society, when it doesn’t have political power, when it’s bearing witness to the radical countercultural teachings of Jesus, and so I think [Mormonism’s] minority status has an impact there as well.”
Occasionally, Rauch — who wrote a book titled “Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights and Good for America” — has told senior Latter-day Saint leaders that their policy on same-sex marriage “is not probably what Christ would have had to say about it.”
He hopes for a “revelation” that will change their position. Until then, the atheist will “stoutly defend their right as a church to do things their own way in their own community.”
And he will continue to spread the word about a Christian church that understands compromise.
“Secular people are completely unaware of the path that church has taken,” Rauch said. “This is not your father’s LDS Church, and it’s very different from white evangelicals. So part of what I’m trying to do is just focus attention on it a bit.”
At the same time, the church has work to do “to project these values and make it stick inside the church,” he said. “They can’t wave a magic wand and change people’s attitudes. They’ll have to keep repeating a message like that.”
It has to be “an institutional commitment,” he said, and “that’s really hard.”
