The Dispatch: Something Spiritual This Way Comes, by Patrick T. Brown (Ethics and Public Policy Center):
Believe engages with materialism on its own terms. Roughly the first half of the book deals with consciousness and the cosmos, from the start of the universe to the end of life. Science, far from disproving religion, has deepened it. “We have much better evidence for the proposition that the universe was made with human beings in mind…than ancient or medieval peoples ever did,” Douthat argues. Some who presume faith and reason are incompatible may well have their eyes opened.
From there, he guides the reader in how to think about the variety of spiritualities on offer, with an expansive, egalitarian argument for belief over apathy. And it’s this second half that seems more likely to wiggle its way into human hearts than the more abstract first chunk. …
Without quite fully lapsing into Huxley-esque perennialism—that is, the idea that every religion reflects different facets of a core truth, beneath cultural differences—Douthat argues that belief in anything is preferable to indifference. Even converting to the “wrong” belief system, he suggests, can rescue one from “the mire of meaningless and the snares of indecision.” …
A book arguing it is good to go to church or mosque or synagogue, even if you don’t actually believe in the supernatural bits, would have been a trivially easy book for Douthat to write. Asking the reader to grapple with the claim that the spiritual, moral, and ethical claims of religion matter as much as, if not more than, the benefits community and fellowship provide, is a harder task. In a “spiritual but not religious” world, Douthat seems to be channeling C.S. Lewis, who said in 1952: “You can shut [Christ] up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
The Atlantic: How Ross Douthat’s Proselytizing Falls Short, by George Packer:
I’m a hard target for Ross Douthat’s evangelism. When I got a copy of his new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, I felt an impulse to answer, Nope: Why You Should Leave Everyone Alone. I come from a family of atheists and am a lifelong nonbeliever. At difficult times I’ve tried very hard to cross the river into the kingdom of faith—read the Jewish Bible and the New Testament, attended church and temple services, immersed myself in Kierkegaard, and stared at the sky for a flicker of divinity. None of it made any difference. The universe remains random, empty, cold. We’re alone in the dark, nothing means anything until we give it meaning, and death is the end. These are comfortless facts, but I’ve come to accept and even, at times, embrace them, with no desire to disenchant anyone else. …
Believe suffers from the limitations of Douthat’s brilliance. He has absorbed a good deal of recent literature on cosmology, physics, neuroscience, and supernaturalism, and he devotes most of the book to arguing that scientific knowledge makes the existence of God more rather than less likely. Douthat is speaking to the well-educated contemporary reader who requires a rational case for religion, and among his key words are reasonable, sensible, and empirical. Belief, in Believe, isn’t a leap of faith marked by paradox, contradiction, or wild surmise; it’s a matter of mastering the research and figuring the odds. If brain chemistry hasn’t located the exact site of consciousness, that doesn’t suggest the extent of what human beings know—it’s evidence for the existence of the soul.
Douthat guides the reader through the science toward God with a gentle but insistent intellectualism that leaves this nonbeliever wanting less reason and more inspiration. … We don’t fall in love because someone has made a plausible case for being great together. Some mysteries neither reason nor religion can explain. …
The rational, speculative approach of Believe comes to an end in its last pages, when the authoritarianism that underlies Douthat’s, and perhaps all, religion, suddenly shows its face. He adopts a darker tone as he asks what you will do if you’ve guessed wrong—if God turns out to exist and is waiting on the other side to punish you for failing to get the point of Douthat’s book. “What account will you give of yourself if the believers turn out to have been right all along?” he demands—and then goes on to portray nonbelievers as shallow, mentally lazy, and status-obsessed, too concerned with sounding clever at a dinner party to see the obvious Truth …
Believe is not a political book, but it would be naive to imagine that Douthat’s evangelism has no political implications. He acknowledges that the book could be “a work of Christian apologetics in disguise,” and his invitation to religion in general leads predictably to a case for Christianity in particular, preferably of the conservative-Catholic variety. In his columns he draws no bright line between religion and politics: Contemporary America is decadent, liberalism has famished our souls, and any renewal depends on faith—not New Ageism, not progressive Protestantism, but religion of a traditional, illiberal cast. Douthat has carried on a years-long flirtation with MAGA, endorsing many of its policies while hedging his personal dislike of Trump against his antipathy toward the opposition. (He refused to disclose his choice in the most recent election, which seems like a misdemeanor for a political columnist.) Douthat hasn’t gone as far as the head of the new White House Faith Office, but when he calls Trump a “man of destiny,” it isn’t easy to extricate his metaphysical leanings from his partisan ones.
Douthat wants you to abandon secular liberalism and become a believer at a moment when democracy is under assault from a phalanx of right-wing ideas, some of them religious. That is not a reason to believe or not to believe, for belief needs no reason. But it should make you pause and think before following Douthat on the path to his promised land.
World Magazine: Modern Mere Christianity, by Francis J. Beckwith (Baylor; Google Scholar):
In 1952, a well-known public intellectual named C.S. Lewis published Mere Christianity, a small and accessible book in which he made a case for the Christian faith in response to a particular set of objections that were becoming increasingly prevalent in the United Kingdom and continental Europe after the Second World War. Although an Anglican, Lewis’ project was not to draw converts to his church (though he would, of course, welcome them), but to offer an intellectually compelling account of what he believed are the central tenets of the Christian faith held in common by Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox.
Seventy-three years later, another well-known public intellectual, Ross Douthat, has published his own small and accessible book in response to a particular set of reasons for unbelief that find their salience among those who dominate the elite culture of this present age. In Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious (Zondervan, 240 pp.), the New York Times columnist offers a more capacious defense of the reasonableness of religious belief than did Lewis in his original volume. Although a Catholic Christian, Douthat’s project is not to draw converts to Rome or even to Christianity (though he would, of course, welcome them), but to offer an intellectually compelling account of the philosophical, experiential, and historical credentials of the worldview and attitude shared by the world’s leading religious bodies. For Douthat, although certain forms of religion are closer to the fullness of truth (Christianity) than others, he argues that it is better for someone to embrace and practice an imperfect religion than to reject religion in toto. Better to be an observant Muslim or Buddhist than a disciple of nihilism. …
What makes Believe particularly effective is Douthat’s unusual combination of deep intelligence, firm religious conviction, intellectual modesty, and an understanding and conversance with the strongest contemporary arguments for unbelief. Believe is truly a Mere Christianity for the 21st century.
Christianity Today: Ross Douthat Bets on Belief, by Brad East (Abilene Christian University; Google Scholar):
Something is happening. Christianity is having a moment. Our culture is shifting. Whether this change will be minor, temporary, or tectonic, we cannot know. Nor can we know where it will end—or even whether it will be good.
What we can say is that much that was certain is now up for grabs. Much that seemed settled has been shaken up. Old orthodoxies are under assault. Will new ones emerge? Or will the real article, orthodoxy proper, reemerge as the only viable answer to the restless longings of human hearts?
Time will tell. For now, we should be keen to read the signs of the times. Intellectuals are converting. Atheists are softening. Agnostics are hungry. No longer are believers on the back foot, defending alleged irrationality before a hostile consensus. Crystals and hexes, seances and saints, meditation and manifesting, angels and aliens, goop and God—the whole syncretistic bundle is out in the open now. Religion is afoot in the public square.
Not that it ever went anywhere, except underground. It’s true that measurable, institutional forms of religion have been in decline—and not only in Europe, where the loss is most pronounced, but also here in the US, where religiosity has always been more spectacular, entrepreneurial, and grassroots, reveling in its disestablishment.
Scholars like Phil Zuckerman are right to hold Christians’ feet to the fire on this point: Narrowly defined, the secularization thesis is demonstrably true. Millions of people in the West now live lives devoid of formal religion and default to supposing the supernatural is of no relevance to their daily concerns. This is genuinely new in human history.
But the secularization thesis is often overextended into a false story of inevitability and materialism. As it turns out, post-religious people are not thoroughly disenchanted. They may not attend church or pray, but they’re quite open to a spooky cosmos. Indeed, many appear to take it for granted. And because living with Mammon for a master is as soul crushing as Jesus long ago warned, materialism has its discontents. We were made for more. We were made, full stop.
Ross Douthat, a Catholic columnist for The New York Times, has written a new book in response to this moment and to the readers he’s trying to reach. In Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, Douthat makes a Pascalian pitch to the curious among the post-secular crowd.
Blaise Pascal was a French thinker who lived 400 years ago. His too was a time of religious and technological upheaval, one straddling the end of the Middle Ages, the Reformation’s fresh divisions of Christendom, and the beginnings of “enlightened” modernity. In such a time, and in response especially to religion’s cultured despisers, Pascal wrote that the first task for Christian thinkers is “to show that religion is not contrary to reason, but worthy of reverence and respect.” This is just what Douthat sets out to do, and he likewise follows Pascal in stressing the existential urgency of religious questions and the necessity of placing one’s wager.
“It affects our whole life to know whether the soul is mortal or immortal,” as Pascal put it. “Anyone with only a week to live will not find it in his interest to believe that all this is just a matter of chance.” And though we may (or may not!) have more than a week to live, inaction is impossible. You cannot choose not to choose. Your life is your seat at the table, and you must play the cards you were dealt. Declining to play is not an option; folding is itself a play.
Pascal famously chose to wager: “I should be much more afraid of being mistaken and then finding out that Christianity is true than of being mistaken in believing it to be true.” Douthat doesn’t quite take this tack, but Pascal’s confidence and resolution, his unwillingness to let the reader off the hook, are present on every page.
This approach to religion is present in all Douthat’s writing. As a conservative Catholic writing for a liberal audience in the Times, Douthat is an expert at fine-tuning tone to topic and readership. In his previous books and columns alike, Douthat is cautious, coy, patient, and pleasant, ready to present different perspectives or to challenge the assumptions of whoever is reading his words.
Matters of first importance, though, Douthat doesn’t soft-pedal. Morally and politically, he plants his flag on abortion and same-sex marriage. Theologically and philosophically, he refuses to budge on the shortcomings of secularism and the strengths of theism. Atheism and scientism aren’t merely vulnerable to criticism; they’re absurd. The existence of God—indeed, of angels and demons and the whole spiritual realm—isn’t simply plausible or probable. It’s far and away the most rational interpretation of the evidence. …
Douthat advises: Wake up and look around you. That eerie presence you sense or suspect is not a fiction. Whether a human ghost or the Holy Ghost or something else entirely, it is all too real. Accepting that is the easy part. The hard part comes next: Place your bet.
- City Journal: Faith in the Age of AI: Ross Douthat’s Book Offers Modern Readers Reason to Believe
- Commentary, Reason to Believe
- The Economist, Why You Should Believe In God. Or Allah. (But Not Baal)
- First Things, Mind the Gap
- Free Press, Ross Douthat: Why It’s Logical to Believe in God
- Front Porch Republic, Is Ross Douthat Our C.S. Lewis?
- The Gospel Coalition, Ross Douthat Breaks Down Barriers to Faith
- Law & Liberty, The Theists Strike Back
- Los Angeles Review of Books, Ross Douthat’s Tame God
- National Review, The Wages of Faith
- New York Times, We’re More Secular Than Ever. How’s That Going?
- Patheos, Ross Douthat Wants You To Believe
- The New Yorker, Should You Be Religious?
- Washington Free Beacon, Ross Douthat and the New Theism
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