New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, left, and Ari Schulman, editor of The New Atlantis, participate in the "Can Humanity Survive the Digital Age?" event hosted by the Institute for Human Ecology at The Catholic University of America in Washington Sept. 17, 2024. The conversation explored the social and political dimensions of science, technology, culture, and religion. Credit: OSV News photo/Patrick Ryan, The Catholic University of America

Ross Douthat is a popular author, a Catholic convert and a self-described “conservative and religious” columnist for The New York Times. He also hosts a podcast, “Interesting Times.” He is not a theologian and does not claim to be, as he said in an online brouhaha from a decade ago. But he enjoys a lofty platform, and he has a prominent voice. In effect, he is more of a public theologian than scores or hundreds of others who hold advanced degrees in theology.

Believe

by Ross Douthat

Zondervan
240p $30

Douthat remains remarkably prolific, and a mark of that is his recent book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. He has been making the rounds on many other podcasts to promote the book. In the introduction to Believe, he writes that part of his job “is to make religious belief intelligible to irreligious readers.”

In the course of eight brief chapters, Douthat addresses weighty topics. In the first half, he takes up the universe, the mind and the cosmos, disenchantment, and the case for commitment. In the latter half, he writes about the most prominent faiths, three stumbling blocks to belief, coming to the exploration’s end and why he is a Christian.

I had been looking forward to reading this book, but my first exposure to it was by listening to a podcast interview with his fellow New York Times columnist Ezra Klein. The discussion puzzled me because so much of it seemed to focus on what Douthat called “strange stories” that upset a materialist world view, such as that of a broken radio that turned on apparently by itself, fairies, ghosts, hauntings and other unexplained phenomena. At one point he said, “If there seem to be higher powers interested in talking to human beings, then maybe you should assume that God is not out to trick you.” Personally, I found the focus to be eccentric, but after reading the book, it seems to be an accurate reflection of Douthat’s point of view, perhaps even his theology.

The first half of the book reflects public debates from a couple of decades ago between atheists and believers regarding the nature of the universe, the anthropic principle and—from Douthat’s view—the lamentable letting go of the pre-scientific mindset, which was more open to mystery. Douthat is open to mystery and the unexplained, including U.F.O.s, apparitions, the irreducibility of the mind, near-death experiences and other “spiritual” or “mystical” experiences that even transition to the physical world, manifesting themselves in melting batteries, poltergeists, weeping statues and much more.

For Douthat, the fact that people still have these experiences suggests that there must be something more there than superstition or coincidence. For him, faith in a major religion can help individuals make sense of and explain these various experiences. I will admit that by the end of the first half of the book I was bewildered—and unconvinced that Douthat’s arguments or hypotheses were actually the basis of what would become a call to believe.

In the second half, Douthat begins by making a case for major religions—Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism (he does not mention Judaism here, but does so later)—since they “are more likely to stand in a strong relationship to the truth about existence than religions that flared and died, that subsist in cultural isolation, or that came into existence the day before yesterday.” Whatever religion you enter, he writes, “will have hopefully acquired enough truth and wisdom in its long development to make a ladder upward, from the mire of meaninglessness and the snares of indecision toward whatever the full plan of your life is meant to be.” With this, Douthat brushes past one of the primary reasons that people choose to be religious: It provides meaning.

Douthat could have made a much stronger case for religion if he had focused on meaning-making rather than religion’s utility in addressing the “unexplained” or its ability to last centuries. My own contention is that Christians, at least, are convinced not by “thinking one’s way from doubt to belief,” as he writes early on, but by that personal encounter with Christ.

After addressing three “stumbling blocks” to faith—theodicy, evils done in the name of religion and religious attitudes toward sex—Douthat’s penultimate chapter focuses on “the end of exploring.” He advocates for placing trust in God or providence that a seeker will find a good spiritual or religious harbor. In his final chapter, Douthat speaks to why Catholicism was attractive to him, especially its systematization, its sacramental system and its antiquity. Included is a surprising statement about faith in Jesus: “But I have never found the Son of Man as reassuring a character as some Christians do, or quite achieved the sense of personal relationship that gives so many of my co-believers comfort.”

Douthat has written a sincere book, and he seems genuinely motivated to help other people come to a good place with respect to religious belief. But I came away with a perplexing amalgam of platitudes, warnings and exhortations, such as: “The spiritual and supernatural never really go away, and already the time of the new atheism is passing; already mystery and magic and enchantment seem to be rushing back.”

Other examples include a warning regarding spiritual experiences: “You may find what you’re looking for and come away haunted and oppressed, because some of the spirits most eager to be summoned may not have your good in mind.” At another point, Douthat offers a rationale for belief that harkens back to Pascal’s wager but falls somewhat short of a passionate faith: “Life is short and death is certain, and what account will you give of yourself if the believers turn out to have been right all along?”

Throughout, Douthat attempts to provide a rational explanation for belief. But the beliefs he espouses, and the reasons for them, are not so much intelligible as odd. I recalled a sentiment of the late E. O. Wilson, that people today prefer science fiction to science, “Jurassic Park” to the Jurassic Era and U.F.O.s to astrophysics. Though Douthat’s book has earned high praise from many of his readers, unless one is already part of the “conservative and religious” thought world he inhabits, this earnest book might leave his intended audience of “irreligious readers” more perplexed rather than grounded in belief.

This article appears in November 2025.

Brian Schmisek is provost and Cardinal George Chair of Faith and Culture at the University of Saint Mary of the Lake in Mundelein, Ill.. His most recent book is Signs, Superstitions, and God’s Plan: The Human Quest for Meaning.