A World Made for Us

An Interview with Ross Douthat

The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat has spent his career bridging worlds—explaining faith and conservatism to a largely secular audience while also translating secular ideas back to religious readers. In this conversation with Wayfare editor Zachary Davis, Douthat discusses ideas from his new book Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, which makes a compelling case for why belief isn’t a blind leap into the unknown, but a rational and maybe even necessary response to the world as we actually experience it.

What kind of spiritual moment are we in?

I think we’ve passed through a period of crisis and decline for a lot of institutional forms of Christianity in the US and the larger West, and we’ve passed through a kind of high tide for atheism and outright skepticism and secularism that peaked with the new atheists, figures like Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens. There was a kind of maximal point of what you might call secular postreligious confidence, and I’d say it was pre-Trump, so about ten years ago.

And then the last decade has been quite hard on concepts of secular progress and optimism about what a world without religion looks like. There was a powerful narrative during my twenties that held that the big problem in the world was the persistence of religious fundamentalism, whether it was Islamist or Evangelical Christian or anything else, and that once you swept away creationism and biblical literalism and fundamentalism the world would enter a new era of science and progress and reason and enlightenment.

I think people have slowly but surely given up on that vision and have recognized that whatever the problems in the world, they are not essentially just about people being too religious. That politics after Christianity’s influence looks just as polarized, if not more so. The forces that have emerged as religion has declined—wokeness on the left, different forms of populism on the right—do not seem marked by great devotion to reason and tolerance. 

And then there’s a lot of deep existential uncertainty and unhappiness pervading the secular world right now, to a greater degree than ten or fifteen years ago, some connected I think to technological changes to screens and social media and the retreat from reality into virtual life, some connected to Covid and its aftermath. But some of it is connected to people losing a kind of metaphysical horizon, and maybe wanting to have that back—feeling nostalgic for religion, feeling intrigued by religion but also feeling a stopping short.

I think a lot of people who have been reared without religion or who let their religion slip away over the last ten or fifteen years might like it back, but feel that as a serious, enlightened, educated, modern person they can’t really go all the way to embracing a traditional form of faith.

And so they’re in this zone of either personal uncertainty, hovering on the threshold of belief, experimenting with churchgoing, but feeling like it contravenes their reason, or they’re doing a kind of spiritual experimentation, a kind of dabbling that I think is very commonplace right now, people playing around with astrology or magic or psychedelics, forms of spirituality, or of quasi-Christian practices that don’t add up to any kind of formal practice or belief.