Shifting Culture
Shifting Culture
Ep. 282 Ross Douthat - Why Everyone Should Be Religious
In a world that often feels fragmented, uncertain, and spiritually empty, what if belief isn't just possible - but essential? Today, I'm sitting down with Ross Douthat, New York Times columnist and one of our most nuanced cultural thinkers, to explore a radical proposition: Why everyone should be religious in an age of growing skepticism. We're going beyond the debates of belief versus non-belief. This conversation dives into the mysteries at the heart of human experience - from quantum physics that suggests the universe might be more intentional than we thought, to near-death experiences that challenge everything we understand about consciousness. Douthat brings a provocative, intellectually rigorous perspective that defies easy categorization. We'll explore how ancient spiritual wisdom might hold profound answers for our hyper-individualized, technology-driven world. How can religious thinking help us navigate complexity, find meaning, and reconnect with something larger than ourselves? Expect surprises. We'll uncover scientific discoveries that point toward design, discuss supernatural experiences that defy materialist explanations, and wrestle with life's deepest questions. Whether you're a committed believer, a curious skeptic, or someone feeling spiritually lost, this episode promises to expand your understanding and offer a message of hope. We're not just talking about belief - we're reimagining what it means to be human in a mysterious universe.
Ross Douthat is a columnist for The New York Times op-ed page. He is the author of Believe, The Deep Places, The Decadent Society, To Change The Church, Privilege, and Grand New Party. Before joining the Times he was a senior editor for The Atlantic. He is the film critic for National Review, and he has appeared regularly on television, including Charlie Rose, PBS Newshour, and Real Time with Bill Maher.
Ross' Book:
Believe
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The reality is that if you're just telling people, let's hang out and talk about ethics, it's just not doing the same kind of thing that an institution that's trying to sort of prepare people for virtuous behavior through the life cycle with an eye towards your eventual destination after death is doing. Oh, Joshua,
Joshua Johnson:hello and welcome to the shifting culture podcast in which we have conversations about the culture we create and the impact we can make. We long to see the body of Christ look like Jesus, I'm your host, Joshua Johnson, in a world that often feels fragmented, uncertain and spiritually empty, what if belief isn't just possible but essential? Today, I'm sitting down with Ross Douthat, New York Times columnist and one of our most nuanced cultural thinkers, to explore a radical proposition, why everyone should be religious. In an age of growing skepticism, we're going beyond the debates of belief versus non belief. This conversation dives into the mysteries at the heart of the human experience, from quantum physics that suggests the universe might be more intentional than we thought, to mere death experiences that challenge everything we understand about consciousness doubt that brings a provocative, intellectually rigorous perspective that defies easy categorization. We'll explore how ancient spiritual wisdom might hold profound answers for our hyper individualized, technology driven world. How can religious thinking help us navigate complexity, find meaning and reconnect with something larger than ourselves. Expect surprises. We'll uncover scientific discoveries that point toward design, discuss supernatural experiences that defy materialist explanations, and wrestle with life's deepest questions, whether you're a committed believer, a curious skeptic or someone feeling spiritually lost, this episode promises to expand your understanding and offer a message of hope. We're not just talking about belief. We're reimagining what it means to be human in a mysterious universe. So join us. Here is my conversation with Ross Douthat. Ross, welcome to shifting culture. Excited to have you on. Thank you so much for joining
Ross Douthat:me. You're very welcome. Thank you so much for having me.
Joshua Johnson:I'm excited to dive into your book. Believe why everyone should be religious, and your case for religion. I would like to know as we start, how did we get here? What is the state of the world? And I want to go back pretty, pretty far. Let's go back to what was the organizing thought, life belief, before Copernicus and Darwin, and then what shifted and changed to move us into, I think, a secular type of non belief world that we currently sit in.
Ross Douthat:It's a good question. We'll try and cover, you know, 500 to 1000 years of history in brisk fashion. I think the, you know, the simplest way to look at it, especially in the context of the arguments I'm making in the book, is that for most of human history, in most societies and civilizations, there was a default to a view that the universe existed for some reason, that there was some deep relationship between mind and matter, where mind in some form, was primary. This could take the form of a creator god. It could take the form of a kind of pantheistic conception, where mind and the universe are sort of bound together in some way. But you know, in there was some sense of order and design and intentionality in the cosmos. There was some sense of a kind of spiritual hierarchy in which human beings existed, that also included a spirit world that you know might include the local spirits associated with the tribe. In a primitive society, might include a pantheon of gods. And a polytheistic society might include saints and angels and medieval Christendom. And then there was an assumption that human life continued in some form, maybe a more fulfilled form, maybe a more attenuated form, but continued in some form after death, and that your conduct in this life, your relationship to higher powers in this life, had some kind of relationship to some kind of eternal destiny. So that's again, you know, we're glossing, we're glossing a lot of a lot of different pictures. But I also think you could say then there was also a certain kind of convergence between the major religious traditions, right, that obviously Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, retained a lot of significant differences, but you could still see similarities, certainly in. Their ethical codes that, you know, emerged in the, you know, the first millennium BC, and then afterward, with Christianity and Islam, you have ethical conversion convergence, what, what CS Lewis calls, in one of his books the Dow, this sort of, you know, common moral inheritance of the major religious traditions. You have some convergence on ideas about heaven and hell and life after death, even though Eastern religions believe in reincarnation and Western religions don't. Both religions believe in some kind of heaven and some kind of hell after death. And you know, and you have certain kinds of philosophical convergences where you can find Hindu philosophers and mystics meditating on the nature of God, who say things that can sound a lot like Western mystics and philosophers, again, notwithstanding real theological differences. So that's that's a picture of the religious world. So then what happens to that world? I think it's a, it's a, it's an interesting and complicated question, because you have a series of in the Western world, scientific revolutions that you know deal pose particular challenges to particular aspects of Western Christianity, right? You know, the Copernican Revolution changes the basic conception of how the universe is put together, and where earth fits among the planets. And then Darwinism poses a specific challenge, I think, to Christian ideas about the fall of man, the book of Genesis, the origin of the human race. So, so there, there are those scientific challenges. Then there's obviously a kind of, you know, a sort of political process in the western world whereby new states and governments, you know, sort of compete with one another and are in conflict and tension with religious authorities in ways that sort of create Church State debates the secular versus the sacred. All of these things that themselves play some important role in weakening religions hold. And then you have certain, you know, broad social transformations, industrialization, you know the end of the agrarian world. And then beyond industrialization, the trans the the revolutions for the last 50 or 60 years, the sexual revolution, the cultural revolutions associated with it that sort of alienate modern people from a lot of the traditional, or at least some of the traditional moral teachings of the faith. So you, I think, in talking about how the world became more secular, you have to see, yes, there's a scientific dimension. There's a scientific challenge to certain religious ideas. There's a political dimension. There's a social and moral dimension. And then finally, there's just, and this is, and relates to the argument I'm making in the book, there's just sort of the fact of modern pluralism, right? Like, you know, modernity, it's not just liberalism, it's globalization, it's, you know, whole host human communications technology, a whole host of trends just brings people into contact with the diversity of religious traditions for the first time fully, you know, unless you're Marco Polo in in most of human history, and that change, I think, creates sort of an extra burden for people in sort of either sticking with or Choosing a particular religion, a sense that, like particularity seems, if not, a mistake. You know, it's that it's more unlikely, right, that any that any particular one faith could be the one true faith in the way that you know, again, certainly, various forms of Christianity and Islam would would claim to be,
Joshua Johnson:that's really helpful.
Unknown:Goodness, six, six minutes, 1000 years of history, yeah, what,
Joshua Johnson:what has been then some of the scientific discoveries and the way that we have seen the cosmos and the order of the universe, what are some of those discoveries that have started to point then maybe this isn't just an accident that has happened. Maybe there is something a mover at the beginning. There is a creator.
Ross Douthat:Yeah, I mean, I think the shift in evidence in that direction, you could say in part, it just reflects realities that were always there and have been integral to modern science from the beginning, if you go back to the first few centuries of the modern scientific era, most scientists, while they might have been heretical Christians, heterodox Christians, very eccentric Christians, in the case of Sir Isaac Newton, most, or all of them, took for granted the idea that there was some ordering Power to the universe, and that they were discovering an order that was discoverable precisely because it was designed right and science would make less sense if you assume that the universe was accidental and random. Because why would we be able to discover, you know, regular, consistent, physical and mathematical laws that made sense of it if. It was just random and accidental. So that there was, there was that synthesis originally, and versions of that evidence still remain right, like the fact that, you know, science works and discovers, discovers laws and predictable realities and beautiful mathematical symmetries, that was always there, even you know, and sort of you know, the peak of certain forms of materialist and atheistic science. But the change, the shifts in the last 70 to 100 years start, starts with the realization that the universe probably had a beginning, the Big Bang, right? And, you know, there's debate about whether that's the only beginning. Maybe universes emerge and die and emerge and die. But prior to the Big Bang being sort of widely accepted, it was the concept of the of an eternal universe seemed more consonant with with atheism than dis a universe that has a beginning, a moment of creation, much like what's described in, say, the book of Genesis, and then, you know, moving from there, you entered into some of the weirder discoveries of quantum physics, which whose interpretation, I think will be, you know, debated for centuries yet to come. But one of the simplest readings of what quantum physics seemed to reveal about reality was that there was some mysterious interplay between observation and reality, between the conscious scientists doing measurement and whether sort of reality collapsed from contingencies and possibilities into a singular reality. So there seemed to be a sort of spooky connection between mind and matter that takes us a bit out of the purely clockwork universe model. And then, above all, you had a series of discoveries about the ways in which the laws and constants of of this universe were set up that suggested what people now call fine tuning, the idea that there were, you know, literally, quadrillions of possible universes in which It was impossible for anything like human life to ever, ever develop, and then our universe was set in a kind of Goldilocks jackpot zone. Those are the kind of phrases that people, people talking about this use, where you know one constant is set exactly here and another is set exactly there, all of which is necessary to produce basic order, stars, planets and eventually life, life itself. And that has left us in this curious position where the alternative to a design hypothesis, a, you know, some kind of, you know, prime mover and so on. Coming back into the picture is theories about a multiverse, right? Where, in effect, the hardened materialist is left to insist that the reason we exist as we do is that there is a near infinity of other universes out there, all somehow invisible to us, that are necessary to explain the one we have. You know that's that's not a dynamic where it's clear that the materialist paradigm has, you know, any kind of claim to represent the kind of parsimonious, hard headed alternative to wild thoughts about a creating God. In some ways, people argue about this, but in some ways, you know, the the argument from design seems like the much more parsimonious explanation for why our universe appears to be ordered with us. In mind,
Joshua Johnson:that's good the multiverse, the one thing I do know about the multiverse is it has made Marvel movies worse and
Ross Douthat:yes, well, it's an interesting thing. Where it's been, it has been adopted into pop culture, right? And it's, it is a case study in how, even you know, the speculations the most sort of, you know, abs speculations of physicists and philosophers eventually find their way into Marvel movies. But it is a it, you know, they see it as it's like a cheat code, right? It's like, okay, we got bored with this storyline. We can just reset it. It's actually much better for drama and this, you can draw theological conclusions or not from this to have just one timeline that can't just be reset every time everyone gets bored. And
Joshua Johnson:I mean, this is the the story of who we are, I think we it makes sense and meaning of our lives. So if we have a story of a purposelessness, we have a story that there is just randomness everywhere. It seems to me that there has been, there's definitely been a rise in anxiety depression. There's been a rise in malaise of not knowing if there's anything here. I think some people have thought that, hey, once we get rid of religion, we could organize into other groups, and we could still find some meaning in the world, and we'll we'll be okay, and maybe we'll be even better than the institutions that we have left behind. So why has that not really panned out? Well. Well, and why do you think religion is a better answer? A couple reasons,
Ross Douthat:right. One reason is just the sort of you know, the practical reality that the claims that religion makes are more likely to inspire the kind of pro social behaviors that even some secular people miss when religion declines, right? So there have been endless attempts to set up communities, congregational communities, organized around, let's say, the ethics of Christianity without the supernaturalism, right? Some, some of these have a kind of quasi religious component, right? And but many of them do not. You know the ethical culture societies, which still exists, by the way, you know the sort of various atheist societies and humanist societies and so on. Who tried, tried to do these things. And the reality is that if you're just telling people, let's hang out and talk about ethics, it's just not doing the same kind of thing that an institution that's trying to sort of prepare people for virtuous behavior through the life cycle with an eye towards your eventual destination after death, is doing right? Like, what does a funeral look like at the ethical culture society, right? What does a bar a bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah look like in these kind of secular religions? I think it's obvious that you can do things like that, do rites of passage and initiation and so on, but they just aren't going to have the same power and draw people in in the same way. And so those institutions are weaker, and therefore don't do the things, the sort of Alexis de Tocqueville and, you know, social society building things that religious institutions do, the other thing, and this, you can see this, I think, play out just in the last 15 years, right? Is that secular alternatives to religion are more appealing, naturally more appealing if they can promise definitively some kind of better world, maybe not paradise, but at least a better world in the here and now. Right? The idea that you don't need religion because we have progress, right? You don't need heaven because we're, we're getting toward heaven on earth, right? And this was obviously the tremendous appeal of Marxism for so long, right? The Marxism said you don't need religion because, good news, the iron laws of history, the science, you know, the science of socialist materialism tells you that if you do these things, if you work for the revolution, you will get a better world, a transformed world, if not a heavenly world. The next best thing, right? If you don't have that kind of confidence, then it's harder to sustain, to sustain a kind of secular form of faith and just just in American life, right? Like it's easy. It was easier to be a secular, liberal progressive in the time when Barack Obama was elected president, and it seemed like there was a permanent Democratic majority and that the future belonged to liberalism than it is has been in the age of populism and Donald Trump and various defeats for liberalism, things not going liberalism's way right. And it's not a surprise that secular progressivism would become more pessimistic and despairing when it's losing politically, because politics is all in the end that secular progressivism has as a place to vest, to vest your hope. So in microcosm, what's happened in the last 15 or 20 years is the larger problem with secular utopianisms. They're great when maybe not great, but they're okay when things are getting better or seem to be getting better, but if you have setbacks, then you're thrown back on the depressing reality that it's a meaningless universe, and you know, What? What? What? What's your what's your sucker and what's your help? Exactly,
Joshua Johnson:I think, you know, my friend talks about the the old ways, the ancient religions as ancient wells. And my question then is, why, when a lot of people think about progress and moving forward, going into the future. Why do you think religion is something that has been around for for centuries and centuries, and they are ancient wells of wisdom and understanding for our world? Why do we reach back as we are moving and propelling forward into the future.
Ross Douthat:I mean, I think that part of the assumption is that basic questions about human life are persistent and permanent across different eras, right? You can't, you can't just sort of, you know the just to take the basic question, like, you know, what happens to people after they die? Right? Like, presumably, if that question has an answer, it's not radically altered by the Industrial Revolution, the rise of the iPhone or anything like that, right? Questions of morality, maybe you could say are a little different. You know, moral landscape looks different in a pre industrial society than it does in a post industrial. Society. But I don't think anyone thinks it looks that different, right? The questions of what it means to live a good life, you know, there's a reason that people still read, you know, there's a reason that Buddhism, you know, Buddhist styles of meditation, can seem deeply relevant to the most harried modern person, even though they developed in a completely different cultural, political and social context, right? So there is just sort of a permanent set of issues, of human issues that don't go away and that require, in a sense, some form of reaching back and rediscovery when we sort of go through a period where we think that we've sort of transcended the need for them. Now, I would say two other things, though. One is that, you know that that reaching back and rediscovery is never just sort of a pure, you know, a pure, sort of return to the past, right? All eras of religious revival or religious ferment, are eras in which things from the past are sort of brought back, but they're also reshaped and remade and made new, right? And this is even true of sort of forms of religion that appear, you know, steeped in ancient tradition, right? Like just in my own Catholic Church, a lot of what you know, Latin Mass, traditionalism in the Catholic Church has found a number of early 21st century converts and in part, Latin Mass, Catholicism really does connect to the medieval church and the ancient church. It really does go deep into the past. There people are not wrong about that, but it also includes elements that are very much, very much belong to the 1800s and to sort of very, or the 19, early 1900s these sort of very self conscious attempts to restore and renew Catholic tradition in the face of industrial modernity, right? But so both things are there and the same. So the same would be true if you had a, you know, a successful 21st century religious revival would produce a successful form of religious faith that was inevitably part old and part new or part reinvented at the same time. Then the final, the final point is just on this question. There is, of course, right now, as an alternative to religion, or maybe a form of religion, the idea of transhumanism, right that is very powerful in Silicon Valley right now. It takes sort of, you know, genetic and biological forms. Right now, it's more focused on AI and sort of ideas of digital life and digital intelligence. But there is clearly an idea in human life that maybe you could transcend human nature, right, and get to a point where, in that case, maybe the religious questions would be different, or something like that. I don't think that is likely, but it is worth describing as a you know, as part of the conversation right now, right? That like there's renewed interest in religion, but there is also transhumanism as an intellectual force in the conversation, especially in elite in elite circles and the most sort of future and forward oriented circles,
Joshua Johnson:yes, and it feels to me, a new form of religion. It looks like all of the Silicon Valley executives are dressing alike. They're all going to the to the gym, working out. They're all into, you know, health and well being. They're organizing around something, right? And their their belief that we can actually transcend some of this human experience and maybe live for, you know, centuries on my own, like I'm trying to do this on my own. A lot of these scientific discoveries after pernicus and Darwin made us into a lot of materialists and thinking that maybe if we got rid of the institutions, our mystical experiences, singing angels and demons and the supernatural will go away. But we've been discovering that the supernatural is encroaching on our world because it's always there, but it is encroaching on our world in ways where we haven't actually seen for a while, even though it's probably always been happening. So what is happening when you're looking as a journalist, what have you started to discover with near death experiences and others as they're they're seeing the and interacting with the supernatural?
Ross Douthat:Yeah. I mean, so 111, point to make, right is that there's an idea that the world was disenchanted by modernity. And this is a very powerful idea, and it's held by secular people and religious people, and I think it's an incomplete way of looking at things. I think that what was disenchanted was what we might call official knowledge, right? Which is to say, you know, if you are a student in a law school and you're writing up, you know, a paper on the history of some legal debate, you would not put in, you know. And then. So and So cast a spell on so and so, right? And you know, you would not be taken seriously if you included or similarly, like, if you read Wikipedia pages, right? Wikipedia is sort of the official knowledge of the internet. Wikipedia editors are extremely hostile to anything related to the supernatural, right? So there's a kind of official knowledge production that sees itself as necessarily excluding those possibilities, but in terms of experiences, terms of the experiences that people had and the shaping effects they have on individual lives and religious conversions and culture and so on, there's no real evidence at all that religious experience, mystical experience, apparent miracles, healings and so on, visions, psychic experiences, that any of this became less common under modern conditions. And if you read some of the 18th century rationalists and skeptics, I quote David Hume in the book, there are others. You know, their their assumption was, yes, people are credulous. You know, there'll be belief in the supernatural. But once we get rid of established religions and stop teaching people, you know, about the miracles of Jesus and so on, a lot of this stuff will just sort of fade. And it hasn't faded. In fact, you know, if you look at like pentecostalist Christianity, you know, a lot of the emergent forms of Christianity have been more supernaturalist than a stayed kind of Presbyterianism or something would have been right. That's sort of the baseline. Then you have specific things, and you mentioned near death experiences, and that is sort of the prime example specific kinds of mystical experience that have become easier to study and observe under modern conditions because we bring more people back from the threshold of death, right? So we now know more about the kind of experiences that people have on that threshold, and we know that there are sort of consistent seeming experiences across cultures that are not just, you know, sort of garbled hallucinations or whatever you would expect a dying brain to produce, but that map in a very general and not theologically specific way. I want to stress onto broad expectations about, you know, God, angels, meeting your dead ancestors, experiencing some kind of judgment. There are hellish and purgatorial near death experiences as well, and this is just a feature of human existence that we know more about than we did a couple 100 years ago. Does it prove that there's life after death? No, but it makes it more plausible than it would have been had we started bringing people back from the dead, and these experiences didn't exist, right? So there's there's changes like that then and last and here, I'm a little less certain where we're actually going. But there is, in this particular moment, in the last 10 or 15 years, just more supernatural interest in the culture, more people, you know, taking psychedelic drugs, doing Ayahuasca retreats with shamans and saying, I'm, I'm trying. I'm not just, I don't think this is just in my brain. I'm trying to get in touch with the supernatural people doing the same things in the context of, like, UFOs, not, not imagining them to be aliens from Vulcan or Klingon, but like, you know, interdimensional God, like, beings, these, these kind of things, right? And so at the very least, it's a kind of 1970s style moment where there's just a lot of bubbling supernatural interest. I how far this goes. Maybe it's just, you know, it's a cycle, right? And maybe it goes away. You know, it is possible to imagine things happening that were observed or witnessed, right? That could change how the culture's official knowledge regards the supernatural. I wouldn't exclude that as a possibility. I think, I think the next, you know, 20 or 30 years will be quite interesting in that regard. People are, people are opening doors, sometimes in cautiously and unwisely, in my view, and it will be interesting to see what passes through, if anything,
Joshua Johnson:yes. And so I have a belief that there are forces of evil and there are heavenly forces of goods as well, and we could actually access forces of evil that will really do harm to us and our communities as well. That
Ross Douthat:that is the traditional teaching. And I think that you know, you can certainly see evidence in the realms of spiritual experimentation, where people are operating outside of any kind of formal Christian or otherwise paradigm. Plenty of case studies that seem to confirm, at the very least, that there are spiritual entities out there that don't have our good in mind. And you see, you know, kind of there, it's amusing, maybe not amusing, right? You know, you'll read literature. For instance, people. People who are interested in psychedelics or doing psychedelics, and people will say, ah, you know, we keep having encounters with what we call negative entities. What do we do when we encounter a negative entity? And obviously, Christianity has some specific views on that, but that's, you know, but people are, yeah, people are sort of going out and having encounters. This is true in the mystical experience writ large, right? That, like in a secularized society, what you don't get. It's not that mystical experience goes away, it's that people lose a common language to describe what it is, right? People will be like, Wow, I, you know, I had this experience, and it was seems sort of ultimate and absolute. But, you know, is it really, God, can I use those kind of archaic terms to describe this experience? There's, there's a lot of of that, I think, in the culture right now.
Joshua Johnson:I just randomly picked up Sebastian younger in my time, a great example. Yeah, and, you know, as he experienced, has this near death experience, he sees his father in a vision and sees other things. He then tries to figure out what in the world is this and what happens? Yep, and the end to me, it feels like, well, I don't know, and we can't really explain it, I'll just be loved by my family, and I'll love my family. And so how does this then move us into a place? Why do you think religion actually then organizing into a religion to to help us encounter mystery, wonder, the unexplainable in community? What do you think that is important for us to move into instead of just going, hey, there are unexplainable things. Let's just live our life and love our family. Yeah?
Ross Douthat:I mean, I found, yeah. I found the end, I mean, of, you know, of the younger book, disappointing in that sense, but also characteristic of the phenomenon, yeah, that I was, that I was just describing, right, where people have these kind of encounters. Barbara Aaron Reich, a you know, political journalist, woman of the left, wrote and wrote a book not about near death experiences, but about, you know, mystical experiences called Living with a wild God that had the same kind of flavor as younger as book. Like these things happen, these, you know, mystical encounters. They sort of lead her beyond materialism, but she resists the idea that they should ever lead you into organized religion. And I think that's a mistake. I think the best way to describe the mistake, right, is to say, you know, look, these, these things are not actually random, right? Like, if you read Aaron Reich's in kind of encounters, or you read Jungers encounters. Obviously, they're sort of personal distinctives, but they they tend to fit reasonably well into the broader mystical traditions. Again, as I said earlier, that sort of show up in multiple world religions, not just in one, right? So like there is some, they suggest that there's some primal reality that different people get in touch with in different ways, but you are more likely to get in touch with when you're about to die, right? And when you combine that with like, the case for religion that I try and make in the book is a case about converging lines of evidence, right? So it's not it's not okay, it's not mystical experience alone. Mystical experience is really interesting and telling, and sort of pushes you in a particular direction, but you want to combine that with the evidence for cosmic design, right? It's like, okay, the universe appears to be organized and ordered, not accidentally, maybe with us in mind, oh, and our minds, our consciousness, turn out to be able to perceive and understand and penetrate the mysteries of this universe in ways we wouldn't have expected. And oh, by the way, lots of people have these mystical experiences that seem to bring them in touch with some absolute form of being and some kind of life after death. I think when you put all those things together, that's a lot of evidence that there's a story going on here. We're part of a story. We don't know all of the story. We don't know everything that's going on, but whatever the story is, on the evidence of Jungers experience and others, it seems like it may be consummated at the end of our life, or at least there's some kind of transition. It seems like some higher agent has put us here for a reason, and oh, by the way, there are a bunch of distinct but with some convergences traditions around the world that have spent 1000s of years thinking and arguing and talking about what all of this means and what one might do, collectively, with support from other people, not just on your own, to one, live in some, try and live in some kind of relationship to ultimate reality, not, you know, you don't have to become a monk or, you know, go live on a pillar in the desert. Maybe some people, maybe should. But no, this is, you know, you're going to church on Sunday, right? You're doing, you know, you're you. Doing certain disciplinary things integrated with your normal life that try and keep you connected to the ultimate as well as the everyday. And you're trying to, you know, be a good person and prepare, but in a context where that is oriented towards whatever happens after death and ultimate reality, rather than just towards the secular and the material. And I just think it's really hard to come up with a better system on your own for organizing your life as a response to those realities than what is offered in in organized religion. And it's certainly better, like it's one thing to say, I've had these experiences, and now I'm going to, you know, go off on my own spirit quest and figure things out. I think that has problems, including the problem of demons that we were just discussing, but at least that has ambition, right? At least that is a response I really don't understand. I mean, I do. It's very human in a way, but I struggle with the kind of shrugging reaction, like, Whoa. That was crazy, man, you know, but I guess I just got to live my life. It's like, No, you need to, in some way change your life if you think these things are possibly real and possibly possibly serious.
Joshua Johnson:A lot of this guide, the spirit guide. We're on a quest to figure out what is happening. We're seekers, trying to figure out what's going on in this world. But we in the in the West, particularly in America, we live in a hyper individualized culture. It's it's really about us and our well being and who we are, and we're going to get ahead. Why? Why do you think organized religion as a construct for community and being in a more communal type area is better for us and more helpful for us long run, then just saying, we're going to then start to organize ourselves in a more communal type culture, without religion, but we're going to try to be a little bit more interdependent than we were in the past. Because I think hyper individualization kind of is a problem in our world, and we need something to help us. I
Ross Douthat:mean, towards a different direction. To be clear, I don't think non religious forms of community building are bad in any way, right? And if we're just having a conversation about what ails American society, right, I'm happy to place religion. I think it has a big role, but it belongs in a category with other forms of community building, solidarity building as well, right? So there's, there's nothing wrong with saying a response to alienation and isolation and enemy in the modern world is to, you know, Join your local kickball League, right? Whatever the equivalent of the bowling leagues of years gone by. There's nothing wrong with saying we need to revitalize the local Elks club. There's nothing wrong with treating political engagement as a method, as long as you're actually joining a community and not just posting online, right? Like a big, a big part of our problem as a society is that in all things, including religious things, I'm guilty of this, right? People substitute posting for actual, you know, actual engagement, but, but if you're getting your hands dirty in the world, then you can find benefits from, you know, your your community garden and your book club and your sewing circle, as well as from going to church on Sunday, right? The the case for actually going to church is, first, the point I made earlier, right? That the the things that religion is connected to life death. You know, morality, transitions between stages of life are just a more powerful glue, often for community and solidarity, than other things, right? So you get, you get a little, you get a little more solidarity out of religion than other things. But then two, the idea that, in fact, the things religion is concerned with are important in ways that go beyond their sociological benefits. So I'm, I'm very intent on saying you can't just make a kind of utilitarian case for religion. There is one, absolutely. But in the end, you have to be willing to say, and the religious world picture is broadly correct, probably broadly Correct. You have good reasons for doing this, and potentially eternal consequences if you don't. And it's not just about, you know, the rate of, the rate of, you know, social participation in American society in 2025
Joshua Johnson:Yeah, that's good. I think one of the stumbling blocks that you write in your book, you have a few of them, but one, I think, is a pretty big one, is the problem of evil in the world. So let's dive into theodicy, just very briefly.
Ross Douthat:Five. If minutes or less, why do bad things happen to good people?
Joshua Johnson:Why is there evil in the world? And is that a deterrent for us to actually have belief in God?
Ross Douthat:I think it obviously is a deterrent for people, right? Like there's a reason that this argument comes up again and again across history, including in the sacred books of Judaism and Christianity themselves, right? The fact that theodicy is woven into the Old Testament and the New Testament in different ways, tells you that it is a substantial issue that religion has to take seriously. My argument in the in the book which I which I stand by, is that doubting, you know, doubting, having doubts about what God is up to, having, you know, sort of feeling like you know he How can he possibly be omniscient and or omnipotent and all good if he allows you know, Ex tragedy or ex genocide to happen, those are issues that should shape your conception of God, right and should should shape your theology in certain ways. They're bad reasons for being an atheist, because even if you say, I can't get to the omnipotence and Omni benevolence combination, you're still left with all of this basic evidence for design and order in the universe religious experience, like you know, the person having the near death experience, right? If that's real, it's real, whether or not it all you know, the moral logic of God's goodness and the problem of evil adds up in your head. So what are, what are, then the plausible responses. One plausible response is to say, I don't agree with classical theism, this sort of philosophical concept of who God is. I think you know, something else must be going on. And there are other theological schools that have, you know, different accounts of who God is that make the problem of evil at least seem less like an inherent contradiction or tension, right? So, you know, pantheism, where God and the universe are one, offers a somewhat different set, set of issues. You know, you can be, you can be a Gnostic. You can be, I mean, there's, there's a long list which, as a Christian I'm not actually, I would prefer that people became an Orthodox Christian. But I would also say it's better to have a heterodox concept of God than to become an atheist, because the heterodoxy has a better argument for it than than the atheism. But then I also think that you know that most of my own tradition seems to signal very strongly that God exists, and the problem of evil is one that he expects us to wrestle with, and he doesn't mind it. If, you know, we if, if we do the wrestling in ways where sometimes we feel alienated from him, and sometimes we feel angry with him, and you know, all the way up to Jesus himself weeping in the Garden of Gethsemane and crying out in desolation on the cross, right? And I do think, as a Christian, that the New Testament, the Gospels, the passion especially, are pretty clearly an answer to the problem of theodicy. They're not an answer in the form of logical proof, right? You're not saying here at all. It's all mathematically resolved, but they are an answer where you know the claim is that God Himself has come down and shared our suffering in a very profound and extreme kind of way. And I completely understand why some people confronting the problem of evil are not fully satisfied with that kind of narrative answer. But it is there, I think, and is an important part of what Christianity specifically is offering. But the whole monotheistic tradition, I think, is it basically says, Yeah, we can't fully resolve this problem. Come on in and wrestle with it with us. Because whether or not it fully makes sense, there still probably is a god.
Joshua Johnson:Yeah, that's good. As you mentioned, Jesus and God, becoming flesh, living among us, suffered with us and entered into our suffering, took on all of our suffering himself. What really attracts you to Jesus? Why Jesus for you? Why Christianity and you could go into Catholicism. And why Roman Catholic for you, but why Jesus? Jesus specifically? Well,
Ross Douthat:I mean, what I just said is part of it, and maybe a really important part of it, because, and this connects to my Catholicism in the sense that I think one of the one of the strongest things that Catholicism does as a liturgical religion is to place, is to sort of put the passion front and center in this way that I didn't experience in the same way when I was a Protestant, right? That like you would, you would the protestantisms that I was part of were very focused on here. Faster and less focused on Good Friday and the Catholic tradition. Just, you know, the whole build up through Lent Palm Sunday, through passion week and so on. Think just does a really good job of making the divine response to human evil and human suffering really powerful and potent before you reach the joy, the joy of the resurrection, the story of Jesus is a answer to certain questions that hang over monotheism as a tradition, and that is important to me. But then beyond that, I think that, you know, I've been saying throughout this conversation, right, that I think there's good reasons to think that God is present in multiple religious traditions, that there are these convergences and overlaps where people seem to be talking about the same reality, even if they're using different language at the same time. The reason I'm a Christian, and not just a kind of like perennialist or someone who says they're all basically equal, is that I think that the story in the Gospel stands out in a really radical and stark and unusual way among the different stories of religious foundings, prophets and holy people, right? That, you know, there is a basic historical credibility to the Gospels, that is, I think, underestimated currently, by whatever the secular historical consensus is, I think that, you know, and I don't think that consensus is destined to long survive, to the extent that it still survives. But I think the Gospels present themselves as, you know, overlapping credible eyewitness testimony, personal memoir that doesn't seem constructed long after the fact is not sort of a pious fake, is a real account of something that happened to real people in the full light of recorded history that they did not expect at all, right, that baffled them, and that bafflement is itself apparent in the Gospels. It's not all smoothed away into perfect theological formulations. There's a lot of riddles and uncertainty, and it's like you're reading people working through an experience, right? And that experience was extreme. It was not just, you know, a healing miracle or a sort of one off sign or signifier of which there are plenty in history. It was a whole drama, a whole story that, you know, that that essentially reshaped the moral landscape of the ancient world in profound ways. You know, recommend a book like Tom Holland's book, Dominion about the Christian revolution, that focuses on that component, right? Just how completely the crucifixion and resurrection sort of inverted a lot of the moral categories that people had inherited, but, and, then, but then it's just sort of, you know, it's this wild and crazy ending, right where Jesus comes back from the dead, and in ways that, you know, again, if you, if you don't exclude the miraculous presump presumptively, are pretty compelling, pretty historically compelling. And I don't think there's anything else quite like it, again. Not that other religious foundings, other religious experiences, aren't themselves or, you know, I don't think they're all fake. I think God is there in a lot of places, but I think God seems to be there in a really singular way, in the New Testament, and in a way that, for me, makes it reasonable to say, Okay, think there's a lot of divine stuff out there, but this is the controlling revelation. This is the place where God wants you to start. God wants you to read other religious material through this story and this and this person.
Joshua Johnson:Ross, I think people need to go pick up your book. Believe why everyone should be religious. It's fantastic read. You're a fantastic writer, and you're you're writing in The New York Times elsewhere has been fantastic as well, so they should check that out too. What hope would you have for your readers if they they pick this up and pick up belief
Ross Douthat:it depends on the reader, for the sort of curious, secular reader who's interested in religion but feels like it requires too much of a sacrifice of your reason and your confidence in science and your place as a modern person. I'm trying to help that reader get over, get over that sense and realize that no, actually it is more reasonable than not to become religious. And then for the religious Reader, I'm either trying to instill a version of that same confidence, right, a sense that, like the religious believer, doesn't have to be back on their heels and defensive all the time. Of course, there are issues in religion and scandals and unresolved controversies, all that's real, but the basic attitude towards the world has more to recommend it than the alternative. But then also for the religious reader, who is you know people, people go through difficult times in their faith life, and people you know, in evangelical terms, a lot of people end up deconstructing right at some point. Or in their life in some way, something they've inherited or believed they suddenly struggle with. And I'm kind of trying to put a floor under that, right? I'm saying, yes, you may change your mind about a particular idea or particular doctrine, but at bottom, you should hit a level where you say, okay, but I still should be religious. I'm still doing the right thing. Maybe I need to do it in a different place or with a different set of ideas, but the basic thing is still worth doing, even if you've had a period of struggle and transformation. That's
Joshua Johnson:so good. A couple real quick questions at the end. One, if you go back to your 21 year old self, what advice would you give?
Ross Douthat:I mean, that's a tricky question, right? It get it touches on questions of divine providence. I mean, the worst, the worst thing that has happened to me as an adult has been that I, we my family, and I moved to a farmhouse in rural Connecticut, fulfilling a sort of fantasy of rural, rural life, and immediately I got Lyme disease and was desperately sick with it for many years, and I'm much better now. But so the easiest, the simplest thing is to say, oh, you know, go back and tell your 21 year old self, don't walk in the fields of the house that you just bought without checking for ticks. But, but this is like a question of suffering thing, right? It's like, okay, but at this point, at 45 you know, would I want to lose the person that I've become over the last 10 years, like we've had, you know, two children. My wife was pregnant when I got sick, so two and a half children, let's say, since I got sick, like I don't know. I don't I think there are ways in which you, you almost you don't want to say anything to the 21 year old self. If you have a certain confidence that you know that Providence has a hand in in your life, even the even the toughest parts. That's
Joshua Johnson:really good and helpful for us as we look back on our life and figure out who we are and where we're going. And that's helpful anything you've been reading or watching lately, you could recommend
Ross Douthat:the TV show that I've been watching is the Apple TV show severance, which just came back for its second season. And it's a show about people who basically have a procedure where they go to work during the day and don't remember the self that works, that's at work. So they have a literal home self and work self. And these have different experiences. And of course, there's, you know, a sinister Corporation, and it's, it's sort of probably a little bit like lost in that way, like various signifiers and so on. So far, it's a good show. It'll probably disappoint me in the end, but it does touch on, you know, it connects to some of the things we've been talking about, you know, the soul, the self, the possibility of a plan, all of these things, religious issues are never completely absent, even from pop culture. Yeah, the last episode really don't, don't say, No, I have not gotten out. I'm not okay. I'm two episodes into season two. So there's
Joshua Johnson:an interesting religious conversation in that. That's all I want to say, is that.
Ross Douthat:So there were, I did notice a lot of churches in season one, sort of in the background, so we'll see what I think. Don't spoil
Joshua Johnson:it. I won't spoil it, but I'm just saying it's interesting that there is religious conversation going on and figuring out, right, what's going on here. Good. Ross, this is fantastic. Is there any place you would like to point people to for to connect with you, or anywhere specifically you would like people to go out and get your book, no
Ross Douthat:wherever, you know. I mean, both support your local bookstore, but also it has a very low price on Amazon. So if the price point is an issue, that's that's the place to buy it. I write for the New York Times, that's right, and do podcasting for them. That's the primary place they can find me. I'm on Twitter, X, whatever intermittently it's, you know, it's a bad habit. Oh, and I know, and I should say that for readers who who like that sort of thing, I am also serializing a fantasy novel on sub stack called the Falcons children. So if you want to read a different kind of book about the supernatural, I have that one to offer as well.
Joshua Johnson:Awesome. That sounds great. Fantastic. I'll check that out since we get off now. All right, the Falcons, children, falcons, children on sub stack, awesome. Well, Ross, thank you for this conversation. I really loved going deep into some of these, the reasons why people don't believe and the things that we have started to observe in the cosmos of things that says, hey, maybe there is a Creator. Maybe there is a God that actually organizing in religion with God at the center in communal life is a good way to live like we should actually move towards that place. So thank you for this conversation. It was a pleasure to talk to you. I truly enjoyed it. I really appreciate
Ross Douthat:it as well. Thanks for the opportunity. You.
