Reviews

To read more from Daniel, visit his blog, Sic Et Non. 

I recently read Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, by Ross Douthat.  Over the past decade and a half, Douthat (whose name is pronounced roughly “DOW-that”) has been among the very few conservative and religious columnists for the “New York Times,” a newspaper whose audience tends to be both liberal and secular.  Accordingly, as he himself explains it, part of his mission there has been “to make religious belief intelligible to irreligious readers—both those who think of themselves as having grown out of faith’s illusions or escaped its bigotries, and those who have barely any acquaintance with serious belief at all.”

That is also very much the task that he has undertaken in Believe.  He explains the motivation for the book:

“More and more of my readers seemed to experience secularism as an uncomfortable intellectual default, not a freely chosen liberation. More and more seemed unhappy with their unbelief. And whenever I wrote about the decline of religion in America, and especially its decline among the educated classes, a rush of emails arrived from readers saying that honestly they wished they could believe, that they missed the consolations of churchgoing or envied people raised with some sort of belief—but still and all, isn’t it just too difficult to be a thoughtful, serious modern person and embrace religious faith?”

In other words, many of his correspondents express a wistful longing for faith, even a desire to believe.  But they just can’t bring themselves to do it.

For some time now, Douthat notes, educated elites have instead cultivated and, indeed, often advocated a view of the world around them according to which “intelligence and seriousness is measured in how meaningless you assume human life to be.”  But this default assumption of unbelief has come at a high price.  Nevertheless, “As its promises of liberation dissolve, as unhappiness and angst and regret take over, atheism defends itself by pretending to be hardheaded, extremely serious, the price you pay for intellectual adulthood. It is none of these things.”

But the prestige cultural assumption of faithlessness is difficult to overcome.  The modern current of irreligion is hard to resist.  Even among those who write to him expressing a yearning for religious belief, he reports, there is commonly “a stopping short, a sense that any reconsideration of religion still runs up against the limits imposed by being a Serious Modern Person Who Doesn’t Believe in Magical Nonsense. The serious modern person might believe that religious faith can be psychologically advantageous and necessary to human flourishing; he might set aside the animus of the anti-God brigade and embrace a more nuanced and potentially favorable view of religion’s place in contemporary life. . . . 

“But that’s still a long way from accepting that faith in its traditional form could accurately describe reality, that the God of the old-time sort of religion—supernaturalist and scriptural religion, angels-and-miracles religion, Jesus-was-resurrected religion—might actually exist, that religious belief might be not only socially or psychologically desirable but also an entirely reasonable perspective on the nature of reality and the destiny of humankind.”

“So,” he says, “the time seems ripe to argue exactly that.”  His book “makes the case that religious belief is not just an option but an obligation—and offers a blueprint for thinking your way from secularism into religion, from doubt into belief.”

He sees himself as making a case for adopting a religious worldview as a rational choice.  He’s not merely advocating the embrace of an attractive community of faith or a quest for psychological comfort based on intuition and emotions.  He argues that theism is actually true, and that a conviction that it is true is enough to justify accepting it as such.  The well-documented sociological, psychological, and even physical benefits of religious involvement are real and important, but they’re just icing on the cake.

I happily acknowledge that I agree with him on this point:  Such benefits accrue to religiosity because theism goes with the grain of the universe, rather than against it.  As he writes, treating religious belief as “desirable but nonrational—a leap into mystery, a rejection of evidence and empiricism—concedes far too much ground to skeptics.”

Douthat begins his book with what he describes as “the basic reactions to the world that lead people and cultures toward religion,” and he argues that “these are solid grounds for belief—indeed, more solid than was apparent at earlier stages of modern history and scientific progress. Reason still points godward.”

Happily, though, he says, you need not be a great philosopher or a brilliant scholar to be able to follow reason toward religious belief.  Ordinary intelligence and common sense are enough. 

“Ordinary reason plus a little curiosity should make us well aware of the likelihood that this life isn’t all there is, that mind and spirit aren’t just an illusion woven by our cells and atoms, that some kind of supernatural power shaped and still influences our lives and universe. The world as we experience it is not a cruel trick, our conscious experience is not a burst of empty pyrotechnics in an otherwise-illimitable dark, there are signs enough to point us up from materialism and pessimism and reductionism—signs that most past civilizations have observed and followed, signs that we have excellent reasons to follow as well.”

The first three chapters of Believe make the case for taking religious perspectives seriously.  They cover “the evidence for design and purpose in the universe and the indicators that human life was specifically selected for by this design; the way that human consciousness serves as a strange key fitted to the order of the cosmos; and the persistence and credibility of spiritual and supernatural experience even in a supposedly disenchanted age.”

I’ll provide you with a couple of samples.  I know that I’m quoting too much of the book, but parts of it are extraordinarily quotable, and I’m painfully aware, in these cases, that I can’t really improve on Douthat’s wording.

The rise of modern science, he says, is thought by many to have undermined rational grounds for religious belief.  But, he writes,

“It has done no such thing. Indeed, to the contrary, the scientific revolution has repeatedly revealed deeper and wider evidence of cosmic order than what was available to either the senses or the reasoning faculties in the premodern world. This has been true from the very start, the Copernican and Galilean period, when one of the new astronomical perspective’s earliest achievements was to reveal greater mathematical order in our own solar system, which had seemed relatively chaotic to the ancients, with planets charting seemingly irregular paths relative to the moon and sun and stars. Where once this irregularity had required a desperate piling on of complex epicycles to predict the motion of Mars and Venus and Mercury, the breakthroughs of the early modern era made it clear that planets followed a much simpler pattern of motion, the ellipse—which of course itself had been discovered by ancient mathematicians, unaware that they were anticipating a heavenly order that only the telescope would fully reveal.”

And, he observes, “The same pattern has repeated itself throughout the modern scientific era, as we have moved from a landscape where human beings could only see the order on the surface to a world where we understand order at much deeper levels—the level of cells and atoms, physical laws and mathematical equations.”

Ancient peoples lacked both telescopes and microscopes.  Now, though, equipped with both, we see far more regularity and order in nature than the ancients could.  They formulated arguments for the existence of God that are rooted in the apparent design of the world around them.  We are now in a position to make much more powerful arguments.

Elsewhere in the book, Douthat points to the mysterious phenomenon of consciousness, and to our sense of self.  Our consciousness is directly accessible to all of us, as nothing else is.  And yet it remains a mystery—and perhaps an insoluble one.

“For all the advances in brain mapping,” Douthat writes in another chapter, “the mind itself is still irreducible, an enigma, a mysterious substance unto itself. Science can tell you how certain atoms in combination create water or carbon dioxide, or how mass and speed and distance combine to predict movements and trajectories, but it’s powerless to tell you how the physical elements of book and brain give rise to the personal experience of reading. The ink on the paper, arranged in certain geometries, conveyed by light to the retina of your reading eye, transformed into electrical signals, carried along the optic nerve to the brain, yielding a specific burst of activity in some particular set of neurons—how does any of that produce the feelings we call confusion, recognition, disagreement? If reading an argument makes you angry, if reading a novel makes you sad, if reading a poem stirs a sudden childhood memory, there is no material account of how that happens, how the outward act generates the inner experience.”

In the next four chapters of his book, Douthat suggests how to move from a general religious disposition to a specific religious practice, “a case for joining a larger faith tradition rather than traveling solo on your quest.”

However, he stops short of what many readers might have expected him to do:  Douthat himself is a believing Christian, indeed a committed convert to Catholicism.  But Believe isn’t an effort to talk its readers into following his own path to Rome.

Why not?  Nearly a century ago, between 1941 and 1944, C. S. Lewis delivered a series of BBC radio talks that eventually became his classic book “Mere Christianity.”  In these talks and in the book, Lewis decided to advocate neither his own specifically Anglican form of Christianity nor the creed of any other particular denomination but, rather, to argue for the basic message of mainstream historic Christian faith.

Presumably, he could do so because the British audience to which his remarks were addressed was still overwhelmingly Christian, at least in name.  Other religious options simply weren’t on the table for most Britons.  But the United Kingdom that C. S. Lewis knew isn’t the United Kingdom of today:  A recent Pew Foundation study indicates that residents of Great Britain who profess no religion outnumber professing Christians by a margin of 46% to 43%.  (See https://humanists.uk/2025/03/26/non-religious-outnumber-christians-in-uk-pew-study/#:~:text=The%20report%2C%20which%20examines%20patterns,at%2046%25%20to%2043%25.)

That isn’t yet the situation in America, but Ross Douthat is acutely aware that the religious climate in the United States has discernibly shifted during the past generation or two.

Accordingly, as he explains, “Many arguments for Christianity (or for other faiths as well) take as a given a religious or religion-friendly common culture that no longer exists, particularly among the general book-buying public in the Western world. So it seems reasonable to start at a more fundamental level—with mere religion, not just mere Christianity—and work our way upward to the questions and choices where the great faiths differ and part ways.”

“I am a believing Christian,” he writes, “but I am not attempting a wholesale defense of Christianity here, or mounting a traditional apologetic case. I think our moment could use something more basic, an argument that tries to lay a general foundation for religious interest and belief, to persuade skeptical readers that it’s worth becoming a seeker in the first place, and to provide guideposts and suggestions for people whose journeys begin in different places or take them in different directions.”

And that is what he does.  Throughout his book, he focuses on “mere religion.” It’s only in his last chapter that Douthat writes explicitly as a Christian, offering his own life as something of a model of how a person who has decided to take the claims of theism seriously can benefit from aligning herself with a specific theological commitment within a particular religious community.

“It is the religious perspective,” Douthat writes, “that asks you to bear the full weight of being human. It is the religious perspective that grounds both intellectual rigor and moral idealism. And most important, it is the religious perspective that has the better case by far for being true.”  I commend Believe to your attention.