The sharpest and best insight at the core of New York Times columnist Ross Douthat’s recent book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, is that religious disaffiliation is effectively the new norm, in practice if not in profession. In other words, even though most Americans still profess attachment to some religion, those attachments are in many cases so anemic and so historical—and American society as a result is now so presumptively secular—that a case for religious belief and practice must start from a very different place than might have made sense a quarter century ago.
Douthat, a conservative Catholic who has been writing at The New York Times since 2009, has watched as the educated elites that comprise his readership have morphed from “lapsed Catholics” and their counterparts hailing from other faiths to people whose parents were lapsed Catholics or Jews or Buddhists. With a front row seat to these changes in modal worldview and with great speculative prescience, Douthat posits that this kind of mass apathy toward religion might, counterintuitively enough, be fertile ground for the seeds of curiosity and faith. Certainly, today’s ignorance of religion is less compatible with a broad acceptance of presumptive atheism than was yesterday’s mass antipathy toward religion. In other words, it was much easier for yesterday’s educated elites to reject, with principled if misguided conviction, an institution in which they were raised than it is for today’s educated elites to reject a framework of ideas and beliefs that they know next to nothing about.
For Douthat, this opens up space for “an argument that tries to lay a general foundation for religious interest and belief.” So, in Believe, he attempts “to persuade skeptical readers that it is worth becoming a seeker in the first place, and to provide guideposts and suggestions for people whose journeys begin in different places or take them in different directions.”
The ambition and scope of such an argument can hardly be overstated. That Douthat pretty much accomplishes his end, balancing his own Catholic faith with broadminded, ecumenical dexterity, is a testament to his talent and his quality of mind. A lesser thinker, writer, and believer would no doubt have failed to deliver on any of these objectives, much less on all of them.
Douthat, though, manages to deliver and then some. In the course of his argument, he offers thoughtful commentary on, among other topics: the order of the universe, the virtue of committing to one religion even if one harbors some doubts about its veracity, the reasons why skeptics are often reluctant to consider religious commitment, and the ways a skeptical reader might think past those hang ups.
Nevertheless, there are two tensions at the heart of Douthat’s case for religion that I believe make his exhortation toward belief a bit more complicated and confounded than it may seem at first glance.
First, while Douthat’s move away from the purely utilitarian promotion of religion is by in large well-taken (full disclosure: I have written several pieces on feminism that espouse religious practice in exactly these terms, and Believe shamed me accordingly), the intellectual individualism of his argument for institutional religion seems in some ways at odds with an understanding of how religion as an institution works (or doesn’t) in the lives of most people, including most educated elites.
Like Douthat, I am practicing Catholic with an Ivy League degree, living in the secular Northeast. I was raised by a Catholic father and a Jewish mother who converted to Catholicism, making her first communion the same spring I did. My Catholic paternal grandmother—my primary caregiver as a young child—regularly made pseudo-sacred relics, pagan style, out of ordinary objects touched by the long-deceased (i.e., pencils her father had used). Additionally, in response to my preschool misbehavior, she often closed her eyes, crossed herself, and wished for “Mother Mary” to “take me now.” When she opened her eyes to find that she was still in the playroom, across from a skeptical three-year-old, she typically expressed vague, macabre resignation: “It won’t be too long.” I coded this as evidence of exceptional piety.
Meanwhile, my husband was growing up in the Midwest, the son of Liberian immigrants, a Lutheran father and an Episcopalian mother. As a young parent, my mother-in-law—who is, much like my paternal grandmother was, spiritual in a way that leans heavily toward the mystical—did not know much about the theological differences between the Catholic church and the Episcopal one that had educated her. But she knew that the Catholic school in inner-city Cleveland, unlike the public one, was safe and taught kids to read. And she soon learned that it charged less in tuition for Catholics. That was enough reason to convert. So, she did, along with her then five-year-old son. When my husband was a child, he went to two churches every Sunday: first, Catholic mass, where he was an altar boy and involved in youth group; then, Lutheran services, where the Liberian community congregated after church for donuts.
I share these character sketches and vignettes to offer the observation that most people are not and have never been spiritual seekers. Most people who are religious come to their faith through habituation, have only a partial grasp on the tenets of that faith, and pass it on to their children in whole or in part more in the way that they pass on allegiance to a sports team than not. This goes even for people who are highly educated and comparatively thoughtful, let alone for the vast majority of people, past and present, who are neither.
Why, for example, are my husband and I Catholic? Why do these two children of mothers who converted to Catholicism—neither after discerning the merit of every major faith and arriving at this one, but spurred on by familial and educational considerations, respectively—stay Catholic, raise children in the church, and build lives centered on the practice of the faith?
There are two answers.
The first is perhaps somewhat embarrassing, but I will offer it all the same: Neither of us has ever considered being anything else. This is not because we aren’t thoughtful about or educated in the faith; indeed, we are both. My dad offered me a solid grounding in the intellectual foundations of Catholicism, and I added to it over the years. Nevertheless, I admit with humility that it is as impossible to disentangle my thoughts about Catholicism from my own Catholic formation as it is to disentangle my thoughts about baseball from my being steeped in Philadelphia Phillies fandom. I have a lens that engages not only my mind but also my psychology and my emotions, and that has become inextricable from my intellectual pursuits through long habituation.
If this is true even of highly educated people—and even truer of less educated people practicing a given religion—I struggle to envision the reader to whom Douthat is writing.
In other words, I am skeptical that any significant number of skeptics are interested in or even capable of overcoming their skepticism such that they could undertake a self-directed survey of major religions, light upon one, and commit to its practice. Moreover, even if there were large numbers of seekers aching to do that very thing, finding a specific religious community that nurtures the professed beliefs of the newly religious is difficult. Dying churches—and that’s most of them—are not fertile grounds for spiritual growth. I am a pretty committed Catholic, but if certain Catholic parishes I’ve been in were my only options for Catholic practice, I would wind up either Protestant or lapsed.
So, while I find Douthat’s intellectual pursuit and defense of religion intriguing and noble, I do think that the utilitarian case—an exhortation to check out some churches of your grandparents’ persuasion in order to make friends and find community, from which belief will spring if indeed you commit—might remain more potentially effective to achieve his ends.
Especially if we’re talking, as Douthat does, not just about the Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—but also Hinduism, Buddhism, and other faiths. Which brings me to both the second reason I stay Catholic and the second tension in Douthat’s thesis.
Catholicism is, as Douthat knows as well as anyone, a religion that can take, absorb, and answer for all the intellect a believer (or, for that matter, a skeptic) can bring its way. Take intellectual queries to Catholicism with any degree of seriousness and you will find not only answers, but more and better questions.
This was thrown into sharp relief in Bill Maher’s 2008 film, Religulous, in which the atheist comedian interviews believer after believer in a way that makes them look somewhere between stupid and insane. He makes the mistake, though, of visiting the Vatican, where Latin literature expert Fr. Reginald Foster displays a Catholic worldview far more capacious, curious, and open to contradictions than Maher’s atheist one, such that Maher is, this once, reduced to self-effacing laughter himself.
I short, I was blessed to be born into a faith where intellectualism trained on theological questions and religiosity itself are not at odds, but complements. This makes it easy—rational, even—to remain Catholic.
It makes it difficult, however, to accept the breadth of Douthat’s intellectual ecumenism in Believe. Not just because I can’t buy his reasoning that one is closer to ultimate truth as a practicing Hindu than as a religious skeptic (though I can’t), but because I can’t buy that he himself buys it. As an observant Jew? Of course. Per my seven-year-old, “they’re right until half time.” But religion writ large? I’m not so sure.
If the truth is as Douthat and I see it, then, if anything, one is further from that truth as a practicing Hindu than as a non-believer in much the same way that one is closer to marrying the right guy as a single woman than as the wrong guy’s fiancée.
In the book’s introduction, Douthat addresses the reader: “If you feel tempted to read my defense of belief as a work of Christian apologetics in disguise, a subtler path to a predictable destination—well, I can’t help that, and maybe it’s true. But my aim is for this book to be useful to readers who might take many religious paths.”
I can’t help thinking that the book would have been more useful without any reason to suspect disguise. Although Douthat wrestles his expansive project down as well as anyone could, Believe’s meta-exhortation just is not as effective as an argument more accessible in scope, and more targeted, might be.
Fortunately, Douthat has already given himself a head start on exactly such an undertaking. “Why I am a Christian” is Believe’s final and most compelling chapter.
It would make for an even more compelling book unto itself.
Elizabeth Grace Matthew writes about books, education, and culture, including on Substack.
