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- [00:01]
Derek Thompson
What's up everybody?
- [00:02]
Russ Douthat
It's Austin Rivers here and we are back for another season of Off Guard. Me and my guy Pasha Hagigi are hitting your podcast feeds every Monday and Thursday talking everything hoops.
- [00:11]
Derek Thompson
Austin is bringing that 11 year NBA veteran perspective and of course keeping you guys entertained throughout the season. Make sure you tap into Off Guard with Austin Rivers on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [00:21]
Russ Douthat
And don't forget to follow everything we've got going on social media, the Off Guard podcast, Ringer NBA and of course, check us out on Ringer NBA's YouTube channel.
- [00:29]
Derek Thompson
We're getting better.
- [00:36]
Russ Douthat
This episode is brought to you by Marvel Television's Born Again.
- [00:40]
Derek Thompson
Charlie Cox returns as vigilante lawyer Matt.
- [00:43]
Russ Douthat
Murdock and Vincent D'Onofrio as former mob boss Wilson Fisk. The darker side of Matt Murdock is revealed when he gains a new perspective on his role as the Daredevil and faces an internal struggle between justice and revenge. The Devil's work is never done. Don't miss the two episode premiere of Born Again on March 4th, only on.
- [01:04]
Derek Thompson
Disney I can say to my new Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, hey, find a keto friendly restaurant nearby and text it to Beth and Steve.
- [01:13]
Russ Douthat
And it does without me lifting a.
- [01:15]
Derek Thompson
Finger so I can get in more squats anywhere I can.
- [01:18]
Russ Douthat
12123 Will that be cash or credit? Credit.
- [01:23]
Derek Thompson
4 Galaxy S25 Ultra the AI companion that does the heavy lifting so you can do. You get yours@samsung.com compatible with select apps. Requires Google Gemini Account results may vary based on input. Check responses for accuracy today the existence of God, the decline of faith, and what the west loses when it loses its religion I grew up a reformed Jew in McLean, Virginia, which is a suburb of Washington, D.C. and my relationship to the Jewish faith was always tenuous enough to be, frankly, comical. My dad grew up a Southern Baptist and converted to a kind of staunch anti theism. I mean, he hated Christianity with a passion that would have embarrassed Christopher Hitchens. My mom descended from a family of Jewish Germans, but she had this flavor of spirituality that resulted in our bookshelves often having more titles about reincarnation than Moses. We went to temple for the high holy Days, Rosh Hashanah, which is the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. I had a Bar Mitzvah, which I enjoyed not only for the excuse to have a party to impress the girls I had a Crush on at 13, but also because I genuinely loved learning how to chant from The Torah. Like many reformed Jews of my age, I think the pinnacle of my religious experience was the six months leading up to my Bar Mitzvah. But the truth is my family was the ultimate archetype of that old joke that some folks are Jewish, with the emphasis squarely on the ish. Yeah, we love Passover and Purim and even tu Bishvat, but we also celebrated Easter. We were the only Jews in the neighborhood, but for some reason I don't quite remember and can't even even attempt to explain right now, we were the ones hosting the neighborhood Easter egg hunt in our backyard. We celebrated Christmas in a way that was totally indistinguishable from, say, a lapsed Protestant. It's not just that we had a Christmas tree or that we put out cookies for Santa, whom I believed in until an embarrassingly late date. It's also that when I was 12, I was cast in a play at the Folger Shakespeare Theater in dc. The play was called A Child's Christmas in Wales, and it was a review of old Timey Christmas carols organized around a reading of the poet Dylan Thomas's beautiful short story by that same name, A Child's Christmas in Wales. And as a result, during the rehearsal process, I had to learn no less than 20, maybe 30 19th century Christmas songs, which I loved. And I remembered one day in middle school a year or two later, our Catholic music teacher was directing the Christmas play and she didn't have enough, didn't know enough English carols to fill out the play. And here I am, the Jewish kid in the cast going, well, if it were me, I'd certainly recommend King Wenceslas if you want a high energy tune or maybe God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen. But personally I'm very partial to the more solemn deep cuts like past 3 o'clock or in the Bleak Midwinter. I'm not joking when I tell you my familiarity with 19th century English Christmas carols rivals the most devout Christian you possibly know. And maybe this is why you can understand that by the time I was in my 20s, my connection to Judaism had been quite diluted. And the truth is, I didn't really mind. It didn't really feel like my losing the faith amounted to losing anything. It felt in some ways like being unburdened by a set of rules that I never fully believed in. So anyway, we fast forward the story to my 30s and for a variety of reasons, I slowly began to feel like my lack of religiosity and my secularism, which had previously felt like the weightlessness of freedom was starting to feel like a heavy absence. There's a thin and even cheap way to talk about this, which is that I am dispositionally sort of a mystical person without any particular way to channel those instincts. I mean, I'm picking a purposefully ridiculous example here, but I think it illustrates the point. When I was single in New York in my mid-20s, I believed very strongly that I had a pair of lucky socks. I believed that my sock choice was materially connected to whether I would go out and meet somebody that I jived with. And to be a secular person who nourishes superstitions like this is almost too ridiculous to consider in close detail. I mean, the idea that my sock choice made things happen in the world was essentially to believe that God existed and that he was waiting around in the firmament of eternity, twiddling his thumbs, ignoring the epidemics, ignoring the wars, with his finger hovering over the good stuff happens now button if I picked out the right pair of Old Navy fabric to put on my feet. But if you take this seriously for a moment, my absurd superstitions, it does speak to the fact that even non believers often imbue the physical world with magical properties. Even people who think they don't believe in divinity nonetheless sometimes inscribe their reality with a sense of the divine. When I think about it really deeply, when I think about the absence of an organized belief system in my life, I think it's very connected to the fact that I lost my parents in my 20s. There are an infinitude of things that a person loses when he loses his parents. But one thing I can clearly See Now At 38 as a father, is the way that being without parents can disconnect someone from a sense of. Of backward looking tradition. My mom died when I was 26 and my dad died three years later. And in an extraordinary and even chilling way, he died early one morning in January 2016, the very same day he was about to meet the young woman I was dating who would eventually become my wife. And I've never felt, forgotten that detail, the fact that in a way that seemed almost too fitting for an accidental universe, I lost my family on the same day that I found my family. And as I got older and passed through all these familiar gates of life, get engaged, get married, have a child, I felt in a variety of ways the pain of not being able to, to tell my parents about my life. I'm talking about the simplest questions, questions as simple as, here's what my life is like. Now, was it like this for you? At the same time that I was feeling this hard to define absence in my life, which I occasionally associated with the absence of religion, I was becoming very interested in this question of religious non affiliation at the level of society, of country. Why had America become so much less religious in the last 50 years? The reasons for this country's disconnection from religion seemed often understandable. You have the horrors of Catholic priest abuse, the religious right turning off a generation of young liberals, even the sexual revolution, replacing a set of Christian principles about sex and marriage with modern secular principles about freedom and individualism. But surely one truth about life is that just because something happens for good reasons doesn't guarantee it will lead to good outcomes. In fact, in a recent report from the Brookings Institution on the decline of social well being in America, the Tulane University economist Douglas Harris said, quote, if there is one overarching theme to American life, it's that we're pulling apart economically, politically and socially. Frederick Hess, an education expert who worked on this report, said he thought the disconnect between America's high GDP and its low levels of happiness and life satisfaction was related to, quote, the weakening bonds of community and the degree to which Americans feel less rooted in close knit bonds of family and faith. Today's guest is Ross Douthet, a New York Times columnist. Ross is a Catholic conservative. So from an identity checkbox standpoint, we are very different people. But Ross is one of my favorite writers from any point along the ideological spectrum. Not only because he's very interesting, but because he takes these issues that I think about so damn seriously. His new book is called why Everybody Should Be Religious, and it begins with this incredibly compelling and relatable description of Ross. Reading the feedback that he's getting at the Times and watching the letters from the editor evolve from a genre of you stupid idiot, how could you possibly believe in a magical man in the sky? To I think I'm missing something in my life. A religion sized hole at the center of my community or myself. Can you, Ross, help me find it? Today we talk about Ross's religious journey and mine. The history of religion in America, the popular misconception that science automatically rolled back religiosity, the rational scientific case for the existence of God. Why I find that case intellectually compelling but emotionally lacking. And finally, I entreat Ross to give me his single best case that Christianity is true. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English.
- [11:52]
Russ Douthat
Russ Douthit.
- [11:53]
Derek Thompson
Welcome to the show.
- [11:54]
Russ Douthat
Thanks so much for having me, Derek. It's great to be with you.
- [11:56]
Derek Thompson
I could tell from the first pages of this book that it was written for somebody just like me. You describe a tonal shift in the letters you were getting from New York Times readers from essentially, lol, you believe in a flying spaghetti monster, to genuine and earnest questions about how the demise of religion in modern secular society leaves painful cavities in our lives in the form of less meaning, less community, a weakened sense of backward looking story or forward looking purpose. And as I'm reading along to the introduction, I'm thinking, my God, this book feels like it was written for me. You write, quote, the serious modern person might believe that religious faith can be psychologically advantageous and necessary to human flourishing. End quote. And I'm thinking, me too. Next sentence. He might set aside the animus of the anti God brigade that was my dad and embrace a more nuanced and potentially favorable view of religion's place in contemporary life. And I'm thinking, my God, maybe me too. Next sentence. Quote. He might regard faith in terms suggested recently by the Atlantic's Derek Thompson. That's right. I'm like, what the hell? Very rare to be reading a book and think, this really feels like it was talking to me. And then boom, the author's like, if the person reading this book happens to be a 5, 8 secular Jew working at the Atlantic named Derek, I am in fact talking to you. So I Very interesting.
- [13:21]
Russ Douthat
That was in a footnote. We had to cut that footnote cause I had too many of them. I was like five, seven, lapsed Lutheran, you know, working at the New Yorker. I mean there's a. The book is written for a lot of people. But you are one of them, Derek. You are.
- [13:37]
Derek Thompson
Yeah. When my lawyer saw five, seven, I know that we threatened to sue the publisher. And I think that's where the footnote was.
- [13:43]
Russ Douthat
Here was some behind the scenes, there was a negotiation.
- [13:45]
Derek Thompson
So look in the open. I talked about my religious experience, which so clearly matches up with this audience that you're trying to reach with this book. Let's start with your religious experience. Tell me the story of how you came to be a Catholic. What was your religious experience growing up?
- [14:04]
Russ Douthat
So I grew up in Connecticut in the 1980s and my parents were Episcopalians when I was a kid, which is, you know, one of those old mainline Protestant denominations that basically dominated large swaths of American history and went into steep decline starting in the 1960s. And so in sociological terms, I was probably set up, well for a kind of future where my parents took me to church and had me baptized. And we were sort of loosely attached to the church. And then I would drift away in adolescence and become, you know, a sort of lapsed Protestant or maybe, maybe a Christmas and Easter Protestant, taking my kids to church and so on. But in reality, we ended up taking a kind of strange detour out of that path because my mother, who had some. The illness issue she was dealing with, got invited by a friend to attend a charismatic healing service. And my mother went to one of these things and it was something where this woman would walk around the auditorium with a microphone and point to people and say, someone in this aisle has serious problem with their, you know, sciatic nerve. Someone in this aisle, you know, is dealing with this and that and the other thing. And people would come out and she would pray for them and they would fall over and have to varying degrees, a kind of ecstatic experience of the Holy Spirit. And so this happened to my mother and it sort of, it changed our lives. When I was a kid, we were living in New Haven and then for reasons that were in a way quite different, my parents and I, my 17 year old self, ended up converting to Catholicism. And for my mother especially, who was sort of the myst, the more mystical personality, there was a kind of. There was a kind of mystical continuity where, you know, she went to some. There's sort of a charismatic piece of Catholicism that provided a kind of entry point, but it also connected back to her Episcopalian childhood. The one thing to say is I didn't have these experiences personally. I was an observer of other people's religious experiences and I both thought that they were real also. It often made me very uncomfortable, especially as I became, you know, an awkward teenager. And I was very happy to enter a more sort of intellectualized and ritualized form of Christianity where, you know, the idea in Catholicism is basically that, you know, the God's grace is available to you and you don't have to have this kind of, you know, dramatic on the floor, slain in the spirit experience to feel confident that God's grace is working through baptism, you know, the sacraments and so on.
- [16:57]
Derek Thompson
Well, there's two pieces of that story that I really want to hold onto as we continue discussing this subject. One which is that while people like me often confront religion as a set of arguments, there's many people that feel religion as a set of rituals, sometimes at the level of falling on the ground, speaking in tongues, like it's a very physical experience for many people. While people like me sort of think of it in an intellectualized way. That's one piece of the story that stuck with me. Another is that you mentioned you were brought up Christian. You are Christian. I was brought up reformed Jewish. I am reformed Jewish. My dad didn't really care about religion. My mom enjoyed Judaism, but also was sort of Buddhist at the same time. I am also kind of reformed Jewish and a little bit interested in Buddhism and whether religion exists at some kind of polygenic genome level, whether there are religion genes, hard to say. For the moment, there does seem to be something very real about the fact that religiosity seems to travel in some way through families that people tend to, for the most part, have a faith that's somewhat related to the faith of their parents. What do you make of that? Is that a significant point to hold on or is that just an obvious point like, yes, of course children would be more likely to have the religion of their parents.
- [18:25]
Russ Douthat
I mean, I think there's two, I think you actually collapsed together two slightly different realities of the way that religion is inherited. I think there's a way that religion is inherited that's similar to the way, you know, your political worldview is inherited. Right. Like, you know, you, you grow up with liberal parents and you're a liberal, you grow up with conservative parents and you're a conservative. You grow up in the US in the late part of the 20th century and you believe in liberal democracy as you would not have if you had been growing up in 16th century Italy unless you were, you know, an extremely unusual character. Right. So there's, there's one sense if you think of religion as kind of a package of ideas in which, yes, it is probably inherited in, you know, in sort of cultural ways. But that doesn't mean that you can't have useful and productive arguments about it. Right. Like, it would be strange, you know, you and I both write a lot about politics. It would be strange if somebody said, well, the reality is that most liberals grew up with liberal parents and most libertarians grew up with libertarian parents. And so we can't have an argument about, you know, who's. Right. About the minimum wage dispute. Right? No, I mean, of course you can have that argument while recognizing that, you know, it's not going to be absolutely settled because people carry different backgrounds, backgrounds with them. The other point though is like the kind of, there are different people have, have different sort of experiences of, I mean, like, I obviously, I believe in God. Right. So I'm just going to call them experiences of God. Right. That, that do themselves seem to have Some temperamental. Temperamental and sort of genetic conditioning. There clearly are sort of people who have more pious temperaments and more skeptical temperaments. There are people who have more cerebral attitudes towards the ultimate questions and people who literally couldn't, you know, would not be satisfied with a religious journey or anything else if it was not primarily experiential. Right. You know, Reform Judaism has a particular sort of cerebral, fairly secularized and ethically driven approach to religion. And you have a, you know, a particular. You inherit that from your parents via. Via a shared culture, and there's some shared temperament. I think it's interesting, though, like, from my own perspective, looking at my own experience, I am not temperamentally a mystical personality in a deep and any kind of deep and profound and profound way. I have a fundamentally cerebral attitude toward religion. Here I am, you know, publishing a book filled with arguments to try and, you know, get, you know, lapsed Reform Jews to, you know, be persuaded to believe in God. But. But having these weird experiences as a child, being around other people who had mystical experiences had a profound effect on my cerebral view of religion, which is, you know, which is interesting.
- [21:30]
Derek Thompson
So your book, the meat of your book is a defense of commitment to religion, a defense of faith. But there's also a piece of your book that touches on history, and I want to touch briefly on history before we get to the thesis of your book. There's a sense, I think, among people like me that the decline of religion in the west, and it's really a decline of religion in America, was the result of faith losing an argument to science. That essentially there were a set of questions like why does the sun rise? That we used to answer with faith. And then we did some experiments and we said, oh, it turns out that gravity exists and the solar system is shaped like this and it's heliocentric. And suddenly we had a scientific answer that faith previously had to answer. But when you look at the graphs of American church attendance up until the middle of the 20th century, something like 70, 80, 90% of Americans, based on the survey you're looking at, were still attending temple regularly. This is a century after Darwin, centuries after Copernicus. And it makes me wonder whether. Do you think religions declined in America because religion lost an argument to science or rather because religious institutions like the church lost legitimacy and secular institutions gained it.
- [22:57]
Russ Douthat
I think the decline that you're talking about at the end over the last 60 years is heavily driven by sociological and technological changes that are only that have big effects on religion. But don't start at the level of an argument about the existence of God or even the authority of a particular church. Right. So, you know, why is Christianity more potent in 1957America than in 2007America? Right. Well, you know, before you get to any kind of argument about Darwin or evolution, it's because we invented the birth control pill and we had a sexual revolution built around, you know, that technology and social changes associated with it that alienated a lot of Americans from the traditional sexual ethic offered by Christianity. But also, I think, in different ways, most of the major world religions, right. So in 1957, there was this kind of deep overlap between what you might call like middle class, moral common sense and religious teachings that said, don't have sex before marriage, you know, don't get divorced, you know, have a bunch of kids. Right. You know, if you're trying to answer the question, why are fewer people going to church? You would want to focus on that before you would focus on Darwin and so on. Similarly, you'd say the same thing, I think, about the age of the Internet. Right. The age of the Internet has had a dissolving effect, as you've written about many times, on all kinds of institutional loyalties and commitments, from basic ones like, you know, falling in love and getting married to, you know, whether you have trust in government or civic institutions and so on. Right. And so religion has been caught up in that kind of shift too, in ways that get sociological and technological, not intellectual. However, I also think that there is a kind of background reality that I think especially comes in after Darwin in the 19th century where but is sort of, you know, built into the larger idea that science is a. Science is the most successful form of knowledge generation that we have, and it is for good reason, a pursuit that sort of deliberately tries to rule out religious explanations, Right. That I think that that creates this kind of background where what I call in the book official knowledge is, you know, becomes secular at a certain point. At a certain point, it becomes embarrassing if you are a college professor or a journalist or an elite podcaster, you know, to be too interested in the supernatural. Not that people aren't right people, you know, the 1970s happened. The spiritualism craze in the late 1800s happened. There's still sort of ebbs and flows of supernatural interest, but there is this kind of elite level default, not toward hard atheism, but towards a kind of, you know, a kind of skepticism about any kind of religious argument that is. That is sort of a persistent part of our culture. And so then when these deeper Sociological and technological forces come along and, you know, dissolve part of the foundation of religion. The elite culture sort of goes, you know, it doesn't do much to pull things back. Right. It's sort of like, oh, yeah, it makes sense that fewer people are going to church because, you know, we are rational people and we know that probably, you know, religious ideas belong to this kind of, you know, this sort of antique, antiquated category of superstition. So that there is, I think, a kind of intellectual background to the decline of religion that is important, but it's not like the reason that churchgoing collapses in a particular moment in time usually.
- [26:59]
Derek Thompson
Russ, tell me how this sits with you. I'm hearing you say the scientific revolution, Darwin, Copernicus, these forces acted a bit like termites in the wall of religiosity. Right. They weakened the structure, but they didn't bring the walls down. In America, the wrecking ball came in the form of political and social changes. You mentioned birth control. I'll mention the rise of the religious right in the 1970s and 1980s, which tied Christianity to the Republican Party, alienated a lot of young progressives in the 2000s. And you see this in the data with secularism or religious non affiliation rising much faster among liberals than conservatives. Is this a fair way to describe how you generally see the decline of faith in America, like termites versus wrecking balls?
- [27:49]
Russ Douthat
I mean, I completely agree what you said about politics and political polarization playing a big role. I think there's a longer list of factors, but yeah, I think that's generally fair. I do think, though it is sort of. There's two things. One is it's termites in the walls. For the intelligentsia, I think most profoundly. Right. It's like you generate out of the kind of post Darwin moment a elite class in America that slowly sheds its Protestantism. And that happens. You know, there's a sociologist named Christian Smith who's written about this, but that there is a kind of secularization of the Protestant elite that happens pretty steadily from the middle of the 19th century down to the middle of the 20th century. And that is really important. Yeah. For sort of creating the context in which then everything from the birth control pill to the automobile to the Internet to polarization, to the Catholic sex abuse crisis, all, you know, all these things then give you rapid mass secularization. But I think it is a very. It's. It's sort of particular to the development and sort of deep Protestantization of the American elite. Right. That like you go from, you know, all of the elite, all the elite schools in America were founded as Protestant schools, right? And they remained sort of tacitly Protestant for a long time. And. But that sort of, that had dissolved before the larger secularization took hold.
- [29:27]
Derek Thompson
I wanted to begin with history rather than psychology because in a way, the historical lesson anticipates the psychological lesson, like civilization can believe in science and also have deep faith, and so can people. And what's interesting about your book is how seriously you take the idea that science itself isn't just compatible with faith. Science, you say, arguably bolsters the case for belief. This was such an interesting argument. I want to quote from your chapters and then throw things back to you. The cosmological constant which governs the speed at which the universe expands sits in a range that is roughly a 1 in 10 to the 120th power chance of occurring randomly. That range is essential to prevent both a flying apart and a swift collapse of the universe, both of which would have doomed the development of anything like life. Were the nuclear force, the force that binds protons and neutrons inside atoms, just fractionally stronger, it would have eliminated all the hydrogen atoms in the very earliest phase of the universe. No hydrogen, no water, no us. End quote. Ross, we do appear to live in a kind of jackpot universe. Why do you consider this to be exhibit A in the case for scientific, secular folks like me to be more open to the idea of a divine creator?
- [31:02]
Russ Douthat
I mean, I think my personal inclination is to make the argument that it's not just that science itself should be open to this idea. It is that the coherence of science is much stronger and the ambitions of science much more plausible. Once you accept that we probably almost certainly live in a universe made with us in mind. I think it's the case that basically the entire modern scientific project has always sort of depended on tacitly religious expectations and understandings about the universe. The modern scientific. And it does in fact begin with, with, you know, deeply religious scientists. The, you know, the scientific revolution doesn't begin with a bunch of atheists throwing off the chains of science. All of you know, the, from, from Copernicus down to Isaac Newton, who was kind of a religious kook in his own way. It was completely normal for scientists to say, look, we are, you know, we are investigating and expounding upon the order that some kind of God has created, right? And that makes sense because the scientific project assumes order, right? It assumes regularity, predictability, mathematical beauty. It assumes all of these things as sort of givens of its project, right? So that's. That that pattern has always been there. And you have divisions obviously where science challenges particular religious doctrines or, or, you know, and you get that with Galileo in certain ways, you get that with Darwin in certain ways. And there obviously are ways specific scientific discoveries can unsettle particular interpretations of scripture, particular theological world pictures. That's clear. But that's different from saying, you know, because it, it's different from saying that because science has proceeded from discovery to discovery at every stage, finding the universe, yielding to our, you know, our investigative efforts, therefore there's no God and it's all a random accident. That's an odd position to take when you sort of separate it a little bit from debates about, you know, evolution or, you know, or heliocentrism and just say, wait, what are we actually saying here? We're saying we have this incredibly successful project to understand the cosmos, but we're claiming that the very success of this project proves that the cosmos has no fundamental underlying design behind it. That that's, that's a peculiar place to be in. Even before you get to the stuff that, you know, you, you quoted from the book, which is the basic, the revelation of science, of late 20th century science, basically, which is that our unit, that there are many, many, many, like gazillion level, many possible orderings for a possible universe, and ours sits in this incredibly unlikely range necessary to produce not just sort of basic order, but planets, water, life, us, et cetera. Supposedly John von Neumann, you know, one of the greatest minds of the 20th century, said there probably is a God. Many things are easier to explain if there is than if there isn't. And that's basically where I think we are. Just with the kind of physical, cosmological evidence, plus the fact that we sort of jumped up apes from an obscure planet in the western spiral arm of the Milky Way. The fact that we can understand all of this is also quite peculiar if we aren't part of the reason why it's here.
- [34:46]
Derek Thompson
I love this line of thinking. I love this idea that seeing science, which means seeing reality clearly, is to see the hand of creation. I mean, you know, to spin this up a bit like the idea that from a stew of hydrogen atoms and quantum mechanics emerges. My seamless experience of consciousness is miraculous. Like the idea that out of a world of rocks and gases, we get love, we get beauty, we taste wine and chocolate, we feel awe, we make art. This is miraculous, even if it's not a divine miracle. And yet when I think about all this, when I hear these words Coming out of my mouth. I'm not sure it brings me any closer to belief in any religious faith specifically. And it makes me wonder whether faith can be accessed by logic alone. Maybe this is just the wrong door to knock on to enter the temple of belief, so to speak. And religion has to be felt first, experienced first, and then intellectualized second. Do you agree with that? Do you think it's possible to logic oneself toward the leap of faith?
- [36:01]
Russ Douthat
I think that the goal, I mean, there's some Jewish Christian difference here, but allowing for that. Right. The goal of serious religious practice, the goal of being part of a religious community in the end, is a relationship with, you know, the consciousness, the mind, the being that is at the origin of the universe and that is responsible for all of those things that you just expressed gratitude for. And since it is about relationship and sort of seeking and encounter and all of those things. Yes. Clearly there is a zone where you're not. We're not talking about. We're not talking about logical argument anymore. And I'm not suggesting in this book that, you know, you can think your way to sainthood or you can think your way into heaven or you can think your way into enlightenment. I'm saying that you can think your way to the point where you can say, okay, there probably is some kind of higher power and I probably should be seeking that kind of relationship. I do think you can think your way, logic your way to that initial point. It obviously, like we started the conversation talking about, you know, temperamental, temperamental differences and so on. Everybody's different, right? Everybody's going to have a different kind of experience. I do, though, think that there is a kind of cultural conditioning here that a lot of secular educated people, my friends and neighbors, people I work with and love, have right where, you know, there. It's like you just said, they'll be like, well, you know, there might be some higher purpose to the universe. We might be here for a reason. Love, beauty, all these things. But that's not religion, right? Like, I don't know, that's. I feel like that is. It's not religion, but it is part of the reason to be. To be religious. Yes, it is. It absolutely is.
- [38:01]
Derek Thompson
This sets me up perfectly for what might be the biggest question I have to ask you. And it touches on the psychology of belief, the emotional psychology of belief. Imagine that you don't know me that well, but imagine that I'm someone who's.
- [38:17]
Russ Douthat
We played softball together.
- [38:18]
Derek Thompson
Sorry, excuse me.
- [38:19]
Russ Douthat
We were many years ago. We know each other as well. As any go on.
- [38:25]
Derek Thompson
Trust that I'm diligent and loving. Trust that I read philosophy and want to feel gratitude and I want to think deeply about life. That I have an appreciation for the mystery of the world. That fundamentally, whether or not I believe in God, I basically adhere to the values of the Old and New Testament. Consider the Sermon on the Mount to be a beautiful guide to life. And throughout all of this, don't accept Jesus as my Savior and don't accept the existence of God or pray to him. What am I missing?
- [39:01]
Russ Douthat
I mean, we can. You're missing a lot, right? I think. And I think there's sort of different, different layers, right? I think there are things that you yourself feel yourself to be missing that are. That you've written about, right, that we. You were talking about at the outset that are the kind of immediate goods of religious practice which include sort of basic obvious things like, you know, there's obviously lots of different ways to have a community, but the religious model of community has been an effective and successful one for a long time, right? You know, it delivers sort of ritual, it delivers ways to usher your child or children into adulthood. It delivers support in tough times. You know, it delivers communal experiences of joy that you can recreate by being a sports fan. But there is something substantially different about them in a religious context. So there's sort of a range of practical. This worldly benefits of religious practice that are hard to reproduce. Not that it's impossible, but hard to reproduce as a kind of high minded sermon on the mount, admiring secular humanist, right? Like that's. So that's, that's level one. I think a lot of not, you know, plenty of secular people wouldn't accept that argument, but I think there are.
- [40:30]
Derek Thompson
I accept it.
- [40:31]
Russ Douthat
Quite a few, right? Quite a few do. And I think the age of the Internet has made more people accept it because it has so many different community is harder now, clearly, in various ways, right? And religion can feel almost like a hack, right? But then the secondary thing and what I would, you know, what I would insist on, right, is that, you know, you're also missing the quite strong possibility that God is real, right? And that the reason that religion delivers a lot of these ancillary benefits and the reason it makes it easier for you to cultivate those good things that you as a secular person find in religion is that in fact, right. The basic claims of religion are correct. And it's not just that there's a God. It's not just that you have an immortal soul. It's that you're going to die and meet God and, you know, be accountable for the decisions that you made in this life. And all of that reality bleeds back into the everyday in ways that shape the everyday, but that reality is also itself out there. And so if you say to yourself, well, you know, I can have these immediate, some of these immediate goods of religion without belief, it's harder, but you probably can. But there are also ultimate goods that I think the realities of the universe push you toward that you should want as well. Like, and these are the old boring, you know, it's a boring argument for religion, right? It's like, hey, Derek, you're going to die, right? You're going to die. But in fact, you are going to die and I'm going to die. We're all going to die. And maybe there's no God and we just sort of, you know, evaporate, like all we are is dust on the wind. But I think that the order and structure and nature of the cosmos give a pretty strong indicator that that's not actually the end of the story. And if it's not the end of the story, you know, you've got a strong interest in, you know, preparing yourself for that ultimate translation encounter. Whatever, you know, whatever sort of ecumenical word you want to use for it.
- [42:45]
Derek Thompson
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- [42:47]
Russ Douthat
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Derek Thompson
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Russ Douthat
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Derek Thompson
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Russ Douthat
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Derek Thompson
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- [46:27]
Russ Douthat
Yeah, I don't think I have a perfect expression. I mean to me, and again, this is a difference that I go back and forth on, whether it is sort of inherent or culturally conditioned. Right. But to me, the hard part of religion is what I was, the relational side, right? The idea that you are trying to be connected in a sort of intimate and personal way, since I'm a Christian to Jesus. But this applies generally to people who believe in, you know, who believe in a higher power, right? You are trying to get into a place where you, a mortal, finite, time bound creature, have a real relationship with a higher level of reality and a being that exists at a higher level of reality that is, you know, in some similar or supposed to be deeper and more profound than the kind of relationships that you have with your wife or your kids or your parents or your friends, right? That, that to me is what religion like as a technology, right, is ultimately trying to do. It's trying to create rituals and structures and actions and prayers and so on that enable you to have that kind of relationship. And that's really hard. And I don't have any illusions that I have achieved it in a profound way. That's why I'm not, that's why I haven't written a book that's called like, you know, how to have a Relationship with Jesus Christ. Because I do believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the second person of the Trinity and so on. But I don't have like a deep, profound sort of saint level confidence in that relationship. What I do have that I am trying to convey in this book is a sense that just believing that God exists is not as hard as you might think it is, right? That like, what are you thinking when you think that God exists? You're thinking a set of things. Again, I would say that you already think 60, 70, 80% of these things. You think the universe is ordered. You think that human life is miraculous. You think that consciousness, you know, has this special role in understanding and you know, literally shaping the universe as, as we go through it, right? And what belief in God does, is sort of say, okay, and all of those realities have their point of origin in a kind of structuring and ordering mind. You know, higher, higher, higher power of which we are, we are made in its image, right? It is like us, except, except, you know, perfect, perfected and above, right? And I, on the one hand, I, I, I can see why people can find that hard to believe. At the same time, I have always found it quite persuasive that like, look, you know, this is, we find ourselves in an orderly universe in which, you know, our minds have some integral relationship to the order in which, you know, people have since time immemorial had experiences, encounters, mystical experiences, and encounters with what seems to be the higher order. Why doesn't it make sense to just say that higher being and consciousness probably exists? That doesn't resolve any of the secondary questions, right? It's like you've still got the problem of evil, you know, you've still got the question of, you know, what. What is God up to? What's actually going on? It's quite, you know, it can be quite mysterious, right? It doesn't tell you exactly how to have a relationship with God. But I don't think. I think you can. I don't think you should leap ahead and say, well, in order to believe in God, I have to have some clear sense of how I have a relationship with him. I think it's okay as an initial step to say, okay, there's probably a God. I'm not sure how to have a relationship with him. Maybe I can't. Maybe, you know, maybe it's impossible, right? Like, who knows? But that initial move, I don't think, is some vast step away from the world as you already. I mean, like, people experience their lives as stories, right? I mean, not everyone, right? But many people, perhaps. You experience your life as a story that you're living. You're living inside a story, the story of Derek Thompson. To believe in God is just to believe that that story has an author, right? I don't know. Is that an impossible move? I'm not sure.
- [51:15]
Derek Thompson
You are. Again, I think retracing these two related, but ultimately importantly distinct ideas, which is, number one, that what we're talking about, what matters is belief. And number two, that what matters is belief in a specific organized religion with a specific scripture and set of rituals that goes back thousands of years. And again, I think these are related questions, but they are very different, right? To be overwhelmed by, as I sometimes am, the awe of experience, and not just experience in the big picture, like, oh, my God, how sick is it to be alive? But the awe of specific experience. Like, wow, my daughter did something so adorable. Like, this moment feels like it has a shimmer of sacredness to it, right? There's those uncanny moments that everyone must feel, whether it's love or awe. Hiking a mountain, extraordinary celebration. Your favorite team won the championship. Those heightened moments exist. There's one layer here which is attaching those moments to the sense of a being an author, a creator. And then there is a second question of whether to become a Jew, whether to become a Christian. So I want to close on that with you the way that I have the question written down in my notes is a little bit churlish, but actually it really is the way I want to ask it. Like, what's so great about Christianity, Right. Like, to be a devout Catholic is to not only believe in God, it's to believe that the infinitude of religious scriptures outside the New Testament are wrong or meaningfully lacking.
- [53:00]
Russ Douthat
Meaningfully. Well, first, meaningfully lacking I think is important, right. Because there is this idea popularized by Richard Dawkins, but it goes back to Hume and others, right. That if one religion is true, it means all the others are fake and made up. And that does seem quite implausible, Right. If you believe in one God, every other God that people have worshipped is just a figment of the imagination. I don't think that's true, and I don't think Christians are obliged to believe it's true. I think that it is itself sort of a fruit of secularization. I think Christians are allowed and obliged to believe in a somewhat enchanted cosmos of many different powers, some of them friendly, some of them not so friendly. Right. And it's not at all crazy that people have intimations and experiences of higher orders of reality and all kinds of religions in all kinds of ways. So that's one thing to say at the outset in terms of Christianity itself, just to go back to where you were, right. Like, you're trying to go from, okay, I've accepted that there might be a God. Now am I really going to join a particular religion? Right. And one idea that I feel very strongly about that people can disagree with and so on is that if the universe was made and fashioned and all of these intimations of wonder and so on are important, then, you know, God clearly is hidden from us in some way. But he's not, pardon my language, just trying to fuck with us. Right? Like the universe. I don't believe in a God who is tricking us by hiding the one true religion, like, under a rock. Right? Yeah. You're going to. Going to go up to Antarctica and there's a sacred scripture buried, you know, six layers down that no one has ever read, and that contains the truth. I don't think that that's the right way to think about it. Right. I think the right way to think about it is to say, okay, if there is a God and he wants to be in some kind of relationship with us, then you probably want to look at human history and see, like you, what are the big religions? What are the big ideas that lots of people, over a long period of Time have thought and believed and practiced in order to seek a relationship with a higher power, right? And that makes me biased towards the big religions. It makes me biased. I would say if someone was joining a religion, better to be a Hindu or Buddhist or Muslim than to join some startup rationalist cult in Northern California. No offense to rationalist cults, except the murderous ones, right? But then within those big religions, you know, I think you should pick one, right? And so you pick one. One way to do it is to look at the origins of those religions, the figures, the stories, the narratives, right? And say, okay, the universe is not a trick. What seems like the strongest signal here? You know, it's the signal in the noise, right? What's the strongest signal? What is. All religious origins are unusual. Which one is the most unusual? Right. And again, as we said at the outset, I was raised Christian. I carry certain biases towards Christianity no matter what, but I think Christianity does quite well at that test. I think, you know, your reaction to the Sermon on the Mount is part of it. I think that, you know, a strong case for the ethical teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, certainly. But then I also think that the narrative of his crucifixion and death and resurrection stands out among religious stories both for its unusual historical credibility. Not obviously, that, you know, you have to believe that he literally rose from the dead just because a bunch of people felt they saw it and wrote it down. But it is. The degree of attestation to the miracle is quite unusual. And, you know, there's sort of rabbit holes we can go down about that, but stipulate that some version of that is true. And then the story itself is just, you know, it's like the universe itself. It's sort of fascinating and strange and makes a certain kind of intuitive sense that, you know, is not, not the same thing as a logical proof, right? But it's like, yeah, you know, God himself was incarnated and, you know, was persecuted and suffered and died and shared, shared our suffering. It has something to say to the problem of evil, right? And then was raised again in a way that points towards the defeat of death and the transcendence of flesh and mortality. It redeems the physical world, but also transcends it. Anyway, I mean, I could go on, but that's sort of the starting point, right? And I completely respect someone who does the same thing and says, no, I have the reaction you have to the New Testament, but I have it to the Quran or to, you know, or to the story of the Jewish people. I was Doing an event with a rabbi in New York who was saying, well, no, this is. It's the story of the Jewish people that is the central revelation of God. Right. Like, you know, reasonable people can disagree about this, but I think that's what you're looking for as a religious searcher among religions. You're like, okay, what, which one? What's. What's the signal here? What's the standout religious event? And to me, the gospels stand out.
- [58:21]
Derek Thompson
Would you acknowledge or agree that your case for large old organized religions is a kind of Darwinian case for religion? You're essentially saying in a way that the religions that survived are proof of the fact that they're the best fit for our minds.
- [58:43]
Russ Douthat
Well, yes. No, I think that the, you know, the, the default insight of Darwinism, right, is that. Is that, you know, adaptation confers advantage when it's fitted to reality. Right? And I think that it's. This is not. Again, this is not the only reason to, you know, to sort of be inclined towards big old religions, but I think the, the evolved character of world religions, yes, is. Is part of the reason to prefer them to sort of, again, a religion that you make up yourself or that has total novelty. Now, you know, you could say, well, I mean, that. That can't be the only claim because obviously, you know, you could say, well, in the age of the Internet, they aren't evolved anymore and so we need to found a new one, right? Like, no, there has to be something more to them than just their evolved ness. But their evolvedness is, I think, at the very least, a point in their. Their favor. And I mean, this is, you know, what with Darwinism, one thing that's interesting too is you get there's all this energy expended by sort of atheist theoreticians of religion who are trying to explain just the evolution of religion itself. Forget Islam and Christianity. Right, but just like, why. Why did human beings evolve to be religious and to build these systems and so on, right? And, you know, one of the amusing things is that of course, in most. Much of Darwinism depends. Much of Darwinian theory depends on the idea that like, you know, things evolve because they fit reality. Right? Like, if your mechanism of deceiving a predator doesn't actually fit the reality of the predator, it's not going to work. And I mean, I think obviously the simplest reason why you would assume that human being, human. Human beings had evolved to be religious is that in fact, there is something out there that we can get in touch with through religion that confers some kind of advantage.
- [60:49]
Derek Thompson
I will say this. For whatever reason, in the last two years, I've read a lot of Christian philosophy especially, really enjoy sort of existential Christian philosophy. And I do think there's something really beautiful about aspects of the New Testament that's wonderfully subversive. I mean, here you have in the Sermon on the Mount, in particular, this extraordinary inversion of the aristocratic code. And you mentioned, you glossed this in your book, the idea that suffering is nobler than strength, that the meek shall inherit the earth, harder for a rich man to enter heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. These are not ideas that seem to me to come naturally from Roman history or Levant history. They do seem genuinely radical for their time and age and geography. And the fact that these ideas conquered the west is an extraordinary thing.
- [61:56]
Russ Douthat
I'll just pick up there, because I think that for whatever reason, this, you know, moment in our history where, you know, people have sort of moved beyond religion to some degree, perhaps, you know, found that they miss it, are looking at it anew without some of the burdens imposed by the very real failures of institutional churches and so on, this moment yields a sort of. It yields a sensibility that goes along as far as you've gone and then hesitates.
- [62:29]
Derek Thompson
Right?
- [62:30]
Russ Douthat
And I mean, this is the argument that you're talking about, is an argument that, for instance, the historian Tom Holland has made. He wrote a long book about sort of the Christian Revolution, how it still shapes secular morality and liberal morality all around the world. And Holland is someone who himself sort of writes about religion, talks about religion a lot, and is always sort of hovering on the threshold, right? And, you know, he even had a kind of apparent healing happen when he was diagnosed with cancer and went and prayed in, you know, a chapel of the Virgin Mary in England, and his cancer went into remission, right? And so it's like. But he's still, you know, he's still. I've seen events with him where, you know, it's like, well, do you believe in an afterlife? He's like, well, no, you know, no, I can't quite believe in that. Right. And again, I've been, you know, I've been sort of pitching you. Pitching you hard, Derek, on this. So I won't, you know, I won't. I won't end with the strongest possible pitch. I will just say, you know, it's. It's okay. It's okay to take one more step. Just, you know, just one more step. Because I think, you know, in the End. If there is a God, an ultimate purpose to the universe and so on, then there probably is something outstretched towards you, maybe just a little bit beyond your sight. So how's that. How's that for a.
- [64:00]
Derek Thompson
It's a beautiful poetic.
- [64:01]
Russ Douthat
Poetic evangelization or something.
- [64:02]
Derek Thompson
Anyway, it's a beautifully pitched pitch. Not too strong, not too light. The last thing you make me think of before that you go is there's this famous concept of. Of Pascal's Wager, of you might as well believe in God, because if you're right, you get eternity. And if you're wrong, eh, what are you giving up? Just about nothing. There's a kind of modern version of Pascal's Wager that I've seen becoming a little bit mainstreamed, which is that if you're right, then you get eternity, and if you're wrong, then you get a set of material benefits here and now in the real world. Because life without belief or life without congregation or life without religious community is a thinner life than the thickness and fullness that you get with religion.
- [64:54]
Russ Douthat
Yeah, I think there is a version of it out there, and I think it, you know, and again, I think it partially does reflect just the weakness. One of the reasons that people didn't want to make that wager for a long time, to be fair, right, Was this sense of institutional religion as a source of sort of imprisonment or oppression or these kind of things. Right? And so, in a way, we've reached a point. It's precisely because institutional religion seems so weak that it's hard to imagine being oppressed by it, that you can sort of get down to the fundamentals and say, okay, well, what is, you know, what is actually going on here? And what is the right way to. The right way to think about this? Right? Like, that's. That's sort of a peculiar feature of our times, that this moment of sort of reconsideration of religion is not manifest in sort of, you know, it's not like, you know, the Catholic Church is suddenly becoming more powerful in various ways. Right. Like, no, institutions are still as weak as ever. It's just in the weakness of institutions you've sort of removed. Oddly, first you removed reasons to believe, but now maybe you're removing impediments to belief, and people can sort of say, okay, I have less to lose by making this wager, and, yes, an eternity potentially to gain.
- [66:18]
Derek Thompson
Russ Douthit, thank you very much.
- [66:20]
Russ Douthat
You're very welcome, Derek. This was a lot of fun. Thank you so much.