I don’t usually write about religion here. But I think there are several good reasons for engaging with Ross Douthat’s new book on religious faith. First, because I share Douthat’s assessment that religious practice and belief are of great sociological importance, their decline in recent decades has had at least mixed results, and the fact that there seems to be something of a cultural shift in which people are groping for more meaning than is offered by an ethos of secular liberalism on the left or individualistic capitalism on the right.
In addition, as a self-critical leftist, I am trying to better understand the world, and understand where both liberals and lefties may have gone wrong in recent years. More broadly, I firmly believe that the left needs to be more open and welcoming of religious belief in its many forms. Just as it is not healthy for American politics to be divided into white and non-white political tribes, it will profit no one for America to be divided between a religious right and an atheist left.
And finally because Douthat, as a public intellectual, embodies many of the virtues I aspire to: he is humble, open-minded, respectful of alternatives and the inevitably incomplete nature of our individual (or tribal) assessments of the world, and he is interested in big ideas. The fact that he is a conservative Catholic, while I am neither of those, only makes engaging with this book more valuable.
In his book Believe, Douthat, a New York Times columnist, makes a case for general religious belief. He notes that Americans are in a different place culturally than, say, 20 years ago, which saw the publication of aggressive “new atheist” tracts from the likes of Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris. The percent of Americans who are religious has continued to decline (though there is some evidence that it has leveled off this past year) and there is now maybe more yearning for, and even nostalgia for, a more believing time.
Moreover, concerns about an empty, secular individualism becoming the dominant public culture are neither new nor confined to the right. In the 1980s, for instance, political theorists debated between communitarian and liberal perspectives. The communitarians, some of whom were more leftist than the liberals, argued that a shallow secular liberal culture was too hollow to sustain itself. Furthermore, there is pretty clear evidence that things have not gotten uniformly better as America has become less religious. While we have thankfully become more culturally open and pluralist on issues like gay marriage, we have also become more lonely, divided, angry, and dysfunctional. Of course there are many contributing factors to that (Think that neoliberal capitalism is a key contributor? Welcome to the left!). But it is plausible that the decline of religious practice is one of them.
In Douthat’s words, “relative to twenty years ago there is more discussion of the obvious sociological importance of institutional religion, its crucial shaping role in human culture, and its foundational place in the development of the modern democratic order. And there is more fear that a post-Christian or post-religious future might yield not liberal optimism and leaping scientific progress but tribalism, superstition, and despair.” (2-3). As Derek Thompson in The Atlantic notes, religion exiting the public sphere may leave a massive, unfilled void in its place, rather than a more enlightened alternative. For those interested, Thompson has a nice interview with Douthat on his Plain English podcast at The Ringer.
On the scholarly side, a detailed study of the sociological role played by religion in American life can be found in Robert Putnam’s American Grace. And various figures and writers on the left, like United Automobile Workers President Shawn Fain, Reverend William Barber, public intellectual Cornel West, and political theorist William Connolly (the latter not conventionally religious but a political theorist who is very critical of secularism) have discussed the centrality of their religious faith and/or problems with a wholly secular worldview. I mention these people just to reiterate that there is nothing strange or problematic about being on the left and being interested in religion.
Okay, on to Douthat’s arguments for why everyone should choose some form of religion. He begins by saying that he doesn’t want to make a case that you should shush your doubts and just jump into religious practice and then belief will follow (the fake-it-til-you-make-it approach), nor does he insist that if we engage in the most abstruse rational argumentation that this will prove religion’s veracity.
Rather, he is going to use evidence and arguments that appeal to the everyday reason and commonsense that we all possess and use to make sense of our world. As he says, he wants to not merely invoke the spiritual but “to think rationally about it” and to hopefully show that religion “offers wisdom and protection that in today’s spiritual landscape are in dangerously short supply.” (10). His argument “is that the basic justifications for a religious worldview are readily accessible to a reasonable human being.” (111).
The first topic he tackles is physics. Douthat’s main point, which rings true, is that the basic history and structure of the universe seems to suggest some kind of creator. The elegance of the mathematical equations that describe the movements of the cosmos at least raise the question why the universe is not merely a void of random chaos. But the second, and to me more powerful point, is that the big bang surely feels like an act of creation. If the universe was created by some sort of deity or higher power, is this not what it would look like? This deity snaps their fingers and the universe explodes into existence? At a precise point in time that we can measure, no less.
This takes us to ideas that go back to the Ancient Greeks, that to explain the beginning of the universe requires some sort of prime mover, or first cause, to get everything else going. I generally call myself agnostic. But if there is an argument for deism, the belief that there is some higher entity who created existence, this is it. This doesn’t take you all the way to accepting any particular religious faith of course. It will, however, get many, myself included, to concede that some form of deism might be the best explanation for how the universe came to be.
The second, and fascinating point of argument, concerns consciousness, the mind, and neuroscience. In Douthat’s interpretation, when we consult the latest findings of neuroscience, not to mention reflections from the best philosophers, we still don’t understand consciousness. Self-awareness, what it is, how it comes to be, continues to be something of a black box.
For all the advances in neuroscience, consciousness remains a miraculous mystery. Consider its existence throughout the animal kingdom: consciousness in a crow, a jaguar, an orca, is a truly stunning feat, let alone in human beings. Now consider our computer age: generative AI like ChatGPT has no more consciousness than a pocket-watch, in part because we have no idea how consciousness works or how it is created. Here again I generally agree with Douthat—we have no idea how consciousness operates and simple material explanations don’t seem adequate. (On this topic I am looking forward to reading David Bentley Hart’s All Things Are Full of Gods).
If you are committed to the idea that consciousness is not mere delusion, not just something produced and determined by chemicals in the brain, if you believe humans and other animals have something like free will, you are stuck in a weird place. It is not at all clear that we can account for these things through a purely material explanation—we may need something like the old mind/body dualism to make sense of them. And if there is something in us, a mind perhaps, that doesn’t reduce to mere brain matter, what are the implications? I’ll leave this question hanging.
In political terms could this make room for strange bedfellows on this issue? Humble people on the left and right, religious and non-religious, who don’t want us to merge with AI, who see humans as embodied mammals, who don’t want a techno-futurist singularity to emerge, and who see natural life, of humans and animals, as sacred? Perhaps such people might agree on various regulations and strong norms regarding big tech, AI, etc., though the stumbling blocks are substantial and that is a topic for another time…
The next chapter concerns miracles and evidence of the supernatural in the world today. The common disenchantment story says that as modern science came to explain more of the world, human life became “disenchanted” and we stopped seeing supernatural hands and actors behind every event. A medieval world full of spirts came to be replaced by a modern world full of mechanistic laws. This argument, which has plenty of truth to it, is explored brilliantly in Charles Taylor’s lengthy A Secular Age.
However. As Douthat observes, “when intellectuals stopped taking mystical experiences seriously, actual human beings kept on having the experiences.” (69). Here I am much more skeptical—not that such experiences happen, for they clearly do, but that we can draw any clear metaphysical conclusions from them. Crazy coincidences, UFO sightings, a broken record player that mysteriously turns on during a wedding. These things do happen. Douthat strenuously argues that such experiences have not gone away in our more scientific and disenchanted age. This is an interesting point, no doubt, though we might still dismiss many of them as confirmation bias or things conjured up by “the power of the human mind to generate what it wants to hear or see” (84), (Douthat’s words). I frankly think this, combined with simple mistakes of interpretation, can account for most of these uncanny experiences, though it is fascinating that some of these experiences come unbidden. The same goes for the sheer strangeness of near death experiences. I guess, for me, there is no clear takeaway. Things happen that defy explanation, yes. But what to make of them? Much less certain.
In my life, as with Douthat himself, the miraculous tends to assume more prosaic forms: falling in love, becoming a father, developing lifelong friendships, growing up in a loving home with two amazing parents. Of course, from my own gut perspective, these are far more rich and meaningful than an encounter with the uncanny. Perhaps I am mistaken.
The book then makes the case for joining a religious practice/tradition, not just experimenting alone. This is because, as Douthat argues, it is harder to commit to something solo, and because the major faith traditions of the world are likely to have endured because they each, in their own way, connect to some features of the divine. Any is better than none, he suggests. A lot more could be said here but I don’t want the review to get too unwieldy. Let me just say that if more Americans participated in religious institutions, as well as all sorts of other civic organizations, from bowling leagues to yoga groups, our political culture would likely be in a healthier state.
How about possible criticisms? There are at least three that stand out to me, one cosmological, one scientific, and one moral. First the cosmological: the arguments Douthat points to, many of which I think have merit, seem to argue at most for deism, not to the much more specific theological claims of the real religions of the world, many of which advocate a very active, personal, theistic God. This is a big leap and one that he tackles. His argument, in short, is that all the major faith traditions are likely to get at some truths about the divine and so it makes sense to follow one’s gut and go where one is drawn. Anywhere is better than nowhere, to reiterate his claim. So I suppose he would suggest I look into practices within the major faiths that are most aligned with my own leanings about the nature of the universe. Perhaps versions of Buddhism, a unitarian Church, maybe the immanent Christian explorations of Tolstoy, though the latter don’t fit as well with collective engagements.
The second point concerns the scientific method. To simplify, the modern scientific method works, more or less. It gives us life-saving medicines, planes that fly, and deep insights into the nature of the cosmos. Any religious turn that saw a widespread abandonment of this would be a massive loss, for the insights into reality that have been uncovered in modernity are truly stunning. Douthat largely concedes this point, indeed his argument centers around the claim that modern scientific knowledge suggests a world ordered by a divine hand.
The third point is the moral one, namely the problem of pain and suffering. This is a standard stumbling block for many people of good will and a classic issue for religious believers to wrestle with.
As for the problem of pain, not to be hyperbolic, but how can there be an all-powerful, loving God and the Holocaust? This isn’t just a moral intuition, a gut-feeling. This question is probably the most damning challenge to theism imaginable—far more so than the misplaced claims of the new Atheists that religion is the source of most evil in the world. As an atheist friend of mine correctly pointed out in grad school, nationalism as an orienting force has probably killed more people than all the world’s religions combined. Which is to say, the reason to be skeptical of religion isn’t because of the claims of Harris or Hitchens. (Ben Burgis points out, in a thoughtful book on Hitchens, that Hitchens’ God Is Not Great is filled with pretty bad arguments against religion).
And Douthat rightly criticizes the lazy atheist argument that religion is the cause of most wars, or more broadly, most evils in human history. As he says, “there is no good evidence that religion has been a special source of violence in human history, as compared to the entirely worldly and secular aims of conquest or resource control that drive most warfare between countries and peoples.” (161). Agreed.
As for the problem of pain, Douthat recognizes it as a key debate and challenge that believers, especially Christians, have been wrestling with as long as we have had these religions. It doesn’t have easy answers. Rather, he tries to show that it doesn’t defeat all claims to belief.
He also ends with an admirable and honest discussion of how he came to his own faith. I don’t have the historical knowledge to assess discussions on the veracity of the gospels, though I shared his experience of being blown away by the Gospels when I read them in their entirety for the first time. For some time in college I was more or less a Tolstoyan pacifist Christian, and maybe still am. I certainly have never lost my interest in Christian writers on the left.
Let me conclude on some strong points—I agree with Douthat that a fully materialist account does not seem able to explain the entirety of the world, especially consciousness and free will (both of which I believe exist among animals, most obviously humans, but also among mammals and birds), and that the very existence of the universe and its seeming laws suggests the hand of a prime mover. Thinking big picture, what does that tell you? I’m not sure.
For more on this topic, see the following:
Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos. A philosopher, he rejects both materialism and theism, arguing for a third way of viewing the universe and its purpose.
David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind. This is a long, dense book that delves into the most complex questions and problems of consciousness. Perfect if you want a philosophical deep dive.
Meghan O’Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine. A thoughtful book on related topics, discussing the connections between religion, AI, human consciousness, animal life, and more. I reviewed it in an earlier blog post.
David Bentley Hart, All Things Are Full of Gods. Next on my reading list. Hart is a thoughtful theologian discussing in detail the materialist worldview.