MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

• Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious by Ross Douthat
• Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis
• The Weight of Glory by C.S. Lewis
• Paul Kingsnorth
• J.R.R. Tolkien

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CONNECT with Ross on X (@DouthatNYT).

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Watch this conversation on YouTube by clicking here. 

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ABOUT:

Ross Douthat has been a New York Times Opinion columnist since April 2009. Previously, he was a senior editor at the Atlantic. He is the author of The Deep Places; The Decadent Society; To Change the Church; Bad Religion; Privilege; and, with Reihan Salam, Grand New Party. He is the film critic for National Review. He lives with his wife and five children in New Haven, Connecticut.

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Note: This transcript is autogenerated using speech recognition software and does contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

Amy Julia Becker (00:05)
Amy Julia Becker, and this is Reimagining the Good Life, a podcast about challenging the assumptions about what makes life good, proclaiming the inherent belovedness of every human being, and envisioning a world of belonging where everyone matters. I’m talking today with New York Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat. We are talking about his most recent book. It’s called Believe Why Everyone Should Be Religious. I wanted to have Ross on the show because

In the work of reimagining the good life, religion can play a significant part. We are all wired to ask the questions, what does it mean to be human? Does God exist? Is the universe good? Is there order and purpose to human life? These are the types of questions that shape our imagination about our individual lives and about our life together. And Ross and I get to talk about all of these things and more today.

Speaking of religion, I will mention here one last time that if you are a religious person and you’re looking for a way to observe the season of Lent, I have two resources for Lent that you can find on my website. One is a devotional guide, one is a small group discussion guide for a weekly discussion. And you can find those at amyjuliabecker.com backslash lenton dash devotional, or just check the link in the show notes and get to it that way.

But now let’s turn to my conversation with Ross Douthat on why everyone should be religious. Well, I am sitting here with Ross Douthat and I’m so excited to have this conversation today. Welcome to Reimagining the Good Life.

Ross Douthat (01:46)
It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Amy Julia Becker (01:49)
Absolutely. So I have followed you and your writing in the New York Times for many years. I’ve also read a number of your books and we’re here today to talk about this most recent book, which is called Believe Why Everyone Should Be Religious. And I’m curious, I thought maybe as a way to introduce our listeners to both the book and to you, could you talk about why you decided to write this book right now?

Where does it kind of fall in the landscape of the books you’ve already written? But also, what is it about this moment, whether that’s a personal or sociopolitical answer, like what is it about right now that called for this book?

Ross Douthat (02:29)
Sure. So I say this at the outset of the book, but I’ve been at the New York Times for a fairly long time now. And, every columnist has certain roles they play. And one of the roles I play is that I am the religious writer, sort of the religious conservative writer who writes for a not exclusively, but largely secular audience, right. An audience that may have some connection to institutional religion, but has often

you know, sort of keeps the distance, has fallen away from it, was raised without faith, and so on. So I spent a lot of my time over the course of my career sort of essentially trying to make not just spirituality in general, but kind of traditional religion, you know, the old time, the old time form, more intelligible to readers who either have reasons to be skeptical of it or don’t know a lot about it at all. So the book is in a way an outgrowth of

something I’ve been doing my whole career at the Times. But I think I ended up deciding to write it in this moment because I think we’re at sort of an unusual moment in American cultural life right now vis-a-vis religion. We’ve sort of passed through a period of increased secularization, meaning fewer people going to church, fewer people identifying with religion, right? You’ve had the rise of

what’s called the nuns, meaning not Catholic nuns, but people who say none, if you ask them what their religion is, right? That’s been a big change in American life in the last 15 or 20 years. And then there was also sort of this period that has now sort of passed where there was a bunch of very popular atheist writers, Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens and so on, who were perceived as having, you know, sort of won.

a bunch of rhetorical battles at least over religion. You would turn on a, you know, a debate show and one of them would be having their way with some sort of well-meaning Anglican bishop or something, right? Like that was sort of a feature of American life. And then there’s been sort of more broadly this era of declining trust in all institutions, which has hit religion as hard as it has hit anyone. have been things like the sex abuse crisis in my own Catholic church that have left people disillusioned. have been

other scandals elsewhere. So in a way, you could say, okay, America has just becoming less religious full stop, right? For all these reasons. At the same time, I feel like I’ve really noticed and again, especially in the last three to five years, this sense of sort of, you know, disappointment, angst on we in the post religious landscape, maybe especially among younger people, the cohort that is,

Actually most likely to be raised without religion but among older people as well, right this sense that well, you know religion has declined but our politics hasn’t become more reasonable right the way some people promised or expected or you know religion has declined but we’re struggling to figure out, know where to find meaning and purpose, you know, there’s a lot of anxiety and depression about the future a lot of anxiety about climate change as a source of you know, sort of

people not having children because of climate change. Anyway, all of that sort of in the air. And so I thought it was a good time for a kind of reintroduction to, you know, some very basic questions like why would you be religious? It’s, know, C.S. Lewis wrote a famous book called Mere Christianity that tried to make a very basic case for Christianity independent of Catholic and Protestant divisions. That was, you know, 80 years ago now or something.

This book is even more basic than that in a way. This is basically mere religion. It’s saying, why would you want to be a Christian or a Jew or a Muslim or a practicing or observant Buddhist or Hindu? What would be the perspective on the world before you get to, you know, some kind of direct experience with God or something like that? What would be the basic perspective on the world that would lead you into one of these faiths? And so the book makes a case for that perspective. And it argues it’s a little different from

or tries to be different from what I think is a sort of commonplace way that religious people sort of introduce religion nowadays. You’ll often hear people say, well, you know, religion, practicing religion, seems a little unreasonable, contrary to science, these kinds of things. But if you just practice, if you just enter a community, have the experience, you will, you know, discover that there’s really something there. And I think that’s true. But

I think in a way it concedes a little too much. think the initial decision to join, to practice, to try is also reasonable in ways that are not in conflict with what science has revealed about the nature of the universe or what modern life has revealed about religious experience, these kinds of things. So it’s making an initial case for the ultimate reasonability of religion. The idea that being religious is

I mean, it’s called why everyone should be religious, right? It’s the idea that, you know, whatever faith you choose or end up in or drawn to, there is an obligation to take religious questions seriously. This has not gone away even under 21st century conditions.

Amy Julia Becker (07:57)
Yeah, thank you so much. That’s a great summary and one of the things I really loved about the book was that sense of an unwillingness to Concede, you know to say look no, I’m not gonna concede that this is unreasonable and let’s talk about why like I really

Ross Douthat (08:12)
I

can see nothing.

Amy Julia Becker (08:15)
But you do a good job of at the same time and I know this has been your job for many many years but of anticipating the arguments and I thought maybe so maybe we can back up into the idea of secularism you this is early on in the book you write more and more of my readers New York Times readers seemed to experience secularism as an uncomfortable intellectual default not a freely chosen liberation

So I wanted to just kind of pause on that sentence as a way in not just to where we are right now, but actually to whether it’s the past 20 years or the past 200 years, if kind of religious history. And I’m thinking about the ways in which our cultural imagination has been shaped by secular assumptions, by assumptions that either there is no God or there’s no God that is meaningful or religious experience doesn’t matter. In what ways do you see secularism

kind of at play in our culture and then increasingly becoming an uncomfortable intellectual default.

Ross Douthat (09:16)
Yeah, mean, think, you know, secularism is different from atheism, right? Atheism is the idea that there is no God. Secularism presents itself as a kind of, in a way, a more neutral perspective. It’s just saying it’s sort of the absence of religion, right? The idea that there are religions out there, government society should be neutral between them. That’s sort of how it begins. over time, it becomes.

kind of culture unto itself, right, where there’s this sort of, it’s not just that we say, you know, we don’t have an established religion or things like that. It’s sort of this default that like, the reasonable thing, the default thing is not to be religious. There are people who are religious, and they’re interesting and have curious ideas, and that’s fine. But the baseline for sort of a respectable person who has gone to a good college, right, is to not, is to not.

not be religious, not think that there’s probably a god or anything like that. And I think that that, you know, at times and in certain contexts that that is felt clearly as a liberation, right? You know, anyone who has had a negative or toxic experience with religion, anyone who has a strong conflict with particular religious ideas or practices will often initially feel

the absence of religion as a kind of lifting of weight, right? And that’s still a powerful sense in our society, right? If you, like the song, I mentioned it briefly in the book, but the song, Imagine by John Lennon, right? Is, this kind of, it become this kind of anthem of progress and enlightenment and harmony for a lot of people. And, you know, the lyrics of that song are basically like, you know, imagine there’s no heaven.

Imagine, you know, there’s there’s no God, we’re just alone here. That’s it. And clearly there is some kind of relief that people can feel in that in that initial sort of sense of like, OK, you know, yeah, the you know, God is not judging me all the time. You know, punitive rules don’t actually apply. I know I don’t have to swallow some mythological conceit. The challenge then, though, of course, is

you what what do you do next? Right. And what is what is the actual source of meaning and purpose in your life if there is no God? Right. If there is. by and by God here, I’m not just saying like no, you know, particular Judeo-Christian concept of God. Right. The statement that there’s no God is often a larger statement that the universe is random. Right. There’s no cosmic purpose. The only purposes are the ones that we might

provisionally and temporarily impose upon it. And I think that perspective, it can work well for people when things seem to be going well in their own lives or in their culture, right? So you have, I think, a version of secular thinking that sort of borrows from religion the idea that history has a direction. It has an arc, right? It’s going somewhere better. Progress is slow but difficult.

but we are building towards a better society and a better world. And so I think in eras when that sensibility is in the air, have an easier time living as secular people. I think in the last 10 years, for reasons related to politics, to the internet and how it’s changed our lives, to COVID-19, to a lot of other forces, I think for a lot of people that sense of progress or certainty about progress has slipped away.

And it’s of thrown people back on the downside, the obvious downside of imagining that there’s no God and no heaven, which is that human life comes to seem accidental, contingent, random, futile, liable to dissolve. And that’s become a powerful idea right now. And in turn, I think it’s left a lot of people in a kind of interesting halfway house. You see a lot of this, I think, in our culture now.

of a kind of experimentation on the fringes of religion, a sort of that doesn’t go all the way to religious practice itself, right? And this is part of what you get when you hear people say, I’m spiritual, but not religious, right? What that can mean is I’m taking two steps back toward religion, but I don’t want to fully commit to really concrete beliefs. want to pick up a religious practice, prayer, meditation, these kinds of things. want to dabble in.

you know, astrology, right? Like there’s been a big vogue for astrology. If you go to the bookstore, there are now shelves and shelves of sort of magic, you know, this this kind of, you know, tarot cards, spell casting. And are the people who are buying those books devout believers in witchcraft and neo paganism? Probably not. Some of them are, but probably not. It’s more like, what do we you know, what are we missing in a secular life? And what can we

Amy Julia Becker (14:24)
rate.

Ross Douthat (14:34)
What can we sort of pull out of the religious past to resolve that sense of difficulty or loss?

Amy Julia Becker (14:43)
I’ve there’s so many ways I could take my next question in terms of all that you just said. And I do I feel like there’s sometimes when I interview people and I feel like all that someone who listens needs is the interview. And then there are other times where it’s like, no, really, go read the book. And this is one of those times because I’m like, we could talk about the danger. Like you’re really good at talking about if there are spiritual forces that probably are good and bad ones. And there’s danger out there like that’s in the book. You talk about why we should have some

actual belief in a cosmic ordering of things. That’s there. And I think a very compelling, kind of helpful history of science and, you know, even current metaphysics, which are hard for me to understand, but I appreciate it. But here’s where I’m going to land instead. This is another line from the introduction that really stood out to me. You wrote, it’s the religious perspective that asks you to bear the full weight of being human. And

I think a lot and we talk a lot on the show about what it means to be human. And I wanted to ask why religion asks us to and perhaps also helps us to bear the weight of being human. Like, what did you mean by that?

Ross Douthat (15:54)
So I’m there too, I’m sort of stealing a idea or phrase from CS Lewis who wrote a book or an essay, maybe it was a lecture originally called The Weight of Glory. And the idea in that argument was that if you assume that human life has a eternal destiny of some kind, right?

You don’t have to have sort of a specific belief about the nature of heaven or the nature of you know I’m Catholic so, you purgatory is in there too, right? You know for you don’t think even get into the specifics you can just say look if you think that All the world’s great religions are correct and that human life extends somehow into Eternity or into future lives if you believe in reincarnation if it if it has this this long-term extension

beyond this life itself, then what we do in this life has, you know, has has very, very substantial long term stakes. And by long term, I mean long term. Right. You are as you know, as a as a soul having an experience of embodied existence, you know, sort of the religious perspective on what’s what’s going on here. Right. You are

turning yourself into the kind of person that you are going to be in eternity, right? And that’s a very big deal. And it’s good news, right? In the sense that it means that good things last, that they aren’t just sort of lost in time. And so yeah, it’s good news, it’s welcome news, but it is also a kind of, it has a heaviness.

to it, right? I think that, and again, this is sort of like why people like the song Imagine, right? It’s like people, there is a sense in which there’s a sense of relief when things are not going well in your life or when you’re unhappy with your own choices or with the person you have partially become or anything like that. There’s a relief to think that it all just dissolves away eventually. And there’s a weight, a heaviness in thinking, no, actually, you know, if I have sinned, I need to

Repent or else I carry that sin with me. Right if I you know, if I have wronged someone I need to make it right and I mean to your original question religion obviously also Helps us bear sort of the immediate weight of him bought of this existence right that that is that is a part of this too and This is not the main theme of this book, but the the last book

I wrote, you know, we’re both, we both live in Connecticut. you’re familiar with Lyme disease, right? And the sort of strangeness of, of, of chronic illness in the context of New England. my last book was about, the experience of having Lyme disease over a fairly long period of time and struggling with that. And in that context, I wrote a fair amount about the extent to which, you know, religion, religion in those circumstances is a crutch.

in a good way, right? It’s not a criticism to say religion is a crutch. No, religion, when you are suffering, the promise that you’re suffering is for something, that it’s not just random, right? That if you go through and bear up and endure and do the right thing, that great good will come of it over, you know, a potentially eternal time horizon. is an easing of burdens. That helps you carry the burden. But

it is also the case that there is a way in which that perspective adds burdens to people as well. So both things are true at once in a way, right? Religion, you know, it lightens heavy burdens when you’re trying to sort of go forward through difficulty, but it freights your choices with real cosmic significance in a way that sometimes it’s easier to sort of slip away from and say, you know, better if it all just sort of…

you know, goes back to the dust.

Amy Julia Becker (20:15)
What do you think is the difference between belief, like kind of, you know, a set of propositions that you believe to be true, and religion? Like, I think there’s an overlap, but maybe they’re not the same. And I’m curious to hear you talk about that a little bit.

Ross Douthat (20:31)
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I’m trying to use terms in the book in sort of colloquial ways, right? There’s endless debates about what constitutes a religion. I’m sort of using it the way most people use it, right, to mean a sort of set of a set of beliefs and practices that assume a supernatural horizon for human life that are intended to prepare you for, you know.

prepare you for that horizon, bring you into right relationship with God or the gods or the ultimate, whatever you want to say. And in that definition, you would say that belief is a kind of, it’s part of the larger category. Religion is a larger category in which belief exists as a subset, right? The beliefs are part of the foundation that anchors a set of practices and habits.

that are seeking transformation and relationship, right? And so you don’t want to place too much weight on the idea of belief, qua belief, right? I think that there are sort of, you know, people like me who write and argue for a living, right, may tend to sort of put too much weight on the idea of like, well, you you’ve got to…

You have these dogmas and the way to understand a religion is what does it say? What’s its dogmatic view of this and that? Right. Who does it think God is? What’s the technical definition of the Trinity or anything else? Right. And there’s a critique of that, a reasonable critique that says, look, that matters. But what religion really is, how you it’s a way of life. Right. It’s how you live. And and ultimately, if you’re

seeking God, what kind of relationship you find with God. And that’s, that’s, I think, a powerful and important argument. At the same time, I think that there is a having a baseline, a baseline of things that you believe to be true about the world. And again, in this book, I’m talking about basic things before you get to the level of, you know, is Jesus the son of God is Mohammed, the seal of the prophets, just sort of

basic ideas about the universe and what we can sort of not know fully, but feel pretty confident about. And I think there is a set of those beliefs that are a reasonable and important grounding for all of the kind of community seeking, relationship seeking, virtue seeking aspect, experience seeking, right, aspects of religion.

Amy Julia Becker (23:23)
Well, and one of the things that you do in the book is you’re actually pretty clear that although you are a Christian and are happy to make a case for Christianity, you also are making a case that religion more broadly is worthwhile and that actually the kind of big old religions are the most worthwhile of the of the lot. Right. And I’m curious, you’ve mentioned New Age, you’ve mentioned kind of spiritual, but not religious. And you’re basically saying, yeah, don’t go that way. Like go in the way of some of these

sets of beliefs and practices that have actually been communally enacted for centuries if you really want to find your way here. I wondered if you could talk a little bit about, first of all, correct me if I’m misstating your position.

Ross Douthat (24:06)
No,

that’s right. mean, I think, you I think you assume. So I’m imagining, you know, the hypothetical reader who is not religious, who is persuaded by my argument to sort of come to the threshold of religion, right, and look around. And when you’re on that threshold, obviously, you’re not going to probably you’re not going to immediately say, OK, and now I will just convert to Roman Catholicism. Right. Right. There’s going to be a period of exploration. Right. And I’m not.

I’m not criticizing that. I am saying though that, you don’t want to maintain a kind of purely open, highly individualized exploratory mode, you know, over a, you over your whole lifetime, but over some long time horizon where that comes to define your whole spiritual life. And I think there are several reasons for that. Like the most basic that I say is you’re probably not yourself.

a religious genius, right? You are probably, you to basically sort of do religion exclusively on your own, you have to have, you know, a pretty high opinion of your own, either your own spiritual capacities, how much God is personally favoring you these kind of things, right? Like, because this I mean, this is true in any, know, it’s useful to think of religion as not being completely different from other modes of sort of

human life, right? You would not say like, you know, I’m going to, you know, do this activity or that I’m going to become, you know, a great painter, but never like subject myself to any of the disciplines of artistic training, right? I’m going to become a soccer player, but I will never join a team. You’ll just find me outside in the backyard kicking the soccer ball for the next 25 years. Right. That was pretty weird. think religion is similar in that sense, right? Like there are certain, you know, there are obviously certain

things to be gained by submitting yourself to disciplines and traditions that have existed over an extended period of time and have seemed to deliver either moral improvement or religious experience or connection to God for lots and lots of people before you. And I think that holds true even if you assume that no one religion is absolutely true, right?

You that you can say, okay, well, you there are multiple paths to God, the big religions, ultimately, if they work, they lead to the same place. Okay, that’s fine. You can say that, but they still all have their own internal integrity. Right. And it would be, I have this, you know, maybe slightly strained metaphor, but I say, you know, look, let’s say you’re setting out on a journey and you have five different maps of how to get from, you know, to, think I said like, you know, Bangor, Maine to Topeka.

I why I picked those places, right? But sort of a long journey. Good names. Good names. Good American names, right? And so you have these five maps. And it turns out, you think, well, all of these maps work. They’re different maps. take you a different route, but they all work. That’s great. Does it make sense to then say, OK, great, I’ll take this piece of this map and put it together with that piece of that map and do a couple side quests, add that map, and I’m sure I’ll get to Topeka in the end? No, that would not, in fact, work. And I think, so even if you say,

you know, there’s an Islamic path to God and a Christian path to God and a Hindu path to God. You probably want to usually stay within the parameters of a path unless you feel called to, you know, actual conversion from one to the other, which I think is the other thing, too, right? That like, you know, there are contexts and situations where you can enter a religious group and be sort of feel yourself imprisoned in it. Right. In general, the religious seeker in 21st century America

has a lot of latitude. And if you enter Catholicism or Islam or Buddhism and practice them sincerely and then reach a certain point where you think, you know, okay, I’m actually being called into a different tradition, you can make that move. And there are lots of, you know, interesting stories of, you know, people I know, writers who have had that kind of experience in which it seems like the initial choice

was part of how they ended up in the other place. And so there’s a novelist called Paul Kings North who’s a British novelist, right? He was technically raised Christian but had no attachment to his youthful Christian faith. It was totally Moroban, pointless. He couldn’t imagine anyone taking it seriously. And he embarked on this long winding religious journey that led through pantheism, Zen Buddhism, Wicca. He was like,

accessing white magic and ended up becoming a Christian at the end. And looking back over that arc, there was probably no way that he would have become a Christian at the start without making commitments in other places. First, if he’d just stayed sort of perfectly open, he wouldn’t have actually ended up in the destination where he ended up. So that’s, I think, part of it too. then the last thing which you alluded to, right, is that, you know,

Spiritual landscapes are dangerous if they’re real, right? If you take the supernatural seriously, and this is a book that takes the supernatural seriously, maybe in some slightly weird ways at times. But one thing all the great religions say is that there are blind alleys and traps for the unwary. There are perhaps supernatural entities out there that do not have.

the good of human beings in mind. And, you know, I’m very interested in people who are taking who are using psychedelics these days for religious purposes, basically, who see them as sort of opening their mind to spiritual realities. And a lot of those people have really positive experiences and come away genuinely transformed. They feel like they’ve had a religious awakening through, you know, siloed bison or ayahuasca or one of these things. Right. But then

there is a substantial minority of people who experiment with these things who basically seem to run into demons, right? You don’t have to believe they’re literally demons, know, you can say they’re Jungian archetypes that we’ve surfaced from our subconscious, but bad, bad things happen in the course of experiments. And I think, again, one of the reasons to adopt a certain set of strictures and rules and inherited traditions is just the kind of protection that

that again you would take with you if you went on a journey in the real world, right? So why wouldn’t you want it on a spiritual journey as well?

Amy Julia Becker (31:04)
Mm hmm. Yeah, I did find it really compelling because I think it would be easy to assume that this book is I don’t like using the word rational because I think one of the things you’re trying to argue is that there’s a rationality or reasonableness to an understanding of a supernatural world, to an understanding of our world, including the supernatural. So I don’t quite have the words or the category.

Ross Douthat (31:29)
I think materialist is the word, right? For someone who thinks that atoms are all they are.

Amy Julia Becker (31:36)
And yeah, and like I think in other words, and you mentioned this, like you could have written a book that’s basically saying, look, we need religion for the sake of morality and we need it for the sake of weaving the social fabric together. This society has been based upon understandings, religious understandings of human dignity. want to keep those. So whether or not it’s true, I’m going to make a case for religion. And you are pretty clear that that’s not actually what you’re doing. That’s other. That may be true, fine. But like that’s there’s actually something more here.

And part of that being the supernatural kind of breaking into the material order of things. And I’m curious, like, why that matters to your argument? Like, why does the super why does that? maybe, I mean, the weight of glory is part of that, right? Like, if there are eternal stakes, it’s a different game that we’re playing. But does it matter here and now also?

Ross Douthat (32:28)
Well, I think it matters insofar as like, I’m interested in what is actually the case in the world. Okay. If, know, if there are supernatural things that happen to people, if people, you know, could get possessed by a demon or be healed through intercessory prayer, those are important and notable facts about the world that should be considered in making your, in making your life choices again, here and now, regardless of what you believe about heaven and hell and so forth.

so that’s part of it. It’s also very relevant to the question of whether it makes sense to join a major world religion because the major world religions do assert very strongly, that the supernatural is real and is sort of, it’s, is, you know, not the only, but one of the crucial things that separates a, you know, a sort of Christian world picture from a purely materialist world picture is the,

that that idea. And again, this is it’s not that there aren’t there are obviously sort of forms of religion, you know, that have watered down or tried to empty out some of the wilder supernatural stuff, certain liberal forms of Christianity, certain westernized forms of Buddhism, where it’s all just sort of meditation. And, you know, the hungry ghosts aren’t aren’t as important as they are in, you know, popular Buddhism in China. So those exist. But in general, yeah.

The choice to be the choice that I’m urging on people, the choice to join one of these big faiths is a choice to join a world picture that thinks that these things really go on in the world. Right. So it matters whether you think that’s true or not. And then, mean, the final thing I’d say is just, you know, I’m what part of what I’m interested in is, you know, to what extent, to what extent is it actually true that

over the last 200 years, the religious world picture has become less credible. There are certain things people tend to cite, Darwinian evolution above all, that are invoked as of blows to a religious perspective. And some of those exist. I think Darwinism certainly poses some particular theological challenges for Christianity that I’d have to write another book about. I sort of left, I gestured at that in this book.

But I also think there are big ways in which the things that materialists, people who don’t believe in the supernatural, 200 years ago have just not happened, right? There was this strong expectation, if you go back and read people from the late 18th century, sort of enlightenment types, that once churches didn’t have power anymore, once everyone wasn’t reared reading the Bible and sort of taught these ancient stories about miracles and prophets,

that once all that went away, you know, so would a lot of people’s reports of, you know, visions and healings and religious experience. Right. Yeah. Like all of that was just culturally conditioned. It’s what you were taught to believe. You know, people said they saw angels because they were taught to think they saw angels, this kind of thing. Right. Everything we’ve seen since then is no, you can you can diminish the power of institutional religion. You can people can stop believing formally in God and they keep on having

weird sometimes deeply weird Yeah religious experiences that map onto the religious experiences that saints and prophets had in the past that stuff just hasn’t gone away And so if you you know, and it extends I talk a bit about near-death experiences Which are a case where you have a really weird phenomenon that we actually know much more about yeah Because we bring a lot more people back from the brink of death in our hospitals than anyone did in the middle ages, right? so

That’s just very interesting to me. And I think people don’t always fully appreciate it because and in part because, you know, it’s a little bit, it’s disreputable to talk too much about some of these things. Right. And so there’s sort of this, this like, you know, widespread reality of lots of people have lots of different views, having a lot of weird experience that I don’t think gets talked about.

adequately in the secular parts of our culture and that is clearly relevant to a decision of whether you think a religious world picture makes sense.

Amy Julia Becker (37:00)
Yeah, I mean, I’m with you in everything you just said, both in terms of, you know, some very much personal experience of some of those weird religious things where I’m like, and the desire, if that is true.

Ross Douthat (37:13)
There’s a lot of weird stuff that happens in a lifetime.

Amy Julia Becker (37:16)
And if that’s true and there is a spiritual dimension to all of material reality, I do want to know about that. And I want to be in touch in a careful and mindful way. But I also I don’t want to cut myself off from from that reality, especially when there could be kind of eternal goodness present.

in the here and now, right? Obviously, as you said, there can also be kind of eternal danger present in the here and now. And paying attention to all of that seems I agree it makes a lot of sense. I have a little bit of a pivot here that I just did want to ask you about, because, you know, you are known for writing about religion. You’re also known as somewhat of a political pundit. And this book is not political punditry. Like there’s I don’t think any direct political commentary.

Ross Douthat (38:05)
I hope there is

Amy Julia Becker (38:07)
I’m pretty sure not a whiff. I did read it. I did read every word. But I also think there’s a connection between our religious commitments individually and socially, like more collectively, and our political commitments. And I don’t mean by that that, you know, if you are a Christian, then you’ll vote this way. And if you are a Hindu, then you’ll vote this way. just mean that our shared kind of understandings of what it means to be good citizens and good neighbors and to be involved in the life of the polis. Right. Like, so I’m just wondering if you could speak to that.

connection, like why religion matters as far as who we are as like political actors.

Ross Douthat (38:42)
Yeah, I mean, I think that there’s, you know, there’s endless debate about the proper relationship between religion and politics. Yeah, I think that historically, the American model has worked reasonably well, where we have a society that is, in some sense, secular in its politics in the sense that, as I said before, it doesn’t have an established religion.

you’re not supposed to use the power of the state to impose your specific religious beliefs on other people. And yet at the same time, we have taken for granted religion as a crucial source of motivation for moral and political reform. Right. and this is something that, you know, nowadays, because conservatism is a bit more religious and liberalism is a bit less religious, liberals are a little more.

anxious about and more likely to see the specter of theocracy hanging over religious engagement in politics. But then if you push back and say, but what about Martin Luther King? What about the social gospel? What about the abolitionist movement? These kind of things, right? It’s actually very hard to tell a reasonable story, a positive story about American history if you don’t accept that many of our

core moral debates about how you fill in the details of what kind of society we want to have and share. Those debates have always been informed by religious ideas. And I think to the extent that as religion declines, what happens is not that religion goes away and so politics just becomes purely rational.

no longer no longer metaphysical or supernatural. No. What happens is that people people pour religious kinds of energy more and more into partisan politics and invest partisan politics with moral and theological significance when the correct balance is to have a moral and theological perspective that it’s more important to you than your politics that informs your politics.

But you don’t confuse your politics with your religion. There’s a statistic I like to cite that 50 or 60 years ago, parents were more upset when they were asked, your child is going to marry a member of a different religion than they were if their child married a member of the opposite political party. So was more unsettling if you were Catholic and your child was marrying a Protestant than if you were a Democrat and your child was marrying a Republican.

nowadays that has switched. People are much more relaxed about the religion of their child’s future spouse and much more likely to be anxious or even horrified if their, child comes home and says, Hey, Hey dad, I’m marrying a Trump voter or a Harris voter. Right. And I don’t think that’s a good change in American. I think it’s a change that reflects the weakening of religion. And, the, but not, but in that weakening, the substitution.

of political attachments and for, you know, for attachments and relationships that are better suited to religion.

Amy Julia Becker (42:13)
So I’m also wondering for you personally, and you give you’ve given some hints about this as far as just even an experience of suffering, as well as in the book, you, you know, tell some kind of more personal stories. But what difference does belief and practice make in your day to day life? Like if you just bring this into, you know, Ross Douthat 101, like here’s how I live. What difference does it make?

Ross Douthat (42:39)
I mean, first of all, I would not hold myself up as a exemplar of Christian practice in any way. I’m the guy who gets to mass on Sunday dragging the kids 12 minutes late. You’re trying to get in before the gospel to make sure it counts. There’s a ragged edge, let’s just say, to my religious practice that where…

That’s yeah, that’s that’s just sort of a reality. I will not be writing a book at least for the foreseeable future, offering a long list of I mean, there is spiritual yeah, there is spiritual advice in this book, but it’s very general. So I would say that I think that for me, you know, religion does various things. There is a kind of both grounding of but also sort of challenge to

worldliness, I think that’s very important for those of us who are, you know, members of the professional class sort of participating in elite forms of professional life and culture and so on. I I write I write for the New York Times. It’s probably the most important newspaper in the world. I’ve you know, I’ve always been very ambitious. Ambition ambition and competition are sort of essential to a lot of the worlds that I’m in. Right. And so having

religious commitments and loyalties that are supposed to take precedence over those ambitions. While they don’t always take precedence, just having that pull is a good and important thing. Religion, as I mentioned, has been very important in sort of dealing with and getting through some of the serious hardships that I faced in my own life, which are not the most serious hardships anyone’s faced, certainly.

You know, we’ve had I’ve had some bad times and religion has it’s again. This is not like this is quite different from the argument and believe right is an argument about the reasonability of religious faith. I don’t think the fact that religion helps you through crises proves anything about whether it’s true necessarily. It does hopefully if God speaks to you in some way, but it’s not, you know, it’s it’s fine for people to look at it and say, you know, well, of course, doubt that leaned on religion when he was really sick because, you know,

That’s what he needed, right? That’s fine. But it’s still true. And it’s very, very, very helpful to believe in cosmic purpose when you’re going through some trial or difficulty. And then finally, even when you’re not in a trial or difficulty, having a sense that the universe is good, that it has bad things in it and evils in it, but it’s a good thing that the universe exists, human beings exist for a reason. We are not just

contingent or accidental history in some way is unfolding under the aegis of a larger plan. All of those things, I think, are actually quite helpful to writing about politics and culture in a way that doesn’t veer constantly between total optimism and total hysteria. There’s a lot of hysteria in the way people write about

politics now that is exacerbated by the way we relate to each other on the internet, the immediacy of the news cycle, all of these things. And I’m not going to tell you that I’ve successfully achieved an eternal perspective. That’s not true. yeah, having some confidence that the larger story is not in my control, but it is in someone’s control, I think that’s a good

that’s a good thing to carry into the kind of work that I do.

Amy Julia Becker (46:34)
I love that. Thank you so much. I have one final question for you just as we come to a close. I’m thinking about back to the earlier questions about kind of a secular reader who has that sense of like default secularism and yet I’m not totally content with that. So there may not be much of a religious imagination that that person brings into

this conversation, and yet maybe there’s a desire for that. You write, it’s worth becoming a seeker at one point in the book. And I loved that idea. Like, it’s worth it to seek. It’s worth it to seek after truth and goodness and beauty and justice and all these things that I hope religion ultimately stands for. And I’m curious if you have any thoughts on how you would start. I mean, if you are the person and you don’t even have the map yet, you just know you want to go from Bangor to Topeka, right? Like, how do you start?

Ross Douthat (47:31)
Well, mean, one one one place in the book that’s somewhat relevant is there’s there’s a section where I talk about, you know, not being embarrassed to start with whatever is readiest to hand. Right. That, you know, there’s people who will say, you know, how can I believe in religion when in the truth of religion, when everyone just ends up following the same religion as their parents? Right. And, you know, or people

you know, the people just convert for the wrong reasons because, know, they got married or they have some cultural affinity or for politics. Right. We were just talking about sort of the collapse of religion into politics and all that’s true at the same time to go back to what I was just saying about sort of having some confidence that, you know, the universe, the universe is not a trick, right? It’s not out to get you exactly. if there’s something, you know, where, where you have been placed is there has to be something.

there for you that’s worthwhile. even in a secular and disenchanted culture, most people have some form of religion that is sort of nearest to them. And for some people, it’s what they were raised in. For some people, it might be an identity, like a Jewish identity that goes back generations that hasn’t been sort of practiced. For some people, it might be their friend who is a serious Buddhist and who they’ve been.

been friends with and found that sort of an interesting and quirky part of their life for a long time. You the examples will vary with the person, but I think it’s still a quite unusual person in our era who has no point of entry to some kind of religion, no book that they’ve ever liked that didn’t have some religious element. There’s tons of people who are total atheists.

whose favorite authors are like JR R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, right? These were two of the most serious Christian authors and thinkers of the 20th century, right? So, you know, maybe that’s your way in. And in the final analysis, you know, sometimes it is okay to just, you know, find a church that’s open and go sit in it. With the last point I’ll make on this being too, that like, as a seeker,

There are some people who feel like they won’t be satisfied, right? Unless they have a kind of undeniable and certain encounter with God, right? I’ve read some writers who say, I’ve tried it, you I’ve done, you know, it’s been a couple of years, went to church, read the books and so on. Where was God? didn’t, know, and obviously I think such experiences are real and possible and they’re out there. And I think if you really want a religious experience, if you really go for it, you probably will eventually find one. But,

At the same time, the default has to be that God placed us in this world for a reason, right? In this material reality. I’m not a hard materialist, but I believe that the material world is where we’re supposed to be most of the time. We’re not all supposed to be on ayahuasca trips all the time, right? So, you know, looking for, if you’re looking for the experience of God, it’s not

it’s okay to say like I have good reasons to think there might be a god and I am experiencing religion as a phenomenon in this world in that and and not like you know not immediately setting the bar at direct divine revelation the day after next Tuesday or else you’re out

Amy Julia Becker (51:14)
Yes. Well, thank you again just for the book and for your time and for giving some sense of how some of us might begin that journey. That’s the point.

Ross Douthat (51:16)
Thank

Well, thank you so much for having me on. This was terrific. I really appreciate it.

Amy Julia Becker (51:34)
Thanks as always for listening to this episode of Reimagining the Good Life. As you go from here, I would first just encourage you to check out Ross’s new book. Also, I’ll remind you again about my Lenten devotional and Lenten small group discussion guide available on my website. And I will also remind you, I love getting your questions and suggestions. I am always so grateful when you share these conversations with other people, when you rate and review it so more people know that it exists.

I want to thank Jake Hansen for editing the podcast and Amber Beery, my social media coordinator, for doing everything else to make sure it happens. I hope this conversation helps all of us to challenge assumptions, proclaim belovedness, and envision a world of belonging where everyone matters. Let’s reimagine the good life together.