Why the crisis of Christianity has become a crisis for democracy

What happens to American democracy if Christianity is no longer able, or no longer willing, to perform the functions on which our constitutional order depends? In this provocative book, the award-winning journalist Jonathan Rauch--a lifelong atheist--reckons candidly with both the shortcomings of secularism and the corrosion of Christianity.

Thin Christianity, as Rauch calls the mainline church, has been unable to inspire and retain believers. Worse, a Church of Fear has distorted white evangelicalism in ways that violate the tenets of both Jesus and James Madison. What to do? For answers, Rauch looks to a new generation of religious thinkers, as well as to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which has placed the Constitution at the heart of its spiritual teachings.

In this timely critique Rauch addresses secular Americans who think Christianity can be abandoned, and Christian Americans who blame secular culture for their grievances. The two must work together, he argues, to confront our present crisis. He calls on Christians to recommit to the teachings of their faith that align with Madison, not MAGA, and to understand that liberal democracy, far from being oppressive, is uniquely protective of religious freedom. At the same time, he calls on secular liberals to understand that healthy religious institutions are crucial to the survival of the liberal state.

Arming Americans to defend the truth from today's war on facts

In what could be the timeliest book of the year, Rauch aims to arm his readers to engage with reason in an age of illiberalism.
--Newsweek

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

Disinformation. Trolling. Conspiracies. Social media pile-ons. Campus intolerance. On the surface, these recent additions to our daily vocabulary appear to have little in common. But together, they are driving an epistemic crisis: a multi-front challenge to America's ability to distinguish fact from fiction and elevate truth above falsehood.

In 2016 Russian trolls and bots nearly drowned the truth in a flood of fake news and conspiracy theories, and Donald Trump and his troll armies continued to do the same. Social media companies struggled to keep up with a flood of falsehoods, and too often didn't even seem to try. Experts and some public officials began wondering if society was losing its grip on truth itself. Meanwhile, another new phenomenon appeared: cancel culture. At the push of a button, those armed with a cellphone could gang up by the thousands on anyone who ran afoul of their sanctimony.

In this pathbreaking book, Jonathan Rauch reaches back to the parallel eighteenth-century developments of liberal democracy and science to explain what he calls the Constitution of Knowledge--our social system for turning disagreement into truth.

By explicating the Constitution of Knowledge and probing the war on reality, Rauch arms defenders of truth with a clearer understanding of what they must protect, why they must do--and how they can do it. His book is a sweeping and readable description of how every American can help defend objective truth and free inquiry from threats as far away as Russia and as close as the cellphone.

A liberal society stands on the proposition that we should all take seriously the idea that we might be wrong. This means we must place no one, including ourselves, beyond the reach of criticism; it means that we must allow people to err, even where the error offends and upsets, as it often will. So writes Jonathan Rauch in Kindly Inquisitors, which has challenged readers for more than twenty years with its bracing and provocative exploration of the issues surrounding attempts to limit free speech. In it, Rauch makes a persuasive argument for the value of liberal science and the idea that conflicting views produce knowledge within society.
In this expanded edition of Kindly Inquisitors, a new foreword by George F. Will strikingly shows the book's continued relevance, while a substantial new afterword by Rauch elaborates upon his original argument and brings it fully up to date. Two decades after the book's initial publication, while some progress has been made, the regulation of hate speech has grown domestically--especially in American universities--and has spread even more internationally, where there is no First Amendment to serve as a meaningful check. But the answer to bias and prejudice, Rauch argues, is pluralism--not purism. Rather than attempting to legislate bias and prejudice out of existence or to drive them underground, we must pit them against one another to foster a more vigorous and fruitful discussion. It is this process that has been responsible for the growing acceptance of the moral acceptability of homosexuality over the last twenty years. And it is this process, Rauch argues, that will enable us as a society to replace hate with knowledge, both ethical and empirical.
It is a melancholy fact that this elegant book, which is slender and sharp as a stiletto, is needed, now even more than two decades ago. Armed with it, readers can slice through the pernicious ideas that are producing the still-thickening thicket of rules, codes, and regulations restricting freedom of thought and expression.--George F. Will, from the foreword

In this warm, wise, and witty overview, Jonathan Rauch combines evidence and experience to show his fellow adults that the best is yet to come. --Steven Pinker, bestselling author of Enlightenment Now

This book will change your life by showing you how life changes.

Why does happiness get harder in your 40s? Why do you feel in a slump when you're successful? Where does this malaise come from? And, most importantly, will it ever end?

Drawing on cutting-edge research, award-winning journalist Jonathan Rauch answers all these questions. He shows that from our 20s into our 40s, happiness follows a U-shaped trajectory, a happiness curve, declining from the optimism of youth into what's often a long, low slump in middle age, before starting to rise again in our 50s.

This isn't a midlife crisis, though. Rauch reveals that this slump is instead a natural stage of life--and an essential one. By shifting priorities away from competition and toward compassion, it equips you with new tools for wisdom and gratitude to win the third period of life.

And Rauch can testify to this personally because it was his own slump, despite acclaim as a journalist and commentator that compelled him to investigate the happiness curve. His own story and the stories of many others from all walks of life--from a steelworker and a limo driver to a telecoms executive and a philanthropist--show how the ordeal of midlife malaise reboots our values and even our brains for a rebirth of gratitude.

Full of insights and data and featuring many ways to endure the slump and avoid its perils and traps, The Happiness Curve doesn't just show you the dark forest of midlife, it helps you find a path through the trees. It also demonstrates how we can--and why we must--do more to help each other through the woods. Midlife is a journey we mustn't walk alone.

In Japanese, the word for foreign country means outnation. But to many Americans and Japanese, it is Japan itself, despite its increasing influence in world affairs, that is the outsider-the outnation: a country, as some have said, in the world but not of it.

How different is this industrial superpower? Why did its fast climb to the pinnacle of the global economy also contain the causes of its subsequent fall? And what can we all-Americans and Japanese alike-learn from the Japanese model?

In this rigorous, searching, deeply personal journey through Japan's islands and institutions, Jonathan Rauch reveals how different the country really is-and how hauntingly, sometimes eerily, familiar. In 200 numbered, lyrical paragraphs, The Outnation takes readers through Tokyo's nighttime crowds and into quiet country hamlets, to the office of a high-tech industrialist and to a farmer's dinner table. He distills conversations with dozens of Japanese, statesmen and professors as well as sushi chefs and innkeepers. He probes the public values of the Japanese and details the inner workings of their political, economic, and intellectual systems.

Now an acknowledged classic, republished with a new foreword by Dreux Richard, The Outnation is a perceptive and honest exploration of Japan and its people-and a sometimes disconcerting mirror that reflects America in a fresh light.