A Follow-Up on Christian Influence in Kansas (Democratic Edition)

[An expansion upon my latest Insight Kansas column, with the help of an image from The Active Age]

Two months ago, I wrote a column (which I later expanded upon) which addressed, among other things, on how Kansas Christians (which over two-thirds of the population of the Sunflower State identify as) have changed how they make use of their influence as citizens. Obviously the historical develop I was addressing had many causes—technological, socio-economic, and more—but still, it struck me just how many Christians, when they thought about the public-facing aspects of their faith, once regularly aimed to lift up Kansas society to the moral level they held to be scripturally mandated, whether in the form of prohibitions upon alcohol or Sunday closing laws or the abolition of slavery or women’s suffrage or so much more. Today, with a few notable exceptions—mostly pertaining to abortion, LGBTQ issues, and other matters involving personal sexual identity and behavior—the focus is more about providing financial support or legal protection to individuals, families, or businesses that affirm particular Christian standards, and less about presenting their moral message as relevant to social life itself.

One problem with that essay, though, was that as it moved from Kansas’s Carrie Nation past into the present, it came to focus entirely upon Kansas Christians organizing on behalf of and arguing for or against issues and policies that map almost solely onto the interests of the Republican party. In some ways, that’s predictable; for decades, the public language of Christianity (particularly Protestant Christianity, which for a variety of reasons has long been the dominant religious faction here in Kansas) has been owned by the Republican party. But nonetheless, there are still plenty of religious believers in Kansas—especially if you look at Black congregations, or other multi-ethnic Christian churches and groups who aren’t part of the powerful and mostly White evangelical subgroup—who approach the question of how to engage in public life with a focus on collective causes that are more typically associated with Democrats. Some attention needs to be paid to them as well, so this month, for reasons I explain below, I wanted to do so.

Over the past five years, multiple church-based organizations have sprouted up throughout Kansas, sometimes standing on their own and sometimes joining with others that have had a long history within their local communities. Together, these groups could be seen as Kansas instantiations of a national revival of the religious left (which there is evidence for, but which has also been falsely predicted much too often in the past), giving new voice to groups of believers who feel a need to, first, drill down on specific public policy problems, and second, pressure city and county officials to recognize the problems that have been identified and respond to the solutions which these groups recommend. In this, they’ve been making a real, unglamourous difference in many communities across the state.

Some of groups—all of which are multi-faith, but within which Protestant Christian congregations (Methodists in particular) invariably provide the largest number of supporters—include Topeka JUMP (Justice Unity and Ministry Project) in Shawnee County, MORE² (Metro Organization for Racial and Economic Equity) in KCK and KCMO, Churches United for Justice in Wyandotte County, the Good Faith Network in Johnson County, and the organization I know best, Justice Together in Sedgwick County. I’ve written on the latter organization multiple times before, and I’m proud to be a supporter of their work. But all of these organizations, representing tens of thousands of believers in the Bible’s messages about inclusion, charity, compassion, and justice, have pushed for the creation of municipal IDs (which help homeless individuals begin to rebuild their lives by applying for jobs and aid), for setting up affordable housing funds (which helps bring downward pressure on home costs in genera), for holding corrupt city officials accountable for their crimes (which helps increase trust in government and thus makes more legitimate collective efforts to aid those suffering from abuse and poverty), for creating additional services for those struggling with mental health or facing gun violence, and much more.

Have they been successful in all their work? Not remotely. For example Justice Together, after much internal discussion, elected to throw their weight behind an ill-conceived (but still, in my opinion, defensible) sales tax proposal in Wichita, entirely because of the funding it would have guaranteed to anti-homelessness and affordable housing programs, a decision that ended with egg on their (and my, and many others’) faces. But that hasn’t dissuaded them. Here in Wichita, at a recent town hall on the city’s 2027 budget, Justice Together brought out over 130 people to press their case for the importance of trying once again to secure through the ballot a stable, enduring source of funding for affordable housing and homelessness support, as well as other issues. As Justice Together co-president (and old friend of mine) Rabbi Andrew Pepperstone said at the start of the meeting: “We will not avoid this crisis; we will not stop; we will not be silent.” The turnout was so large the meeting had to be moved to the main city council chambers, and the power of their voice (and vote) was acknowledged throughout the evening.

To some, of course, the efforts of these organizations, and the numbers of faithful Christians supporting these progressive causes, is easily dismissed. In their mind, Christian engagement in politics remains the natural property of conservatives, and they point to how some progressives across Kansas have reacted with hostility to the entrance of Methodist minister Adam Hamilton into the race to be the Democratic challenger to Senator Roger Marshall as evidence for their presumptions. That hostility is mostly online and isn’t terribly loud, in my judgment, but it would be foolish to pretend that it isn’t real. In a low-turnout primary election, it might even be enough to sink Hamilton’s chances with the Democratic electorate (despite some of those same voters supporting churches engaged in the social justice work mentioned above).

At an event where Hamilton met with local voters in Wichita last night, I was impressed with how forthright he was regarding this particular challenge. For decades, Biblical language has been publicly owned (at least among White voters and those soliciting their support) by folks on the conservative side of the aisle; Democrats have spent decades articulating secular self-justifications, and sometimes some outright defiance, in response. Given all that, there is bound to be some members of the Democratic primary electorate who will insist that no minister, and certainly no person who—as is obviously appropriate when one works in a pastoral context, as Hamilton has for more than 30 years—approaches some of those same “matters involving personal sexual identity and behavior” with a recognition of and respect for the “tensions” which surround them (he shared a story about his own family history which, in another context, would have sounded like a set-up for an anti-abortion rights argument, except he turned it around into a case for supporting reproductive rights) will ever win their vote. How can someone like Hamilton reach them? Certainly not by downplaying his Christian approach to political questions; he knows that would be impossible, in the same way that organizations like Justice Together understand that eschewing Biblical arguments when they make their case simply undermines the whole point of their existence. The ways in which those inspired by the progressive or egalitarian aspects of the Christian message express themselves publicly have to reckon with pluralism in a way that wasn’t the case decades ago. That’s a complication, to be sure, but also one that aligns the character of the society we live in today—and that, perhaps, is an advantage, however small.

In any case, the history of Kansas shows us that Christian priorities were once as likely to be expressed by Democrats as by Republicans in this state. While that, obviously, has changed a lot over the years, it’s not like the language of faith as an important motivator for collective change ever entirely disappeared from the small liberal corners of Kansas. Expressing it today can’t be something done in same manner as decades past, but this election season, it’s heartening to see a variety of individuals and organizations looking for new ways to keep that expressive process going. I hope they succeed.

Kathleen Jolley Fox, 1945-2025

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent] 

By the time my youngest brother, Baden, and I arrived at the Spokane Valley Hospital in Washington state on Thursday, November 13, 2025, our mother, Kathleen Jolley Fox, was no longer truly communicating with others. Baden and I, residents of Nevada and Kansas respectively, had the furthest to travel out of our seven other siblings to get to our mother’s bedside. Afterward he and I spoke with each other, wishing that we’d called from the airport that morning, just for the chance to speak with Mom before she began her final decline. But at least we were able to be there with all our brothers and sisters when she passed away, and that was the most important thing.

Like all my siblings, I had time to hold my mother’s hand and listen to her breathing slowly weaken throughout the afternoon. She had still been conscious and speaking with my siblings that morning, following the family conversation on Zoom the previous Wednesday evening, when our mother decided, in agreement with the doctors tending to her, not to pursue another, rather risky surgery, and instead to forego any further curative care. There was no discussion or announcement following that call, but we all independently recognized our need to journey quickly to our old home state of Washington, to be part of the inevitable. But after the pain drugs she was given around mid-morning, she fell into a slow torpor, which continued for more than a day, well into Thursday. I don’t know if she was ever even aware of me while holding her hand, on and off, during those hours. I hope so, but do not know.

When one of her oldest grandchildren, McKenna, a daughter of my brother Stuart, arrived at our deathwatch later on Thursday afternoon, Mom surprisingly rallied enough to say her name. She also, that evening, as discussion was taking place about who would stay in her hospital room overnight, unexpectedly responded to a question, and said that she wanted her second daughter, Marjorie, to stay. And then, very early on Friday morning, as nurses moved our mother to prevent bed sores and check her dressings, she moaned and struggled and pushed back loudly. But other than that, there was no interaction with her children or grandchildren or anyone else around her, nothing that could give Baden and I any reason to hope for a final connection before her end.

Except, actually, for one other interaction, one that stays with me strongly, though it was completely silent. It involved another one of my brothers, Philip, who on Thursday afternoon attempted to give our mother some ice chips, seeing as she hadn’t eaten or drank anything since first thing in the morning. I was standing nearby her bed when this happened, and saw Mom’s reaction. Her eyes were suddenly sharp, shooting daggers at Philip; she tightened her closed mouth, shook her head, and her hand and fingers flailed in opposition, rebuking his efforts. I watched this, and thought: she’s dying, and knows she’s dying; she can feel herself passing away, and wants it, and absolutely does not want anyone, not even a beloved child, to interrupt or prolong the process. What I heard, silently, was very clear: leave me alone; I’m done; let me go.

 **** 

When I was in high school and competed in debate, our tournaments were almost always held on university campuses, and during our tournaments, I would always strive to find the time to visit the college’s bookstore. I loved those stores, and the environment of intellectual advancement and adventure that wandering down their stacks of books enabled me to conjure up. I would pretentiously pick up academic copies of classic texts, imagining the day when I would be taking classes in history and literature and philosophy far beyond that which my high school offered. So it wasn’t surprising that one day, I think in my sophomore year, I came home with a complete copy of Dante’s Divina Commedia (the classic John Ciardi translation). 

What was surprising is that I actually read it, all three volumes, unlike so many books that crowded my shelves and which I probably enjoyed at least as much for being able to run my fingers along them, reading their titles and feeling their pages, as for anything I could learn from their contents. I didn’t purchase them because I had any preternatural interest in late Medieval poetry; actually, I probably bought those volumes solely because of a comic book that made use of Inferno in describing the origin of a particularly diabolical super-villain. Nonetheless, I not only read all the way to the end of the first book, but worked my way through Purgatorio and Paradiso as well–and one part of the latter has never left me. 

In the final two volumes of the Commedia, Dante’s imaginary travelogue through the afterlife, his guide has been Beatrice, his muse. But towards the conclusion of his vision of heaven Beatrice ascends beyond him, and Dante is ushered into the Empyrean, wherein dwells God Himself. Dante’s eyes are enabled to behold a beatific vision: a realm of pure light and pure love, wherein all the angels and saints and saved are arrayed, outward and endlessly and all around, like petals of a glorious, cosmic, celestial rose. All is fulfilled; all is in a state of perfection. And of those within this state of celestial grace, Dante writes:

There is a light above, which makes / Visible the Creator unto every creature / Who only in beholding Him has peace (Paradiso, canto 30, lines 100-102) 

It’s difficult to figure out exactly why this invocation of divine peace has stayed with me for so long. Much of it, surely, is tied up in the many complicated ways I have, over the decades, tried to situate my own sense of God's creation and purposes within my own spiritual experiences, my membership in the Mormon church, my always-evolving understandings of scripture. But at least part of the reason it has stayed with me, I’m certain, is Mom. 

**** 

Ours was a very patriarchal family, though mostly in a default rather than an intentional manner. There were seven boys and two girls in the Fox family, and our father, James Russell “Jim” Fox, was charismatic and commanding, though not someone who strove to be comprehensively involved in the lives of his children. So long as our basic behavioral choices (church-attending, tithe-paying, only-other-members-dating, etc.) reflected his and Kathleen’s deep commitment to the LDS Church–and almost without exception, our choices did–perfect obedience and perfect harmony were not something Dad expended a great deal of consistent time or energy attempting to achieve. Predictably, especially when one adds the variables of being raised in the 1970s and 1980s on farms that had plenty of open pasture and thick woods and multiple mostly empty old buildings to wander around, hide, and plot revenge in, ours was a family of young men (and, occasionally, our sisters as well) who were regularly shouting at, fighting with, and sometimes bleeding on each other.

Mom did not deal well with all this chaos, though some years were better than others. She loved her children absolutely; she had nine, she said many times, and would have had more if her health had allowed, because she was always curious about, delighted by, and genuinely in love with whatever the next one would look like, and how she or he would turn out. But the constant craziness and near-constant contention of her children as we grew up was absolutely wearying to her, and her own inability to respond to it correctly, at least in her mind–to keep the house clean, to keep the children orderly, to keep herself presentable, and so forth–filled her with frustration. (She would reminisce with me occasionally in later years about how she would go into my bedroom while I was growing up, and just sit quietly on my bed, soaking up the calm environment created by her–then and still–somewhat obsessively neat-freak son.)

In retrospect, perhaps one of the ways she sought to balance out the weariness and frustration was with snark. It was so common for her to follow her husband’s lead, to stay silent when he spoke, that the times when she would issue a joke or reproach or a sarcastic correction would always come as a surprise, which only added to their sharpness. Kathleen absolutely had passions and interests and opinions that went far beyond the patriarchal, mid-20th-century conservative Mormon world that she committed herself too and firmly identified with; I hope that for most of her married life, those other aspects of her personality provided an alternative to her always feeling the full weight of every choice, every mistake, every argument, every conflict that her children were drawn into (or just came up with on their own). The fact that she was, by and large, during the busiest years of our growing up, to my memory mostly a happy and kind and laughing woman, gives me reason to believe that was so. Still, the weariness and the sadness that attended it was undeniable as well.

Once, during a family meeting wherein Dad was attempting to lead his rambunctious brood in developing a family motto, Mom, who had written “Love One Another” on a pad of paper where she was keeping track of suggestions, scratched it out as the family meeting descended into another one of its all-too-frequent bouts of chaos, and wrote “Hate One Another” in its place. (This was not an unique instance; throughout her life, Mom kept lists, writing down inspirational quotes, or conversely, recording of how sad life with the Foxes, with all the sometimes disappointing–to her, that is–choices they made, could be.) Add to this her long struggles with health issues, with being overweight, with what would almost certainly be diagnosed today as depression, and the fact that some of her children’s strongest memories of her are not necessarily her reliable expressions of love–which were never doubted–but rather those moments when her joy in her family was broken up by mistakes, apologies, weeping, or (more commonly as the years went by) retreats to quiet seclusion in her bedroom with her movies–is no surprise.

At one point our father became a passionate fan of Taylor Hartman’s thoroughly unscientific “Color Code” personality assessment; he and Kathleen took the test, and all the older children did as well. Dad was, unsurprisingly, a strong Red: assertive, inventive, a born leader. I asked Mom what the test revealed her to be. I was expecting that she’d be a Blue, the empathetic, maternal care-giver. I was surprised–though as the years went by I no longer was–by her answer: White. “Peace,” she said to me on the phone. “I just want peace; I just want quiet; I just want everyone to get along and leave each other alone.” That’s something I don’t think I could have seen in my mother when I first read the lines above from the Commedia as a teen-ager, but it haunts me now. 

 **** 

Whether my father was made by the cultural and doctrine of Mormonism, or just found it a perfect fit for the person he was, is an unanswerable question. What is undeniable is that the milieu Dad created for himself, imagined for himself, worked and prayed and served for in connection with himself, was Mormon to the core. He was LDS American busy-ness personified: always setting goals, making plans, accepting callings, starting projects, borrowing money, giving counsel, shifting funds, giving lessons, bringing lawsuits, preaching sermons, being sued, opening accounts, leading prayers, arranging vacations, making deals, and more; the idea of our father fully at rest is almost inconceivable. The words of Joseph Smith presented as a revelation in Doctrine & Covenants 130:2–“that same sociality which exists among us here will exist among us there,” presumably referring to the activity which will exist in the heavenly afterlife–has long since become a part of Mormon folklore, and it is a way of understanding eternal activity, engagement, and progress that fits our experience of Dad perfectly.

Personally, I find that promise of Smith’s an existential horror, and thankfully impossible to imagine actually being true. The “sociality” of human existence, the phenomenology of our daily-ness, is wholly defined by the banalities of our fallen, broken character, and our embodied limitations: unexpected delays, embarrassing remarks, mislaid plans, accidental lies, frustrated schedules, false presuppositions, misunderstood comments, unforced errors, harmful distractions, mistaken identities, rude fantasies, failed witticisms, and the thousand other mix-ups and indiscretions that give rise to the hidden confusion, quiet annoyance, unarticulated resentments, and general consternation that everyone experiences. Not everyone experiences them in the same way, of course: some they drive to distraction, or even despair, while others find ways to manage them, transcend them, or just keep themselves so busy they barely know they are there. But the way they wear us down is, I think, inextricable from being human.

To imagine a world where the Savior’s grace burns away all our enervating imperfections and quotidian foolishness would have to involve, I believe, imagining a world without business hierarchies, social obligations, scheduled meetings, family relations, civic arrangements, first impressions, and all the rest; whatever kind of “sociality” it would have, it certainly couldn’t be anything like what the work and weariness of the mortal world has prepared us for. Some of those who fully embrace the folkloric (and I think maddening) implications of D&C 130:2 come around, in my observation, to implicitly agreeing with the above sentence, and therefore choose to deny the burning promise of salvific transformation entirely. God’s power, to their mind, becomes merely the power of a smart mechanic, a talented artisan, a genial human resource operator: heaven is just a continuation of what we already have on earth, and the eternities are nothing but management, only management, all the way down (or rather, up). To the skilled who have spent their lives joyfully cracking their knuckles and matching their wits and waking up early and leaning in and trying again in the midst of the ever-busy, never-ending machine that is the universe God created, this might not appear problematically unChristian (though I think it actually very much is). But regardless, maybe, just maybe, if one can untangle oneself from Mormon folklore, one might be able to imagine the eternities instead as being a place without the temporality of interaction at all. Maybe it could be a place of being seen, and loved, fully and finally and eternally, with no further obligations entailed and no continuing actions required. Maybe it could be like a beautiful rose, an endless celestial circle of petals full of light. Maybe, just maybe, it could be a place of rest, of peace.

**** 

I’m sure all these memories have been intensified and shaped by Mom’s struggles during the years which followed our father’s entirely unexpected and profoundly distressing death on September 19, 2016. The distress was not because of Dad’s suffering; his death was instantaneous, a random stroke while golfing alone early one morning. (He would routinely wake up very early and head to the golf course to play 18 holes by himself, because partners would slow him down.) The assumption which everyone, including Mom herself, had long held was that Dad would long outlive his wife, and that he would be able to care for her and protect her privacy until her end. With the terrible loss of her husband of 51 years, Mom’s life was upended. In the years that followed, she sometimes enjoyed long stretches of stability and peace on her own at Foxhill, the family home on tall hill overlooking Otis Orchards, WA, which my father had built for the whole family nearly two decades before. But eventually, her ability to take care of herself greatly declined, and her dependence–costly in terms of time, and increasingly complicated in terms of the emotions involved–upon my brother Jesse and my older sister Samatha, the two siblings who still lived in the Spokane area, became unsustainable. Up until the very day we moved our mother into a full-time care facility, she wanted to stay at Foxhill. The changes she faced then were deeply painful, because they meant a change of space, a change of routine, a change in the patterns that she’d fallen into–and Mom, I came to understand only as an adult, had spent her whole life building, for those she loved as well as herself, patterns and expectations that could be relied upon. I can only imagine how difficult their disruption could be.

On my proselyting church mission, I ended up serving for nearly a full year in a South Korean city named Suwon. Mom and Dad came to pick me up at the end of my mission, and we toured around South Korea. On our last night of visiting Suwon, after a church meeting where I was able to introduce my parents to people I had long known and say some goodbyes, I was frustrated, feeling antsy and unsure and unfulfilled. So I sneaked out of our hotel room, and I spent one last night in Suwon, wandering the city. I came back to the hotel believing I’d had the experience I was looking for–and I discovered my parents awake. I can’t remember anything specific about that 3am encounter, except one line as we settled back to sleep: my mother begging me, “Please stay.” It took me years to begin to recognize how confused, frustrated, or terrified my mother must have felt that night, in a country where neither she nor her husband could speak the language, in a hotel room where their connection to the culture around them had left in the middle of the night without a word–and especially since, knowing my father, aware that there was nothing he could do, had probably promptly fallen back asleep after I sneaked out, while Mom waited all through the hours while I was gone.

Perhaps, in the end, our mother was tired of waiting–waiting for her body to finally shut down, waiting for her to be reunited with Jim. She would talk about wanting to die and be with her husband once more casually with her children and grandchildren; while sometimes her time at Guardian Angel Homes enabled her to make new connections and take up new practices, more usually she would fall into ever more sad and slow routines, staying alone in her room, watching movies, separating herself from church, finding even close associations with her children sometimes hurtful and depressing, as her expectations shrunk further and further. Eighty years, after all, is a very long time to live. Perhaps she’d lived enough.

When her health seemed to require yet another trip to the hospital, yet another surgery, yet another set of burdens (this one would have been a colostomy bag, a continued increase in the likelihood of further infections, and likely even more pain), we all could understand her decision. The very last words that I spoke to her that I know she heard, on a Tuesday evening phone call, the day before the end was made clear, were words of trust: “You know your body and spirit better than anyone, Mom–we’ll support whatever you do.” She replied “Thank you,” and kissed me through the phone connection. There she was, thanking me and showing loving appreciation, as though it was me who needed to give her permission to make the most personal decision imaginable–a decision to finally, at last, not focus on the future, not accommodate other people’s plans, not make arrangements and adjustments but to accept the end that would come, and look forward to it gratefully. I doubt she felt these preoccupations that haunt me now, but that doesn’t make them, as I weigh them in my heart, any less true.

**** 

Kathleen Jolley Fox died on Friday, November 14, at 1pm, less than two days after entering the hospital for the final time. By early in the afternoon her breathing had slowed even further, and he face was turning pale. The family decided it was time, and all seven of her sons–all of us Melchizedek priesthood holders as the Mormon faith understands such things–laid our hands upon her body to pray, with my oldest brother, Daniel, giving voice to our desire that she be released from this life. And her waiting ended. I hope, immediately thereafter, she found herself in God’s glorious presence, a petal enveloped in love and light and a timelessness free from any kind of wearying work and waiting. And, since we really can’t know what the afterlife is truly like, I hope there is, somehow, nonetheless some element of Mormon folklore present there as well, so that my father can, as he always did, find joy in making himself weary with organizing, serving, planning, doing. And finally I hope, in that eternity, that when he takes an occasional rest from his work, he can be like a bee landing on a flower petal–because Mom, at rest, would likely rather simply abide attentively in the presence of her eternal partner more than anything else.

 

Two Comments and Two Questions about Religious Liberty

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent] 

Last week I attended the "Kansas Summit for Religious Freedom," a gathering designed to provide representatives of multiple different faith traditions here in Wichita, KS–Christian, Judaic, Islamic, Buddhist, and more–to share thoughts about and perspectives on religious pluralism. [In the attached photo, from left to right: Rabbi Emeritus Michael A Davis, Congregation Emanu-El; Gehad Qaki, Islamic Society of Wichita; Senior Pastor Rev. Dr. Robin McGonigle, Riverside Christian Church (Disciples of Christ); Sriraman Kadambi, temple priest at the Hindu Temple of Greater Wichita (with his son, Srivas Kadambi, providing translation); and Micah Fries, Director of Programs, Multi-Faith Neighbors Network.] The theme of the gathering--which was primarily organized and paid for by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Mormon church I belong to; the main sponsoring organization, the Religious Freedom Alliance Council, was founded in Provo, UT, and is led by BYU faculty and graduates--was "Religious Liberty and Human Flourishing." I appreciated much of what I heard there; it gave me some good things to think about. Unfortunately, the summit wasn't designed to allow for much audience interaction, so I came away with a couple of questions that I really would have liked to have heard some of the speakers discuss as well. So instead, I'll share them here.

The comments first. The presentation the event’s keynote speaker, Dr. Hannah Smith from BYU Law School, mostly covered data that I suspect many who are even just remotely interested in the topic of religious liberty, from whatever ideological perspective, has heard before: that regular participation in a religious community is one of the strongest variables that point towards human flourishing, such as levels of personal happiness, physical and mental health, social connection, etc. The data on this is voluminous (though as with anything, particularly anything that involves the social sciences, there is always contrary data as well). But what really struck me was her argument about how a strong defense of religious liberty contributes to the spread of these positive correlations across society.

Leave aside how exactly to define “religious liberty” (a contentious argument which Smith did not get into); let’s assume that however you define it, its presence will result in more religious believers and organizations exercising their liberty by expressing themselves more fully in more diverse ways. Presumably, that would mean—again, leaving aside exactly how theses expressions would be manifest in the context of actually existing religious organizations, many of which are not entirely friendly to doctrinal or theological diversity within their ranks—more religious institutions offering more religious visions to more ranges of religious perspectives and preferences. That would in turn mean greater levels of competition in the religious marketplace—and such competition will in its turn result in more religious institutions, and their members, necessarily involving themselves in the civic-strengthening work of discussion, engagement, compromise, moderation, and more.

I would have loved to discuss this more deeply with Dr. Smith. It’s a Madisonian framing that I’d never thought of before, one which presents religious diversity in terms of factions that will be obliged—because there are so many of them, thanks to the aforementioned liberty—to negotiates with, learn from, and adapt alongside other religious factions, thereby creating a kind of ongoing civic lesson to all involved in any of those religious organizations. It’s kind of an ingenious argument, though how exactly one is supposed to hold on to a utilitarian conceptualization of religious liberty while also holding on to doctrinal devotion to one’s own religious faction isn’t an easy question to answer, I think. It places the whole theologico-political problem on a liberal footing that I suspect at least few leaders of my own LDS Church, if they understood the implications of this philosophical shift, would have some real concerns about. But it’s a valuable intellectual framing of the problem of pluralism, nonetheless.

Less philosophically weighty, but much more pastoral and wise (perhaps for that reason), was a concluding address given my old friend James Fleetwood, a retired judge and a man I served as a counselor to in a bishopric a decade ago. Rather than touching on any of the contentious debates over or even definitions of religious liberty, Jim focused on the need to peacefully engage with others, and specifically on the Christian requirement, in his understanding, to treat all others’ belief systems with respect, so as to become the sort of people who can love another as God loves us. He organized these ideas primarily around the centrality of sacred spaces–temples, yes, but also mosques, synagogues, and more. Such spaces provide for the faithful with both connection and revivification; as such, the claim of religious groups to spaces of holiness must be respected as much as those making the claims themselves. Here I am expanding upon Jim’s ideas somewhat, but it seems to me that he was describing a more demanding obligation than just respecting “belief,” because sacred spaces are, well, spatial, and therefore social and political. Religious worship is not a merely intellectual exercise; it is a bodily one. Thus, seeking peace in the midst of pluralism involves real concrete acts of respect: sharing spaces, shared participation, and more. One of his lines will stay with me for a while, I think: “Respecting the reverence of others refines us.” If there could be a better summation of what any meeting about religious liberty ought to teach, I can’t think of it.

Okay, so much for comments; now the questions. 

First, a more general one, which again I really would have liked to have been able to talk with Dr. Smith about. If we are to understand that religious liberty will benefit society through her Madisonian model, then presumably it does so through enabling people to find greater numbers of ways to attach themselves to religious factions and organizations. But doesn’t that mean that anything which discourages people to attaching themselves to and engaging with others through religious factions and organizations is actually hurting the cause of religious liberty? Because if that’s the case, then there is a, perhaps small, but still very real problem here.

That problem, specifically, is that the concept of “religious liberty”—once more, however you want to define it—has over the past 25 years been broadly appropriated by, and therefore has become coded as supporting, politically conservative, anti-LGTBQ forces. It obviously doesn’t have to be this way, but both the polling data and the legal record provides good reason to acknowledge the reality of that association, or at least the perception of that association, the religious liberty movement’s involvement in fights over parents being able to shield their children from stories involving homosexual persons (Mahmoud v. Taylor) or over the legitimacy of licensed therapists being able to provide “conversion therapy” to gays and lesbians (Chiles v. Salazer) getting as much or more attention than the fights it has engaged in on behalf of minority religious groups. And that association is driving people away from religious participation—not a huge number of people, but the negative effect of religious bodies involving themselves with politically conservative causes is quite real.

Please note that I don’t see this as a “gotcha!” problem for religious liberty. Personally, I’m not a First Amendment absolutist, as I suspect most of those who presented at the summit were; on the contrary, I tend to see strong readings of the First Amendment as creating at least as many social problems as goods (Buckley v. Valeo, Snyder v. Phelps, Janus v. AFSCME, or National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie, just to start). But still, there’s nothing flawed with the priority that many attach to religious liberty—including the new president of the LDS Church, Dallin H. Oaks. It’s a valid and important principle to defend. I would just like to see people wrestle with the costs of defending it, particularly when those costs include at least some degree of discouraging people from benefiting from the involvement they might have gained through association with religious organizations in the first place. (Of course, this is overwhelming a problem faced by socially conservative Christian churches, including Mormonism; more liberal Christian, Jewish, Islamic, and other religious bodies really don’t face this dilemma at all—which, unfortunately, too often means the former group gets to dominate the discussion when religious liberty comes up.)

Another question, tangentially related to the one above, but even more directly connected to matters of First Amendment interpretation. Lance Kinzer—a smart Kansas lawyer and former legislator whom I'd met and interacted with before—gave a presentation that dove deep into the details of various current and past court cases, on both the state and federal level, dealing with matters of religious liberty. A consistent through-line in his presentation was the problems which Employment Division v. Smith—a case which overturned previous First Amendment precedents and stipulated that the amendment’s guaranteed religious freedoms should not ever provide exceptions to “generally applicable” criminal or civil laws—has posed for religious organizations over the years. Specifically, he wanted to see the post-Smith standard of simply asking whether the government has a “rational basis” for imposing a possible burden on a religious body overturned, and to bring back the “strict scrutiny” rule for judging the constitutionality of any possible burden which essentially existed before that 1990 decision. 

That’s a position that I basically agree with—but it’s one that also presents some conservative defenders of religious liberty with an inconsistency.Specifically, multiple conservative churches (including my own LDS Church) have written a legal brief urging the Supreme Court, in the case Little v. Hecox, to refuse to grant the plaintiffs—transgender athletes who are suing the state of Idaho, arguing that a state law which denies transgender individuals the ability to complete in sports aligned with their gender identity is a violation of the right to be treated equally—a “quasi-suspect” classification. This is deep legal nerdery here, but to make it as simple as possible: past Supreme Court decisions, going back many decades, have articulated various categories of plaintiffs whose standing in American society are either more or less likely to trigger various standards of scrutiny when it comes to judging the impositions and restrictions of laws. For more than 70 years, race as consistently been labeled a “suspect class” and has thus been accorded “strict scrutiny,” with the result that laws which discriminate or burden citizens differently on the basis of race, whether intentionally or unintentionally, are almost always found unconstitutional. Gender, beginning about 50 years ago, has been labeled a “quasi-suspect” classification, which in practice means that laws which end up burdening people on the basis of gender are not as likely to be found unconstitutional as those which do so on the basis of race, but are more likely to be so found than those distinctions which merely have to pass the “rational basis” test.

I think advocates of religious liberty are correct to want to get back, broadly speaking, to that era of constitutional interpretation when the First Amendment freedoms guaranteed to religious bodies necessitate that laws which restrict or regulate churches and other religious organizations have to pass the strict scrutiny standard. But I also think that if churches ought to enjoy such projections from the state, that gender and sexual minorities—like trans individuals that want to compete in sports—ought to be able expect similar protection as well. That’s only consistent, right?

The LDS Church and other conservative religious groups navigate this inconsistency by pointing out that previous interpretations of the rights of churches has included their right to be exempt from laws that make it illegal to fire someone, under certain religious conditions, for being gay or transgender; the same goes for laws having to do with public accommodation or public aid. These interpretations would have to be rethought if the classification of those burdened by what is allowed under those exemptions were to change. They’re not wrong to point that out! Consistency on this point of law would obviously require a whole new set of balancing tests be worked out, probably over a long period of time, and I have no idea what such balancing tests might eventually look like. So it doesn’t surprise me that someone who makes religious liberty their primary concern would rather leave things as they are. But then, if you want to leave things as they are, then why the wish (a justifiable one, I think) to upset current legal balances by hoping for an overturning of Smith?

Point is, these are deeply complicated issues, and they invite a lot complicated trade-offs and difficult arguments. I wouldn’t expect every gathering of folks speaking on behalf of religious liberty to make room for a consideration of all this—but since this particular gathering, valuable and insightful as it was, really didn’t allow for any formal debate, so here I am, making my contribution to such here. Consider it an expression of gratitude for all the important ideas that were voiced by those who participated (at least I hope they see it that way.) I appreciated it being part of it very much!

Rauch Among the Mormons

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

Jonathan Rauch’s Cross Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy, the latest book by the longtime policy journalist and public thinker, argues three things:

--first, that throughout American history Christian churches have played an essential role in enabling our liberal democracy to properly function;

--second, that America’s Christian churches (mostly, though not exclusively, Protestant ones) have of late abandoned this role, and by so doing have contributed to the breakdown of liberal and democratic rules and norms in American life;

--and third, that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has continued to model exactly the sort of role which historically American Christian churches had once played, and that therefore, the more the rest of American Christianity can learn from and perhaps even emulate the Mormons–very specifically, the room which he believes LDS doctrines and practices make for a pluralistic civic theology–the healthier America’s democratic culture and institutions will be. 

Given the praise contained in that third point–and given the philosophically liberal presumptions which underlie it–it’s not surprising that Rauch and his book have received a positive, bordering on enthusiastic, reception among intellectually-inclined mainstream American Mormons, while a small philosophically (as opposed to merely politically) conservative minority have viewed Rauch’s arguments far more suspiciously. Who is right? Assessing that requires considering Rauch’s claims in somewhat more detail.

Rauch is well-known as an advocate of classical liberalism and political moderation; indeed, a large part of his reputation as a writer has been built on the fact that he is both an unapologetic atheist and a gay activist, yet neither reasons nor votes the way most Americans would stereotypically assume a gay atheist would. Throughout his career, Rauch has presented himself as a consummate pragmatist, always asking careful questions and eschewing any kind of controlling ideology. Of course, as with pragmatism generally, this kind of evidence-based, practical-minded worldview does tend to support a particular ideological position–namely, a classically liberal, utilitarian, and secular one, in the spirit of John Locke, Adam Smith, James Madison, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill. Early in Cross Purposes, he describes his ideological preferences (though without calling them that) succinctly: “the modern tradition of freedom, toleration, minority rights, and the rule of law.” In support of such aims, he sees “three linked social systems” as essential: “liberal democracy to make political choices; market capitalism to make economic choices; and science and other forms of open critical exchange to make epistemic choices” (p. 12). He is and long has been a consistent defender of responsible, thoughtful, but nonetheless total individual choice, in matters of politics and economics and religion, unfettered by custom or community.

Still, he's no libertarian. He knows that there are things that he does not and perhaps cannot know, and thus needs reign in his drive for individual autonomy and trust at least to a certain degree in the slow, patient work of ideas and options through society and culture. It is that conservatism in his nature which has led him, a non-believer, to take seriously the historical role that Christianity has played in the development of the American democratic system that he prizes. In the book, he repents of his one-time intellectual over-reliance upon the separation of church and state when addressing social and political problems; he now views his youthful celebration of “apatheism”–the ideal of simply “not caring very much one way or another about religion”–as “superficial” (p. 5). Instead, he now believes “not just that secular liberalism and religious faith are instrumentally interdependent but that each is intrinsically reliant on the other to build a morally and epistemically complete and coherent account of the world” (p. 21).

In his view, since secularism and freedom of choice cannot fulfill the human need for belonging and meaning, and since the Christian religion cannot escape its inability to account for the physical laws and the moral horrors of the universe, what is necessary–and what he believes that “the United States has been generally good” at for most of its existence–is for both American Christianity and liberal democracy to do their part in holding up the walls of our civic home. Creating an environment wherein this balance can be maintained requires “that the Constitution be interpreted in a way which is consistent with the well-being of law-abiding faith communities, and that God’s work be interpreted in a way which is consistent with the well-being of democratic pluralism” (p. 33). The rule of liberalism in matters of politics and law must always accommodate religious exceptions, he affirms–but at the same time, the rule of Christian faith in society and culture must always give way to liberal protections and rights. This is a complicated balance, but it is one Rauch has confidence in, and one that he seeks to persuade his secular readers to be confident in as well.

Having laid his foundation, Rauch proceeds to build an argument that aligns with a good deal of other contemporary sociological research and political observation. First, that over the 20th century, mainline Protestant churches became less culturally distinct, losing their ability to mold their parishioners and implicitly direct them towards the virtuous role they had historically played in America’s civic order. And second, that Protestant churches which rejected the mainline’s compromise with secular liberalism gradually moved in an ever more partisan direction, adopting a paranoid and conspiratorial version of Christian teachings which Rauch refers to as “the Church of Fear.” This transformation led them to acquiesce to–and eventually triumphantly embrace–the vulgarity, immorality, and cruelty of Donald Trump’s paranoia and defensiveness as their perfect political avatar. And while I will not deny that my personal political judgments are a factor here, I would still insist that the passages where Rauch brings receipts, showing how thoroughly un-Christian it is to support Trump and the party he has built in his image, are really the best in the whole book. 

Rauch shows how evangelical (again, primarily Protestant) Christians have dismissed their previous insistence upon personal character in judging candidates, and in so doing ignored Trump’s criminality; how their gleeful identification with Trump as a cultural fighter has underscored how little faith they actually have in God’s providence; and how their embrace of what Rauch calls “sharp Christianity” has prevented them from articulating even a semblance of adherence to the Christian imperative to forgive and love, rather than fight and punish. It is, frankly, a damning indictment–and since he believes that those imperatives have been central to the develop of the civic culture within which American democracy developed, it is an indictment of Trump’s Christian supporters as un-American as well. All of which leads him to conclude:

[S]ecular liberalism and Christianity have separate purposes. They do not need to ally (and should not); but they do need to align, at least well enough so that democracy’s wheels don’t come off. . . . In that respect, we seculars are entitled to hold the church accountable to the democracy of which it is part. We are entitled to hold it accountable for the choices it makes. While the church’s relationship with God is its own business, secular Americans are justified in reminding our Christian friends that the Church of Fear is toxic for them and for us. We are not out of our lane to suggest that what Russell Moore calls 'confident Christianity'–one which 'constantly reminds us that this life is less important than the next [and] demonstrates something of what it means to forgive and serve one another'–needs repair for all our sakes. In short, we have standing to hope, perhaps even insist, that Christians get their act together (p. 89).

As I wrote at the beginning, Rauch believes American Mormonism provides a model of action that Christians could use a blueprint to repair themselves. But should we accept as accurate his overarching historical account of American civic pluralism? Should we accept as correct what he sees within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as contributing to it? And if we do not accept one or both of these, does that mean the conservative critique of Rauch is correct? 

Let’s begin with what I assume to be the most obvious problem (at least for the likely readership of this essay; were I a Roman Catholic, Rauch’s Protestant-centric account of America’s civic culture would probably rankle even more). Any Mormon who is remotely familiar with our own history ought to be prompted to ask Rauch why his initial description of the American bargain between Christianity and democracy doesn't incorporate an explanation for the profoundly anti-pluralist attacks on Mormonism that defined its nineteenth-century development. After all, perhaps the single greatest argument that America’s liberal democracy was not, in fact, built within the liberal civic walls he describes was the official exclusion and persecution that violently drove the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints out of the United States entirely. And this is not a parochial point; placing nineteenth-century anti-Mormonism alongside slavery and Know-Nothingism as clear signs that America’s Protestant Christian civic culture was heavily dependent upon racial, ethnic, religious, and gender exclusion is broadly accepted as a key component of any historically honest consideration of America’s civic identity.

Yet the only discussion of this defining example of religious oppression in American history which is present in Cross Purposes isn’t to be found Rauch’s description of the intellectual components of America’s liberal democratic culture, as it should be; rather, it appears as one of the motivating reasons why Mormons–on Rauch’s reading–are so supportive of that democratic culture: “the modern church’s...memory of persecution has bred sensitivity to the importance of religious freedom and pluralism” (p. 108). Contrary examples from Mormon history–like Brigham Young’s politically illiberal State of Deseret or the economically illiberal United Order of Enoch–receive no mention in the book. Joseph Smith’s Council of Fifty does get a mention, but even that rhetorical embrace of religious authoritarianism–however quickly abandoned–is instead presented entirely in terms a defense of freedom and religious choice, emphasizing how “Smith went so far as to...propose constitutional revisions requiring ‘the armies of the government’ to enforce ‘principles of liberty’ for all people, not just the Protestant majority” (p. 110). That Rauch passes over the complications of Smith’s not-always-coherent embrace of both religious authoritarianism and republican freedom, to say nothing of other explorations of very real authoritarian alternatives present throughout American history is, perhaps, predictable, but still unfortunate.

My point here is not to claim that LDS church members (like myself), or Americans generally, necessarily must have some secret, ambiguous authoritarianism historically buried in our belief system. (Not that the rise of Trump hasn’t led some historians of American religion to suggest exactly that.) Rather, it is to claim that Rauch’s understanding of America’s liberal democracy and its relationship to expressions of religious faith, both as a matter of history and a matter of theory, is simplistic, and it requires papering over many ideas and actions that cannot be neatly arranged into a straightforward argument against the terrible choices which Christian churches that have embraced Donald Trump’s person and agenda have made, however worthwhile such an argument may be. 

Rauch makes a good deal of the LDS doctrine of agency, and connects that doctrine (one which, under Rauch’s reading, stipulates that, as all of God’s children have the ability to make choices, the process of choice–if not necessarily the end result–must be respected and tolerated and negotiated with) to several passages in sermons and speeches of President Dallin H. Oaks: “Oaks argues for an alignment between God’s moral constitution and Madison’s political one. Speaking for the church, he sees patience, negotiation, and compromise...as social and spiritual ends unto themselves” (p. 96). Rauch’s discussion of Oaks’s ideas is thoughtful, and his connection of them to larger LDS perspectives on matters dear to Rauch’s heart (he describes the surprise passage of the “Utah Compromise” in 2015, which provided protection against housing and employment discrimination to Utah’s LGBTQ population, as “inspirational”–p. 100) is obviously sincere. But it is difficult to square his praise of Utah Governor Spencer Cox for apologizing to LGBTQ Utahns for his past offenses in 2016, with his silence regarding Cox’s vocal support for Donald Trump and opposition to the interests of trans individuals in 2024, or his quotation of polls from 2016 and 2020, showing comparatively low levels of support for Trump among LDS Republicans, while failing to note more recent polls which show that support for Trump increased among all Mormon demographics in 2024. To be sure, these snapshots are part of a complicated story. But a complicated story about LDS history and culture–one where our appreciation of personal agency and public spiritedness is deeply entwined with our own particular, prophet-idolizing Church of Fear–is not what Rauch wanted to tell. 

In some ways the critique of Rauch made by conservative–or “post-liberal”–Mormons is thus correct here. Ralph Hancock’s pointed challenge--“how can religion ‘align’ itself with liberalism...without at some level in or some way ‘supporting’ Rauch’s liberal (that is, atheistic and ‘scientific’) understanding of truth and of humanity?”–is a hard one for those desirous to accept Rauch’s conflation of being a good Mormon and being a good (that is, non-Trumpist) modern American to deal with, and his fierce dismissal of Rauch’s key theological claim about Mormonism–“his understanding of ‘agency’ is neither a remotely adequate phenomenology of human choice nor a serious rendering of LDS belief”–is undeniably true. Unfortunately, Hancock’s conservative rebuke of Rauch’s longed (and simplistic) for rapprochement between liberal principles and Christian churches in America is also, in it’s own way, superficial. Rauch’s summation of the message of Christianity as “Don’t be afraid. Imitate Jesus. Forgive each other,” is obviously incomplete, and designed to point out an easy alignment between Jesus and his hero James Madison. But it is a substantive message, nonetheless, one grounded in a deep conviction of and commitment to Jesus’s loving, sacrificial gift of grace. To claim, as Hancock does, that the characteristics of Christianity which Rauch correctly condemns many Christian churches for having abandoned in their partisan, paranoid embrace of Donald Trump--namely humility, forgiveness, and tolerance--are somehow actually insufficient to allow for a “substantial participation as Christians in public life” is pure nonsense (or at least, nonsensical assuming one accepts such giants of liberal Christianity from Dorothy Day to William Sloane Coffin to Fred Rogers to Eugene England as Christians, which I assume Hancock would, though perhaps only with large, grudging asterisks beside their names).

To be fair to Hancock, none of those Christian leaders had to explicitly confront what he considers to the primary challenge to maintaining a substantive Christian anthropology today: namely, gay marriage and other assorted LGBTQ issues. Rauch himself frequently underscores how difficult these concerns–or indeed, his own marriage to his gay partner–are for certain Christian believers, which is again what brings him back to the LDS church, and how he believes its chastening failure in the fight against same-sex marriage made it re-dedicate itself to its supposed inner liberalism: “After its Proposition 8 debacle in 2008, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has foregrounded those elements of its faith which harmonize with America’s constitutional order” (p.120). Rauch believes, in short, that even Mormonism’s illiberal elements (which he does not theologically explore) point in the direction of a Christianity at peace with pluralism and negotiation. The LDS church changed regarding plural marriage and the priesthood ban on Blacks, after all, and yet it remains a substantive, in no sense “thin” church. So why shouldn’t the rest of Christianity follow its example, and make its way through a culture supportive of gay rights respectfully too? And it is this prospect which most horrifies conservative critics of Rauch’s vision of Mormonism–in Hancock’s words, the fear that “LDS church members have been insufficiently appreciative of the positive cultural and evangelical effects of the church’s alliance with Roman Catholics and others” in opposing gay marriage; the fear that the institutional church, in its drive to “participate in the fashioning of legislative compromises” over LGBTQ issues, will not fully attend to the “trade-offs of these compromises and their long-term effects”; and the fear that Mormons will take a little too seriously the idea of “peacemaking,” which comes “perilously close to endorsing not only the fundamental dignity of all God’s children, but even the ideological self-understanding of those with whom we find that we must compromise.” These are the sorts of terrors that will keep those who find the substance of their Christian faith mostly fully defined by few passages from Paul’s Letter to the Romans and a few pages from Spencer W. Kimball’s The Miracle of Forgiveness awake at night, that’s for certain.

Surprisingly to me, I find myself thinking that President Oaks’s words provide a better guide to the complexities of maintaining a binding Christian faith in the midst of a world of individual choice, as well as a better guide to the doctrinal imperatives behind such supposedly banal principles as showing respect to and non-violent acceptance of those whom one disagrees with, than do either Rauch or his critics. Rauch celebrates Oaks’s comments from the University of Virginia in 2021, “Going Forward with Religious Freedom and Non-Discrimination,” but that speech leaves aside explicit consideration of LGBTQ issues, mentioning them only in passing, preferring to avoid any explicit reference to doctrines or ideas, and instead endorsing the view of a colleague that practical, informal, non-rule-based trade-offs often work well in addressing questions about compromise where “abstract principles sometimes cannot.” Hancock describes Oaks’s General Conference sermon “Balancing Truth and Tolerance” as a “classic address,” highlighting its martial language “We are cast as combatants in the war between truth and error. There is no middle ground.” However, he seems to fail to fully appreciate the sermon’s very next sentence: “We must stand up for truth, even while we practice tolerance and respect for beliefs and ideas different from our own and for the people who hold them” (italics added). The post-liberal rejection of Rauch’s version of Mormonism appears to insist upon a supposed distinction between respect and tolerance, between people and the beliefs they hold--Hancock in fact goes so far as to state that it simply isn’t possible for religious believers to function honestly in an environment of democratic compromise while holding to a doctrinal understanding that their opponents are “profoundly and disastrously wrong.” Yet that admittedly hard, deeply Christian thing is pretty much exactly what Oaks is calling the Mormon faithful to do. 

Rauch is too much of a secular liberal, too committed to open inquiry, to automatically assume that any one view is “profoundly and disastrously wrong.” In contrast to the paranoia of the post-liberals, Rauch’s view of Christianity–even that Christianity which he believes has been horribly twisted into an advocacy for authoritarianism–is neither dismissive nor domineering; on the contrary, he holds up the minority position, what he calls the “exilic mindset,” as something profoundly honorable (p. 135). Like Oaks, Rauch understands the virtue of those see the world in accordance with a different truth than he. (In his General Conference address, Oaks insisted that, even when believing Mormons enjoy a majority position in a community, “they should always be sensitive to the views of the minority,” something that those members of the LDS church who have become convinced that they, and their conservative Christian allies, stand alone, defending Western Civilization, against the woke and LGBTQ hordes, perhaps ought to be reminded of.) So while Rauch’s articulation of that virtue is far from philosophically complete, he has nonetheless perceived something about kindness and respect, compromise and forgiveness, something that too many Christians in America have forgotten. If this gay atheist has found a way to use Mormonism–or at least one small, perhaps insufficiently developed part of it–to call those Christians (including some members of our own tribe) back to those principles, we owe him our thanks, and ought to listen to him as well.

Minding Laurie Johnson’s Gap

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic] 

President Trump has been in office a month as of today, and the maelstrom of orders and actions which he has taken has elicited delight, horror, and/or confusion from many. In the midst of it all, I find myself still thinking about the Never Trumpers. I live in a mostly conservative state, and am a life-long member of a mostly conservative church; hence, the relatively small number of Republicans I know who still dissent from the faux-populist posturing, paranoid postliberal muttering, and borderline criminality that has overtaken most of what passes for politically “conservative” thought these days tend to really stand out. They’re honorable folk, these teachers and police officers, filmmakers and military veterans, farmers and parents and good friends, and the criticism they receive from their supposed ideological allies when they refuse to celebrate the latest mad (or Musk-influenced) order from Washington DC is painful to watch.

I don’t know if recommending Laurie Johnson’s fine book, The Gap in God’s Country: A Longer View of Our Culture Wars, to them would provide them with much solace, but it certainly couldn’t hurt. Johnson identifies herself at the start of the book as “an early ‘never Trumper,’” a registered Republican who broke from her party as she saw the conservative movement she’d long identified with turn into a “right-wing capitalist-friendly ethnically based populism” that idolized “an ill-equipped, seemingly unbalanced nationalist” (who also just happened to be a “narcissistic and unstable reality TV star”—p. 11). If you find such language describing the current occupant of the White House inaccurate or indefensible, then Johnson’s book probably isn’t for you. But that would be unfortunate, because the book—which was written and came out before the 2024 election—actually gives a pretty balanced assessment of Trump’s appeal to the sort of culturally conservative and rural voters whom Johnson (who, like me, lives in Kansas; she teaches at Kansas State University in Manhattan, while I teach at Friends University in Wichita) knows well.

Johnson’s book is sometimes meandering, but always thoughtful; as she writes at the outset, she thinks that the time for “narrow but safe and sure scholarship” (p. 12) is past, at least for her. Her overarching aim is to sketch out the long history of intellectual developments which have, in her view, turned inside out the positions she once held to, positions which most long assumed were deeply rooted in the cultural practices and perspectives common to our shared home in the Sunflower state. In turning to radical thinkers both right and left, Johnson's account of these developments turns primarily on, first, a process of “dislocation”—both material and moral—which has uprooted the cultural foundations for diverse, stable lives and sustainable living environments which were built up over generations, and second, a process of “strong-arming”—both ideological and religious—by which we submit to or participate in a collective attempt to paper over deep disagreements or deeply inhumane assumptions about the lives we live. I think her account is, ultimately, a wise one—but as someone who thinks Trump’s presidency was and will be appalling, I would think that, wouldn’t I?

Johnson is a complicated thinker and a careful writer; those looking for facile diagnoses and easy prescriptions also won’t find this book to their liking. She interchangeably employs both political psychology and political philosophy in building her arguments, making use of everything from sociological examinations of cults to complex agricultural economic data to the history of Bible translations to reflections on television sitcoms along the way. But consistent throughout her analysis is the attention she pays to “domination,” and particularly the cultural and social effects of economic dominion.

Johnson does not frame that domination in terms of class; she’s no Marxist, though she thoughtfully explores what she thinks his philosophy both got right and got wrong. Rather, the domination that she feels far too many of her fellow citizens have chosen not to see or have failed to see clearly is primarily ideational. American individualism, she argues, has been led to its current alienating and disempowering state by the way market-oriented and technology-obsessed thinking has come to permeate even the most basic institutions and practices of ordinary life—in our schools, churches, families, and communities. The domination of the calculating liberal individualist model has not only pushed us away from one another; it has cramped our appreciation of the real-world diversity and richness which open cultural engagement and collective action ought to allow. The omnipresence of “free-market liberalism,” in Johnson’s view, has reached the point that it “shares some of the totalitarian aspects of more openly apocalyptic revolutionary regimes,” with its insistence that “marketplace thinking works equally well for all people in all times and places” (p. 33).

The alarm she expresses at the effects of the homogenizing success of the so-called “American way of life,” as she has come to understand it, is present in every chapter, whatever its specific focus. She sees our valorization of this image in “the imperative to be efficient in the making or acquiring of …goods and services” (p. 99) when writing about human anthropology and psychology; and she sees it in the “politicized Christian opinion leaders” that focus parishioners solely on “worldly ends” (p. 228) when writing about political theology. Near the book’s conclusion, she puts forward a lengthy jeremiad that perhaps comes closer than any other single passage in the book to being an overall thesis statement about how she sees this constrained notion of liberal freedom and economic success as having warped American life:

Let me be perfectly clear. If you are concerned about the current state of our culture because of its contentiousness, seemingly amoral nature, the way it breaks up families, our loss of community, and the every-swifter march of secularization, look no further for the cause than the economy that thoroughly dominates us. Our “freedom to choose” does not stop at our toothpaste brands, though it apparently increasingly does stop at being a small businessperson or a small farmer. We are also free to choose to stay married or not, depending on how we feel. As we have less real choice due to our mounting social stratification and precarity, our “freedom to choose” necessarily gets more and more intensely expressed in our personal moral choices and lifestyles, as well as our stylistic choices. If you don’t like the way the kid down the street dyes their hair purple and wears tattoos, remember that they’ve been taught that the pinnacle of American freedom is in accumulation and personal expression. In effect, we are all in a constant state of flux, and yet we are taught to fear the actual trans person, the one who has the courage to disregard the superficial freedoms most Americans “enjoy” every day because they feel in their interior person that they are not what their exterior says they are. Before we launch any more assaults on our trans neighbors, we need to consider the largely life-frittering ways in which the rest of us are inauthentically fluid, and change our own ways if we do not like what we see (pp. 274-275).

The language by which Johnson condemns the consequences of liberal capitalism--its competitive demands, its expectations of constant change, its condescending charity, its mentality of disposability, its victimizing of those who fall behind, and most of all (echoing Wendell Berry here) its stultifying assumption of “inevitability”--has many echoes, and she does a superb job integrating the many facets of this sort of non-Marxist (though clearly Marx-influenced) cultural critique together. While her analysis mostly bypasses recent integralist critiques, Johnson is clearly respectful of those Christian thinkers who have called for a collective retreat from our corporatized capitalist state. However, reading through her broad-ranging assessment of how the dominance of market values and personal choice has warped American life, and torn a “gap” in structures of community life—a gap which, in her view, Christian churches and those who populate them have overwhelmingly failed to sew back together—makes it pretty clear that she has no interest in fleeing towards some reactionary religious position. (Some of this is plainly personal; twice in her book she details ways in which church communities she was part of simply failed to address the needs of suffering parishioners or to even understand what those needs were, in ways that both involved and affected her directly.)

Johnson’s training as a political philosopher was grounded in the classical liberal tradition, and it’s one she holds to. As such, she blanches at the idea of “a return to some sort of benevolent aristocracy/oligarchy” (p. 231). For her, religious strong-arming and economic domination have mostly developed in tandem, in opposition to a proper articulation of the rights we can exercise in communities built through work and cooperation, free from the worship of political saviors or Silicon Valley “innovators.” That freedom—a small-scaled civic one—won’t be achieved through revolution; as much as she clearly appreciates Marx’s assessment of power under capitalism, she’s not looking for any new vanguard (much less new government programs) to lead us forward.

Rather, Johnson’s hopes—to the extent they exist; her writing is more realist than romantic, and she is better at providing information than inspiration—lay in a different sort of movement, one more focused on recovering habits of work and association than affirmations of identity or authority. Her concluding chapters look closely as distributism and the Catholic Worker movement; she has praise for both, but also gentle criticisms, partly because she is clear-eyed (in ways that more than a few of their advocates are not) about some of the bottom-line realities of exploring these alternatives to capitalism: that is, having less money, less resources, less “stuff” all around. But making due with less is one thing that Johnson can speak to as something more than an academic and critic.

Johnson was instrumental in setting up the Maurin Academy, a multifaceted organization which includes both a farm and a school, one which seeks to provide both content online and food in-person, all in a way which challenges both profit-mindedness and state dependency. Inspired by the legacy of Peter Maurin (the co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, along with Dorothy Day), the idea is to provide a place for the kind of “persistent, often unglamorous work” that she believes—and, I think, has argued persuasively for in her book—is “real and compelling” in the way that life defined by our corporate capitalist and governmental masters is not (p. 269). She recognizes that what they are doing could easily be categorized—especially in the absence of shifts in the state and federal money which keeps our exploitive food systems operating as they have for decades--as just more “quixotic attempts at economic and social experimentation,” but what else, she says in her conclusion, can we do? “We can smile and talk all we want about the benefits of localism, farmers markets, and mutual aid, but how many of us even remotely approach consistently adopting those practices?” (pp. 286-287)

Johnson’s book may not be the antidote to the Trump years which her (all too rare) sort of small-c conservative might need. But she is at least living out, in part, her own retreat from the corporatizing of disruption that seems to be the American lot, at least for the next four years. She is walking her talk, and as much as there are ideas and arguments her book that I admired and learned from (including a few I strongly disagreed with), I find the person she actually is even more admirable still.

Justice Together: Praying, Planning, and Partly (but Not Yet Entirely) Pushed Aside in Wichita

[Cross-posted to Wichita Story]

Before Christmas, I had some complimentary things to say about Wichita’s city council. Here at the end of the year, though, my thoughts are more critical—though this is really a story about an organization of citizens here in Wichita, one that has pushed and challenged the city council, with some (but not total) success.

Justice Together, an association of nearly 1500 volunteers from nearly 40 Wichita-area congregations, synagogues, and other religious bodies, made local history several months ago, when, at a major public assembly, they pressed and received commitments from various elected leaders that certain positive steps would be taken to assist the homeless population of Wichita. Their well-researched calls for 1) more free bus passes for those with mental health needs, for 2) more staffing for on-call psychiatric assistance, for 3) a sustainable budget plan for completing and operating the planned Multi-Agency Center (MAC) which aims to bring together resources for homeless individuals, and for 4) a free municipal ID program, all remain on the table. But two weeks ago a proposed set of changes to how the city deals with homelessness threatened to derail the compassionate efforts that Justice Together, along with many other municipal organizations (Wichita’s Coalition to End Homelessness deserves much credit here), had pushed for.

Fortunately, Wichita’s city council was convinced (or pressured) to bypass the worst feature of these proposed changes, and the role JT played in that effort (in over two hours of public comment before the city council on December 17, 21 of the 24 speakers opposed the proposed changes, and more than a third of those were associated with Justice Together) deserves praise. Still, the fact that the other changes which passed through the council on a 4 to 3 vote will increase the ability of law enforcement to treat homeless individuals from a criminal rather than a compassionate perspective is evidence of how much more, and perhaps how much further, the kind of activism JT represents has to go.

As was pointed out by multiple speakers (as well as a couple of members of the council from the bench), the proposed changes in Wichita’s policies were less rooted in local changes (though Wichita’s homeless population has increased, as it has in cities both large and small across the country, for dozens of often intertwined reasons) than they were in national decisions. When the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its majority decision in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson last summer, making it clear that criminalizing “public camping”—a euphemism that we all know is ridiculous (“camping” is a voluntary recreational activity, while sleeping or residing outside without shelter in public places is practically never either of those) but seem doomed to use anyway—would not be considered an unconstitutional punishment someone for their condition, but would instead be considered a nominally constitutional punishment of an action, the door to more aggressive enforcement of anti-homelessness policies was kicked wide open. Honestly, those of us Wichitans who recognize both the increased costs as well as the lack of compassion which the further criminalizing homelessness entails should probably be grateful that the city’s proposals didn’t go any further than they did.

As someone who has been associated with Justice Together since its beginning in early 2023, I received word of the prayer meeting being planned for the day of the city council meeting. Multiple faith leaders set the tone for the dozens who gathered for the meeting by emphasizing that pushing back, in whatever peaceful way we can, against adding burdens to the lives of those suffering from whatever mix of causes—poverty, trauma, mental illness, drug or alcohol addiction, or all of the above—which had left them living without permanent shelter was a shared religious demand. As I’ve written before, JT is not a radical organization; rather, it is a serious, careful, realistic group of believers, who work in the tradition of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1) researching and proposing responsible plans premised upon compassion and justice, and then 2) presenting their plans before elected leaders in ways that create tension, thereby hopefully forcing action and progress. That was the plan a few weeks ago, with a summary of the changes Wichita’s government was proposing and an action plan laying out a bullet-pointed list of Justice Together’s primary concerns handed out beforehand. (The individuals in the photo above, from the Justice Together prayer meeting before the city council chambers on the morning of December 17, are, from left to right: Pastor Chad Langdon of Christ Lutheran Church; Deacon Lory Mills of St. Bartholomew’s and St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church; Justice Together Co-President Rabbi Andrew Pepperstone of Ahavath Achim Congregation; and Rev. Dr. Karen Robu of Plymouth Congregational Church.)

Topping the list of those concerns was that the city, in the wake of Grants Pass, intended to “remove a requirement that a shelter bed be available for anyone displaced by an encampment removal”—in other words, to no longer oblige law enforcement to confirm that there are beds available at public shelters before enforcing anti-“camping” rules and forcing a homeless person to move from whatever location of rest they’d found for themselves. This central issue was highlighted by Rabbi Andrew Pepperstone, the co-president of Justice Together, when he stood to speak before the city council (two other speakers, Revs. Travis Smith McKee of the Disciples of Christ and Jacob L. Poindexter of the United Church of Christ, later underscored Rabbi Pepperstone’s demand): the “removal of bed space verification” from those tasked with the often ugly task of disrupting the attempt of the homeless to find a secure corner or underpass somewhere in public space has, in his words, “no compassionate rationale that I can conceive of.” He challenged the city council to strip that policy change from the proposal, which resulted in some city leaders playing hot potato, suggesting that this odious proposal was really just a matter of police protocol. But thankfully, whomever ultimately owns this obligation, the result was a positive one. The policy changes voted on ended up preserving this restriction, thus making it at least still slightly difficult for those experiencing homelessness to be forced to move and to abandon many of their possessions like herd animals and not human beings.

Justice Together also opposed, along with other groups, expanding the number of city workers who could wield that kind of police power against the homeless, another proposed change which the city council was convinced to drop. Unfortunately, though, the other priority of JT—opposing “a change to shorten the notice to vacate period before an encampment is removed, from 72 hours to 48 hours, and in some cases, allow removal without notice”—went through. Perhaps that’s unsurprising; the city staff made it clear in their presentation to the council that there was, functionally speaking, only two elements of the proposed changes which they considered truly substantive: getting rid of the bed requirement, and allowing for the more immediate removal of homeless persons and the clean-up of their sleeping locations. Despite complaints that went far beyond the religiously motivated—there were speakers who challenged the proposed ordinances from libertarian perspectives on human rights, and conservative speakers who pointed out all the additional costs which ramping up enforcement requires—Wichita will, beginning probably in mid-January, join the host of American cities that are responding to the increase of the homeless population with even more criminalization, even if conjoining that with some additional compassion.

That additional compassion is obviously vital. Justice Together’s slogan for their (in retrospect, only partly successful) action was “Invest in a Fully Funded MAC, not Criminalization of Homelessness,” and there was much discussion of how to move forward with finding the funds necessary to keeping the plans for the MAC on track, and many supportive words from city council members for doing so. (There was an update on plans for the free municipal ID as well, which still seems to me likely the most important single non-structural action Wichita could take to assist the city’s homeless.) Ultimately, though, those who have dedicated so much time and effort to Justice Together must now consider their next steps.

Do they accept this defeat and continue to focus on pushing our elected leaders on the social justice issues which they have not foreclosed? That seems most likely; what JT’s volunteers are best at is speaking practically about policy options and researching how other cities have funded programs or dealt with changes in the legal landscape is the kind of action that appeals to their skill set best. But there is also the possibility of reconsidering what kind of, and how much, tension they can productively generate—perhaps while looking towards this year’s municipal elections, with the aim of changing one of those 4 yes votes. Becoming an interest group which actively promotes or opposes candidates would give Justice Together a very different and much more contentious vibe, yet political challenges are part of the toolkit of any successful advocacy organization, whether they’re used or not. (Sometimes, simply the knowledge that an organization could organize their forces—in this case, many hundreds of mostly middle or upper-middle class Wichitans in dozens of well-established religious congregations, the great majority of which are likely voters—can be persuasive enough.)

Justice Together has worked with and through the religious faith of thousands of Wichitans over the past 2 years to advance the conversation about social justice in our city. As a supporter, I am curious to see how its leadership will continue to try to advance our shared ideals, even as the opposition to some of what has been labored over pushes back. As in so many other ways, 2025 will be a very telling year.