Interview: Defending Belief
March/April 2025For religious liberty to make sense, society must see religious belief as somehow special; something inherently worthy of legal protection. Is this view still defensible?
Fifteen years ago, when Ross Douthat became the New York Times’ youngest-ever opinion columnist, religious belief in America and other Western nations seemed to be approaching its use-by date. It was the height of the New Atheism movement. Christopher Hitchins, Richard Dawkins, and others provided scathing commentary on faith, making erudite arguments for why organized religion is incompatible with rational modernity and comparing belief in the God of the Bible with belief in a Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Today much of the steam has dissipated from the heyday of New Atheism. Although the influence of institutional religion in North America still seems to be slipping, Douthat believes that there is also a “disillusioned agnosticism and reluctant nostalgia for belief.” And so he has written a book simply entitled Believe (Zondervan, 2025). It’s a full-throated argument for why religious belief is not merely socially or individually beneficial but also a rational end point for anyone willing to weigh the observable evidence of the human and natural worlds. He calls it a “defense of belief in the God of the old-time sort of religion—supernaturalist and scriptural religion, Jesus-was-resurrected religion.”
Douthat writes mainly on politics, religion, and moral values and says that part of his role as an opinion columnist is to “make religion intelligible to irreligious readers.” He’s the author of six other books, including The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success (Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster, 2020) and Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics (New York: Free Press, 2012).
Liberty editor Bettina Krause recently talked with Douthat about his most recent book, and about why he’s convinced that religious belief will continue to play a significant part in America’s future.*
Bettina Krause: It’s hard to know where to put this book in terms of genre. Despite its title—Believe—it’s not really a traditional book of Christian apologetics. So how would you describe it?
Ross Douthat: I would say it’s a book that tries to lay a foundation for religious exploration for people who may have come of age in a society that offers them no foundation at all. It’s offering an account of why one should be religious and how one might go about becoming religious. It assumes that people are starting from scratch, which I think people in the twenty-first century often are. That doesn’t mean it isn’t also a book with interesting things to say to people who are religious believers. It’s that as well. It tries to essentially confirm religious believers in the basic reasonability of the posture they take toward the universe. But it starts at a very fundamental level: the level of what our reason can grasp and understand about the universe and why that grasping and understanding should point us toward religion, belief in God, and spiritual exploration.
Bettina: Year after year, surveys show declining rates of religiosity in America, not just in how people identify themselves, but also in how regularly they participate in religious activities. You argue, though, that spirituality in America is actually increasing—but it’s a spirituality untethered from institutional religion. What’s going on here?
Ross: Well, you might assume that the reason people have spiritual experiences is that they’ve been brought up to believe in a particular kind of God and particular vision of the universe, and so if you take those beliefs and practices away, the experiences will go away as well.
We have quite a bit of evidence now, really hundreds and hundreds of years of what we call secularization, to suggest that that’s not the case.
Religious and spiritual experiences, obviously, are connected to religious institutions and religious practice, and if you train yourself to try to have spiritual experiences, you’re more likely to have them. But people go on having them even outside of the context of institutional religion. Sometimes they have them just through spiritual exploration on their own. Sometimes they have them completely unexpectedly. There are plenty of accounts of people who had no conception of God having a transformative mystical experience. And there are also people who seek out these experiences through psychedelic and hallucinogenic substances too.
So you have this wide range of spiritual experiences that persists even in the absence of an institutional structure. And there’s the impulse people have to seek out these experiences, which persists even among people who have either left institutional religion or, increasingly, have been raised without any connection to institutional religion at all.
Part of the audience for this book, I think, are people who are interested in spirituality and religion, interested in mystical experience, but end up sort of playing around with it because they feel that, as a serious, modern person, they can’t commit to it all the way. They see it as a sort of entertaining, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if this were true’ kind of experience.
But I’m saying that religious experience fits pretty well into a reasonable person’s understanding of what’s actually going on in the world; that it’s reasonable to seek and expect spiritual experiences based on what we know about the cosmos and what we know about human life.
Bettina: The overarching thrust of your book, though, is that of moving people toward a commitment to an institutional or organized religious tradition.
Ross: Yes.
Bettina: But why should we fight this trend toward idiosyncratic spiritual experiences? What’s the problem—not just for individuals, but for society—with people just experiencing spirituality in a way that’s untethered from formal religious structures?
Ross: Well, for society, I think the easy answer is that religious institutions—like institutions generally (this isn’t just true of religion)—deliver a host of social and communal benefits alongside their promise of getting the individual closer to God or to the truth about the universe. There are basic social benefits to being part of a religious community, to showing up in a particular place on Saturday or Sunday, to having an institutionalized place where you are encouraged to do good works and community service.
This week, it’s almost Christmastime, and my family and I are buying a host of presents for different charitable groups that are connected to our church and that we’re connected to through religion. Would we be making the same charitable purchases absent those connections? I mean, I’d like to think so, but in reality, probably not—or not to the same degree.
Bettina: A popular idea among some faith communities is that one of the best ways to nurture spiritual belief is through belonging; through acting out belief, even before you have belief. But you’re very intentional throughout the book in trying to ground belief on what is rational and observable. And you seem to be rejecting that model of nurturing belief through belonging.
Ross: I don’t want to say that I’m rejecting it. I think clearly there are people for whom that is good advice; who enter religion through belonging, who come to believe because they belong, who join a church because of their spouse or their kids, or just a desire for community and out of that experience of communal worship end up believing. Clearly that happens. What I’m pushing against is the idea that to get to the belonging part is itself a kind of move made in defiance of reason, which I think is sort of implicit in that argument sometimes.
People will sort of imply, OK, religion. It seems implausible, it seems crazy, but give it a try, and it might start to make sense. My view is that religion makes sense, that it’s reasonable. You should do it; give it a try. And because it is reasonable and plausible, once you give it a try, it will become more compelling to you. But I’m just insisting on the idea that the initial decision to belong is itself a decision made in conformity with what we know about the universe, not in defiance of science and progress and all of these things.
And I worry that while certainly there are people who belong without believing and then come to believe, there are also people who might try religion in that way and end up disappointed. They say to themselves, Well, I went to Mass for a year, and God didn’t speak to me.
I’m saying that even if God hasn’t spoken to you, there are still good reasons to be in church or synagogue or in a faith tradition and participating in it.
Bettina: In your book you tackle some of the perennial impediments to belief—difficult ideas, many of them advanced, for instance, by New Atheism. And one of these is the age-old question, If God is all-powerful and all-good at the same time, how can He permit suffering? How do you personally square that circle?
Ross: Obviously that is a hard problem for anyone who believes in the Christian God, the God of the New Testament, the God who appears, in the Gospel stories, to love us in a very individual and intimate kind of way. Squaring that individual and intimate love with some of the suffering that human beings experience is a challenge.
I don’t think it is necessarily an insurmountable challenge, because I don’t think that we, as finite and limited human beings, have the kind of sweeping context on the nature of the universe and the destiny of human beings to pass judgment on God Himself. I think that if you consider human beings as Christians do—as made for some form of eternal life—we don’t know how the suffering of this world looks in the context of eternity.
The conceit of the New Atheist argument is that this challenge becomes a reason not just to be angry at God sometimes, or to wrestle with God, as religious people have done for millennia, but to reject the possibility of God outright. That move basically assumes we have God’s perspective on the universe, that we can stand apart and weigh the good of free will against the evil of suffering.
You’re assuming a kind of Godlike perspective in order to reject God. And if the New Atheists are correct about what human beings are, then there’s no reason to trust our judgment on those matters, right?
So that’s the first point. The second point is a more personal one; and that is that we should be a little bit skeptical about an argument that has seemed to gain ground among human beings as their immediate material suffering has diminished. People have come to find this argument more and more convincing, as we have become a wealthier, healthier society, and more insulated and buffered from suffering and death relative to, let’s say, the medieval or ancient worlds.
It is the case that if you spend a lot of time among people who are poor, people who are struggling with illness, people who are experiencing some of the things that are cited as reasons not to believe in God, those people are often much more religious than the people who are confidently expounding on the moral calculus that leads them to reject God. That’s not a proof of anything. Not everyone who suffers believes in God, and plenty of people maintain a resolute atheism on their deathbeds.
But I think it’s an important point to keep in mind that it doesn’t seem to be the case that experiencing suffering drives people away from religion.
Bettina: Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito said a couple of years back—it was in Rome at a religious liberty conference—something along the lines of “It’s really hard to make the case for religious liberty when Americans increasingly don’t see religion itself as a good thing.” The reputation of religion—especially conservative Christianity—has suffered a lot in recent years. Christianity has come to be seen more as a political label than a religious label to some extent. It’s also seen by some as simply a cover for bigotry when it comes to conflicts between LGBTQ rights and religious freedom. In our current culture war environment, what can be done to rehabilitate the reputation of religion?
Ross: Thinking of it in terms of rehabilitation is perhaps not quite the right way to go about it. I think it’s absolutely the case that when religion goes through a period of ebb or decline or crisis, a lot of the time religious believers within those religious institutions have only themselves to blame. It’s absolutely the case that religious institutions do things that make people, understandably, disillusioned. In the case of the recent wave of secularization, you can see everything from the sex abuse crisis in my own Roman Catholic Church, to the use of religion for political ends by various parties.
All of that is real. And I think it goes a long way to explaining something like the appeal of New Atheism 10 or 15 years ago. It’s not that in 2006 Americans suddenly decided that all of the brilliant arguments of philosophical skeptics of religion were true. It was that those arguments suddenly seemed more interesting because Americans had other reasons to be disillusioned with religion.
But if that’s the case, then you would also expect the wheel to turn. As people get used to living in a society where religious institutions are weaker and religion is a less important force, they may quickly come to see a couple of things that I think people are seeing now. One is that getting rid of religion doesn’t actually make politics more rational or less polarized or kinder or gentler in any way.
In American politics, also in European politics, there has been the rise of populist nationalism and the rise of “wokeness.” These have religious elements, but they’re not really religious movements, and yet they’re just as polarizing and deranging as a more religious politics was 20 years ago. So I think people realize quickly that whatever goes wrong with religion and politics, it has more to do with human beings being human beings than with religion being particularly destructive.
And then another thing is that a life in which religion recedes, and a society in which religion recedes, tends to become fairly existentially unhappy fairly quickly. You see this in the data on the depression rates among young people in the Western world, and all of these things are connected to technological changes; the rise of iPhones and social media and so on.
It’s not just secularization, but if you look around at the more secular parts of Western life right now, you don’t see a lot of confidence and existential hope, right? You see a lot of anxiety and apocalyptic fears and a sense that the human horizons without God can be pretty depressing indeed.
So I don’t think you have to rehabilitate religion in some conscious, brilliant way. It tends to rehabilitate itself because, one, it fits with human needs. And two, it fits with those needs because—as I’m insisting in this book—it also accurately describes reality itself.
Bettina: For many different reasons, there seems to be a lot of pessimism around the future of religion in America. On the spectrum between pessimism and optimism, where do you sit and why?
Ross: I’m an optimist in part because I think we’ve passed through peak secularism, peak materialism. Religious institutions are diminished and weakened and have lost a lot of prestige, sometimes deservedly, but they haven’t gone away. The situation in the U.S. does not look like the situation in, for instance, the United Kingdom or Germany. There are countries in Western Europe where secularization has gone a lot further than it has here. So there is still, I think, a foundation of religious belief and practice in the U.S. that is stronger than in some other developed countries.
I think the supernatural and the mystical clearly have ways of breaking into societies that try to reject or deny them. I think that’s happening.
There’s a way in which this is an optimistic spin on a pessimistic reality, but I think a lot of forces—technology and the economy and so on—are creating a kind of bottleneck in human societies where some cultures and ways of life are not going to make it through. You see this in collapsing birth rates all over the world. There are certain features of Western life that are going to struggle to make it through the next 50 years.
I think that religion is going to make it, and therefore if it makes it through this bottleneck, it will probably have a profound influence on the future.
*Conversation edited for length and clarity.