Jonathan Rauch, author of Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy, and Julian Zelizer, author of In Defense of Partisanship, join for a wide-ranging discussion on their new books and the rise of partisanship in America. Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, moderates.
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Jonathan Rauch is a senior fellow in the governance studies program at the Brookings Institution and a contributing writer for The Atlantic. He is the author of numerous books, including The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, The Happiness Curve, and Gay Marriage. His newest book is Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy.
Julian Zelizer is the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes Class of 1941 Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University, a CNN political analyst, and a contributor to NPR’s Here & Now. He is the author and editor of numerous books, including Myth America, Burning Down the House, and Fault Lines. His newest book is In Defense of Partisanship.
Jeffrey Rosen is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization devoted to educating the public about the U.S. Constitution. Rosen is also professor of law at The George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic.
Additional Resources
- Julian E. Zelizer, In Defense of Partisanship (2025)
- Jonathan Rauch, Cross Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy (2025)
- Julian E. Zelizer, Abraham Joshua Heschel: A Life of Radical Amazement (2021)
- Jonathan Rauch, “Christian Renewal and the Future of American Democracy,” Brigham Young University Wheatley Institute (Jan. 24, 2025)
- Jeffrey Rosen, The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America (2024)
Excerpt from interview: Jonathan Rauch regrets supporting secularization, noting it fueled politicized movements and weakened evangelical churches.
Jonathan Rauch: I could filibuster unpacking some of those things, but I will try to go fast and you will stop me at any moment for a footnote or to drill down. 22 years ago, I wrote the dumbest thing I've ever written. And I include it was dumber than my 2015 Atlantic article confidently predicting Donald Trump would never be president. And 22 years ago, I was celebrating secularization in America, saying people are drifting away from religion. Isn't that a good thing? Religion is divisive and often it's ignorant. We'll be better off with less of it. Since then, we have conducted an unprecedented experiment in secularization in American life. Right through the 20th century, 70% of Americans were members of a church. When I was a kid, people, the first thing that people often asked other people when they met if they weren't Jewish was, what church do you go to? Since this century, that number has dropped from about 70 to below half just in 20 years. And there are lots and lots of other numbers like this. It's a dechurching on a scale never seen before. This has resulted in the substitution of pseudo religions.
Some of those are things like Wicca and SoulCycle and Crystals. And some are a lot more dangerous, like radical wokeness and the MAGA movement and QAnon. But a lot of what it is is just politicizing religion and religifying politics so that the next election is an apocalyptic battle between good and evil. So that's been one cost of secularization. Then we had a second wave in the 21st century, evangelical churches, which had been thriving. The White Evangelical church first began to decline in numbers, and at the same time, fueling that, it also began to politicize. It aligned very closely with the Republican Party and then with the MAGA movement and with Donald Trump, so that the two became almost indistinguishable. That made the church smaller because people who didn't favor that course left the church. It made the church sharper, more partisan, more divisive, and more about a culture of fear. We're losing our country. And neither of those things, the thin church, the secularized church that's just not capable of bearing its share, and the sharp church, the partisan church, seems to be capable of doing the job that in your book you outline what the founders relied on civil society to do, which is to inculcate and teach republican virtues and provide sources of meaning and value in life.
Excerpt from interview: Zelizer's book argues that strong political parties are essential for organizing action and preventing demagogues, despite current hyper-partisanship.
Julian Zelizer: Yeah, I mean part of this book is an attempt to give a succinct and digestible history of parties. And I start with Madison and the construction of a constitutional system intended to subvert faction and make faction difficult. And lo and behold, as soon as the system gets underway, those factions form, including Madison being part of creating those factions. And I then try to take us through how the party system, the two-party systems evolved. And one of the things I look at is a history of people who argue that there should be stronger partisanship in the United States. For a long time, there was an argument that there is a virtue to strong parties. Parties, the argument goes, helped to generate big ideas in American politics. And we could think in current times. From FDR in the 1930s to Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party in the 1980s, parties helped to organize action across this different disjointed system and coordinate between Congress and the presidency, rather than just having a system that is purely one of chaos and gridlock, and that when parties work well and are strong, they can serve actually as filters and try to prevent demagogic candidates from reaching the top.
And one of the people who made a strong argument for parties was Woodrow Wilson. First major book he writes is about how we almost need a parliamentary system here in the United States, which was really what he envisioned to coordinate action between the president and Congress. He gradually focuses more on the presidency. And then in 1950, the Political Science association put out a famous report for those of us who study this stuff. And it's about responsible partisanship. And the argument is that in Congress, committee leaders have so much power that they have all these fiefdoms that make strong party action almost impossible. And they call for a responsible partisanship where party leaders listen to the rank and file, where party leaders actually are responsible to not just providing gray, but to providing and representing the differences in our political system that were not being reflected on issues like civil rights. And so then, I fast forward to in the '70s, we reform Congress, we create a much more partisan system where there's much more centralization on Capitol Hill, in part a response to these reforms. But then, we moved in the '90s and 2000s to hyper partisanship, which is a kind of partisanship where concern about institutions, concern about governing falls by the wayside.
It's a total partisan mentality. I do focus on Republicans as really driving this more than Democrats. And I can explain why there's a difference between the parties which leads us right through today. But I'm really trying to separate the way the institutions are working now versus any kind of inherent reason that partisan institutions can't work very well and have not offered a lot in American political history. And I think we often confuse the two. It's a little like religion. I mean, it's interesting to hear that, that we think today of the problems with religion in public life and how it contributes to some of the underside. But that's not essential to religion at all. And I think it's the same with political parties. And frankly, I think we need political parties because we are divided on many issues, and I'd rather have that represented through the main political system rather than in other ways. And so that's the whole book in 150 pages.
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