There is a certain audacity to Ross Douthat’s newest book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. It’s not the fire-and-brimstone sort. Douthat writes in his familiar style: winsome, musing, occasionally self-deprecating. He seems ready, as always, to entertain an opposing view. The New York Times columnist is often dismissed by right-wing critics as a milquetoast, noodle-spined squish, and in this case, that argument writes itself; Douthat has written an apologetic tract that doesn’t even specify which religion readers should join. It’s a rather, well, unorthodox approach.

Look at this glass from another angle. It’s commonplace that religious faith has been in decline over the past several decades. That trend is plausibly connected to many others: falling birth rates, eroding family life, the crumbling of social cohesion and public morals, and the rise of frightening new ideologies and pseudo-faiths. How odd, then, that more energies aren’t directed towards re-converting the secular (woke? Pagan?) world. Churches agonize about the uphill battle to retain their own young people; angry influencers preach despair to the disillusioned choir; traditionalists across the globe gravitate to Benedict enclaves or strongman leaders. When religious people are flocking to political fantasies (neo-integralism, “common good capitalism,” Christian Nationalism) that’s generally a bad sign that hope is fading. But now, here’s Douthat, strolling cheerfully into the virtual agora making his pitch to all and sundry: try religious faith! It’s good for the soul! 

It’s audacious. And who’s to say it won’t work? Believe is primarily a work of apologetics, not social commentary, but it invites reflection: could this be the most significant social-political development of the next few decades, instead of the AI revolution, renewed great-power conflict, elite overproduction, eco-radicalism, transhumanism, the collapse of the nation-state, or demographic death? Consider the possibilities.

The Pitch

Douthat doesn’t take his stand for “religion-in-general” because he is ashamed to be publicly Christian. The final chapter of the book does in fact present a brief apologia for Catholic Christianity, under the guise of “the author as a test case” for the book’s broader principles. It’s effective. One of the many virtues of Believe is the way it illustrates the nuance and complexity of real-world religious commitment. Religious affiliation doesn’t just mean parading around in an invincible dogma-cloak, reveling in a sense of confidence and rectitude. Religious beliefs interact in recognizable ways with “normal” beliefs (because they are, in fact, quite normal). 

A pitch for religion-in-general opens unique opportunities to address the sort of person who is deterred from exploring religious faith, not by strong conflicting commitments, but more by a vague sense that religion is dated, repressive, or pie-in-the-sky. Some people may just fail to see the point of going to church (or a synagogue, mosque, or temple). Even if they crave richer sources of meaning, it can be hard for the citizens of wealthy, individualistic societies to see past the obvious downsides of submitting to religious authority. Americans aren’t big on being told what to do. 

Douthat addresses all of these prejudices and concerns very deftly, covering considerable ground in remarkably few pages. The first two chapters expose many of the weaknesses of materialism, with its inability to give a satisfactory explanation either for the ordered universe, or for the rational mind’s ability to understand that universe. He notes (tipping his hat to the recent work of Spencer Klavan) that the quantum revolution has only intensified the difficulty of these questions. Today we find scientists rolling out complex, fantastical-sounding ideas (like “multiverse theory”) to avoid coming back around to distasteful possibilities like “the God hypothesis.” Perhaps it’s now materialism, not religious faith, that is dated and dogmatically unwilling to adjust its paradigms to account for new discoveries.

Having presented his arguments for the basic rationality of religious belief, Douthat goes on offense more aggressively with a chapter on religious experience. The world, he contends, is not at all “disenchanted.” Again he spreads his net wide, discussing a range of supernatural or mystical phenomena: visions, charismatic raptures, naturally inexplicable events (miracles?), and near-death experiences. Offhand, this might seem like one of the easiest chapters for the skeptic to dismiss. Almost all of these occurrences are anecdotal, subjective, and prime fodder for hoaxes or embellishments. Douthat acknowledges this, but still raises some thought-provoking points. The one that most stuck with me concerned near-death experiences, which have been reported by people across many different countries and cultures. There are some fascinating similarities in the various accounts, and while one could hypothesize that this is just a bracing byproduct of almost dying, there is something rather strange about that. Why would people so frequently have intense, lucid experiences at precisely the time when their brains are barely functioning (to the point where some were ruled medically dead or believed to be dead)? Is it not reasonable to see this as at least some evidence that there might be something waiting for us on the other side?

The middle portion of the book shifts its target from materialism to a cafeteria-style or “not religious but spiritual” approach to belief. For a person seeking truth and purpose, it is reasonable (and indeed quite advisable!) to do some exploring in the religious landscape. But the goal, Douthat suggests, should be to get somewhere. There’s a reason why the great faiths have lasted for centuries, and while it might be possible to glean something good from a religious tradition through an a la carte approach, the rewards of commitment can be far richer. It’s hard for a tradition to offer serious protection against error (either intellectual or moral) if you’re only willing to accept the pieces that have immediate surface appeal. Commitment opens the way to community with fellow believers, who can offer both friendship and reinforcement. Finally, most serious faith traditions have deep stores of wisdom that can only really be tapped through years of formation and discipleship. This shouldn’t be surprising to anyone, considering that more or less everything else in life is like this too. If you want a rich and full appreciation of a sport, a style of music, a language, a body of literature, chess, aikido, or birdwatching, you naturally expect to spend considerable time acquiring knowledge and skills, and cultivating the appropriate sensibilities. Would we expect great religious traditions to have less depth and nuance?

As a backdrop to these middle chapters, there is a lingering question: what’s a good enough reason to join a religious community? Is it necessary to have firm convictions before taking the plunge? Are you a hypocrite if you recite the creeds at church even though you’re aware on some level that you’re not actually sure what you believe, and are largely just there to make friends? Throwing off the faith of one’s fathers used to be seen as a form of liberation, but today many people feel trapped in their unbelief. They might want a religious tradition and community, but they have no authentic connection to any existing faith.

Douthat’s approach to this is quite permissive. He notes that no one really has fully adequate justifications for their religious convictions or any other life-defining paradigms (meaning the cultural, social, and political views that shape our behavior in all sorts of ways). We are all to some extent a product of our time, circumstances, and mixed-motive decisions. Holding religious commitments to an unattainably-high epistemic standard seems counterproductive. With that in mind, Douthat gives an overview of philosophical, theological, and liturgical considerations that might help people find a faith harmonious with their present views and inclinations. But he also “gives readers permission” to practice a faith for familial or cultural reasons, or as part of an exploratory process that could ultimately lead someplace else. 

There are good reasons to favor this “water is warm” approach to religious exploration, given the tenor of our times. It’s absolutely true that modern people are inclined to impose wildly unrealistic epistemic and integrity-related demands on religious commitments specifically. (This was one of the driving insights of Alvin Plantinga, who pressed the point very effectively in the world of academic philosophy.) The problem of religious hypocrisy may still be a bit more serious than Douthat’s work suggests. In joining a faith, one is usually expected to make certain promises or public professions of faith. It’s not entirely bad if people see these as commitments of a particularly serious kind, which one perhaps should not undertake whimsically in the spirit of freewheeling spiritual adventurism. The topic merits further exploration.

However that may be though, the final discussion of “Why I Am a Christian” is disarming in its unaffected sincerity. “I make my bet on Jesus,” Douthat concludes, explaining why the Gospels move him in a way that no other spiritual text has done. I am his fellow traveler in this regard: in my early adulthood, as a not-Mormon-anymore-but-now-what wanderer, I examined some world faiths (Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism) but found I could not seriously consider walking away from the Gospel of Matthew. Douthat offers this as a data point, but it’s a kind of witness too. For modern readers accustomed to “up from religion” narratives (wherein the spiritual explorer finds his way out of a committed faith, like a provincial villager discovering The Big World) there is something slightly astonishing about this conclusion. Douthat has amply proven his religious-cosmopolitan credentials. He knows the landscape. The fact that he’s still willing to recite the Credo without reservation or apology is perhaps the best possible endorsement of the book’s larger thesis: It’s good to believe.

The Hope

Why think that Douthat’s hyper-direct approach to cultural reform can be successful when it’s clear that religious faith has been declining across the world? “As recently as the early 1990s,” says a 2022 Pew survey, “about 90% of U.S. adults identified as Christians. But today, about two-thirds of adults are Christians.” Other faiths have encountered similar headwinds, and the trends don’t seem to be notably reversing themselves, at least if one believes much of the recent literature on the subject. That’s just the American situation, but the collapse of faith in some other Western countries has been far more dramatic. 

In his introduction, Douthat explains some of his reasons for cautious optimism about the possibility of a comeback for religious faith. Across his years engaging New York Times readers, he has perceived a change in attitudes towards religion. Once, the default position was dismissive, and many readers clearly understood its rejection as a kind of liberation. A few years further down the road, people relate to unbelief differently. “More and more of my readers,” Douthat writes, “seemed to experience secularism as an uncomfortable intellectual default, not a freely chosen liberation. More and more seemed unhappy with their unbelief. And whenever I wrote about the decline of religion in America, a rush of emails arrived from readers saying that honestly they wished they could believe, that they missed the consolations of churchgoing or envied people raised with some sort of belief—but still and all, isn’t it just too difficult to be a thoughtful, serious modern person and embrace religious faith?”

Though I’ve been out of the classroom for a decade now, I had similar reflections in my late years as a philosophy instructor. My own cohort, and the students I taught at Cornell in the early 2000s, tended to be reflexively dismissive of religion, and students would sometimes describe for me, with obvious pride, how they abandoned their childhood faiths. (I myself converted to Catholicism in this period, and my fellow graduate students especially found this confounding.) By the mid-2010s, the undergraduates seemed to be shifting from hostility to frank curiosity concerning religion and traditional morals. A growing share of them simply hadn’t been exposed in a serious way to any religious tradition. They didn’t seem to mind if I displayed my Catholic colors in the classroom. It was merely unusual and interesting. 

The sad irony of aggressive political responses to progressivism (such as neo-integralism or Christian Nationalism) is that they may undercut real opportunities that are already on the table. The modern world offers possible substitutes for religious faith, but these tend to be deeply unsatisfying. A life of consumption and flash-in-pan activism gets boring after a few years. The benefits of putting down roots (geographically and spiritually) become more evident over time. 

In the end, some measure of traditionalist optimism is surely justified if one believes both that the modern world is philosophically adrift, and that the great religious traditions have rich stores of precisely the goods that modern society most lacks. If people get hungry enough, won’t they eventually eat?

The Horizon

There are obvious benefits to a rejuvenated religious landscape. Maybe people will be happier, less lonely, and better able to form healthy families and communities. That, in turn, might diminish the attraction of less-healthy fixations, from violence to porn to unhinged social causes and political ideologies. Perhaps we could even expect more moral rectitude from our politicians and cultural influencers! Dare to dream. 

Of course, sincere religious commitments can drive all sorts of movements and cultural trends, not all of them healthy. It’s worth reflecting on this point more deeply, because a widespread return to religious faith could carry both enormous benefits and also certain risks, and some challenges might be more manageable if they’ve been anticipated in advance.

Pluralism is an ineliminable part of modern life, and no one will benefit from a return to fractious wars of religion. At the same time, the past few decades have amply justified Richard John Neuhaus’ warnings about the hazards of “the naked public square.” There is an obvious need for continued efforts to think through the complexities of religion in public life, with the goal of enabling people of different convictions to live together peacefully without compromising their integrity. 

There is a theological component to the puzzle, as well as social and political components, and the two can be interrelated in deep ways. Conservatives will do well to keep in mind the close relationship between freedom and the capacity for self-governance. Thriving religious communities should contribute to a vibrant culture and civic life, potentially in many ways but especially by helping to form citizens capable of freedom. A free society, meanwhile, has a strong interest in protecting the integrity of the religious communities that form and foster their citizens, and that make life worth living. 

Today that may sound like a naïve, Pollyannaish ideal, but perhaps it only seems so because religious traditionalists have become so habituated to the defensive crouch. Putting trust in princes often seems easier than serious philosophical engagement, if only because the political realm is more reliable about offering concrete goals: elections to win, bills to pass, party platforms to build. It may not be necessary to persuade people to believe if you can make them say “Merry Christmas.” 

For my money, Douthat’s approach looks more promising (even for the attainment of this-worldly social goals). The West’s cultural landscape looks bleak in all sorts of ways, but there may be a surprising number of people out there who want to believe.