In October, New York Times pundit and author Ross Douthat penned an opinion column on the theme that religious belief among the disillusioned could be poised for a comeback.
The column was timely for two reasons: First, there has been a spate of new book releases on the question of faith’s rebound, and second, that Douthat himself is among the authors of these religion-themed books.
Douthat’s latest effort, “Believe: Why Everyone Should be Religious,” is set for release in February. In many ways, the new book is a natural outgrowth of Douthat’s emergence as a conservative-minded cultural critic whose work by his own admission is “to make religious belief intelligible to irreligious readers.”
An adult convert to Catholicism, Douthat is also author of “The Deep Places” (2021), a poignant memoir of the writer’s struggle with the lingering effects of Lyme disease. In that work, Douthat makes several references to the comfort and resilience he drew from his Catholic faith in returning to health and personal equilibrium.
Under the circumstances, it was natural for Douthat to offer “Believe” as a testament for the real value of a religious faith.
An effective argument for faith
This slim seven-chapter work makes an effective argument for any legitimate form of religious belief as a salve to the malaise and cynicism of secular mainstream culture. Douthat argues that reason, history and elemental logic support belief in transcendental moral guidelines rather than an uncritical surrender to an attitude of nihilism and meaninglessness.
“To atheists looking to be unsettled in their certainties, to spiritual searchers struggling to imagine a plausible destination, to believers wrestling with doubts and difficulties, and to anyone interested in the ultimate questions about human life, it makes (sense) that religion is not just an option but an obligation,” Douthat writes, “and that it offers a blueprint for thinking your way from secularism into religion, from doubt into belief.”
Douthat takes issue with committed Darwinists and similar skeptics who suggest that creation and human and animal life are the result of nothing more than an inexplicable series of random accidents. By denying that the universe has some divine purpose and meaning, these nonbelievers are forced to fall back to an increasingly untenable position.
“For some time now, the educated world has cultivated the opposite perspective,” Douthat says, “where intelligence and seriousness (are) measured in how meaningless you assume human life to be. Predictably this perspective has not yielded greater human happiness.”
Although most of Douthat’s arguments have a primarily Christian flavor, he credits all forms of traditional and established religious belief as worthy of study and experience. While not all religious forms can lay claim to possess a single, overriding truth, each can provide a pathway to the supernatural.
As Douthat again notes, “Today’s seeker looking out across a diverse religious landscape, doesn’t need to assume that there exists one lonely truth. … Rather the seeker should assume there exist less-true and more-true schools of thought … even if you start in a ‘wronger-than-average’ place you can still draw closer to your eternal destiny by conforming yourself to whatever that tradition still gets right.”
A challenge for critical thinkers
Douthat’s book ultimately offers a challenge to all thinking people, religious-minded or not, to consider life’s more eternal questions: Why were we created, and what might we do with our time on this earth? He urges religious seekers not to defer to what he calls “Official Knowledge,” the elitist opinion makers in the mainstream media, universities and political think tanks.
“Because in the realm that most writers and intellectuals and academics inhabit, the realm of Official Knowledge, disenchantment reigns supreme,” Douthat warns. “Almost all ‘knowledge production’ in the modern world, whether it takes place in universities or bureaucracies or the respectable portions of the media, is informed by a practical atheism, a presumption that you must always analyze human life in scientific or at least social-scientific terms, keeping God or the supernatural safely off the stage.”
Disenchantment, Douthat adds, has become a modern consensus or intellectual default that even permits its adherents to stray into occasional transcendental practices such as attending church services on occasion, reading their horoscopes and dabbling in the fantasy worlds imagined by speculative fiction writers.
Douthat argues as well that the sexual revolution of the 1960s encouraged skeptics and nonbelievers to reject practically every religious tradition as an authoritarian restraint on personal freedom. “Since the upheavals of the 1960s, it’s increasingly taken for granted by the average American or Westerner that a modern and enlightened person must reject the constraining sexual ethics of traditional religion, the prohibitions on premarital sex, divorce, homosexual relations, even nonprocreative sex. Crucially, it’s not only Christian ethics that are rejected here, but teachings found in all the great traditions.”
Christ at the center of history
Although Douthat sees benefit in considering all legitimate religions in search of eternal truths, he sees Christ incarnate as perhaps the most intellectually satisfying quest. “With Christianity we are told that God Himself is on that cross, and through the Cross He is with us also, in all our suffering and to the end of time,” he notes. “And with that movement comes one possible answer to some of the hardest questions people have about God’s distance, God’s silence, the problem of evil and the problem of sin — not in the form of logical proof but as a story, an event, a person who also happened to be God.”
Douthat succeeds in avoiding a note of triumphalism or the “I told you so” attitude in making his argument. By its very nature, the book is aimed more toward skeptics than believers. But the author exhibits a note of sympathy or even compassion for those unlikely to be persuaded.
Like a contemporary prophet, Douthat ends his book with a final question: “You (atheists et al.) took pointlessness for granted in a world shot through with signs of meaning and design? That you defaulted to unbelief because that seemed like the price of being intellectually serious and culturally respectable? That you were too busy to be curious, too consumed with things you knew to be passing to cast a prayer up to whatever eternity awaits?”
