Culture Saturday: Secularism losing its grip

MARY REICHARD: Welcome to a special weekend feature of The World and Everything in It. Today, our regular Culture Friday team of Nick Eicher and Myrna Brown join up with regular guests John Stonestreet and Katie McCoy. The four of them will conduct a panel interview on a recently released book making a rational case for religious belief. We hope you enjoy this full-length interview and after you listen, please let us know what you think.

NICK EICHER: Hi, I’m Nick Eicher. It’s my privilege to get to talk with Ross Douthat, author and New York Times opinion writer. His book is titled Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. It released last month, and I’m happy to say I was able to get our Culture Friday band together, not just Myrna Brown and me, but John Stonestreet of the Colson Center and author Katie McCoy. We all four will have a chance to ask questions and join in the discussion.

But before we get into it, let me mention another writer for WORLD, Francis Beckwith. He’s a professor at Baylor, and he reviewed Ross’s book in WORLD Magazine, calling it truly a Mere Christianity for the 21st century. Beckwith, in his review, said he thought the book was a response to a particular set of reasons for unbelief that find their salience among those who dominate the elite culture of this present age. And for my part, again, I love the ambition here, even in that subtitle of the book—making the case for why everyone should be religious. Everyone. I love that.

Ross, welcome.

ROSS DOUTHAT: Thank you. Thank you for having me. Thank you for humoring my ambitions. I appreciate it.

EICHER: Now, you’ve written quite a lot as a newspaper columnist on religion and public life. But as I say, this ambitious title—I’d like to kick off by having you talk about what drove you to the project, and with reference to Beckwith’s observation, what specifically convinced you that the assumptions of secularism have become insecure?

DOUTHAT: Yeah, so, I mean, I think that arguments about religion are inevitably connected to whatever is happening in the wider culture. Most of the arguments that I make in the book about the reasonability of religious practice probably could have been made 10 or 15 or 20 years ago, but I think we’ve sort of passed through a kind of cycle of disillusionment with religion and religious institutions, a certain kind of vaulting optimism about secular possibilities and, you know, what the world might look like once we shake off, you know, the dead hand of religious hierarchy and these kinds of things. And now we’ve entered into a period of disillusionment with that vision where we’re sort of 15 or 20 years past the heyday of the New Atheists—the sort of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens moment.

We seem to have reached kind of a stopping point for this trend towards religious disaffiliation, fewer and fewer people identifying with Christianity, identifying with specific churches. That seems to have sort of reached a limit in the last few years. And there’s a couple different kinds of energy out there right now in the culture, I think. On the one hand, there’s sort of a renewed interest in what you might call the social uses of religion—the idea that, hey, actually, it’s not so great for kids to grow up without any kind of ultimate sense of metaphysical purpose for their lives. And, oh, you know, religious institutions sure seem like they played an important role in the American social fabric. And, wow, it turns out, you know, in all these sort of practical, sociological ways, psychological ways, we miss religion when it’s gone.

So there’s that sensibility. And then there’s also a kind of 1970s-style zest for spiritual experimentation out there. So there’s, you know, you can run down the list of things, from astrology to psychedelics to the renewed interest in UFOs, and say people are interested in getting in touch with the numinous, the mystical, and so on. But there, the tendency is to pursue it in a kind of very individualized, spiritual-but-not-religious way.

So this is trying to be a book that’s written for maybe people in both of those audiences. And, you know, sort of written first for people who think to themselves, you know, it would be nice to be religious, but it’s just such a leap of faith. It’s, you know, you have to leave so much of sort of secular, modern rationality at the door. And to those people, I’m arguing, No, you don’t. In fact, the case for being religious is extremely rational. It’s consonant with much of what modern science has actually revealed about the world. It’s consonant with what we know about human consciousness and its relationship to reality. It’s consonant with the resilience of religious experience, even in a supposedly disenchanted age.

So I’m basically arguing that it makes more sense than some secular people think to practice a religion. It’s not just a kind of leap upward with no foundation underneath. But then part of the book is also arguing the case for being religious, but not just spiritual. And why institutional religions—the big old ancient religions—still make sense as the place to go if you decide that you should be a religious person.

MYRNA BROWN: Ross, you started off about what’s happening in the wider culture. You talked about atheists, the New Atheists. You know, we’ve seen these headline moments—atheists quitting atheist organizations, prominent figures like Niall Ferguson moving from atheism to Christianity. Wondering, how does that fit with the argument you’re making in this book?

DOUTHAT: I think it’s examples of the moment that I’m trying to write for. So in the first case, the atheists quitting atheist organizations—you know, one of the big promises that the New Atheists made once upon a time, the Richard Dawkins-type argument, was that the reason we had so much division in the world and so much irrationality was because of religion, because people believed silly myths in holy books, you know? And this was the post–September 11 moment. So, you know, a lot of these writers were very critical of fundamentalist Islam, but then they sort of extended that to critique any kind of traditional form of religion generally.

And so the idea was: Get rid of religion, and the world will become a paradise of rationality, rational discourse. And obviously that was always a silly idea, I think, but people have to learn. And I think the experience of the last 10 or 15 years, on both the left and the right, has demonstrated why that was always a bit of a fantasy. That you strip religion out, and people find other things to fight about, other things to polarize around. And in the case of the atheists, you quickly have ended up with these incredibly complex debates about: Should an atheist be woke? How many genders should an atheist believe that there are? And it’s essentially the same kind of debates that the atheists claimed that you could do away with if you did away with religion. And yet, here we are. They come back. And if anything, there are ways in which I think these debates get more polarized and sometimes more irrational in the absence of a kind of metaphysical frame.

Then the Ferguson example—I think there’s, I don’t want to speak about—every conversion is different, right? But I think there’s a bunch of people in this kind of Fergusonian space who are being attracted to religion, usually to Christianity in particular, again, in ways they wouldn’t have expected 20 years ago, but for these kind of almost cultural reasons. Like, Well, what is my foundation? What is Western civilization all about, if not Christianity? And I don’t think that’s a bad thing, but I think that people in that position could benefit from recognizing that they aren’t just making some kind of purely culturally based choice—that there actually is a strong foundation underneath religious practice and belief that they can have. They don’t have to give that up in order to become a Christian or to convert in some way.

JOHN STONESTREET: Hey, Ross, when I saw the book, I wanted to give you kudos again on impeccable timing, because clearly when you wrote this book, it was prior to this wave of religiosity, certainly was prior to the national championship in college football that we saw in all the religious quarterbacks and all the folks talking about Jesus.

But here’s what I want to ask you—you mentioned just quickly, kind of the woke left and the woke atheists. There does seem to be, in this last two-, three-year period, where I guess the wares of a secularism just were exposed to the world. There just isn’t a lot to offer here, other than technological amusement, maybe cell phones and just how bad those things were for our kids, the ideas about gender—certainly there’s been a big pushback against those.

So if there is this uptick in religiosity—which I think is the fascinating headline over the last couple years—how is it related to kind of the evident failures of secularism on kind of a cultural level, maybe that we didn’t see 10–15 years ago?

DOUTHAT: Yeah, I mean, I think just to take the smartphone example, right? Ten or fifteen years ago, there was a lot of confidence that technological progress was just going to make the world happier, more enlightened, more comfortable, less stressed out—all of these things. And whatever else the smartphone has done—and there’s plenty of, you know, reasonable debate about just exactly what its effects are—in the aggregate, it has delivered more anxiety, more social disconnection.

Young people are struggling to form relationships, to get married, to form friendships, right? There’s just a sort of atomization and isolation created by this device that was supposed to bring us all together. And that alone, I think just the tech itself and the social changes it’s unleashed, are responsible for some of the trends I was mentioning earlier.

But the fact that it’s then entering into a world that has gone through a period of secularization, right? It’s like, okay, you have this machine that sort of leaves people alone with themselves in this weird way. And we’ve just spent a generation telling them that there’s probably no God, or, you know, religion is just what you make of it. There’s no sort of structure or foundation for their lives.

I think that combination is especially toxic for young people—and adults—and young people are aware of it. And out of that, I think it’s not surprising at all that you get at least some kind of renewed interest in religious ideas and institutions as just a kind of counterpoint to the kind of society that the smartphone seems to be creating.

I think on the political side, I think it’s worth seeing wokeness as an attempt to sort of have a kind of revivalist spirit without a metaphysical framework. So wokeness is, in a way, a continuation of certain aspects of America’s Protestant heritage. It has something in common with periods of revival and awakening. It’s not coincidentally based in what used to be the great centers of American Protestantism—the, you know, elite universities, of course, now secularized but still retaining some element of that past.

So it’s sort of trying to, at its best, call people to a kind of moral awakening—to the sinfulness of society, to transformation, all of these things. But it’s a religious mentality without a vision of God, without a sort of vertical element. It’s all horizontal. Without a vision of grace. It’s all sin, right, and no possibility of redemption.

And so even before you get into, you know, the specific ways that its ideas about gender and so on clash with actual biological realities, I think it’s sort of a case study in how the desire that people have for some of the things that religion traditionally delivers, and then how hard it is to generate the goods of a religious revival if you’re trying to leave God and the metaphysical out of the picture entirely.

KATIE McCOY: Ross, your book was so erudite and intellectual—I can’t even tell you how happy I am to have learned so many new words just reading it. So thank you for expanding my vocabulary.

DOUTHAT: Not sure that’s a good thing, but you’re very welcome. It’s a recurring problem that I have.

McCOY: No, it was wonderful. It was so great. So my question is—I remember going back to the beginning of the book, and you talked about how kind of the driving why behind why you wrote it is, you weren’t trying to defend that religion was primarily some type of therapeutic benefit, and it wasn’t to necessarily prove that religion was for the good of the social order.

And I juxtaposed that with some other chapters, where, after I read it, I thought, okay, he’s asking Why?—why is it that the universe is ordered the way that it is for the benefit of humanity? Why is it that human beings can even conceive of something so far beyond them?

So kind of driving people to that question of why as a way to examine their own skepticism. But I found myself asking a different why at the end of the book, and that is, why should somebody believe after all of this? If religion is not primarily therapeutic or sociological, then why should anybody come to even attempt a type of faith?

DOUTHAT: Well, first, I do think that religion has many of the sociological benefits that people claim for it. I do think it has many of the psychological benefits that people claim for it. So I do think that you can construct a case for being religious strictly on those terms. There are things that people get out of religious belief and practice that are sort of useful in the day-to-day.

I guess my view, though, is that if that’s the only basis, or the primary basis for your religious belief, then it’s going to be very fragile, very vulnerable to the normal things that happen in people’s lives that sort of knock them around and undercut purely practical reasons to get up on Sunday morning and recite the Nicene Creed or whatever.

And also, I think the reason that religion has those kind of practical in this world benefits is precisely that it is true—that religious ideas accurately describe the universe and our place in it. And therefore, it makes sense that pursuing and following a set of ideas that have a more accurate view of what human beings are and what the world is leads to a happier and more fulfilled human life.

But the primary reason to be religious is still this sort of old answer, right? It’s that we’re all going to die. Human life is time-bound and finite and contingent. And if we have good reasons to think that we have been put on this earth by some kind of higher power for some particular purpose, we have very, very strong incentives to figure out how to align ourselves with that purpose and be in some kind of relationship with that power. Because at the end of the day, we’re going to have a more direct encounter with that power and be held to account for what we’ve done with our lives.

You know, the book ends with some of Jesus’s more urgent admonitions from the New Testament, which are very practical in a way, but practical focused on eternity. It’s like: You’ve got one life. God has given you a certain set of gifts, opportunities, demands, challenges. And at the end of the day, you’re going to be asked, what did you do with what God gave you?

I think the urgency of eternity, I think, is the ultimate reason to be religious—again, allowing for the fact that it also probably makes you a better husband, father, spouse, mother, neighbor, and so on in this life.

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STONESTREET: I know it’s maybe bad form to compare books, but as I was reading this, I couldn’t help but think about your book Bad Religion, in which you argued that the center of kind of institutional Christianity as historically understood had given way to what you called heresy.

Which you could describe in a lot of different ways, but one way would be this completely internally focused, therapeutic version. I think you identified, you know, the Joel Osteens and the Oprah Winfreys.

DOUTHAT: Yes.

STONESTREET: I guess that’s what struck me about this. There’s been a lot of critique about the embrace of  “cultural Christianity.” And I think certainly there’s a qualitative difference between what happens—you talked about Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Niall Ferguson—and comparing that with Richard Dawkins saying he likes Christmas carols. I mean, those are qualitatively different sorts of things, right?

But is it all that bad that people are coming back to faith on this kind of cultural bandwagon? I mean, maybe it’s not far enough, and it’s got to get to the personal, but we are dealing with a religious culture that has become almost hyper-privatized at the same time, right?

DOUTHAT: Yeah, and I think there are ways in which, you know, everybody’s views and analysis change, and over the intervening period, I’ve become less anxious, maybe, about heretical forms of Christianity and more anxious about post-Christianity.

Both post-Christianity as a kind of secular void, and post-Christianity as kind of groping in the spiritual dark, looking for sort of secondary powers—small “g” gods and demons—to communicate with. I think that’s an actual, real danger in our own world to a greater degree than was the case 15 years ago.

So in that sense, I’m more favorable to maybe forms of Christianity that still deserve critique, but I might have criticized them more severely in a slightly different period.

I think, on the question about cultural Christianity, I think, one, I would defend cultural Christianity in a couple of senses. First, in the sense that any kind of robust Christian church is going to have a kind of secondary influence on the culture, on people who don’t fully believe in it. In that sense, like, it’s not a bad thing that secular people sing religious Christmas carols and these kinds of things, right?

This shows Christianity’s strength, ideally, not necessarily its weakness.

And then also, cultural Christianity absolutely can be a kind of waystation on the way back or into a fuller and deeper belief, right? Every conversion is limited and imperfect and starts from somewhere that isn’t where it’s, you know, ultimately supposed to go.

And absolutely that can be true of people who sort of become interested in Christianity again for reasons of cultural identity and solidarity. But you don’t want to get stuck in this zone that I think intellectuals in particular have a tendency to get stuck in, where you’re like, Okay, I’ve decided religion is good. I’ve decided to believe in belief, you might say. But believing in a literal, personal God, that’s for the fundamentalists.

So I’m gonna sort of stay here in this zone of, you know, I’m favorable to religion. I like religion. Maybe I dabble in religion, but that’s as far as I’m going to go.

And the problem with that is that, you know, not just on the personal level but on the general level, if there’s a big swing of the pendulum towards atheism, right? And that swing takes you to religion is bad and should be destroyed. And then the pendulum swings back to religion is good, and, you know, might be true, but we’re gonna sort of stop there.

Then there’s always going to be this sort of ratchet away from actual religious belief. And I think it’s important for believing Christians, in a way, to sort of maybe demand more of our would-be intellectual fellow travelers.

Say, Okay, yeah, it’s good. It’s good that you like religion again. That’s great. But come a little deeper, and consider that, in fact, it might also be true. It might also be much truer, much more likely to be true than a kind of skeptical and atheistic world picture.

And so that’s, in part, what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to say, Okay, you’ve given me a little bit here, but I want to pull you a little bit further. Not that I’m expecting, you know, Richard Dawkins to be pulled that far, but maybe others.

EICHER: Yeah. So in the book, Ross, you talked about the nature of the world, and we see the fine-tuning of the world, the fine-tuning of the entire universe. And that puts me in mind of Psalm 19: The heavens declare the glory of God.

And that brings to my mind, anyway, intelligent design. I would love to hear your take on intelligent design versus the idea of theistic evolution. Do you find, Ross, the intelligent design arguments compelling, or would you say that—would you put yourself more in the BioLogos camp?

DOUTHAT: Well, so I very deliberately avoided digging into that.

EICHER: Well, of course, that’s why I asked.

DOUTHAT: Well, let me just say why. I mean, again, I think that that is such an area of fraught and polarized debate, and it’s often seen as a place where our sense of what God was up to in the universe—God’s intervention in the universe—is seen as sort of standing or falling, right, on the debate about how did human beings develop and so on.

And I think that the broad arguments for assuming that God made the universe, made the universe with us in mind, human beings have a particular role in the cosmos that no other creature that we know of has—we are made in the image of God in some way that is sort of rationally perceptible and understandable.

I think all of those arguments can be made just as strongly on the basis of the issues I do tackle in the book, related to the laws of the physical universe, the nature of consciousness, all of these things, before you get into questions around evolution.

Here is the rest of your interview, formatted for readability while staying as close as possible to the original transcript:

EICHER: Yeah. So in the book, Ross, you talked about the nature of the world, and we see the fine-tuning of the world, the fine-tuning of the entire universe. And that puts me in mind of Psalm 19: The heavens declare the glory of God.And that brings to my mind, anyway, intelligent design.

I would love to hear your take on intelligent design versus the idea of theistic evolution. Do you find the Intelligent Design arguments compelling? Or would you say that—would you put yourself more in the BioLogos camp?

DOUTHAT: Well, so I very deliberately avoided digging into that.

EICHER: Well, of course, that’s why I asked.

DOUTHAT: Well, let me just say why. I mean, again, I think that that is such an area of fraught and polarized debate, and it’s often seen as a place where our sense of what God was up to in the universe—God’s intervention in the universe—is seen as sort of standing or falling, right? On the debate about how human beings developed and so on.

And I think that the broad arguments for assuming that God made the universe, made the universe with us in mind—human beings have a particular role in the cosmos that no other creature that we know of has. We are made in the image of God in some way that is sort of rationally perceptible and understandable. I think all of those arguments can be made just as strongly on the basis of the issues I do tackle in the book related to the laws of the physical universe, the nature of consciousness, all of these things, before you get into questions around evolution.

I think my own view is that there’s sometimes a lack of clarity about exactly what the Intelligent Design side of the debate is trying to establish. Whether it’s trying to establish a sort of recovered version of special creation where God is intervening in the progress of life in a miraculous way, or if it’s essentially trying to reintroduce teleology into a vision of the evolutionary process—where it’s basically saying, Yes, life evolved gradually in these particular ways, following particular basic laws and algorithmic processes. But there was also something built into the system that we don’t fully understand that inevitably pushed development in particular directions towards these particular kinds of complexity that yielded life as we know it.

I am more sympathetic to the second view. As I read the Intelligent Design literature, its strongest arguments suggest that the Darwinian evolutionists are missing some underlying teleological element in the development of life. I’m more skeptical of the argument that we should be looking for direct miracles in the progress from single-celled organisms up to early mammals and so on. I’d be more skeptical of that.

Then there’s the question of human beings themselves and our consciousness and its emergence. And there, I think, again, without getting too into the weeds, the evolutionary narrative does pose a particular challenge to Orthodox Christian ideas about the Fall—what it meant for the first couple to fall and how that changed the world. I do not think that the traditional Christian teaching on what happened in Eden and the evolutionary narrative right now can be perfectly harmonized. So if I were listing particular challenges that current scientific consensus actually presents to Christian belief, that would be at the top of my list.

Ross Douthat Photo courtesy of Zondervan Books

But that would be a completely different book. And part of what I’m doing in this book is basically saying to people: Even if you have a particular doubt or doctrinal uncertainty about a particular religious teaching, that’s still a bad reason not to be religious. Wrestling with those questions should not lead you toward atheism or materialism. It should maybe lead you to uncertainty and epistemological modesty to some degree.

Yeah, I think on a lot of scientific questions, it’s not even that the science is more unsettled. It’s that most of what we know about the world confirms a general religious picture. I’m not saying that the arguments of physicists can resolve the problem of evil, or the question of why is there this specific level of suffering in the world, and why does a good God allow it? Right? That’s not a question that quantum physics can answer.

But I do think that everything from the Big Bang theory through the quantum revolution, down to the evidence for fine-tuning, points quite strongly toward a view of the cosmos as intentional, purposeful, created, or sustained by a higher power. I think you can get into theism versus pantheism debates, but I think some kind of consciousness as the primary reality, and matter as a secondary reality, is very strongly supported by what we know about the actual existing world.

So there, I’m not just saying, Look again. I’m saying, Actually, much of what we think we know—what even materialist, atheist scientists will concede that we think we know—points more toward the possibility of God than did the science of 150 years ago.

And I think this is true in other areas as well, right? I mean, one of the points I make about mystical and supernatural experience is that if you go back to some of the leading skeptics of the Enlightenment, like David Hume, there was this clear expectation that once the churches lose their power, people are just going to stop believing in the miraculous. That they only believed it because they had these legends handed down from antiquity about, you know, the parting of the Red Sea and so on. Take that away, and a lot of belief in the supernatural and the miraculous will go away with it.

Hume would have said, Yes, there’s still a propensity to believe in marvelous things. So he wouldn’t have been surprised at some belief. But in the event, we’ve stripped away power from the churches, no one is forced to go to Sunday school, and yet, if anything, supernatural experiences have seemingly become more common. Certainly more common than they might have been in, say, the 1940s or 1950s. The decline of institutional religion has not at all removed people’s direct encounter with ultimate reality.

And then you have really interesting cases like near-death experiences, where we actually have a lot more data because of scientific advances than anyone had 200 years ago. We bring a lot more people back from the threshold of death than ever before. And it would have been a big coup for the atheists if, in doing this, everyone came back and said, Well, it’s just a big nothing. My consciousness winked out, and that was it. Or if people came back and said, Well, I had a bunch of random hallucinations at the brink of death as my brain misfired.

But in the event, we have this consistent, across-cultures, really striking phenomenon of people having what seem like religious experiences at the edge of death—something we know far more about today than they did in 1780 or 1870. So I think there’s a bunch of places where what we know now is a stronger challenge to the atheists and materialists, not to Christians and other religious believers.

STONESTREET: So in a sense, it seemed to me like you were pulling back some of these arguments from intelligent design, just even from some classical apologetics, when you dealt with, for example, the problem of evil—that there had been this narrative for 20, 30, 50 years in Western culture that secularism had won, that religion was irrational.

And it was almost like you were pulling it back up, saying, Wait a minute, don’t dismiss these things. So yeah, I think—I don’t want to be simplistic—but it was a sense of going, You know, listen, you were told by the New Atheists that the case was closed, that the science is settled. But it’s not that simple.

DOUTHAT: Yeah, I think on a lot of scientific questions, it’s not even that the science is more unsettled. It’s that most of what we know about the world confirms a sort of general religious picture.

I’m not saying that the arguments of physicists can resolve the problem of evil and the question of Why is there this specific level of suffering in the world, and why does a good God allow it? Right? That’s not a question that quantum physics can answer.

But I do think that everything from the Big Bang theory through the quantum revolution, down to the evidence for fine-tuning, points quite strongly toward a view of the cosmos as intentional, purposeful, created, or sustained by a higher power. I think you can get into theism versus pantheism debates, but I think some kind of consciousness as the primary reality, and matter as a secondary reality, is very strongly supported by what we know about the actual existing world.

So there, I’m not just saying, Look again. I’m saying, Actually, much of what we think we know—what even materialist, atheist scientists will concede that we think we know—points more toward the possibility of God than did the science of 150 years ago.

And I think this is true in other areas as well, right? I mean, one of the points I make about mystical and supernatural experience is that if you go back to some of the leading skeptics of the Enlightenment, like David Hume, there was this clear expectation that once the churches lose their power, people are just going to stop believing in the miraculous.

That they only believed it because they had these legends handed down from antiquity about, you know, the parting of the Red Sea and so on. Take that away, and a lot of belief in the supernatural and the miraculous will go away with it.

Hume would have said, Yes, there’s still a propensity to believe in marvelous things. So he wouldn’t have been surprised at some belief. But in the event, we’ve stripped away power from the churches, no one is forced to go to Sunday school, and yet, if anything, supernatural experiences have seemingly become more common.

Certainly more common than they might have been in, say, the 1940s or 1950s. The decline of institutional religion has not at all removed people’s direct encounter with ultimate reality.

And then you have really interesting cases like near-death experiences, where we actually have a lot more data because of scientific advances than anyone had 200 years ago. We bring a lot more people back from the threshold of death than ever before.

And it would have been a big coup for the atheists if, in doing this, everyone came back and said, Well, it’s just a big nothing. My consciousness winked out, and that was it. Or if people came back and said, Well, I had a bunch of random hallucinations at the brink of death as my brain misfired.

But in the event, we have this consistent, across-cultures, really striking phenomenon of people having what seem like religious experiences at the edge of death—something we know far more about today than they did in 1780 or 1870.

So I think there’s a bunch of places where what we know now is a stronger challenge to the atheists and materialists, not to Christians and other religious believers.

BROWN: Ross, can we talk a little bit about your personal faith journey, just a bit?

DOUTHAT: Of course.

BROWN: Okay, you mentioned—well, I took delight in reading about your childhood exposure to Pentecostal, charismatic experiences. You know, personally, I grew up Baptist, then I went Southern Baptist, and now I’m non-denominational. But I know I’m interested in how you made the jump from Pentecostal to your Catholicism. It’s a big jump to me.

DOUTHAT: Yeah, I mean, so I had sort of an odd experience where I was effectively an observer to my parents’ religious journey—a kind of passenger and observer and scrutinizer.

So my parents started out Episcopalian and then, through direct religious experiences, were pulled into charismatic and Pentecostal circles. And so there was a long period of my childhood where I went to a normal, liberal, secular Northeastern school on the weekdays and on the weekends, went and watched my parents speak in tongues.

And there were different things going on. My mother, who was sort of the primary agent of this movement, had this institutional church upbringing in the Episcopal Church, and then this experience of totally decentralized Christianity with this strong mystical component.

And she felt that, in the end, Catholicism offered a kind of synthesis of both—that it was liturgical and traditional in ways that connected to the church of her childhood and that avoided, she thought, some of the problems that we saw in Pentecostal churches.

But it also had this incredibly strong mystical tradition that connected to her actual experiences that had been absent in mainline Protestantism, at least as we experienced it.

So that was for her. For me, I was an awkward teenager who did not have these mystical experiences myself. I thought that they were real—I always did, and still do, and that’s part of my interest in the mystical, having observed these experiences.

But I just sort of welcomed the move from this very personalized setting, where people put their hand on my shoulder and asked me to testify about my conversion—that was very awkward for 14-year-old Ross.

And 16-year-old Ross was very happy to start attending a church where you could memorize a bunch of prayers. Nobody asked you any questions. You know, in Catholicism, you show up, you sit in the back pew, nobody bothers you. Nobody’s like, Who’s new here? Tell us about how Jesus changed your life. I was like, Great. Nobody will bother me.

But also, the promise of Catholicism with the sacraments is that grace is there, the Holy Spirit is there, the action of God is there—even if you aren’t flat on your back or speaking in tongues.

And so, as someone who, again, observed those experiences but didn’t share in them, probably that vision of how grace operates was very attractive to me.

But I’ve always—yeah, because of this background, I’ve always had this weird mixture of, you know, small-c conservative views about church order, liturgy, tradition—these kinds of things. I’m not a Latin Mass Catholic, but, you know, we go to a pretty traditional Catholic Church.

But then also this sense that the action of God takes place in all kinds of ways, in all kinds of contexts. And so I can think that Catholicism is the truest expression of Christianity, and Christianity is the place of God’s central revelation.

But the action of God is not limited to its most central forms and expressions. God acts in all kinds of ways and all kinds of places. And there’s a lot of weird stuff in the universe that we don’t understand.

McCOY: Ross, I loved hearing about your own—in Baptist world, we call it—testimony, I guess, of just your own religious experience.

I’ve got a question in two parts. One is, most of our listeners here are Protestant, and I think we can have co-belligerence with a lot of things in the world with our Catholic friends, but we have theological differences. So how can we sort of employ your approach without feeling like we’re conceding our own commitments?

And then the second part of that is really towards the end of your book, where you encourage people to start where they are. And in a sense—and I hope this doesn’t come out wrong—but it kind of felt like a do it yourself, pick what you want from the buffet and run with it approach.

How do we encourage true belief without it devolving into just kind of a you-do-you spirituality?

DOUTHAT: Yeah, I think that’s a really challenging question. And I think the first reality is that we live with religious pluralism in America and in a sort of globalized world. People are constantly confronted with a myriad of religious options and choices and opportunities in a way that is a new thing in the history of the world.

It means that serious Christians need a certain kind of theory of what is going on in those traditions and in other Christian traditions, if we’re Catholic or Protestant, but also in non-Christian religions. Because there’s clearly a lot of action there—people have life-changing experiences, mystical experiences.

I think there are a couple of different moves you can make as a Christian thinking about that landscape. One move is to say that Christianity is the core revelation of God’s purposes, Jesus Christ is the means of salvation for all human beings who are saved, but at the same time, people can encounter the divine outside of Christianity.

People can have experiences of God and supernatural reality that don’t happen within the confines of Christian churches. And so what Christianity is therefore offering is not a relativistic portrait of the world where all religions are identical, the same, and so on.

Rather, we are saying, There is a kind of hierarchy of belief, where there is a truest faith, but then there is truth available in other faiths as well. Life is a journey, and you have to have some trust in God’s providence, in how people move through different spiritual realms.

The alternative is to say that there’s just a lot of demonic deception—that God is present in Christianity but not present in anything like the same way anywhere else. And so, any experiences that seem similar in other faiths are actually the work of deception.

And this would extend, then, to something like near-death experiences. Lots of people who are not Christian have near-death experiences where they seem to have some kind of encounter with God waiting for them on the other side.

You could take a strong view and say, No, for those people, that is some kind of demonic deception that is there to encourage relativism and so on. I obviously incline toward the first perspective.

It reflects my basic view that I try to argue for throughout this book, which is that I don’t think the universe is a trick. God is not trying to trick us. The universe is not hiding the ball from us.

The reasons to be religious are there and available for any reasonable person to see. And in the same way, the experience of God in some form is available even to people who have never encountered a Christian missionary or never encountered the gospel in full.

That’s what I think. But it’s certainly not the only way to think about this. And thinking about it that way does impose a real challenge for Christians, because you have to sort of maintain this balance, which is hard to maintain—where you say, On the one hand, Jesus Christ is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and everyone should be converted to Christianity. That is God’s ultimate design.

At the same time, there are sincere Muslims and sincere Hindus, and so on, who are having ideas about God—some of them correct—and who have experiences of God that are real.

Maintaining that balance is tricky, and it’s easy to see why some Christians worry about it and say, Well, you’re just going to end up as a relativist, right?

McCOY: Well, so if I could ask a follow-up—yeah, in my limited experience and study, what I’ve come to think is that one of the most important theological questions any of us can ask is: Why did Jesus have to die?

And the answer on the other side of that would seem to kind of set the trajectory for how we relate to other faiths and other truth claims.

So what do you do with that perspective that you’ve just outlined for us? What do you do when the truth claims are irreconcilable?

Because while there are sincere Muslims, they have a different understanding of Jesus, of His death—yeah, all of that. What do you do when you can’t make them fit?

DOUTHAT: I mean, I think what you do is you say that one side has to be right and the other side has to be wrong.

But I think you can’t have sincere interreligious dialogue without having that possibility there as part of the discussion, right? I don’t think that it makes sense to approach dialogue between Christians and Muslims on the assumption that at some point, we’re going to have some kind of breakthrough where we see that we’ve just been saying the same things all along.

No, I think there is a fundamental difference. Even before you get to questions about Jesus’s death and resurrection, there are fundamentally different tendencies just in the basic Muslim view of God versus the Christian view of God.

Certainly, once you get into Hinduism and Buddhism and so on, you’re obviously operating in terrain where there are some ideas that overlap and can be reconciled, and there are some fundamental ideas that don’t.

And that’s just reality. In the end, when we stand before the throne of judgment, God is not going to say all religions were equal and everyone was right. Somebody is going to be right, and somebody is going to be wrong.

At the same time, I don’t think that that makes it impossible for Christians to imagine that a sincere Muslim, practicing Islam sincerely, cannot be saved in some way that we don’t fully understand—through the saving work of Jesus Christ.

Now, this is, in a way, perhaps an easier case for Catholics, who sometimes are accused of overemphasizing good works at the expense of faith. So maybe this is an easier case for Catholics to make relative to some Protestants. I think that’s probably true.

The example I cite in the book, though, is from a Protestant writer—albeit one with maybe some Catholic sympathies—C.S. Lewis.

At the climax of The Chronicles of Narnia, you get a character who is part of a culture that literally worships a vulture demon called Tash, yet he is ushered into paradise. The Christ figure of Narnia, Aslan, says, Well, it’s actually impossible for you to render good service to the devil. Any good you did, you were always rendering it to me.

Which obviously has similarities to when Jesus talks to the sheep and the goats in the New Testament.

I think that has to be the idea that Christians who believe in the fundamental revelation of Jesus Christ bring to these debates and arguments.

Again, if you aren’t just going to assert that all non-Christian religion is deception—which, again, it could be—but I think there’s another perspective available. And that’s the one I’m offering.

Here is the final portion of your transcript, formatted for readability while staying true to the original wording:

EICHER: Ross, thank you for being so generous. You know, if we were Joe Rogan, we’d have at least two more hours.

DOUTHAT: You’d have two more hours!

EICHER: That’s right, I shouldn’t be greedy. I do appreciate the time, and I did appreciate the book—Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. It’s available wherever fine books are sold.

Ross Douthat of The New York Times, thanks.

DOUTHAT: Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me. It was a pleasure.

REICHARD: Thanks for listening to this special edition of The World and Everything in It. You’ve heard Nick Eicher, Myrna Brown, John Stonestreet, and Katie McCoy in conversation with Ross Douthat about his new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. We’d love to hear your thoughts on this panel discussion—let us know what you think.

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