Ross Douthat: Why Everyone Should Be Religious

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Collin Hansen
Ross Douthat is not what some would expect from a New York Times columnist. He’s religious and also a political conservative, and I bet he is the first, and thus far, only New York Times columnist to write an evangelistic book. The new book is believe why everyone should be religious, published by Zondervan Ross. Is that true, by the way?

Ross Douthat
I mean, the New York Times has been in operation for well over a century. I can’t speak to every book that’s been written, and I think the term evangelistic also admits of many definitions. And finally, my colleague David Brooks did just write a lengthy essay at Christmas time, no less, about essay about his his own religious conversion or transformation. So I think I’m in, I think I’m in good company there. I’m not I’m not isolated. Expect from the New York Times that’s exactly, well, you know, the world is the world is changing. Colin and you now, you never know, never know what you’re going to read next.

Collin Hansen
Well, doubt that observes changes in his readers attitudes toward institutional religion compared to 20 years ago, and the sociological benefits of institutions such as churches have become more widely acknowledged, and some previous skeptics have begun to see that a post Christian future might not be the liberal utopia that they had expected. So perhaps we see a cultural opening for the gospel, or at least, we’ve come to a cultural crossroads, and everyone must make a choice. I like this quote from doubt. That’s new book. The choice this book is concerned with, the choice to become religious or not, is fundamentally a choice between looking around at the piled up knapsacks and guidebooks that prior pilgrims have carried and used and written, and deciding to see what they might have to offer, or just wandering onward, willfully blind without a compass or map. Well, Ross is a friend of the show. Always interesting. Fascinating to interview. Glad he rejoined me on gospel bound to talk about, believe why everyone should be religious. Ross, it’s good to

Ross Douthat
see you again. It’s good to be back. Thank you so much for having me. All right.

Collin Hansen
So tell us what is the audience for this book? If listeners, viewers, they’re buying for a friend, multiple copies. Who knows, whom should they have in mind to hand this book to? Well,

Ross Douthat
the book subtitle is why everyone should be religious. So obviously, the intended audience is everyone. Colin, every single human being on planet Earth made in the image of God, can and should and indeed must buy this guarantee. However, however, you know they say it’s the subtitle. However, if, if you were narrowing it down, I think that this book is written in particular for the kind of person who you alluded to in the in the introduction, maybe the kind of person who looks around at the world we live in today, 15 or 20 years after the heyday of the new Atheism, after Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and others sort of you know, argued that we could just do away with religion, that religion poisoned Everything. Think there’s a lot of people who look around at the world and say, Oh, actually, it turns out that a more secular or irreligious or de churched America is not less polarized, is not more wisely governed, does not, you know, and is instead more fragmented, more anxious, more metaphysically uncertain, more depressed, and maybe religion had something to offer. After all, I think there’s a lot of that sensibility floating around the culture right now, but for a lot of people with that sensibility, there’s also, I think, a sense that, you know, to really go back to religion, to return to Christianity in particular. But I’m I’m talking about all of the sort of big religions, the traditional religions of the world in especially the first parts of the book is to basically suspend your reason, to say, all right, it would be nice if religion was true. It would be good for society if we all act as if God existed, and therefore maybe I should act that way. But in doing so, I have to, sort of, you know, turn my back on what my reason tells me or what modern science tells me about the world. I think that’s a very commonplace sense of things that people have. And. Even some people who are deeply committed religious believers have the sense that they’re sort of always operating. They’re always keeping two books right, sort of, there’s the book of reason and knowledge and secular understandings and the book of faith. And so this book is arguing that that’s a mistaken way of looking at the world, that, of course, there are aspects of religious reality that can only be known through divine revelation. Certainly, a relationship with God is something that can only happen through grace, God’s grace and the individual’s life choices. All of those things are true, but it’s also true that there’s a basic foundation, a basic case for being religious, that it is reasonable to be religious, that a religious perspective on the world makes sense, that it makes more sense, certainly, than materialism and naturalism and atheism, that is more likely that Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus are writer about the world and Richard Dawkins than the alternative. And that’s, that’s the case that at least the first part of the book sets out to make that it is, it is, in fact, not just nice or, you know, useful to be religious, but that there is a obligation on any serious person to take religion seriously and and go from there. Talk about

Collin Hansen
your methodology in the book, you’ve alluded to it there a little bit you seem to start with really big intellectual questions, philosophical debates about God, theism as a general construct. You mentioned the big religions there and then. If I understand the book correctly, you progress more narrowly as it continues down into personal belief in Jesus Christ. Could you describe basically how you’re how you lay it out?

Ross Douthat
Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, one very crude way to think about what I’m trying to do is to say, okay, 80 years ago, CS Lewis wrote a book called Mere Christianity that tried to sort of bring Christians back to basics, before the debates between Protestants and Catholics and and others. Right? To say, Okay, what is, you know, what is the core of Christian faith? And sort of build from the ground up, and now we’re in a world where I think it’s useful to even start one level below that with the idea of sort of near religion, like, Why? Why would someone become religious? What does it mean to have a religious perspective on the world, I think there are a lot of people who are interested in or intrigued by religion, who don’t even have an understanding of those basic questions, who haven’t had an encounter with real religious practice in their entire life. Most of the people that Lewis was writing for had at least been raised Christian, were participating in a society that took religious institutions for granted. That’s really not the case anymore. So I’m trying to do something that some work that’s, you know, even more basic than what Lewis was doing, and then from that foundation saying, you know, which starts with, you know, what does science tell us about the world. What is our understanding of our own consciousness? Tell us about the world. What is religious experience, mystical experience, supernatural experience, tell us about the world, and then going from there to kind of advice for the sincere seeker and Pilgrim, right? Sort of trying to say, okay, here, you know, here are the big choices that will confront you if you set out to be religious. Here are the things the big religions have in common, but also the things that separate them. Here are the big stumbling blocks. If you decide that God probably exists, you still might think, well, maybe he’s not a good God, or maybe institutional religion is too corrupt to join, or maybe religion is just too hung up on sex, these kind of things. So moving through those issues, and then at the very end, offering as a kind of personal case study my own Christianity, and saying, Look, here is, you know, how I became a Christian, Roman Catholic Christian in my case,

Collin Hansen
yeah, let’s, let’s go back a little bit earlier there to you’re distinguishing between the spiritual and the religious. You’re not content to say, here’s why you should be spiritual, but you make a full throated defense of the religious explain some of those distinctions why you went that direction.

Ross Douthat
Well. So I think there are, again, for people in this kind of threshold zone that I describe right people who, who you know, are dissatisfied with materialism and atheism and secularism, are looking for something more. Our culture right now offers this big zone that we call spiritual, but not religious, and that’s a big category. And it includes, you know, everything from people who, you know, subscribe to Gwyneth Paltrow newsletter and practice a lot of spiritualized self care, to people who sort of dabble in the major world religions, doing a little Buddhism, a little Christianity, to people who are interested in magic tarot cards, witchcraft, to people who are interested in psychedelics and sort of chemically mediated spiritual experiences, which has been a big growth industry in Western culture in the last 10 years or so. So that’s that’s this broad zone of people sort of looking for the spiritual while ruling out strong religious commitment the institutional. The institutional exactly, and so part of the argument again, before, before I even get to a case for Christianity itself, I try and make a case for institutional religion, for the idea that if you know that you’re the line you quoted about the knapsacks and the journey is, is pertinent here, right? The idea that you know, if you take, if you assume, that a kind of spiritual terrain or territory exists in which there are desirable things, encounters with God or higher powers, or, you know, whatever, whatever language you want to use, you should also assume that that terrain is complex, challenging, sometimes dangerous, that it’s possible to get lost in that terrain, that there might be powers in that terrain that are hostile to human beings. And again, this is something. This is a perspective that’s shared not just by Christians and Muslims and Jews, but by people in Eastern religions as well. Eastern religions have concepts of the demonic, concepts of hell, concepts of spiritual danger. And across cultures, institutional religions develop, you know, to provide sort of forms of support and community and moral orientation for people practice performing spiritual practices, but also to provide a kind of care and caution and safety for people, sort of setting out into the spiritual unknown. And so, you know, I, I emphasize a lot of different reasons for preferring being religious to just being spiritual. But I think that point about danger is quite essential.

Collin Hansen
I think one of the most important observations in your book is where you describe how the educated world equates intelligence and seriousness with how meaningless you assume your life to be, any number of different examples we could cite here, but predictably, you’re right. This perspective has not yielded greater human happiness. I wonder, Ross, do you think the latter? The unhappiness might end up undoing the former, treating life as as meaningless, because I find so much of how the modern West understands the world to be simply unlivable. So could there be a return to religion coming from the recognition that, wait a minute, how did we talk ourselves into thinking that being this unhappy is the way things are supposed to be.

Ross Douthat
I mean, yes, to some degree I think that, well, a couple things. One is that I think you western life, since the crack up of Christendom, right, since the 1600s basically, has gone through these periods, these sort of ebbs and flows, right? Periods of sort of rapid secularization and sort of optimistic unbelief, right? You know, whether it’s the time around the French Revolution or, you know, the rise of Marxism as this kind of claim to be a comprehensive alternative to religion, down to our own era and the new atheist. And usually there’s kind of an ebb and flow. There are pendulum swings, right and where you know a period of sort of atheistic or skeptical confidence ends in disillusionment along the lines that you describe. And then there’s kind of a return to or a revisiting of religion, and you get a great awakening, or you get the romantic era’s fascination with Christianity, or you get the the post world war two religious revival in America. And I think it’s totally possible that we are on the cusp, or entering into a period like that right now. But I also think something that tends to happen is that that pendulum swing back tends to never swing back all the way, right? You do get a lot of people who get end up in this sort of halfway house of wishing to be religious again, maybe finding. Some way to practice religion, but still thinking that ultimately it’s a little bit unreasonable, right? And so in Christianity, right? If you look at, you know, the 1950s religious revival, which I think was real and important, and, you know, I don’t think there was anything fundamentally fraudulent about it. You know, this is the age of Billy Graham and Fulton Sheen and so on. Among the intelligentsia, there was always this sort of hesitation about, you know, the resurrection of Jesus Christ, right? You would have these religious intellectuals who would end up on the cover of Time Magazine and who, you know, took religion seriously. You know, were part of a general turning back to Christian wisdom after, you know, communism and fascism and so on. But who, if you really pushed them, had just all this sort of ambiguity about the more scandalous parts of the faith, the morals, not the miracle, right? The miraculous part, right? And so that’s why, again, in this, in this book, I do, I spend the whole chapter on the supernatural and the miraculous, sort of arguing for its reasonability too. Because I think if you’re going to, you know, if you’re going to fully reclaim ground from purely secular, atheistic ways of thinking, you do have to reclaim all the ground and not just get stuck in this. You know, maybe there’s a God. I’m glad there’s religion. But, you know, don’t push me too hard on the empty tomb.

Collin Hansen
Yeah, I want to read a section from your second chapter on the mind and the cosmos. This is an important passage, I think, for how you flip common arguments against God on their head, and you say here, quote The idea that Cosmos was intended, that mind is more fundamental than matter, that our minds in particular, have a special relationship to the physical world and its originating cause. All of these ideas have had their plausibility strengthened, not weakened, by centuries of scientific success, we have much better evidence for the proposition that the universe was made with human beings in mind, given our extraordinary success in discovering an interpretation an ancient or medieval people ever did. End Quote, what is some of the evidence that you that you have in mind? No passage, well.

Ross Douthat
So that’s, you know, everyone who writes about these issues ends up having sort of a, you know, a favorite little argument about about God, right? And so, you know, I think there’s sort of a lot of arguments that serious believers are quite familiar with that I discuss in my book, I think you know, the the arguments around the fine tuning of the laws of physics that, again, that science has clearly sort of discovered over the last 100 to 200 years, the ways in which the parameters of the universe seem to have been arranged in this incredibly fine grain, narrow, like one in a bazillion, kind of way to allow for the emergence of, you know, stars, planets, complex life, us. I know that’s that’s a striking argument that was not available to people in, you know, in the 1500s or something. It really is something that we have learned over in recent days. So there are arguments like that, right? Arguments about design, arguments about the nature of consciousness. But the argument that I’m referencing in the passage you quoted, that I think is actually quite potent, is, you know, it’s not just remarkable that the universe seems fine tuned to allow the emergence of human life. It’s not just remarkable that human life emerged with this incredibly mysterious, self aware form of consciousness, sort of stapled on, whose essence is really obscure if you try and analyze it in strictly material terms, those two things are remarkable enough. But then you have the final fact that this consciousness, which, again, on a strictly materialist account, is this kind of illusion attached to the biological processes of a, you know, sort of jumped up ape from, you know, who has, who has, you know, evolved through a completely blind and meaningless process. Somehow this consciousness is capable of sort of running the whole tape in reverse and figuring out not just its own evolution, not just, you know, the fundamental laws of physics, not just splitting the atom, attaining sort of God like powers over the universe, but figuring out all the way back to these crazy initial parameters that enabled, you know, enabled jumped up apes and other creatures to come into existence in the first place. And we take this for granted, right? Because, look, obviously, you know, we’re used to our reason working. We’re used to science working our whole civilization depends on a sort of successful, a successful mapping of our own faculties onto the deep, secret physical laws of the cosmos, right? We wouldn’t, we wouldn’t, you know, have our civilization if we didn’t. So we take it for granted, but it’s really weird. And you could totally imagine, you could imagine a cosmos in which life evolved, in which human life evolved, even in which conscious life evolved, in which that conscious life just had no capacity to figure out anything beyond, let’s say, you know, basic tool making, how to hunt some predators, that kind of thing, right? Like, it’s very easy to imagine a world in which Newtonian physics, to say nothing of quantum physics, was totally outside our capacities to to discover. And I, you know, I use the sort of, maybe strange, but I thought, kind of fun analogy in the book of, you know, let’s say you’re, you’re a kid, and you and your friends develop this kind of secret code, a kind of Pig Latin, right, way of talking that has this it’s useful, right? It’s just useful for, you know, hiding what you’re saying from grown ups and stuff. It’s useful for communication. That’s all it is. But then later in adulthood, you discover that this you know thing you develop, just for like this one practical use, also actually unlocks and translates all of the secrets of Mayan astronomy, Greek philosophy, you know, and and so on that are written down in this mysterious book that you found in your own attic. Now there was two, two takeaways you could have from that. One, you could be like, Wow, that’s just a really big fortunate coincidence that my pig latin turned out to be the key to unlocking the secrets of the cosmos. Or you could assume, as a reasonable person would, that this is proof that you are inside some kind of story and the book was, in some sense, placed there for you, and your capacity to read it is proof of your own relationship to whoever is telling the story in the first place. And I think that’s the position we’re in. I just think the ability of human beings to do the kind of science that we do and have it succeed on the scale that it succeeded is itself strong evidence that we are here for a reason, as religious people like to say,

Collin Hansen
Ross douther and are talking about his new book, believe why everyone should be religious, seems that one of The ways that people evade the implications of the arguments there, Ross is through their imagining of the multiverse. Where does the multiverse factor in here as a supposedly appealing alternative to divine design? At least, right.

Ross Douthat
So the multiverse, obviously, you know, is a theory that there exists multiple universes besides our own. It takes a lot of different forms. One, you know, there’s sort of a quantum mechanics version of multiverse theory where, basically, every time, this is a radical oversimplification, but every time you have a choice between action A or action b, and you make a choice, The other choice is also made, right? And so there’s, you know, a there’s an endless branching of universes from every sort of possible decision that you make. And this is used to try and explain some of the mysteries of quantum physics, the extent to which possibilities seem to collapse into reality only when a conscious agent gets involved, and the solution is supposed to be okay, actually, that, you know, all of the possibilities continue to exist. It’s just that, you know, in different universes, different choices are made. Then there’s a version that says, you know, the multiverse. It starts, you know, its universe is sort of bubbling off each other, existing in different regions of the same sort of broad, broad canvas and so on. But what that is supposed to solve the fine tuning problem that I alluded to earlier? Right? It’s like, well, why? Why are there so many ways in which this universe seems so well suited for human life? Well, it’s sort of Darwinian evolution for universes, right? It’s like you get an infinite number of universes, so eventually you get one fine tuned for life. Of course we are observing it because we couldn’t observe any other one, right? Of course, of course, we were in the one that’s fine tuned for life because that’s the only one that could possibly be observed. And the infinite other universes explain why this one is so suited to us. These are ideas have become sort of not dominant, but sort of popular in, you know, in part, for in part, for other reasons. There. Are some sort of straightforward arguments from physics and the nature of the universe that that yields sort of some of these speculations. But I think pretty clearly they’ve really become popular as alternatives to to divine, religious and supernatural hypotheses, right? And to me, speculative, they’re well, right? So they’re highly speculative in ways that science is modern. Western science is not supposed to be, supposed to be him. To me, they represent, in a way, the kind of epicycles that people who believed in Ptolemaic physics, who believed that, you know, the planets, the the Earth, the Sun and the planets went around the Earth, and when they couldn’t make the orbits line up, they would add extra orbits and orbits on top of orbits to try and hold the whole system together. So here we’re adding, you know, a billion or two extra universes to explain features of our own. So I think they’re fundamentally just less, you know, fundamentally more implausible as explanations of these phenomena. Then, in the idea that mind proceeds matter, mind shaped matter, mind continues to shape matter, which is, I think, is what quantum physics suggests, but, and the other point to make is that, you know, well, another point is the version of the one I made in response to your last question, right? Which is like, wait, what? What kind of, what kind of, half evolved ape on a minor backwater planet in one of a trillion possible universes figures out that all these trillions of other universe exists exist that’s that’s pretty wild. And then there is also a way in which they still, like a lot of these arguments, still kick the problem one level upstairs, right? Like, there are people who’ve written about this with fine tuning issues who will say, okay, there could be a multiverse, but you still need fine tuning to generate the, you know, the machine that generates universes may still need to be fine tuned in various ways, right? And and, in fact, there’s, there’s also an argument by some theistic philosophers who say, Well, if there is a multiverse, that actually makes the existence of God more likely, because, of course, you know, if God is a perfect being who desires the good of mortal creatures, why wouldn’t he make many, many more universes, right? So you don’t, I don’t think there, there are religious people who believe in the multiverse, or think, or think it’s a hypothesis worth, worth considering. I don’t think it is, in the end, even if you accepted it, it would not get you out of some of the issues that point towards religion. But at a fundamental level, I think multiverse is useful for describing possibilities that exist in the mind of God as all possibilities do, but that there is, in fact, one reality, and you and I are in it,

Collin Hansen
another, another one of the critiques of religion that you take on in this book is One of the most standard critiques of institutional religion, simply it’s example of abuse or views of power. You mentioned examples of Protestant small towns and pre Vatican two Catholic parishes, the Inquisition, Salem Witch Trials, to

Ross Douthat
be clear, the witch trials in the Inquisition worse than the small towns and, you know, and the free Vatican, two parishes, right? The stultifying

Collin Hansen
the institutional religion. It starts as the small every, everybody starts as a Protestant small town, and it becomes Salem, basically, that’s right, you, you’re, I say this actually with appreciation. You’re rather dismissive of those arguments. I think, explain a little bit why you don’t. I think maybe take them quite at the face value that some people might think that they’re offering them on.

Ross Douthat
I mean, I think that it’s just in the nature of human cultures and human institutions to, you know, be sinful and wicked and do bad things. And this is true in every arena of human life. Human governments do terrible things. That doesn’t mean that politics is that we should sort of absent ourselves from politics families. Human families are filled with divorce, abuse, cruelty, you know, sort of everything from the worst of all things to just, sort of, you know, really unpleasant relationships with your, you know, siblings, or siblings in law or something, right? That doesn’t mean that it makes sense. I mean, there are people who argue this, right, that you should dissolve the family, right? There was a book called full full surrogacy now that came out a couple years ago. Those arguments are out there, but those arguments are stupid. We shouldn’t dissolve the family again. Dismissive, right? I am, I am, well so but, but let me, let me, let me say that’s I’m generally dismissive. Now, in specific cases, if you have had or your so. Family have had a horrible experience with sex abuse, you know cruelty, you know persecution. If you’re raised in a cult, you know it’s a long litany of horrible experiences people have with religion, then you know a certain hostility to that expression of institutional religion makes total sense. And so it’s not surprising to me that people who are burned by institutional religion in one form would be hesitant to sort of jump back into it in another form. All of that, all of that, makes sense, but the implication of that reality is that you know you shouldn’t try and emotionally blackmail people who have suffered at the hands of a particular institution into, you know, just sort of always, always sticking it out and so on, because, you know, God would never want you to leave. Sometimes people have to leave the even, even a church that might dogmatically have the truth right in order to escape some terrible situation. But you’re trying to present, what organized religion is trying to present is ways back in welcomes for people who have had terrible experiences somewhere else. But yeah, so I take, or I try to take, very seriously the individual experiences of suffering and being burned by, you know, the sinfulness associated with all human institutions. What I don’t take seriously is the idea that religion exists in this special category where we accept sinfulness and failure in our politics, our business, our family life and so on. But when we see it in religion, it means we can just write religion off that. I mean that reflects, in a way that, you know, the admirably high standard that people want to hold religious institutions to. I don’t, I don’t deny that, but in the end, you know, it is a feature of human existence that we’re always trying to make the best out of flawed institutions. And if God is real and religion should be taken seriously, we have to accept that we’re going to be doing that with religious institutions too.

Collin Hansen
And you mentioned also a number of other problems that seem more pressing to us than some of those institutional religion concerns. You mentioned that, rather than phariseeism being our biggest concern, isolation seems to be a more pressing concern. Instead of authoritarianism, narcissism and nosiness, really lonely despair,

Ross Douthat
right? I mean, I think again, you’re imagining the target audience for my book. It is people, for the most part, living in some of the most secular societies the world has ever known, where institutional religion, not in all cases, but is often in the weakest position has been in. And you know, if you’re in that environment, you don’t want to spend all your time obsessing about, you know, what might happen to you if you were placed in a time machine and sent back to Salem, or, you know, placed under the rule of a, you know, overly rigid Catholic nun in 1920s Ireland or something, right? Like for most people, that is just not likely to be part of their experience right now, again, with exceptions, right there are, there are cults, there are, you know, abusive forms of both Protestant and Catholic religion in the US. I’ve known people who’ve had encounters with those kind of forms. I’m not saying it doesn’t exist, but the most likely spiritual danger that the average American right is in right now is, you know, sort of hyper individualism mixed up with sort of isolation, anomie and despair, and in that environment, you should not always be looking over your shoulder for the Inquisition. You should be looking around you for a community and a ladder up toward higher things. Yeah.

Collin Hansen
A couple more questions with Ross Douthat talking about his book, believe why everyone should be religious. Ross, I have a short book coming out in a couple couple months that on the problem of evil, on the Holocaust, engaging with Elie Wiesel. And

Ross Douthat
you’re taking, you’re taking on the small, the small, yeah, just looking at nice

Collin Hansen
the argument for atheism from night. No big deal in their short book, like I said, but I make a similar point in the book that that you do in this one, I’d like you to expound on it. Here’s your quote. The moral case against Almighty God assumes a version of the very premise it ostensibly denies, that human beings are so distinctly fashioned among all the creatures of the world that we are equipped to stand outside burial material creation and comprehend it so completely as to make a certain moral assessment of how good and evil are balanced or imbalanced in the cosmos. Indeed, it assumes that we can identify good and evil as meaningful categories at all, as opposed to just flags of convenience. But. For things we have to instinctively favor and dislike, as Ross point that I just try to make is we’re not having this argument unless we’re made in the image of God and but I wonder, I guess one way to put it to you is, why do wealthy, supposedly advanced societies like ours seem to have so many bigger spiritual problems with these questions, and specifically with suffering, then say less developed or less wealthy societies do.

Ross Douthat
Yeah. It’s an interesting feature of these kind of arguments, which is that, on the one hand, they’ve always been with us, and obviously they get sharpened by particularly unspeakable examples of evil, like the Holocaust, but at the same time in terms of their appeal to people, the appeal of the idea that there’s too much suffering in the world for there to be a good God does seem to be stronger in societies where there is less suffering and more material comfort than ever before. And you know, you could argue that several different ways. You could say, well, we need to escape from a certain degree of suffering to sort of recognize just how bad it really is, right? It’s like the fish that’s swimming in water doesn’t even notice he’s wet. But once you know, once you know, our situation improves a little, we can see just how bad things have been, and sort of assess, you know, assess the possibility of God correctly, that that might be an argument that someone, someone would make in practice, though, I think there’s, there’s a kind of Stark presumptuousness for the societies and the individuals that are experiencing less suffering to effectively lecture people in the human past and people in the human present, who you know, while experiencing terrible forms of suffering, nonetheless retain, or even find their faith in God strengthened. And that’s certainly been like the pattern that I’ve observed just in my in my own life. I talk of mention of the book briefly, my experience with chronic illness and being in, you know, some worlds of like people trying to desperately get better from totally mysterious ailments, and moving back and forth between those worlds and sort of like, you know, secular prosperity in the American Northeast, and clearly the world of chronic illness, there are atheists there and agnostics, but there’s just more palpable religious interest and religious faith than there is in the more comfortable parts, parts, parts of the world. And again, that’s not a proof, if anything, it doesn’t prove anything, but it should make you a little bit skeptical that the comfortable people have, really, they’ve they’ve weighed all the evidence, you know, they’ve seen, sort of the true face of suffering and past some sort of, you know, exacting judgment when It seems just as possible that they’re, you know, disinclined to be religious for other reasons, as wealthy and comfortable people in all ages of history often are and are sort of fastening on this moral critique of God as a justification for, you know, impulses that they have for other reasons. Now look, that doesn’t apply, obviously, to Ely wizelle, right? And you know, there’s and there are, there are ways in which you know it generally, I think, schematic views that religious believers often have of, why is there suffering? Why does God allow suffering? And so on, even when they’re convincing, even you know the argument that evil is necessary, you know for free will to exist and so on, even when they’re convincing they do, hit a kind of rhetorical limit when you’re talking to someone facing the absolute worst, whether it’s Auschwitz or just like the death of a child or something, something like that, right? And I think you know the other thing to be said is that, from the point of view of Christian Scripture, the Bible does not offer an answer to the problem of evil. What it offers is right. Is sort of portraits of people wrestling with the problem. From Abraham talking to God, arguing with God about, you know, whether to spare Sodom through job, down through, you know, Gethsemane and the passion and so on, and ultimately,

Collin Hansen
the presence of God himself and the suffering of Christ,

Ross Douthat
right? But all of which suggests that God wants us to have the argument right and rest like that, the wrestling is something that can be encompassed by religion, it’s just the sort of the decisive decision that I’ve I’ve wrestled and I’ve come to a conclusion, and I, you know, I, I can pass judgment on God. That seems to me to be wildly presumptuous, right? Last

Collin Hansen
question here, let’s close on this one. Talking with Ross out there about believe, why everyone? Should be religious. Ross, you end the book this way. How can anyone not be compelled by Jesus?

Ross Douthat
I mean, you know, I don’t want to. I mean, look, I was, I was raised as a Christian, right? I was raised inside a Christian culture, for, you know, whatever sort of odd religious movements my family made as a child, they were always sort of in the shadow of the Gospels and the New Testament, right? And so in that sense, like you know, someone who was skeptical of the conclusions I draw could say, Look, you know, of course, you find the Jesus of the Gospels to be the most compelling of the great religious figures who are available, right? Of course, you find the Gospels to be unique among major religious texts. This is, you know, sort of the argument that I end with, why, if you take the possibility of God seriously, the New Testament stands out among possible divine interventions on offer, right? Someone could say, you know, we’re right. Of course, you have, you have these biases, and they inform and shape your reaction to those texts. And at some level, some you know, some version of that has to be true. And clearly, there are people who read, you know, who read the New Testament and read the Quran, and come away sort of convicted by the Quran in some way that they weren’t by the New Testament. Obviously, that that exists, and there wouldn’t be a diversity of world religions. If everyone reacted to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John the way you and I do, I do think, though, that one of the advantages of a sort of partially secularized culture is that it exposes at least some people to the gospels in the way they would have been originally experienced, as something that you are coming to fresh, that you can be sort of shocked by and surprised by and struck by, in a way that is actually can be harder when you’re raised inside a kind of Sunday School piety, right, where you’re just, it’s like, okay, you’ve you know about the story of the loaves and the fishes Because you did a coloring book exercise about it at age six, yeah, and I wrote a piece about this, you know, for the Times a couple of Easters ago, right? The idea that reading the gospels raw can actually, you know that there is an advantage for Christianity in certain ways in having more people do that, because whatever firm conclusions you draw from them, their absolute strangeness, I think, among religious texts really does come Through strongly when you don’t have an apparatus of faith around them, and that’s, I think, a really powerful thing.

Collin Hansen
What’s in there? Ross, thanks again. The book is, believe why everyone should be religious, published by Zondervan. Appreciate it. Thanks, Ross.

Ross Douthat
Thanks so much for having me. Good luck with the problem of evil.

Collin Hansen
Thank you.

Ross Douthat
I’ll let you know how it works out. Yep, I’ve solved the problem of God. You can solve the problem of evil, and it’s all. It’ll all be taken care of.

Collin Hansen
All in a day’s work. Thanks, Ross.

Ross Douthat
All right, thanks, Collin.