Attaching to God: Neuroscience-informed Spiritual Formation

112 Courage to Commit: Why Embracing Religion Still Matters (with Ross Douthat)

• Geoff and Cyd Holsclaw • Season 7 • Episode 112

Share episode

Host Geoff Holsclaw engages with New York Times columnist and author Ross Douthat. They discuss the enduring relevance and shifting perceptions of religion in a scientific and secular age, driven by Douthat’s book Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. 

The conversation navigates the historical impact of new atheism, the existential malaise in youth culture, and a generational gap in religious knowledge. Douthat elaborates on his rationale for advocating religion not just for its therapeutic or social benefits but also for its intellectual robustness. 

Topics covered include the persistence of supernatural experiences, the case for commitment to established religions, and the importance of community and institutional structure in religious life. Douthat also shares his personal journey through various Christian traditions, culminating in his commitment to Catholicism. The episode concludes with insights into how suffering and chronic illness have deepened Douthat’s faith and understanding of God's providence.

Stay Connected:

Introduction: Does Religion Still Make Sense?

Geoff Holsclaw: Does religion still make sense? Does it give meaning to the mystery of the universe in our scientific and secular world? Can we still believe, or perhaps we can turn the tables and say that those who aren't religious are the ones lacking a little common sense. Welcome back to the Attaching to God podcast.

I'm Geoff Holsclaw, your host. As always, we were brought to you by the embodied faith. Today I'm really excited to have a guest on with us. 

Guest Introduction: Ross Douthat

Geoff Holsclaw: This is. Ross, doubt it. He is a New York Times opinion columnist. Ever since, uh, 2009, before that, he was a senior editor at The Atlantic. He has authored many books. A couple of them are the Decadent Society, bad Religion, just to name a few.

But most recently he [00:01:00] wrote Believe Why Everyone Should Be Religious, and I love that you said religious and not spiritual, which we'll get to in a second. But Russ, thank you so much for being on with us today.

Ross Douthat: You're very welcome. Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure.

Geoff Holsclaw: Yeah, I saw your book, uh, come across probably my email or I don't know. I was like, Ooh, I wonder if somehow I could get 'em on the podcast.

Ross Douthat: And, and here, here I am.

Geoff Holsclaw: Yes, I know. Yes, it's, uh, I recently just got an assistant to help me and so it's, it's, it's like magic things just

Ross Douthat: That's right. People, people just appear, I, I'm actually an AI hologram of Ross outfit, though. That's your assistant may not have mentioned, may not have mentioned that part, but.

Geoff Holsclaw: Well, that's okay. I'm still, we'll still promote this, you know, extensively. So, you know, you, you do talk about AI for a little bit, but we're not, I actually wasn't gonna get into that. 

The Shift in Religious and Spiritual Beliefs

Geoff Holsclaw: But you, at the beginning of your book, um, note kind of a vibe shift from maybe 15, 20 years ago at the heyday of the Milton. new [00:02:00] atheism, but now you know, something different, especially in your younger colleagues. Could you just talk a little bit about some of the religious, spiritual shifts you've been seeing?

Ross Douthat: Yeah, I mean I, I think we've obviously gone through an American life, a period of some kind of secularization or de churching. Over the last 15 or 20 years, um, and the new atheists and that sort of intellectual moment wasn't obviously the only causal force, but I think it was an important kind of accelerant, right?

This sense that, you know, I. The world would just be better off if fewer people believed in an imaginary sky Daddy and you know, a flying spaghetti monster. All these sort of terms of abuse that the new atheists flung at traditional religious believers. And I, I think we've reached a point in the culture where even if people aren't religious.

They don't believe in that narrative anymore, or it is not to say that nobody [00:03:00] believes in it, it's obviously a big culture, but many fewer people find it compelling than did 15 or 20 years ago. Right. And I, I think a big part of that is just, just comes from looking at the world around us, looking at the culture, looking at politics, and you know, you have this narrative that with less religion.

The world would become more rational, more scientific, less polarized, less dogmatic, all of these things. And you know, nothing about reality in 2025 vindicates any of those predictions. It turns out that human beings can, you know, be unhappily, ideologically divided without, you know, without any faith at all.

Um. So you have that sense, right, that the new atheism made a bunch of promises that just haven't been fulfilled. Um, then you have a couple other things. You have, I think, a strong current of existential unhappiness. In American culture right now, particularly youth culture that's visible in statistics on depression and [00:04:00] anxiety and suicidality and all of these things.

And again, I, I don't want to say that the decline of religion is the only force at work there. I think just the impact of, uh, phones and social media and digital life plays a certain role as well. Um, but I, I definitely think you have a lot of people who, who, who are sort of uncertain about what human life is for and unhappy with the existing narratives about what it's for, what we're supposed to be doing in the world, why we should exist at all in some cases.

Um, and then finally, I think we've raised a generation in America, really for the first time, maybe ever in American history, uh, that just has almost no contact with institutional religion at all. Uh, so for a long time, if you were talking to someone who was a non-believer, you could assume that, you know, they'd had some kind of experience with religion.

They'd gone to Sunday school, their parents had been Christmas and Easter Christian, something like that. Often they'd had a negative [00:05:00] experience with religious authority that they were rebelling against. And again, that still exists, but you just have millions and millions of people for whom you know. You say the words like Cain and Abel.

And it, you know, like who are, who are Cain and Abel, right? Like, just sort of, you know, basic, basic forms of cultural literacy about religion aren't there? And a lot of these people are themselves interested in religion. Uh, they just don't have any, they're, they're sort of starting from ground zero, right?

Starting completely afresh. And that's part of, part of the idea behind this book was to kind of write into that moment to say, okay, you're looking at religion almost for the first time. What, you know, what should you be looking for? Why does a religious perspective on the world make sense? And that, again, I think that environment is, is quite different from a world of, you know, 2001 or 2005, where institutional religion still had a little more authority.

There was more of a sense of it as a thing to be rebelled [00:06:00] against rather than as a kind of, you know, mystery that people are curious about Almost.

Geoff Holsclaw: Mm-hmm. So, you know, I'm like a low church evangelical. If we can still use those things within your church and a lot of people who, you know, they, you know, whether it's deconstructing or whatnot, you know, they'll, they'll move away from religion and then talk about how they're being spiritual. But I'm seeing similar things that you just said, that there's a whole generation that would consider themselves spiritual. But they actually wanna move toward the religious. And so I love that you're kind of speaking, uh, into that moment. Uh, you, you mentioned that, um, so this is a quote, I think for page 10. You said this book uh, or this book. It isn't about how religious stories are psychologically helpful, whatever their truth, content, or about how religious communities offer a valuable solidarity, even if their doctrines are made up, or how embracing mystery, the mystery of existence can make you happier.

You say, that's not what this book is about. Right? So that. [00:07:00] not like the therapeutic or social benefits of religion, which some people just kinda lower the bar and say, yeah, there's a place for religion, but you actually wanna make like a more rigorous kind of statement, almost an intele intellectual kind of argument.

Now, why is it that you want to go that route rather than the the therapeutic route, which I think a lot of people are doing right now.

 

The Therapeutic vs. Intellectual Argument for Religion

Ross Douthat: Uh, well, part of it is just, you know, that I think that the. The claim that religion actually describes reality is ultimately a stronger claim than the therapeutic claim. It's not that I think the therapeutic claims are false. Exactly. I I do think that I. Religion has social benefits and the church going is, you know, is good for people's psyches in various ways.

Um, I just think that a first, a lot of those benefits are themselves downstream from the fact that, you know, God almost certainly exists, right? Like, and that's, that helps explain why people seem to be in general somewhat happier when they're in some [00:08:00] kind of relationship with, with that ultimate reality.

Um. There's also the, the reality, I don't get into this too much in the book, right? But I've written about it in other contexts that if you spend too much time on the therapeutic side, you're obviously losing the part of Christianity in particular, but other religious traditions as well that says, well, you know, I mean, in the end, God might ask you to suffer and die.

Right? Like, it's not, it's not, it's, it's not therapeutic all the way down, or it is therapeutic in the ultimate sense, right? You're, you know, gonna go to heaven, but it's not some kind of guarantee of. It's, it's not just some sort of guarantor of American middle class existence, even if it is helpful in certain ways in middle class existence.

But, but yeah, I, I think that there's, again, in this sort of zone of people who are exploring religion and interested in religion and so on, I think they get a lot of pitches that say, okay, it's hard to believe in God. It's hard to be a serious, modern person. And, you know, and take seriously, [00:09:00] uh, you know, the virgin birth or you know what, whatever stumbling block looms large.

But why don't you just come and practice religion? Uh, try it, see how it works, and maybe you'll come to some kind of stronger belief that way. And for some people, I think that's good advice. Uh, I certainly, again, world's a diverse place. A lot of people come to religion in a lot of different ways. But I think there are a lot of people who could just benefit from having a sense that, in fact, that decision to go to church or, you know, return to faith or explore a new faith or something, is itself a rational decision.

Right. That it it has, it's not just a kind of existentialist leap, leap into, you know, into the unknown. There is sort of an unknowable aspect, obviously, and an intensely personal aspect to religion. I'm not saying that you can reason your way. Into a grace-filled relationship with Jesus Christ. I am [00:10:00] saying though, that you can reason your way into thinking that maybe you should have a grace-filled relationship with Jesus Christ and that, that that reasoning in the end gives people a more secure line to.

Practice and belief than does just a kind of instrumentalist case. You know? And it is interesting, I've had a lot of these conversations with, with secular interviewers and sort of somewhat religious people and you know, I, in, in one of them, someone said, well, aren't you making it harder? Right? Isn't it easier to just, you know, not have a full commitment to the beliefs, but just sort of go, you know, go to church and see what happens.

And again, to me it's the opposite, right? It's actually very hard to practice, to practice Christianity in a se and even in a kind of minimal way. Like I'm Catholic, we have a Sunday obligation. You gotta get your kids to mass. Right? That's very challenging. I find that personally a lot more challenging than [00:11:00] just following what I think is pretty strong evidence that the universe has an underlying order and that, you know, God has some kind of intention for us.

But then believing that makes it easier to drag my kids to church on Sunday. And I think there's at least some number of people who are in the same position who are gonna be more likely to practice religion if they feel like there's a basic rational foundation for what you do on Sunday morning. And you know, hopefully not just on Sunday morning.

Geoff Holsclaw: Yeah. The. old Augustinian kind of phrase is faith seeking understanding, but you're kind of also reversing that. It seems a little bit like, well, a little understanding can help at least bolster the, the, the pursuit of faith.

Ross Douthat: Yes. Well, it's like,

Geoff Holsclaw: belong together.

Ross Douthat: right, it's, I mean, if you, you know, if you go back to the New Testament and look at, you know, Paul, I think in Romans, right? Where he, you know, he, he basically makes the argument that the pagans, the people he's preaching to, right? [00:12:00] They hadn't been given the revelation. Of the Old Testament or the New Testament, but they had been given a set of signs and indicators that should have made them aware that there probably is a God.

Right. And I think that's always been an assumption of Christian faith, that there are things that are revealed by revelation and things that you can have and experience only through God's grace. Um, but the basic orientation toward God is a reasonable one. And a sound starting place.

Geoff Holsclaw: Mm-hmm. Hmm. 

Supernatural Experiences and Modern Belief

Geoff Holsclaw: Well, so you, there's too much that we can't get into and I love you, you. have a couple chapters on kind of order found in the cosmos, uh, the mystery of the human mind and consciousness and how early on in the modern age, the enlightenment, you know, they thought that science was gonna dismiss all this stuff about faith.

But now, uh, you know, the more of the most recent advanced findings and [00:13:00] cosmology, but also consciousness, they seem to leave a lot of room for, for faith and religion. Which we could talk about, but I was really interested in your chapter on overturning the myth of disenchantment, or the Myth of secularism.

Can we talk about that a little bit? You know, how do angels and demons and crystals and chakras and kind of, how does all that become an argument for religion?

Ross Douthat: Yeah, so the, so.

Geoff Holsclaw: and, uh,

Ross Douthat: Yeah. The, the UFOs. Yeah. We got, we, we, I, no, I, I'm, you know, I, I, I do take a very open-minded stance towards different flavors of super supernatural experience, but the baseline argument is as, as you said, that the idea of the idea that we live in a disenchanted world, that the modern world has sort of banished, supernatural experience is just empirically false.

And it's falsified every day in a million different places by people who seek out or don't seek out and have anyway, the [00:14:00] same kinds of weird, supernatural ish experiences that people were having in the middle ages, in the ancient world, ranging from, you know, visions and psychic flashes to encounters with other worldly seeming seeming beings to miraculous seeming healings, to near death experiences and so on.

All of that has. Persisted in profound ways, even as sort of official knowledge, what I call official knowledge has become disenchanted, right? So yes, it's the case that if you go hang out at Yale Law School or you know, in in, in, in places where in people who publish academic journals and so on, right?

There is a default exclusion of the supernatural. And that's real, that is a kind of disenchantment, but it is a kind of, it's like a, a thin layer. Of, um, sort of disenchanted assumptions set over a world that seems to be fundamentally unchanged in how much people are experiencing the supernatural. [00:15:00] Um, and I think even before you get into the, the details, I think that alone is a certain kind of blow against materialism and atheism because if you go back and read, you know, a lot of enlightenment era writers and skeptics, there was, there was a real assumption that, you know, once you didn't have established churches and compulsory Bible reading and all of these things, that belief in.

The weird and fringe and supernatural and paranormal wouldn't go away, but it, it would diminish markedly, right? 'cause the reason people believed in these things was 'cause priests were telling them to believe. Um, and I think by now we can say it's clear that that's not true. The reason people believe in these things is because people keep having these experiences and it's just a persistent feature of human existence, um, in a way that doesn't falsify atheism, but should raise some, some serious doubts about it.

Uh, and then, yeah, when you get into the particulars, I don't think you can build a case for one specific religious tradition, just based on the broad evidence of [00:16:00] supernatural experience. Um, it's not that, you know, everyone who has a mystical experience has a vision of Jesus, of Nazareth. Right. Um, which would be convenient for Christians if it were true.

But that's, that's not, that's not what happens. There does seem to be ways in which these experiences are bound by cultural and religious expectations. Um, you know, preexisting beliefs, these kind of things. But there are also just, you know, patterns. Like the supernatural experience isn't random. There are.

Patterns to these experiences. There are clear patterns to near death experiences, features that recur across cultures, across, you know, across religious traditions. There are sort of patterns of direct experience. There's sort of experiences of non-human beings that fall into different categories. The case of UFOs, I think is part of a thread that runs back to experiences with, you know, in the Western tradition, people would say with fairies.

Native [00:17:00] American traditions, you would say with like trickster figures and Native American mythology that fits uneasily into Christian theology. I don't think it is necessarily in contradiction with it. Certainly medieval Christians didn't have trouble believing that there could be some supernatural powers besides just the devil and St.

Michael at work in the world. But, but it, but it is true that like the. The breadth of data on supernatural experience, um, you know, doesn't fit perfectly with sort of every formal Christian commitment. I, I would say, I, I don't think it con, I don't think it necessarily contradicts it, and I think it does provide a really wide range of persistent, not predictable, but like somewhat predictable ways that, you know.

Supernatural realities impinge on our material existence in every time. In every time and [00:18:00] place. And that is, I think, a as re as important a case for being religious as any of the arguments from cosmology and consciousness and design, the sort of more scientifically respectable arguments.

Geoff Holsclaw: Yeah. And none of these, and you make this clear in the book, none of these are like, um, knockout, um, arguments for why religions, but they're, there's cumulative. There's just like, there's a lot of evidence. It's reasonable, um,

Ross Douthat: There's convergence. There's convergence, is how I would put it. You, you would say, well, we live in a universe that exhibits evidence of design, and we have a consciousness that appears to be, you know, in the image of God in some particular way in terms of its. You know, uh, surprising capacities and nature, and we have lots of intimations of higher powers wanting to be in touch with us and so on.

Right. And e each one is, yeah, each one does not, you know, dismiss atheism automatically. It's not like you pick, [00:19:00] you know, one of Thomas Aquinas's Five Ways to God and say, that's it. It's over for the atheists. But yeah, the universe, the point is that the universe in which we find ourselves along multiple dimensions looks more like the universe as.

Religious believers describe it than it does as the, the universe that Richard Dawkins describes.

Geoff Holsclaw: Yeah. And I like the cumulative arguments that it's not that, um. You know, faith is just utterly transparent, you know, through the universe, but it's not totally opaque either. It's not like God's hiding from us. I especially like, just as a digression, I loved your, uh, dig against emergence, uh, theory as an explanation for consciousness as its own kind of magical or mystical.

Uh, thinking, which I've always thought I studied philosophy of mind with David Charmers way back in

Ross Douthat: Oh yeah.

Geoff Holsclaw: you know, it's just like this is a hard problem. And when you make it too easy and you just throw a sprinkle a little, uh, chaos theory and emergence in there and call it a day, I am just like, that's, that's just like saying the triune God made consciousness and the logo's image, like it's it

Ross Douthat: Yeah. I. No, no, [00:20:00] I,

Geoff Holsclaw: little things you have in there.

Ross Douthat: I, I, I appreciate it. And it is sort of a source of, of frustration. I was having a nice lunch with a secular journalist the other day, and he was like, well, you know, I, I've always just assumed that we're going to, you know, consciousness, it, you know, it emerges somehow and maybe it has something to do with quantum fluctuations or something.

And I was like, okay, maybe it does, but what is, what is your actual account of how, of how that happens if you don't have such an account? You're not in a different position from the people claiming that mind is an irreducible feature of, of the cosmos. You are the one casting around for sort of hypotheticals that don't actually deliver the scientific goods.

And I, I do think this is an important thing that like, there, there are particular ways in which, you know, Copernicus and Galileo or Charles Darwin, right? Like deliver. Actual empirical challenges to things that religious [00:21:00] institutions say and believe, right? Where it's like, okay, you can sit, you can look through the telescope and see what's happening here.

Um, and, and you know, there are good reasons why those kind of scientific arguments, challenge and upset religious convictions. I think we're in a, in a world though, where the current sort of materialist atheist alternatives to religious explanations are not, you know, they're not that kind of thing. Like multiverse theory, right?

Maybe it's true, but it's not something you're gonna look through a telescope and prove. It's not this kind of like empirically testable system that is being offered as an alternative to metaphysical speculation. It's just metaphysical speculation of its own sort.

Geoff Holsclaw: exactly. Exactly. Well, and now you have, we're definitely going off the rabbit trail, but, and you mentioned like the, you know, panpsychism and these other alternatives for how mind could emerge in the midst of our universe. And it's just like, that's great, but that's a metaphysical construct that is, has zero difference than believing in the triune God who created all [00:22:00] things. Um, they'd wanna say there's an abundant difference, but I'm not sure there

Ross Douthat: I, I'm not, yeah, the, the pan psychics. I mean, I, I have a certain respect for the Penn cyclists, like I. I think it, you know, it might, you know, CS Lewis is Narnia, right? It's like, yeah, the trees, the trees have some kind of consciousness. The dry ads, you know, are, are there. But I do think panpsychism, if you take it seriously, maybe it doesn't get you to classical theism, but I, I think if I were a panist, I would be a pantheist, right?

I would say, okay, if mind is present throughout the cosmos, it has to have some. Ultimate expression, and we should call that again, maybe a pantheistic God, not a classical theist God. But yeah, I, I, I don't, I think once you start down that route, you end up in religious territory.

The Case for Commitment to Religion

Geoff Holsclaw: Yeah, well, so you start off the first couple chapters making these kind of arguments in these different domains, but you don't just wanna lay it up with something like, and it's okay to be open to the spiritual, you actually, you then have a, a chapter called the Case for commitment. [00:23:00] Uh, so you're not just arguing for a general spirituality, but actually some sort of like. Not, I was gonna say pushing, but you're inviting. You're inviting people into a

Ross Douthat: It's a little push. Yeah, it's a little push. Yeah.

Geoff Holsclaw: the push, but my wife is more of a spiritual director and so everything for her is an invitation

Ross Douthat: Yep.

Geoff Holsclaw: I'm like. But you can push a little. 

The Push Invitation: Embracing Religion

Geoff Holsclaw: So it's a push invitation and, uh, you, you give a couple reasons for why maybe we should commit to, you know, what you'd call, you know, one of the big religions, of course you and I are, are Christians with those commitments.

But I just wanna go through the three of 'em and you can kind of off, you know, just fill it out a little bit. But, but one, and I love this is, is you basically just say, likely that you're not a religious genius, so maybe you should adopt a religion. Could you fill that out a little bit?

Ross Douthat: Yes. 

The Importance of Tradition in Religion

Ross Douthat: I mean, this is, again, one of my suggestions is that you shouldn't regard religion as this special domain that you know is different from every other domain of human life and can't be reasoned about and [00:24:00] so on. But it's like, suppose you became really interested in. Political philosophy and you thought political philosophy was a really big deal, it would be, you know, probably a mistake to start your education in political philosophy by declaring that you were setting up your own completely novel school that no one had thought of before, and you were going to, you know.

Mix. Mix some Play-Doh with some John Stewart Mill and, and craft something new and brilliant and perfect. Now, you know, we both know people who have that impulse, right? And occasionally they're an actual genius. But most of the time you are better off assuming that, you know, the long human conversation has generated a particular set of traditions for a reason and.

You want to enter into one of those traditions, not, you know, not setting aside all of your curiosity and just sort of submitting yourself blindly, but saying, look, I, you know, this, this tradition seems to me likely to be closest to the truth, and I'm going to [00:25:00] discipline myself and educate myself by entering into it and by joining that particular conversation rather than, yeah, sort of setting yourself up immediately as a church of one.

It just seems very unlikely to be the wisest course.

Geoff Holsclaw: Mm-hmm. Yeah. All throughout your arguments is, is a push, maybe your word, not mine. Uh, a push against like. Modern individualism. Like we can't just create these things all on our own. 

Community and Religion: No One's an Island

Geoff Holsclaw: Uh, and that goes to the second one, which is basically a religion because no one's an island. Um, I, I like you give a word picture of like, if someone says they're interested in soccer and they talk a lot about it, but they never join a team, you'd think at some level, you know, that they're just kind of pretending or, uh,

Ross Douthat: Right. Yeah, it, it's, I mean, that's the, yeah. The soccer team analogy is a, again, a non-religious analogy to religion, but you, there are all [00:26:00] kinds of ways in which, um. In which participation is essential to improvement and seriousness and everything else. And some of that relates to just, you know, the reality that it's hard to do things alone.

It's hard to learn that much alone without teachers and fellow students and so on. Some of it relates to the fact that peer pressure is very helpful to get you to continue with something that you've started, as I said earlier, right? It's. It's challenging just to, you know, to do the basics of religion, to get to mass and pray and go to church and, uh, these kind of things.

And trying to set that up all on your own without some network of, um, friends and teachers is likely to go to go badly. Right. Um, and just generally, and, and this is where you sort of do get a bit into the therapeutic benefits of religion, right? Like I, I don't think that's. That's not my mo the most important argument, but it is a [00:27:00] legitimate one, right?

Like there are, there are just benefits that you draw from community itself that are really hard to reproduce outside, outside a religious community. And then finally, well maybe this is segueing into the the third, but I'll just segue, right? 

The Dangers of Spiritual Individualism

Ross Douthat: It's that this kind of community and sort of institutions and teachers is also a form of protection.

Because if you assume that some kind of supernatural realm exists, there's no reason to assume that you know it. It has no dangers or perils that it's, you know, that you can't get lost there. That every force you encounter there has your good in mind. If the natural world is filled with perils and difficulties.

It's quite likely that the supernatural world would be as well. And there, I think in particular, the danger of being spiritual but not religious is, is sharpest, right? It's that, you know, you have a religious experience and you don't have anything to test it against. You don't have anyone to say, well, is this definitely from, [00:28:00] from God is, you know, is it, maybe it's not, you don't have to believe in demons.

Maybe it's like from your own ego, right? Maybe it's from, you know, but, or you might. Believe in demons, right? And you might, you might wanna worry about them, right? So they're there too. The big old religions take for granted that the soul can be lost, right? That things, things can go awry. And not every spiritual power as your best interest at heart.

And the idea of both guidance and protection, I think is a really powerful and important idea.

Geoff Holsclaw: Yeah. And thank you so much for bringing that up too. But in my notes, I, my, it was, uh, the last one was beware the demons

Ross Douthat: Yes. Right, right. Yep.

Geoff Holsclaw: 0.3. And I, and I think that's really important because you move from like the older view of like, oh, we're religious, but we're just gonna be spiritual. There is kind of this, uh, especially like among Westerners, uh, who have maybe grown up in the secular de mythologized world, [00:29:00] disenchanted world, there's kind of a naivete about like the spiritual realm.

Like, oh, you know, it'll just be great. And the same with, um, like the psycho Knotts and, uh, I interviewed a woman, you know, doing psychedelics and, um, you know, and whether it's. Uh, engaging in magic or psychedelics in altered states. Like there is kind of this cheery, like it's so fun to adventure and experiment, but then when you start compiling these stories and you hear people who have been in that world for a long time, you start seeing the dark underbelly of, of experiences that. You know, are, are pretty dark. So I liked how you named the, well we need to kind of get over this spiritual tourism or voyeurism kind of mentality when it comes to the spiritual and understand like most cultures outside the west, like they understand it's dangerous and, and

Ross Douthat: Right. Even, even cultures that use psychedelic. Sort of more traditional cultures, as I understand it, tend to hedge them around with lots of prohibitions and taboos and like you, you know, you spend, you don't, you don't become a [00:30:00] shaman like overnight, right? Like, I mean, this is with, with psychedelics it's sort of like if, you know, if they open into genuine spiritual experiences, you are essentially accelerating to experiences that in most religious traditions, someone would only have after.

You know, a lifetime of prayer and fasting and meditation and religious instruction and so on, and there's absolutely no reason to think that, you know, the average guy in, let's say Silicon Valley, hypothetically, is spiritually prepared from being, for being thrust into whatever, whatever realm is opened up by those experiences.

Geoff Holsclaw: Why did you have to throw my, my, my home area? I was raised there.

Ross Douthat: I, I was, listen, I was born in San Francisco. I, I, I, it's not si

Geoff Holsclaw: Jose. We're on the opposite end

Ross Douthat: listen, si. Silicon Valley is a, you know, an extremely important and interesting zone of American life. Um, but it is a place where, you know, some, some people may be slightly incautious in their spiritual ambitions. I think I would say [00:31:00] that.

Geoff Holsclaw: absolutely. Well, I know, uh, Nasim lib, if I'm saying that right, the anti-fragile guy, he's great. And he, he argues for that the, the deep old traditions of religion kind of the accumulated wisdom that safeguards humanity from their own destruction. You know, it's, and it's like, you know, maybe it's not the best human flourishing, uh, but it's gonna keep us from, you know, kind of following into the deep kind of. Pets and

Ross Douthat: Yes, there's a certain, there's a certain. Mi at, at the very least, minimal ca that's sort of the minimalist case for, for the big traditions. Yes.

Geoff Holsclaw: Right. What you do. You talk about different stumbling blocks to this religious search, which are really great. You cover the, uh, like problem of evil and suffering. Why do religious institutions, you know, do such evil things? And you also talk about why do religions talk about sex so much? Um, and you gave great kind of understandings.

You really turned the tables on people with that. But I want to just shift a little bit to your own. [00:32:00] I guess commitments or your own spiritual kind of heritage. 

Personal Spiritual Journey and Catholicism

Geoff Holsclaw: Could you talk a little bit about kind of how you and your family a little before you kind of fell into, uh, faith and how you journeyed your way toward Catholicism a little bit.

Ross Douthat: Yeah, so I, I had an unusual, maybe unusual background in that I was sort of a passenger for my other people, my parents' religious pilgrimage. So I experienced a lot of different forms of American Christianity as a kid going from Episcopalianism and mainline Protestantism through Pentecostal and charismatic worlds.

Um, a kind of evangelical stint and then we ended up as Roman Catholics when I was about 17. And, uh, you know, one of the reasons that I have an interest in and a respect for supernatural experience is that I saw a lot of it and I saw a lot of it, you know, sort of falling upon people who I knew and trusted and knew were not, you know, insane or schizophrenic or anything else.

Right. And [00:33:00] people who were having. At the beginning, completely unexpected spiritual and supernatural experiences, and at the same time, I didn't really have them myself. I was not a mystical personality. As a kid, um, I'm still not, although, you know, maybe, maybe I'm a little more permeable than I was, was back then.

But you know when that, when that's happening, right? When people around you are having experiences and you aren't, I imagine it could, it could yield a kind of deep skepticism, right? It's like, well, if this isn't happening to me, it must be fake. Uh, but in my case, it yielded an assumption that, okay, you know, some people have these experiences and some people don't, but they're obviously real.

And not adequately explained by existing methods of explanation and should be taken seriously. Right. And that's something that I've definitely carried from my childhood experience all the way to the present and, and writing this, this book. Um, I would say in Catholicism, what, what I, you know. O over the years, but including [00:34:00] at the start, appreciated about Catholicism was that it, it had a kind of institutional and intellectual structure that appealed to me as a sort of, would be rationalist, someone who's interested in intellectual argument and debate.

But it also has this really strong and often very weird mystical tradition that incorporates some of the kinds of things that I saw happening in charismatic Christianity. As a kid, right? So it offers, it has sort of both aspects of religion and, and religious belief. Um, but then the, the point that I, and, and the book with, right, is that, you know, I, I think if you just look at sort of the raw data on religion that you know.

Evidence for design, spiritual experience, and so on. It doesn't get you all the way to a particular religious commitment. It gets you to a general interest in religion and an openness to the big religions. The idea that, you know, they're all sort of getting at something that's out there, but to [00:35:00] get all the way to commitment, you have to find one particular religious story more compelling than the others.

And a more, you know, a strong, you know, you, you want to feel strongly that this is the place. Where God intervened in the most profound and important way, and therefore this is the revelation through which we should read all the other data, right? I use the term controlling revelation, which sounds a little bit maybe overly technical, but that, but that is how I think about my own Christianity, how I think about the Gospels and the New Testament and the story of Jesus of Nazareth.

I. You know, now, as when I was young, I find it to just be distinctive among the origin stories of the major religions distinctive among all of the stories of world history in terms of its mix of flagrant supernaturalism and historical credibility. Um, and I'm very comfortable sort of making that the sort of fixed point around which all this oth all this other data [00:36:00] and analysis and interest can.

Can orbit. Right? And it's not that everything fits perfectly at every given moment, but I'm, I'm very confident with and comfortable in the idea that, um, starting with Jesus, starting with the gospels in terms of figuring out, you know, what is God doing in the world? That's a really good bet.

Geoff Holsclaw: Mm. Mm-hmm. Wow. I agree.

Ross Douthat: Well, yeah, yeah. You know, preaching, preaching to the choir as it were.

Geoff Holsclaw: Yeah. Well, I did really appreciate just kind of that, uh, you know, the case for Christianity that you give at the end. Um, just to finish here, maybe on a slightly more personal note, and, and this is kind of like the verse for this whole podcast, uh, in a sense it. Bible doesn't talk about attaching to God in those words, but just talk about clinging and love. And Paul in, uh, Philippians three, uh, 12, you know, he's talking about his participation or his longing to participate in the death and life of Christ. And he says, I [00:37:00] haven't already alive arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ took hold of me. There's like this mu and I love that verse.

There's this mutual clinging, and so whether it's like. Intellectual or maybe experiential. How have you experienced or maybe through the process of writing this book, like what is it that you clinging onto that you also maybe Rich will actively find out that God was like clinging onto you in the process?

Is there,

Ross Douthat: Yeah, I mean, I think there on the personal side, it's actually more. 

The Role of Suffering in Faith

Ross Douthat: The experience that I wrote about in my last book, which was a book about having a chronic illness, having chronic Lyme disease, which sort of fell on me unexpectedly in my mid thirties, uh, redirected me in various ways where I lived, sort of some of the choices I made and the things, the things that I valued, right?

And, and that was an experience that I think intensified my faith and also just sort of my sense of God's. Providence, sometimes his [00:38:00] harsh, his harsh providence. Um, but just, just a sense of sort of God's control over your life at, at a certain level, right? And the need to try and figure out how to live under his providence in a way that matches your own choices onto what, what he has in mind and.

I don't think of that experience. That experience is less, has less to do with this book because I don't think it's a. Fully compelling argument for religious belief to someone who hasn't had that experience. Right? Because obviously, you know, you can just say from the outside, well, you were suffering and unhappy.

And so of course you needed to think that God was in control that fit a psychological need. And of course the answer is yes. Yes, it absolutely did. It was a crutch. It was a prop, it was a support. It was all of those things, right? So I think. It, it, that's not the place where I would start if I were trying to talk to a [00:39:00] nonbeliever or a skeptic.

But if I'm talking about my own relationship with God and also my own view of larger things, I write about politics and history and everything else for a living. Right. And I've, I think, become more of a, providential is generally less inclined to write columns where I'm like shaking my fist at events and saying, how could this possibly happen?

And more inclined to write columns where I'm saying. Hmm. Where, where is this going? This is a, you know, this is an interesting story. Maybe it looks bad, right? Things, things aren't going that well, but let's, let's see where it's going and let's sort of try and figure out what kind of larger story we're, we're embedded in.

And, you know, you don't always tar, sometimes it's hard to figure that out. I would appreciate more direct dictation from God sometimes about what I'm supposed to do and what certain things happening in the world mean, but. But certainly the experience of going through a severe illness has strengthened my sense that that's what you're looking for.

You're looking for the larger arc [00:40:00] that Providence has in mind for your own life and for history.

Geoff Holsclaw: Yeah. Just for listeners that that other book that, uh, that Ross wrote is The Deep Places, A Memoir of Illness and Discovery, and it does touch on a little bit in an earlier chapter, you talked about the stumbling blocks, and I, I think there is a sense in which there is an apologetic there because you talk about how most often the, the problem of pain or suffering is used against faith by people who don't really. really deep pain and suffering and that the historical data would say those who suffer the most civilizations and or people individually

Ross Douthat: Yeah.

Geoff Holsclaw: to reach out toward, toward God. And so it is, isn't it? And I, and I like you say it pretty diplomatically, but you say, well, who are we who are so privileged to say that the sufferers are wrong their belief in God?

And so, and I,

Ross Douthat: Yes. I think, I think that, I think that works as a, as a gentle pushback against secular overconfidence. I think the, the people who [00:41:00] are in. The strongest position to lodge the complaint against God are people who are in the thick of suffering themselves. And some of those people do lose faith and do have a sort of direct complaint and a direct reason to say I don't think God exists.

But yes, I think a large part of the support for the argument from evil against God's existence is in this weird way, connected to comfort. Sense that like we suffered less. And so when we do suffer, it feels more unfair and more outrageous. And I think that that is a, a flawed, a flawed approach to understanding the issue at the very least.

Geoff Holsclaw: Well, and that goes with maybe just to finish, then, um, it goes with your, your broader conviction that religion is somehow connected to reality and that reality makes demands on us. Uh, and, and so we can't always be in the position to demand of reality. Sometimes reality God, religion is, you know. Like the suffering is a part [00:42:00] of it. The pain is a part of it. Um, I did an interview with Andrew Root on his, uh, new book and he basically says, the thing that Christianity has to offer that you know, no other place does, is where do you bring your suffering?

Ross Douthat: Yep.

Geoff Holsclaw: Um, that is, and that's kind of the non-therapeutic kind of gospel is, you know, it's not that there is no suffering, but what, what, what is God doing about all of our suffering?

And in fact, you know, we just celebrated Easter. And, and the truth is as well, God has entered into our suffering and. Done something about it from the inside, and

Ross Douthat: Yes, I, and it's not, that argument is not, I don't think it's a logical proof that sort of mathematically makes sense of the precise amount of suffering in the universe, but it is clearly for belief in Christians, a strong divine response to suffering and a very, a very powerful one.

Geoff Holsclaw: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. 

Encouragement for Non-Believers

Geoff Holsclaw: Well, as we finish, is there one last thing, uh, that you hope this book would kind of stir up in people or make them take, uh, a gentle push, a stumbling push forward?

Ross Douthat: I mean, I think the push is important. I, [00:43:00] I've been really struck by, in a lot of my conversations, how many non-believers who I've done interviews with. Are not actually defending a hard materialism or a hard atheism. And maybe this goes back to the point we started with that like the moment has changed.

Times have changed, right. But I feel like I've had a lot of conversations with people who say, Ross, I think you're probably right that you know there's more to the world than just Adams and cells, right? That there's some big mystery here. Um, but calling it God that seems like a little much, or getting all the way to Christianity, that seems like a little much, right?

So my, my genuine hope for the project is that I can sort of give a push, impart a little more urgency to people sort of occupying this zone of ambiguity right now who feel like there's something out there. But am I really gonna go all the way to religion? And I'm here to say, well consider taking at least one more step.

Geoff Holsclaw: Yeah. Well, good. So it's both a push and a [00:44:00] invitation.

Ross Douthat: invitation. That's right. A pull. You know, a tug. Yeah.

Geoff Holsclaw: That's right. A push and pull. It's, it's good. Depending on what you, depending on what you need. uh, thank you again so much. Uh, the book is called Believe Why Everyone Should Be Religious. Uh, there's so many good things I'll be, uh, sharing this, you know, with my skeptics in, uh. You know, faith adjacent people. Um, I live in the worlds of people who are deconstructing and, you know, so I love, I love all the work that you did there, and thank you for the, all the work you're doing in other places. We

Ross Douthat: Well, thank you and thank you for the conversation. I really appreciate it.