Christian faith is often seen as a move away from reason and an embrace of the otherworldly, irrational, and unreasonable. But what if believing is the most reasonable, rational thing a human being can do? Amid mounting evidence that America’s long religious decline has leveled off, and growing dissatisfaction with “do it yourself” approaches to spirituality, the question of what traditional faith offers is timely for those who are seeking truth in our time.

Joining us for the conversation is New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, author of the new book Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. A committed Catholic, he argues, “A religious quest can still be a rational undertaking — not a leap into pure mystery but a serious endeavor with a real hope of making progress toward the truth.” 

We thank our sponsors, Catherine and Andy Eshelman, and our co-host, Zondervan, for their support of this event!

• Reflection: What aspect of Ross’s remarks or the conversation was most compelling to you and why? 
• Douthat argued that religious belief is not just an option but an obligation – do you agree? What kind of obligation does he believe we have in regards to belief? How does he distinguish between belief and salvation? Have you felt a responsibility to explore belief?
•  Why does Douthat assert that “reason points Godward”? What do you see as the relationship between faith and reason? Do you consider empirical reasoning to bring you closer to faith – or away from it?
• Douthat outlined three primary and converging areas of argument in favor of religious belief: 1) the seeming presence of cosmic design and order; 2) the capacities of human consciousness, and 3) the frequency and plausibility of religious and supernatural experience. How does he describe these three areas and their convergence? Do you believe these are the most important reasons for faith? If so, why? If not, what would you add – and what do you find unpersuasive? 
• Douthat offered a defense for religious institutions and institutionalized religion at a time when many are leaving it. Why does he do so, particularly given the scandals of failures of so many Christian institutions? Do you find his reasoning compelling? 
• What value do you see, if any, in presenting reason-based defenses of/arguments for religion? Do you believe the unreligious are persuaded? Do they primarily offer a permission structure for seekers? Do they reassure believers struggling with doubts? How do reason-based arguments affect your own faith?

Please note that the transcript may contain inaccuracies and should not be used as an authoritative source.

Cherie Harder: Welcome to all of you joining us for today’s online conversation with Ross Douthat on Why Believe. We’re delighted that so many of you are joining us from all over the world. I believe we have at least a hundred new first time registrants, as well as 100 international viewers joining us from at least 20 countries that we know of, ranging from Nigeria and New Zealand to Pakistan and Panama. So welcome from across the miles and time zones. And if you haven’t already done so, let us know where you’re joining us from in the chat feature. It’s always fun for us to see where people are tuning in from, from all over the world. And if you are one of those first time guests or otherwise new to the work of the Trinity Forum, we seek to provide a hospitable place to engage the big questions of life in the context of faith, and to offer programs like this online conversation to do so, and ultimately to come to better know the author of the answers. We hope today’s conversation will be a small taste of that for you today. I also want to let our regular viewers know that over the next couple of months, you’ll be greeted by some new faces who will be moderating these online conversations. The Trinity Forum board has very graciously offered me a short sabbatical this spring, which I am very much looking forward to. Hope to return rested and ready in summer. And so in the meantime, over the next couple of months, I’ll be joined by my colleague Tom Walsh, who will be moderating several of our online conversations, along with senior fellows such as Jessica Hooten Wilson, even trustees like Shirley Hoogstra, who will be moderating future programs.

Cherie Harder: And I’ll look forward to seeing you back here on this program in the summer. Our guest today is the author of a provocative new work that, in his words, makes the case for religious belief that it’s not just an option, but an obligation, and offers a blueprint for thinking your way from secularism into religion, from doubt into belief. He argues that at a time when materialism and secularism has become the accepted intellectual default, it’s actually that reason points Godward with the signpost discernible to those willing to look for them, and that it is in following those signposts that one ultimately finds both orientation and direction for the journey we each are on. Ross Douthat is a columnist at The New York Times, where he produces an astonishing two columns a week, Tuesdays and Sundays if you want to take a look, as well as being the host of the weekly podcast Matter of Opinion. He previously served as senior editor at The Atlantic, is also the film critic for National Review, and has written numerous books, including The Deep Places: A memoir of Illness and Discovery, The Decadent Society to Change the Church, Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism, Bad Religion, How We Became a Nation of Heretics, and his newest work, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, which just hit number eight on The New York Times Best Seller list, and which we’ve invited him here today to discuss. Ross, welcome.

Ross Douthat: Thank you. It’s an absolute pleasure to be with you. Thanks so much for having me.

Cherie Harder: It is great to have you. And congratulations as well on hitting the bestseller list.

Ross Douthat: And it is actually in spite of being a New York Times columnist for a remarkable 15 years, it is the first time I’ve been on the bestseller list. And any of you who are aspiring authors, I won’t shatter your dreams and hopes by telling you how many books it takes to make the list, how many sales? But obviously it’s a real privilege. Well that’s.

Cherie Harder: Awesome. Like seventh time. Eighth time’s the charm.

Ross Douthat: Seventh time. Six and a half. Technically. I co-wrote one, but yes, we’ll say seventh time’s the charm.

Cherie Harder: Excellent. Well, one thing that struck me—I want to ask you about why you wrote this book. But we have talked before, and we have talked and hosted you on your book Bad Religion. And have noticed that in some ways one could argue that your aims were perhaps a little bit lower here. With Bad Religion, you really kind of went after heresy and made the argument for Orthodoxy in America and argue that there were very real, not only religious and spiritual, but also civic dangers to the heresies that are so widespread. With this book, with Believe, you’re arguing really for belief in and of itself as an entry point. What led you to essentially lower your expectations for this newest book?

Ross Douthat: Well, have you lived through America in the last 15 years? I mean, I’m not, that’s a joke, but not completely a joke, right? So you know, the thesis of that book, written some time ago now, was that the American religious landscape was best understood in terms of religious forms that were sort of still attached to Christianity in some way, but had wandered into various forms of heresy. So I talked about everything from prosperity, gospel preaching, health and wealth, spirituality to sort of Oprah Winfrey style self-help religion to different forms of Christian nationalism on the left as well as the right. This was the Obama and Tea Party era a very long time ago now. Right? Quite different world. But part of that difference is that since then, American Christianity has really just gotten weaker institutionally, in terms of people’s affiliation, in terms of the influence and potency of major institutions from my own Catholic church to Southern Baptist Convention. And I think much more than when I was writing then you have seen the emergence of two sort of overlapping phenomena.

Ross Douthat: One is the first large scale cohort of Americans really raised without any kind of religious tradition, Christian, Jewish, anything else, right? In 2010, I was writing for a world where there were just a lot of people who had a kind of, you know, Sunday school, Christmas and Easter Christianity, reading Deepak Chopra and The Da Vinci Code, but with some Christianity in the background. And I think we’re in a world now where obviously those kind of people still exist, but there’s just a lot more people who are sort of coming to religion as a completely blank slate. Right? It’s like, well, why? I’m interested in God. What does that mean? Why should one be religious? What is religion anyway? Right? What is this category of human experience that I haven’t encountered before? Right. So that’s one dynamic. The other dynamic is, I think, again, more than in the recent past, you have a lot of spiritual experiments right now that are sort of fully post-Christian. It’s not really heresy anymore. It’s just something else. So like, if I go to my local Barnes and Noble, you know, it used to be that you’d have the shelves of Osteen and Oprah Winfrey and one shelf of, you know, astrology and tarot cards.

Ross Douthat: Now the astrology and tarot cards area is three long bookshelves and it’s Wicca, it’s magic, it’s witchcraft, it’s neopaganism. Right? There’s just a lot more of that. There’s a kind of 1970s vibe where people are really interested in UFOs, not just as alien life forms, but as like higher spiritual beings that we can access. People are experimenting with psychedelic drugs and coming back from those experiences with, non-Christian spiritual perspectives. And I think these two things are linked. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that in a landscape where a whole lot of people have never had an experience of religion before, you have a lot of spiritual experiments that don’t even fit into the box of heresy. And so the book is written. It’s written for a lot of people, right? It’s written for believers, certainly, as well, but it’s written specifically for the reader who might be drawn to religion might wonder, you know what religion is and is for, and might need some advice on first steps before you even get to the point of embracing particular doctrines or beliefs.

Cherie Harder: I want to return to a passage where I quoted you at the very introduction where you said that you’re essentially making the case that religious belief is not just an option, but an obligation. And, you know, of course in the New Testament, Jesus offers the gift of salvation as a gift rather than the imposition of an obligation. So I’d love to hear your thoughts on why you believe that there is an obligation to belief and where exactly that obligation lies.

Ross Douthat: Right. So ultimately, salvation is a gift, a relationship with God. A direct relationship is also it’s relational, right? It’s not something that you can just choose entirely on your own. You know, wherever you slice the Grace versus Works distinction in Christianity. Nobody except the pelagians thinks that people can do it entirely on their own, right. So there is clearly some important element of Christian belief in particular, but it’s probably applies in other faiths as well, that you can’t just sort of will your way into or think your way into, right. But before you get to the point of revelation of Jesus’s offer of salvation, of God’s grace, there’s the world that Saint Paul is talking about when he’s going and preaching to a pagan society and saying, look, I’m here with the revelation of God, but even before this revelation came, the author of the universe already put signs and indicators that should have been enough to push you in his direction. And that’s the obligation that I’m talking about, right? So it is again, it’s something short of the full relationship with God that Christians are supposed to seek hope for, and hope that God’s grace grants them. It’s basically the foundation on which that relationship is supposed to be built. It’s what is, in a way, you could see my book as saying a kind of 21st century answer to the question of, well, what is Saint Paul talking about when he says that? What are the signs and indicators that should impel people toward some religious conception before you reach the point of accepting Jesus? Reading the Gospels and so on.

Ross Douthat: So that’s not the only thing I’m talking about in the book. And the book does end with an affirmation of Christian faith and an explanation of how I think Christianity and the Christian revelation fits into the larger analysis of the world that should lead one toward religion. But I do think there is a kind of baseline of reality. And I talk about it in terms of the cosmos, in terms of human consciousness, and in terms of the general run of religious experience that appears in all societies, that it is enough to create an obligation of some kind. Again, not short of salvation, there isn’t an obligation to be saved. Right? It’s not, we don’t decide whether we’re saved. There’s an obligation to being interested in salvation. There’s an obligation to go to heaven. There’s an obligation to try and prepare yourself for what might await after death. So there’s—both things can exist. But I do think there is something that is obligatory before you get to revelation.

Cherie Harder: Yeah. Well, let’s talk about what you see as those signs or pillars that kind of lead people in that way. As you mentioned, you sort of described three main areas, and you also described them as converging both the design and order within the universe, the sort of unusual place or strange capacities of human consciousness, as well as just how widespread it seems that supernatural experiences are. And I’d love for you to talk about each of those, but I also would love to kind of hear from you, why a few that seem—that might seem kind of intuitive to others of us did not make the list. Part of what I mean by that is, just a couple of weeks ago, we hosted Tom Holland, and Tom kind of described himself as sort of being in the shadowlands between belief and unbelief and what had kind of lured him there was not necessarily something that would fall easily within three pillars that you’re talking about, but more of the perhaps what C.S. Lewis or Chesterton would have called the mythic or poetic truths of Christianity, just in terms of describing the human soul and human condition. So I would love for you to say a little bit more about those three pillars and kind of how you identified those as kind of the main supports for religion in general.

Ross Douthat: Yeah. So I’ll try and start at the back and I’ll try and be brief. Just, you know, these are sweeping questions. Listeners can read the book, which is itself tries to be brief, I should say. So the book does not really deal in what you might call the Mythopoetic case for Christianity. Right. Which is it? And it does deal in mysticism. It does talk about mystical experience. Right. But it tries to talk about it in very concrete terms, like this is something that’s real, that happens to people. There’s good evidence that miracles actually happen. We can do a kind of concrete analysis of different types of mystical experience that seem to recur across human societies. It’s not saying, the problem with the Western world is that it’s too rational and scientific, and we need a return to our mythic foundations. And I’m not not saying that because I think that argument is all wrong. I have obviously, there’s a lot of different ways that people can get drawn toward religious faith. And I certainly feel the kind of mythic appeal of Christianity, the sense that it is a story that is the true myth that makes sense of the other myths and so on. But I will confess to a little bit of exhaustion with not Tom Holland, per se, but we’ll call it the kind of Jordan Peterson mode of religious analysis where you’re really wrestling, right? You’re wrestling with the profound truths encoded in the stories of the Old Testament, and someone raises their hand and says, well, excuse me, Mr. Peterson, but do you think that Isaac and Jacob really existed? 

Ross Douthat: He’s like, that doesn’t matter. The important thing is the profound truths encoded and so on. Not that he’s said specifically that, but there’s a mode of religious discussion that goes something like that. And I’m on the side of the person who wants to know if these people really existed. I’m on the side of the person to whom it really matters. You know, whether there was a literal Jesus who performed literal miracles, who was literally raised from the dead. And I do think the Mythopoetic case for Christianity makes the most sense. If in fact, there is a hard material case for believing in God, believing in an order of the universe, and believing in the historicity of the Gospels as well. And there’s a writer named Bethel McGrew, an evangelical writer, who talks about this in terms of like, left brain and right brain Christianity and I’m now going to forget I think it’s the left brain. Is it the right brain that’s more artistic?

Ross Douthat: Anyway, I can never remember which side of the brain is more artistic and which is more mathematical. But I am trying in this book to be helpful to people for whom the mythopoetic argument just doesn’t get them all the way right, and who want a harder answer about the reality of the miraculous and the reality of religious claims. And so that informs the three arguments that I focus on. I start with arguments about creation and the cosmos, where there’s sort of a general familiar argument from argument for design in just sort of the basic order, sort of the mathematical unity and order of the universe that I think has very clearly been supplemented just in the last few decades by all of the evidence for the extraordinary fine tuning of our cosmos, the extent to which it has been, sort of wired in this really, like 1 in 1 quadrillion kind of way with the precise values required to yield stars, planets and human life. I think it’s also a place where you’ve had a very revealing turn among atheists and materialists. Where the atheist and materialist claim used to be were rooted in material reality, and you are not.

Ross Douthat: But as the evidence has mounted that this material reality seems to have been sort of contrived with human beings in mind, atheism has retreated into concepts like the multiverse. This idea of like, well, actually, there’s an infinite number of universes that we can’t see that are invisible to us. And by the way, those may contain simulated universes, and the odds are that we’re living in a simulation, these kinds of things. And in a way, it’s like a retreat, actually, from real science into a kind of Gnosticism. That’s really interesting, but I think also should give Christians a lot more confidence that they are actually making the parsimonious argument. They’re making the Occam’s Razor argument on what the science tells us right now about the cosmos, and it’s the materialists who are spinning up epicycles and contrivances to keep their system going. So that’s one point. And then I talk a bit about consciousness, the hard problem of consciousness, how difficult and I think essentially impossible it is to understand consciousness in materialist terms. And then the extent to which this is the convergence, the part of the mystery of consciousness is how fully it can figure out the universe.

Ross Douthat: Right? So it’s not just that the universe is designed for us, it’s that our consciousness is somehow capable of penetrating that design, understanding it, manipulating it, splitting the atom, just the fact that we can speculate about the multiverse, right, is itself a fascinating indicator of our capacity. So there’s this matchup, I think, between the human self, the larger structure, that is indicative that something like what religion claims is going on here. And then I think you can add to that the persistence and resilience, even in a disenchanted, allegedly disenchanted age of mystical and religious experience as the thing that takes that from a kind of deist conception where there’s probably a designer, and he probably had us in mind to a fully religious perspective where you say, okay, and there seems to be ways in which whatever the higher mind that made the universe is doing, they’re trying to be in touch with us, not revealing everything, not taking us out of the material, but giving us indicators, signs, experiences that point beyond just material existence. And I think that convergence is how you get, again, not to the Christian revelation, but to the idea that being religious, being a religious person, and having a religious sense of your own mission in life is rationally obligatory.

Cherie Harder: There’s so much we could unpack there, and hopefully we’ll be able to dig into a little bit more of it. One of the things I that just sort of came up as you were talking about is even with that rational basis, I think almost anyone who calls themselves, well, perhaps not everyone, but so many people who would think of themselves as, as believers, as quite religious, also struggle with doubt, and struggle with doubt, often repeatedly throughout their life. And one of the things that you have, I don’t know if it’s acknowledged or asserted in the book, is presenting doubt not as an antithesis to faith, but almost as a component or certainly a companion to it. Why should doubt be so continually present if this is so rationally, obviously grounded?

Ross Douthat: Well, I don’t know. There is a kind of mode of like 20th century Christian discourse that including in the writings, the 1960s era writings of even a figure like Joseph Ratzinger, The future Benedict XVI, who was obviously the pope, one of my intellectual and theological heroes, certainly. But there was a tendency to say well, doubt and faith, it’s almost like they’re equal partners. The doubter is always tempted by faith, and the faithful person is always tempted by doubt and so on. And I don’t want to go that far. I actually think that there are certain kinds of doubts that are not fully reasonable. I don’t think it’s a situation where there’s a 60% chance that the religious perspective is true, and there’s a 40% chance that the materialists are right, and it’s all just going to evanesce someday. I think the odds that materialism is true are actually really, really low, and of course, it’s possible, it’s fine to have some kind of doubts there, but I am really trying to put a kind of floor on certain kinds of anxiety and doubt. To me, doubt is about the nature of God. The doubts that I struggle with are all about, what is God up to. I’m very confident that there is some kind of God.

Ross Douthat: I have more doubts about the specific doctrines of my own faith, more doubts about arguments about eternal damnation versus reincarnation. Like, I think a person can have totally reasonable doubts about the full nature of the afterlife and what God’s plan is for every human soul. I’ve had a bunch of conversations with nonbelievers to promote this book, right. And so one I did yesterday, the guy was really hammering on about like, well, what is going on with the life of the person who lives for two years with an incurable brain disease and barely has conscious experience as we understand it and then dies. What is God up to there? I think that’s a really good question. I don’t have some pat answer to that kind of question, but to me, that’s a doubt about God’s nature and purposes, which is different from a doubt about, are we just are we just atoms sort of migrating through a purposeless void? So the book is very sort of small illiberal in the sense that it’s very open to a lot of different religious ideas.

Ross Douthat: I try to take not just Christian, but non-Christian ideas seriously. I think it’s very open to the reality that people’s religious journeys are really complicated, and I think there are people who should who end up Christian who have to start out somewhere else. I don’t think that sort of, it’s necessarily the wrong choice, even from a Christian perspective, to take a religious step in another faith. If that’s where you feel like God is calling you. When I look at people I’ve known who have ended up as Christians, but after like very complicated religious journeys. I don’t look at those journeys and say, oh, they made six mistakes and then they got it right. I look at those journeys and say, oh, it’s sort of seems like God was guiding them through these different things, and each step was the correct step at that moment. So in that sense, it’s a very ecumenical and liberal minded book, but it is a bit harsh and insistent on the idea that modern people have too many doubts about the existence of God. Maybe not too many doubts about other things, but too many doubts about that basic question of purpose and order.

Cherie Harder: You know, somewhat related to that, I want to ask you a little bit about the seeming paradox between what you call the reasonableness of God’s existence and the absolute weirdness of Christianity, and if anything, you make the argument that the weirdness of Christianity might actually be an argument in its favor. That’s an argument that Chesterton makes as well, but just how unexpected unusual it is, you’ve noted in your previous book that often heretics tend to be the logic choppers trying to make the faith a little bit more reasonable, a little bit more easily marketed in a sense. How do you see that connection between the reasonableness of faith, of the Christian faith, and the absolutely unprecedented, uncanny, and unusual character of Jesus?

Ross Douthat: Yeah. This is where I am basically in agreement with Tom Holland. Right. Having criticized some of the sort of mythopoetic case for faith. I think when you reach the point of encountering the Gospels, that is clearly part of what makes them so distinctive, right? As not just among religious texts, but as just sort of texts that appear in history. A story that appears in history. You can rationally approach particular ideas about God and even particular ideas about morality. No one coming into the first century AD would have predicted what actually happened as the sort of decisive, world altering event in human religious history. And it clearly is the world altering event, like even Islam and Buddhism and Hinduism in different ways all exist, I think in, the shadow of that particular religious revolution that starts in Roman Palestine and Judea, and in just like the most sort of unlikely seeming possible way. So but the unlikeliness is not it’s not quite the same thing as unreasonable. It’s sort of saying, well, we didn’t see it coming. But it does, in fact turn out to address certain issues in human life and address certain religious problems and debates. So if you sit around with the philosophy of religion for a long time, you encounter endless debate about God’s immanence versus his transcendence. Are you trying to encounter God in some immediate way in the world, or is that like almost blasphemous? And is God so absolutely other that no such encounter is possible. So the appearance of Jesus doesn’t resolve that debate exactly, but it clearly enters into it in this powerful way.

Ross Douthat: It’s like immanence and transcendence at the same time, right there. Which is sort of or again, the problem of evil, right? The question which I think is a completely reasonable question to stir doubts and anxieties about God’s intentions. Why does suffering happen the way it does? Why is it so extreme? The Gospels don’t provide it, as you said, a kind of logic chopping philosophical answer to that, but they do provide a kind of narrative response to it, where God Himself is entering into not just our suffering in a generic way, but, the most extreme form of human agony. So whatever God is up to with suffering, the appearance of Jesus seems to say something about where his concern lies. And something about like what? How people, human, ordinary humans should feel while they go through suffering themselves. Again, not a philosophical proof, but a kind of divine solidarity with human suffering that I don’t think someone would have seen coming as if you were like, what’s going to be the big answer to theodicy? And the first, in the reign of Caesar Augustus, what’s going to be the hot new answer to theodicy? You wouldn’t have expected it to be the Son of God dying on the cross, I think. So that’s, I think I see in Christianity, sort of places where reason hits certain limits. But the story itself is also responsive to the questions that reason has and the arguments that reason has been having. It’s not just sort of separate from those questions, it does enter into them and respond to them in a profound way.

Cherie Harder: Yeah. I mean, we’re not going to be able to resolve the question of theodicy and.

Ross Douthat: Probably not in the next 27 minutes.

Cherie Harder: Yeah. But you know. It is interesting in that I do think those questions of God’s existence and his goodness are not, they’re two separate questions. But the old dilemma of the idea, given all the suffering in the world, if the idea that if God is God, he is not good, and if he is good, he is not God. It does seem like there is a relationship between the two. Have you have also heard, even like within scientists, usually the more abstract the scientific discipline, the more likely they are to be believers, you know? 

Ross Douthat: Right. 

Cherie Harder: Physicists more likely than chemists, who are much more likely than biologists. And part of the reason is not the lack of order, but the the bloodiness baked into the created order. That is the real sticking point. 

Ross Douthat: I don’t want to take us too far afield. But I will say that I think I gesture to this in one sentence of my book. But if you asked me, you were talking about doubts, right? And if you asked me as a believer, what do I think are the unresolved problems in Christianity? I do think that the question of Darwinian evolution and its relationship to the fall right, and its relationship to original sin, like the question of when does death enter the world? And why and how does animal suffering as an apparent engine of biological development, how does that fit into it? There’s obviously been a lot written on this, but I don’t think there is a sort of clear and perfect theological resolution to this. I think if you read Genesis naively, you can sort of map it in certain ways onto what we know about biological history, right? Even down to the curse of Eve, of pain and childbirth being connected to the size of the human cranium as like a sort of an engine of our modern humanity. There’s all kinds of interesting things like that. But they’re not Christian orthodoxy, right? They’re not the Augustinian interpretation of the fall. So I think there is a real and legitimate question there. But part of why I didn’t take up that kind of question in the book is that I don’t think that that kind of question is a good reason for ignoring or sweeping away all of the larger evidence and reasons to think that there is some kind of God who made the universe. And you will get scientists who will say things like, I will concede that there appears to be all this evidence for design and purpose and so on, but there’s just too much suffering in the world for me to believe in God. 

Ross Douthat: I don’t actually think that’s a really logical statement. I think it actually makes much more sense if you concede the evidence for purpose and design and have uncertainty about the point and purpose of suffering to do what Jews and Christians and others have always done, which is enter into a kind of argument with the God who probably is there. You’ll find plenty of complaints against God’s injustice in the Old Testament. You’ll find Jesus again, Jesus weeping in Gethsemane and crying out in lamentation on the cross. Like theodicy is not absent in Christianity and that’s one of the great strengths of Christianity, that it doesn’t pretend that this issue isn’t there. It just says it doesn’t actually make a case for atheism, which it doesn’t. If you can’t, again, I don’t want to advise people to become heretics. Since, as you said, I wrote a whole book against heresy. But if you really can’t get to the point of buying into the classical theist conception where God is perfectly good and completely omnipotent because of the problem of evil. Then you should just change your conception of God. Don’t throw out religion. Just say, okay, I can’t get to where Aquinas is, so I’m going to be a process theist or a pantheist or something. Again, I’m not in favor of that, but I think it’s a much more rational move than becoming an atheist over that issue.

Cherie Harder: Well, I see the questions like piling up. So we’re going to turn to questions from our viewers in just a second. But before we do have to ask, you have written a number of works on the reasonableness of faith, the benefits of faith and orthodoxy, your own struggles with Lyme disease, with suffering. And I have heard that every book not only reflects an author’s thinking, but often changes it and affects it. How has this work affected your own faith?

Ross Douthat: I think that it has both reflected and confirmed the point that I have been pressing a bit in this conversation, which is that there are lots of reasons for doubt and argument inside the boundaries of religion that are not a good case against religious belief. I wrote a piece for Christianity Today that made a version of this point, but I basically said, how is my worldview changed? I was a pentecostalist evangelical for a while as a kid and then we became Catholic when I was a teenager. And when I was newly Catholic, I had very much a sense of like, it’s Catholicism or atheism, right? That’s something Catholics always like to say. It’s either the Church of Rome or Karl Marx and so on. I’m still a convinced Roman Catholic. I still will accept requests for advice on how to become Catholic at the end of this conversation and so on. I’m not putting that away, exactly. But I do think that, adult life has given me much more appreciation than I had as a young, younger man for the reality of religious like the sincerity and understandability of religious disagreement between Christians, between Protestants and Catholics, and between different religious traditions. I take all of that, I think, more seriously, and the sincerity of it and the authenticity of it than I did as a young man, and I take atheism less seriously. I took atheism more seriously, I think in my 20s. And the deeper I get into life, the less plausible that particular perspective on the world has come to seem. And that sense is reflected in the book and nothing in the writing of the book did anything but sort of push me further in that direction, I think.

Cherie Harder: Okay, well, the questions are lining up, and we’ll take the first question from Beth Cook. And Beth says, what role does religious experience play in finding faith? In the book, you talk about people who have, quote, tried religion and received nothing revelatory in return and indicated that you may sincerely doubt their effort. But there are some people who have sincerely and extensively prayed for religious experience with no profound sensation, yet have held fast to faith. And there are some cult members who have incredible experiences but are led by astray by them? Is experience essential?

Ross Douthat: No. Absolutely not. My point in that line was more to say there are people who will tell you that experience is essential, that they can’t become religious until they have an experience, and that they’ve tried and haven’t found one. Some of those people turn out not to have really tried at all. Or not Not at all, but it’s like, oh, I went to church some and I said some prayers and the dove of the Holy Spirit didn’t descend on me. So God isn’t there, right? No. I think there is a kind of person for whom it’s hard to get there without experience. But that kind of person should be out at their local Pentecostalist church, right? Should be out in the ashram in India if you want to go outside Christianity. There are forms of religion that are really geared toward experience. And the person who claims to need the experience to believe. All I’m arguing is there is that they need to be willing to go a little further than just their local Presbyterian church or something, If they really are looking for the experience of its experience or nothing. But look, I am not someone who is a great religious experiencer. I have had some experiences that maybe are on sort of the borderline, I guess, but I’ve written a lot about mystical experience and what I’m describing are experiences that other people have had that I am very interested in.

Ross Douthat: I’ve seen people have mystical experiences. I grew up with parents who had mystical experiences, but I personally am not like that experience has not been essential to my faith. I do think that taking the experiences seriously, though, is important, and I think it’s perfectly plausible and reasonable for someone to say, look, God hasn’t chosen to give me an experience, but clearly he does give people experiences and they are part of the interlocking set of signs and indicators pointing toward him. And it’s okay that that he gives experiences to some people and not others, and I’m going to take other people’s experiences seriously as a partial guide to where I’m supposed to go and that’s, that’s sort of the case I’m making. Not that everyone needs to become an experiencer, whatever that means, not that God gives experiences equally. He clearly does not, but that if there is a panoply of those experiences out there, then that is in fact evidence for God. Even if you yourself have not had a near-death experience, a sort of mystical awakening, etc..

Cherie Harder: So a question from Richard Morris, who asks, are we in a new paganism? And if so, is Christianity’s response today different from the response of the early church?

Ross Douthat: I think we are a little bit, for the reasons I said earlier in the call. I think that there is a palpable desire in our culture right now for small g gods, meaning people who can’t get all the way. Maybe for some of the reasons we’ve been discussing right to belief in an all powerful, benevolent creator, but also aren’t really atheists and materialists anymore and are looking the way pagans did for help. And you see this in literal paganism and witchcraft. You see it in what some people are looking for from sort of UFO stuff. You certainly see it in the people who come back from like an ayahuasca trip and say, oh man, I finally met my spirit guide, I met a being of light. And you see it in a kind of more scientific way, but with some religious overtones in the fascination with AI. The idea that we’re sort of building some kind of non-human intelligence that will provide us answers. So that’s all out there. I think it is new and different relative to the immediate past, but it is also different from pre-Christian paganism in that it hasn’t yet condensed into a shared cultural world, picture. So when Saint Paul is preaching to the pagans, he’s preaching to people who have temples, they have rites of worship. They have specific personified gods who they believe in and worship, They have a system and our paganism is individualist, non systematized. Tthere’s obviously like sort of a church of Wicca and there’s some sort of quasi churches, but it is quite different in being individuated in that way. So again, one thing I’m trying to do in the book, is pull some people back from that quite dangerous approach to religion into a more corporate and institutional and traditional form. In part because I’d rather not see what the world looks like if that kind of paganism went from the individual to the to the corporate, I think something would have to change to have a corporate paganism. You would have to have, you know, the Nephilim appear, the aliens descend in their spacecraft, the AI God announced its presence. You’d have to have some crazy shift to take people from dabbling in the occult to formally worshiping Jupiter again. But I’m enough of a weirdo that I don’t actually rule that out as a scenario and I do think better not to get that far.

Cherie Harder: So Victoria Martino asks, do you believe that one must be dualistic about the search for God, i.e. either materialist design, historical veracity, etc. versus mystical that is revelation, miracles and interiority? Or can these two be in harmony?

Ross Douthat: I think up to a point they can be in harmony and they should be. I think that the the evidence for God from mystical experience makes more sense in the context of a cosmos designed and that appears to be designed and created by God. And I think consciousness itself is kind of a bridge between these two things, that when you get right down to it, consciousness is already sort of supernatural. When your mind consciously tells you to sit down and write a question into a prompt during a video call, you’re actually doing something a little bit supernatural already. So I think you can build a fairly plausible chain from hard material evidence from physics, slightly fuzzier evidence around consciousness to mystical experience itself. Now, with that said, there are things that, as Christians, we believe are made manifest through revelation and also things that in personal experience, you might feel or experience that do seem to transcend any kind of watchmaker, divine architect conception of God. Thomas Aquinas at the end of his life, had some ecstatic vision where he said, everything that I’ve written, all those books and treatises are just like straw compared to the majesty of God. So there is a place in the end where, in spite of my strong faith in human reason, I think the religious person should expect human reason to hit a limit and something else to be just the doctrine of the Trinity is not something you can reason your way toward, but I think you can get pretty far without saying, oh, we have to leave reason out of it. I think we can get farther than people think.

Cherie Harder: Interesting, so a question from Mark Berner, who asks Phil Gorski is working on an alternative to the secularism thesis, contending that late modernity is characterized more by fragmentation than secularization, that is, the West hasn’t lost its faith as such, it has lost faith in traditional religions, especially Christianity. You contend something similar. How should the church respond? More dynamic worship, greater social engagement, sharper apologetics, personal holiness, or something else altogether?

Ross Douthat: Why not all of them, right? I agree with that description broadly and I think that certainly one way to see modernity is just as an inherently pluralistic environment where you are never done with evangelization, you’re never done with competition between different religious bodies. That puts more of a burden on Christian churches, a good burden in a good way. To maintain proper levels of holiness and solidarity and to manifest the Christian virtues in a sustained way, because in every generation you can lose your neighbor or your child, just because habit is not enough, if your child thinks you’re a hypocrite or your neighbor thinks your pastor’s involved in scandal and so on, you don’t have any kind of cultural superstructure to hold things together. So one basic response is just modernity calls forth more intense forms of Christianity in response to, or should call forth more, intense forms of Christianity in response to that reality. The one mild, maybe it’s not a disagreement, but I think secularization as a deep and profound phenomenon is not real, as you can tell. I think the world remains shot through with miracle and mystery and enchantment. Even under current conditions, I do think there is a thing you might call official knowledge that is secularized, and that makes it hard, even for people who have religious experiences, to recognize how commonplace they are. It’s sort of like there’s an embarrassment around the direct experience of the divine, because Wikipedia and Yale Law School are not open to it. I think that, to me, is sort of the nature of what secularization means is not that people stop having religious experiences, it’s that they lose some of the language to make sense of them, and they lose the confidence that what they’ve experienced is part of respectable reality.

Cherie Harder: So Brenda Berman says, I’m curious to know more concretely what Ross means by saying people should, quote, be religious. In some context, being religious is equated with observing lots of traditions without any substance of actual faith or conviction. How is he using the term religious here?

Ross Douthat: I think I’m using it very conventionally. Where being religious means belonging to an organized tradition that has a particular understanding of how to put human beings in touch with the higher reality about the universe, to guide them morally through the life cycle in ways that keep them in alignment with that higher reality about the universe and that prepare them for death. At which point, presumably, those higher realities will be more fully revealed. Obviously like you can enter into religion in that form and only do part of it, you can be a ritualist who never gets the moral teaching right. Or you can be someone who tries to be moral in a kind of publicly respectable way, and never has interior conversion. Or you can be someone who is part of a tradition but uses it as a club in partisan political debates. Which obviously we see a fair amount of today. In spite of all those problems with being part of an institutional religion, I still think the institutional approach is more likely to deliver what people should be looking for than sort of saying, because people inside the institutions fail in these ways, it’s better to leave the institutions behind, and I think that’s true. This connects back to my arguments about heresy. I think that’s true even in our own time.

Ross Douthat: It is certainly the case, for instance, that in the age of Donald Trump, there are forms of institutional Christianity that have gone too far in partisanship and sort of blind allegiance to whatever is happening on the American right. Even if you’re pro-Trump, I think you should acknowledge that some version of that exists at the same time, like as I look around the most sort of politicized forms, the most intensely politicized value systems on the American right are often people who are very loosely connected to religion, who are not participating in institutional religion. I don’t think it’s the case that the worst forms of Populism are concentrated among the most devout churchgoers. I don’t think that’s how it works at all. And then, as someone who spends a lot of time in the world of American liberalism and the political left, I think it’s very clear that the most secularized parts of our society would just not be worse off if more people went to church, even if those churches themselves ended up a little bit hypocritical and a little bit politicized. Right? There’s just more to gain from institutional membership and participation than there is to lose, I think. Not in every single case, but as a general guide to life.

Cherie Harder: Yeah. We’ll try to fit in one more question. This one comes from Mark Escobar, and Mark asks, in light of the changes brought about by the post-enlightenment influences such as cultural pluralism, modern communication, and advances in science and technology, do you think the postmodern church continues to wrestle with material consciousness that affect the faith of people, that generates this so-called exclusive humanism with less reliance on the transcendent.

Ross Douthat: That’s a hard question, it’s a dense question. I’ll just pick up at the end, I think that one interesting thing about this moment is that certain forms of humanism have kind of run out. That, again, I’m coming out of a world where I live in New Haven, I live near Yale University, I went to Harvard. I’m like sort of steeped in the culture of the academic and secular elite. What you can see in that realm is a kind of multigenerational process, where there was sort of a real and powerful humanism that did fill part of the void left by a retreating religion. There was a kind of view of art and philosophy and Shakespeare and all of these things. The art museum as a kind of substitute cathedral. That was powerful and real and it was a big part of what secularism meant in, even my parents’ America. I think for various reasons, there’s just, everything from the way the internet has changed, how we interact with every kind of cultural form to the way that a kind of fully sort of postmodernist in certain ways just woke Deconstructionism has sort of tried to take apart any idea of sort of distinctive humanism and distinctive artistic and cultural greatness.

Ross Douthat: I could go on, but there’s just a lot of ways in which I think that story is over, and right now, there isn’t a kind of strong humanist alternative to Christianity or religion. I think this enters into like, there’s just a sense of kind of despair, anxiety, pessimism and despair that hangs over the liberal intelligentsia right now. It’s like the future is fascist, climate change is going to kill us all, and there’s no God, and we’re doomed. Now that vibe is really in the air in parts of America right now and I don’t think there’s any kind of humanist complex of ideas that is sufficient to sort of fix that problem. And I think out of that, there does come a different kind of potential openness to religion than what you would have had in the heyday of opera and theater going and these things as sort of substitute religious goods. I think that was not a complete answer to the specifics of the question, but hopefully it was at least an interesting comment.

Cherie Harder: No absolutely and thank you, Ross. In just a minute, I want to give you the last word. But before doing that, a few things just to share with all of our viewers. First, immediately after we conclude we will be sending around an online feedback form. We really encourage you to fill that out. We read all of these, we try to take your comments and put them into practice, and as a small token of appreciation for filling out that form, we will send you a code for a free Trinity Forum reading download of your choice. There are quite a few Trinity Forum readings that bear very directly onto the conversation that we have today. And so if you want to go deeper into some of the ideas discussed, there’s a few that we would particularly recommend, including The Wager by Blaise Pascal, The Strangest Story in the World by G.K. Chesterton, A Practical View of Real Christianity by Wilberforce, and for a more poetic angle, Gerard Manley Hopkins selection of poems; God’s grandeur. So we hope you will fill out that feedback form and hope you’ll take advantage of that free reading download. In addition, tomorrow, right around this time, we’ll be sending around an email that includes links to different readings and resources, as well as a lightly edited video link of today’s conversation. Be on the lookout and share this link with others. Start a conversation with those, there will be plenty of additional readings, discussion questions, and the like to do so. In addition, we would love to invite each of you watching today to join the Trinity Forum Society, which is the community of people who help together to advance Trinity Forum’s mission of preserving and defending the best of the Christian intellectual tradition and nurturing new growth.

Cherie Harder: There are many benefits to being a member of the Trinity Forum society, including a subscription to our quarterly readings, a subscription to our daily ‘What We’re Reading’ list of curated reading recommendations, and as a special incentive for all new members, or with your contribution of $100 or more, we will send you a signed copy of Ross Douthat’s book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. So we hope that you’ll take advantage of that invitation and join that community of supporters. In addition, we wanted to let everyone know about the next online conversations coming up. Our next one will be on March 13th. My colleague Tom Walsh will moderate a conversation with Bill and Dana Wichterman around their new book, Stewards Not Owners, and we’ll be talking about generosity and stewardship. And then on March 28th, our senior fellow, Jessica Hooten Wilson, will be talking with Lanta Davis on her book, Becoming by Beholding. I’d like to add my own thanks to our sponsors today, Catherine and Andy Eshelman, for their generous support of today’s program, as well as our co-hosts, Zondervan Books. And I’d also like to add my thanks to the Trinity Forum team of Tom Walsh, Campbell Vogel, Marie-Anne Morris, Macrae Hanke, and Frances Owen, who together put the mission of the Trinity Forum into action. Finally, as promised, Ross, the last word is yours.

Ross Douthat: In the last word, I’ll just say is that the book we’ve been discussing is written in part, just in an attempt to give religious believers and Christians more basic confidence. I think a basic confidence that the Christian world picture has more to recommend it than its rivals is an important thing. I’ll say it’s an especially important thing, because I do think that the rest of the 21st century, in large ways and small, is going to be extremely weird, extremely surprising, and it’s much better to go into it with confidence that it will all come out right in the end.

Cherie Harder: Ross, thanks so much. It’s been so great hearing from you. 

Ross Douthat: Thank you Cherie.

Cherie Harder: And thank you to all of you, for joining us. Have a great weekend.