Be Religious! Really?

 

Ross Douthat, a New York Times opinion columnist since 2009, has been the author of multiple books on diverse subjects, including books on religion - notably Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics (2012) and To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism (2018). His latest such venture - this one of a quasi-apologetical nature - is Believe: Why Everyone Should  Be Religious (Zondervan, 2025).

The context for this effort is Douthat's impression that, at this juncture, many seem "to experience secularism as an uncomfortable intellectual default, not a freely chosen liberation."  His response - his style of apologetic, if you will - is to "begin with the basic reactions to the world that lead people and cultures toward religion, and argue that these are solid grounds for belief - indeed more solid that was apparent at earlier stages of modern history and scientific progress."

Accordingly, the first part of the book agues that, contrary to the once assumed trajectory of the modern secularization thesis, "the scientific revolution has repeatedly revealed deeper and wider evidence of cosmic order that what was available to either the senses or the reasoning faculties in the premodern world." He goes on to argue, for example, that "to acknowledge a point of origin, to recognize a moment of creation, makes it intuitively more likely that the universe as we know it now has some specific importance to its creator - that any divinity isn't just perpetually emanating or sustaining space and time, but using them to tell something we would recognize as a story."

As a person of faith, I, of course, am gratified by these insights. Obviously, I agree with the overall conclusion that faith makes sense and that the case against it, despite its assertions and claims, has not quite been completely made. Hence, the persistence of religion worldwide, despite those whom Friedrich Schleiermacher in the 19th century famously labelled its "cultured despisers." Thus, Douthat reminds his readers that while "intellectuals" may have "stopped taking mystical experiences seriously," nonetheless, "actual human beings kept on having the experiences. When Official Knowledge ruled out the supernatural, in ordinary life it kept breaking in." Moreover, the contemporary "decline of institutional religion in America has had no effect on the share of Americans who report supernatural experiences."

Al this is very edifying. Whether it can really convince is, I suspect, a question of entirely other order. Personally, I have always been satisfied with the minimal claim that religion's case cannot be falsified by modern science and have never much seen the point of pushing the argument further to the contention that somehow science specifically supports the case for religion. Such is the subjectivity of faith that I have no problem picturing someone being completely unmoved - and hence unconvinced - by Douthat's data.

Thus I personally found more interesting - and maybe also more compelling - Douthat's case for commitment, especially commitment to what he calls the "Big Religions." Revealingly, he recognizes that religions (including Douthat's own Catholicism) "are filled with people who maintain private heresies or private doubts, who feel agnostic two days out of seven - but who have made the sensible decision that it's better to live inside the tradition they consider most plausible  while holding doubts than to reject any system in the name of those difficulties."

For all his public commitment to Catholicism, Douthat argues somewhat encouragingly that "if some kind of God exists and ordered the universe for human beings, then even a false or flawed religion will probably contain intimations of that reality, signposts for the discerning pilgrim, some kind of call to higher things - such that a sincere desire to find and know the truth can fail to reach truth's fullness and still find its reward."

That said, Douthat concludes with a case for his own religion of (Catholic) Christianity. He agues for the credibility of the Gospels and the uniqueness of the story of Jesus. He especially emphasizes how "the Jesus of Scripture isn't always the Savior that my native self finds relatable, the kind of God I would have invented for myself, because there is a tension between some of His hardest and most inscrutable sayings and my own personality, my natural intellectual perspective, my instincts and desires."

Anyone who seriously engages with Christianity will recognize Jesus' challenge to be otherwise than who and what one would choose on one's own as Christianity's distinctive demand. Way more than any classical apologetic argument - intellectual, historical, or even moral - that demanding challenge is the place where the search best comes to an end.