Ross Douthat on Why Everyone Should Be Religious

Ross Douthat spoke earlier this year both with Cherie Harder of the Trinity Forum on February 21, and at the Catholic University of America on February 6 about his new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, and whether or not there may be a new opening for religious belief after a period of twenty-first century secularization.

Responding to a More Secular America

Harder observed that Douthat seemed to have a “lower bar” in his new book than in his 2012 book Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics: “Your aims were perhaps a little bit lower here. With Bad Religion you really kind of went after heresy and made the argument for orthodoxy.” With the heresies that have become widespread, there are not only spiritual dangers, but also “civic dangers,” Harder noted.

But with the new book Believe, Douthat seemed to be asking only for some kind of religious belief, not belief in any particular religion. Harder asked why this was. Douthat responded “have you lived in America through the last fifteen years?” Since the publication of Bad Religion, “American Christianity has really just gotten weaker.” This is seen in denominational decline “from my own Catholic Church to the Southern Baptist Convention.” Since 2010, we have seen “the first large-scale cohort of Americans really raised without any kind of religious tradition.” Before that, traditional Christianity at least tangentially affected most Americans. In the earlier era, self-help books at a bookstore would outnumber those on “astrology and tarot cards.” Now the occult books may predominate.

Harder observed, however, that Douthat “is making the case that religious belief is not just an option, but an obligation.” How is this consistent with the doctrine found in the New Testament that salvation is a gift, she asked. Douthat said that salvation is indeed a gift, but it is also something which the believer has to make his or her own. Yet the individual must understand truth before he or she comes to saving faith. He referred to Paul’s encounter with pagans on Mars Hill. There Paul told them that the true God had “already put signs and indicators that should have been enough to push you in his direction.” He asked what in the twenty-first century “are the signs and indicators that should impel people toward some religious conception before you reach the point of accepting Jesus, reading the gospels, etc.” This is the “general revelation” in nature, seen in the fine-tuning of physical constants, the origin and complexity of life, intelligence and the problem of the relation of consciousness to physical reality, and the widespread occurrence of seemingly supernatural experiences (miracles or the paranormal). His book ends with an explanation of how Christian faith fits in with this general revelation. This means that there is an obligation to respond to the Christian gospel.

Three Signs of the Supernatural

Harder asked Douthat to expand on the three signs identified (design in the universe, consciousness, and miracles) and also about the validity of a “mytho-poetic” approach to Christian faith, which is impressed by its meaning and its relevance to our lives without addressing whether or not it is true.

Douthat said that his new book does not use the mytho-poetic approach to Christianity. He said he is not saying that “the problem with the modern world is that it is too rational and scientific, and we need to return to our mythic foundations.” While he does not think that such a claim is “all wrong,” his appeal is to objective reality. Among other things, “there’s good evidence that miracles actually happen … The mytho-poetic case for Christianity makes the most sense if in fact there is a hard material case for believing in God, believing in an order of the universe, and believing in the historicity of the gospels.”

Douthat wants particularly to appeal to people who find the mytho-poetic approach inadequate in evaluating the Christian gospel. There is a “basic unity and mathematical order to the universe” which has “been supplemented just in the last few decades by all of the evidence for the extraordinary fine tuning of the cosmos.” This has meant that atheists and materialists have turned to belief in unseen worlds to justify their denials of God, specifically appealing to the possibility of a “multiverse” to explain the probability of a visible universe precisely ordered to allow life and intelligence. Douthat sees this as “a retreat from real science into a kind of gnosticism.” Christians and other theists are today “making the Occam’s razor argument” about what the universe tells us about ultimate reality. Materialists are “spinning theories about epicycles and contrivances” to maintain their view of physical reality.

He then turned to the problem of consciousness, which he believes “is impossible to understand in materialist terms.” Part of this mystery is the fact that human consciousness is able to grasp concepts of nature and order in the universe. This ability, along with the “mystical and religious experiences” that people still have in the modern world, Douthat believes, is enough to indicate that a religious conception of the world which goes beyond a simple deism and in which interaction with the supernatural occurs is reasonable and compelling.

The Role of Doubt

Harder questioned Douthat about the presentation of doubt as not necessarily the opposite of faith, but as an accompaniment of faith, even “a companion to it.” Douthat said that while some doubt is to be expected, he believes that metaphysical materialism is overwhelmingly improbable. He finds doubts about the nature of God to be reasonable. He is concerned about suffering and the problem of evil. He takes both Christian and non-Christian ideas concerning evil seriously. But he does take a hard line against doubt in the existence of God. This, he believes, is not reasonable.

Harder asked how Douthat reconciled “the reasonableness of Christianity” with “the absolutely unprecedented, uncanny, and unusual character of Jesus.” No one before the time of Christ would have expected a suffering messiah to be “the decisive, world altering event of religious history.” Douthat believes that many other faiths exist “in the shadow of that particular revolution that starts in Roman Palestine.” But the “unlikeliness” of Jesus Christ is not the same as his “unreasonableness,” Douthat said. Jesus’s incarnation addresses one of the deepest of religious questions, the issue of divine immanence versus transcendence. Jesus is both a man among us, and transcendent God. While the gospels do not provide a logical answer to the problem of evil, they do offer a narrative response, with God entering the world of suffering and suffering one of the most extreme forms of death. This “divine solidarity with human suffering” is not something people would have foreseen.

Regarding unresolved problems in Christianity, Douthat cited “Darwinian evolution, its relationship to the Fall … [and] original sin, the question of when does death enter the world, and why,  and how does animal suffering as an apparent engine of biological development, how does that fit into it?” But he does not think that these kinds of questions are reasons “to sweep away all of the larger kinds of evidence” pointing to God and Christianity. While Douthat said he was not recommending heresy, he did urge people who cannot bring themselves to believe in the Christian God to at least acknowledge a divine reality, whether in process theism, pantheism, or something else.

Religious Revival After Secularization

At Catholic University of America on the topic “Is There a Religious Revival,” Douthat discussed the possibility of a religious revival at the present time.

He said we are at a moment of the “possibility of revival.” For the last twenty-five years (i.e., the twenty-first century) the rise of the nones has been the big religious story. This may have gone “slightly into reverse.” We are at the end of “a period of secularization.” “Generational turnover” is part of this. Generation Z has “somewhat different attitudes” toward faith than previous generations. Typical of the 1970s there is significant “unfocused, non-doctrinal spiritual interest.” People are endeavoring to get in touch with intermediate spiritual realities, rather than pursuing the ultimate spiritual realty. Tarot cards and interest in UFOs are part of this. Additionally the “new atheist” attack on religion seems to have subsided. It did not make the world a “more enlightened and rational place.” A more recent trend is to a kind of “cultural Christianity,” supporting religion for its social utility while regarding it as untrue.

Douthat was asked about Laplace’s comment on belief in God: “I have no need of that hypothesis.” It was observed that Joseph Ratzinger maintained that such a claim “takes a lot more faith” than religious belief. But Douthat replied that Marxist atheism goes well beyond Richard Dawkins to a religion-like worldview. “The iron laws of history” substitute for providence. Douthat considers it “sub-religion,” however. In the twenty-first century West, Marxism has assumed the form of “wokeness.” It was held to be the new worldview, taking over the West the way Christianity overtook pagan Rome. Douthat, however, considers it a “thin … post-Protestant moralism.”

Douthat himself believes that people should be religious, monotheistic, Christian, and Roman Catholic. But many people today are coming to religion as a fresh category. They try to look at the universe from the standpoint of the twenty-first century, and “have not gotten whatever divine guidance they need.” Douthat believes that from this perspective “monotheism has the strongest argument.” But there are also more arguments “for being a polytheist than for being an agnostic.”

Contemporary Developments Pointing to Religious Renewal

It was observed that in ancient times, materialist philosophy was broken by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. “Is there a breakthrough for us on the horizon,” it was asked. Since the “multiverse” theory is considered by many to be “too kooky,” many are turning to the idea that mental properties are present in all physical objects (panpsychism). Panpsychism is experiencing a surge of popularity. There is also a “weird” atmosphere of “cultishness” around the fascination with artificial intelligence. People know that “consciousness is not reducible” in the way that materialists have thought.

Douthat said that “if you don’t look too closely” at the founders of the major world religions, and “you just sort of take their general world pictures, you would say that they’re all responding to somewhat similar data, in terms of the nature of the cosmos, the nature of religious experience, etc.” This picture includes “some kind of higher power, some sort of intermediate powers … there’s heaven after you die, there’s hell after you die, there’s disagreement between East and West about whether you get reincarnated out of that hell or stay in it.” The next question is should we take any particular religious worldview as controlling? One can be a perennialist, holding that the ultimate truth is partially revealed in different world religions, or one can look for the correct religion.

Against Christianity, “there’s the story of how Galileo and Darwin overthrew traditional religion, there’s the story of how historical criticism overthrew the credibility of the gospels – the New Testament. And to an even greater degree than I think the first story is wrong, the second story is just manifestly wrong. And that Christians should have more confidence even than they sometimes do.” One need not believe in the resurrection of Jesus, he said, to take the narratives of the New Testament seriously.

Douthat said that “there’s a lot of anxiety about whether people are converting for the right reasons.” There is concern that people are converting to save Western civilization, rather than from a conviction that Christianity is true. But he said that he is “very pro-conversion.” People convert for “all kinds of reasons.” Whatever people’s motivations, what is important is that people convert, Douthat believes. He attempts in his book to give people ways to approach the supernatural. But the mytho-poetic approach to religion, referred to above, he does not think – at least by itself – is the correct approach.

Currently there is a “bottoming out” of the “prior religious dispensation,” which is happening in Europe as well as in America. He believes that there is a greater chance of a religious revival among youth in highly secular western Europe than there is in the still markedly religious parts of eastern Europe, where he fears that religious collapse is ahead.

Another feature that will be important in any possibility of religious revival is the “crazy collapse in global fertility.” The idea that “human beings are obsolete” is part of this, he believes.

Questions about Defending Religious Faith

Harder asked Douthat how writing Believe had affected his own faith. He said it had confirmed his opinion at there are reasons for doubt “inside the boundaries of religion that are not a good case against religious belief” in general. By contrast, he says that he takes atheism “less seriously” than when he was young.

In answer to a question about the role of religious experience in coming to faith, and in particular about those who have sought a religious experience and not found it, Douthat said that it is not necessary to have a religious experience indicative of a divine reality to have faith. He conceded that “there is a kind of person” who finds it hard to get to faith without religious experience. He recommended “experience-oriented groups” (such as Pentecostal Christians) as groups to associate with in an earnest effort to experience God. Douthat said he grew up with people (including his Pentecostal parents) who had mystical experiences, but had not had one himself, and did not feel the need for one.

It was asked if the contemporary world is in “a new paganism.” Douthat said “I think we are a little bit.” He said that “there is a palpable desire in our culture right now for small ‘g’ gods.” People are “looking for help.” Witchcraft is one example of this, interest in UFOs as manifestations of the supernatural is another example, those who claim to have met their “spirit guide,” and also the “religious overtones” of artificial intelligence. While this is different from the scientific, positivist past, it is also different from the past of pagan antiquity. Unlike antiquity, with definite gods and beliefs and practices concerning them, today’s paganism is individualist and nonsystemized.

In answer to another question, Douthat said one can pursue faith both through a search for objective evidence and reasons for faith, and the “interiority” of personal experience or mystical experience. He saw “consciousness itself” as a “bridge” between these two approaches. He referred to Thomas Aquinas’s mystical experience at the end of his life that caused all his theological work by contrast to seem “straw.”

It was asked how the church should respond to the fragmentation of religious belief in modernity. Modernity is “inherently pluralistic” and Christian belief and practice must be sustained in each generation. Simply doing things as in the past will not suffice. He does believe that secularization is a deep feature of the modern world. What might be called “official knowledge” has been secularized. This is the knowledge accepted as truth by “Wikipedia and Yale Law School,” which is not open to the reality of supernatural or mystical experiences, even though they are not uncommon. This does make religious faith more difficult at the present time.

Asked about the decline of institutionalism, Douthat said “there is more to gain from institutional membership and participation” in organized religion than there is to lose. Another questioner asked whether scientific and technological changes pose a threat to the post-modern church in affecting the material consciousness of believers so that they have less a sense of the transcendent. Douthat seemed to say that people have a need for the transcendent, which the contemporary world cannot satisfy. At the present time “certain forms of humanism have run out.” He lives in a strongly secular world in New England, and in an earlier generation, there was a strong humanism that filled the role religion once played. He referred particularly to interest in “art and philosophy and Shakespeare” with “the art museum as a kind of substitute cathedral.” Today, postmodernism has deconstructed this for many people. There is no strong humanist alternative. In this view, “the future is fascist, climate change is going to kill us all, and there’s no God.” This may lead to a possible new “openness to religion.”

Douthat said that the ideas presented in his book should give Christian believers “more basic confidence” in the truth of their faith, and that Christianity “has more to recommend it than its rivals.” The future, he said, will be “extremely weird, extremely surprising” and Christians will need confidence to endure it.