Hosts
Derek Thompson
Derek ThompsonAbout the episode
This is a conversation I’ve wanted to have for a long time. It’s about the decline of religion in America, the value of faith, the case for belief, and the rational reasons to believe in God. My guest is the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. He is a Catholic conservative. From an identity checkbox standpoint, we are very different people. But Ross is one of my favorite writers from any point of the ideological spectrum. His new book is Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, and it begins with an extremely compelling description of Ross reading the feedback he’s getting at the Times, watching that feedback evolve from “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 help me find it?” We talk about his 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 emotionally lacking, and the case for even secular people to believe in God. And, finally, I invite Ross to give me his single best case that Christianity is true.
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Summary
In the following excerpt, Derek talks to Ross Douthat about his journey to religion.
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, “The serious modern person might believe that religious faith can be psychologically advantageous and necessary to human flourishing,” 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, me, too.” Next sentence: “He might regard faith in terms suggested recently by The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson.”
Ross Douthat: That’s right.
Thompson: 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-foot-8 secular Jew working at The Atlantic named Derek, I am in fact talking to you.” So, I very much appreciate—
Douthat: That was in a footnote. We had to cut that footnote because I had too many of them. I was like, “A 5-7 lapsed Lutheran working at The New Yorker.” The book is written for a lot of people, but you are one of them, Derek. You are.
Thompson: Yeah. When my lawyer saw 5-7, I know that we threatened to sue the publisher, and I think that’s where the footnote was taken out.
Douthat: And there were some behind-the-scenes, there were some negotiations.
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?
Douthat: So I grew up in Connecticut in the 1980s, and my parents were Episcopalians when I was a kid, which is one of those old mainline Protestant denominations that basically dominated large swaths of American history and went into steep decline starting in the 1960s. 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 a sort of a lapsed Protestant, or 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 illness issues 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 a serious problem with their sciatic nerve. Someone in this aisle 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 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. For my mother especially, who was sort of the more mystical personality, there was a kind of mystical continuity where 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, and it often made me very uncomfortable, especially as I became an awkward teenager. And I was very happy to enter a more sort of intellectualized and ritualized form of Christianity, where the idea in Catholicism is basically that God’s grace is available to you and you don’t have to have this kind of dramatic, on-the-floor, slain-in-the-spirit experience to feel confident that God’s grace is working through baptism, the sacraments, and so on.
This excerpt has been edited and condensed.
Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Ross Douthat
Producer: Devon Baroldi