Douthat’s Big Tent Revival for the Reluctant

Having called the election results with impressive accuracy, Douthat is gamely hoping to show how the animal spirits unleashed by Trump’s second coming could be turned to good account. He has even tried to sell to Canadians the president’s oafish offer to annex them to the United States. A revival of religion is for him too important a source of personal fulfillment and social stability to be impeded by bickering over doctrines. Like Ronald Knox’s apologists, he proposes instead to preach “mere religion” to the rough third of Americans who are “nones” — not hostile to religion, but as yet unwilling to accept it. Once he has established the likelihood that mere religion is true, he pivots to winning converts for one or other of the great historic religions, with a mild preference for his own.

His urbane liberalism makes a nice change from the sloganizing polemics that threaten to make public discussion of religion as skin deep as the crusader tattoos sported by Pete Hegseth, Trump’s secretary of defense. Douthat deals in modest probabilities rather than angry certainties. Given that his past work has often urged policymakers to rescue Western societies from demographic and cultural stasis, its emphasis on the truth rather than the instrumental value of religion is also a surprise. Believe is a raft for Americans set adrift by the shipwreck of New Atheism. His “irenic optimism” points these seekers to multiple and converging indications of a creator deity. He joins many recent writers — from the Orthodox provocateur Rod Dreher to the Catholic socialist Charles Taylor — in exploring the “resilience of enchantment”: the enduring human appetite for heightened or even paranormal experience, which only grows as our “buffered selves” navigate increasingly desiccated and fractured societies.

With so much apparently at stake, Douthat’s early chapters make for slow going, rehearsing as they do teleological arguments for the existence of God that were old-fashioned even in Knox’s time. His opening gambit is natural theology, which the New Atheists claimed Darwin had torpedoed. In the resonant phrase of Richard Dawkins, evolution by natural selection was the “blind watchmaker,” which explained how natural mechanisms as intricate as those we find in a watch could have originated without the need for a divine maker. Douthat does not buy this, in part because every scientific advance gives the cosmic smartwatch an upgrade. The more physicists investigate the values that sustain life, the more it seems to Douthat they are “excruciatingly carefully chosen.” We appear to be alone in the universe, but also the multiverse: ours is not so much the best, as it is the only viable world.

For Douthat, the atheist who refuses to entertain the most likely explanation for our existence resembles a person who examines blueprints but denies the existence of an architect. Yet the likelihood of a creator seems like a question that only people who are or once were theists would find necessary to weigh. Charles Raven, a contemporary of Knox who was both an Anglican clergyman and an avid ornithologist, once wrote that he could not watch puffins swimming without believing in the God who fashioned them. Although science has made the existence of puffins — or sea cucumbers, or us — even more marvelous than in Raven’s day, there seems no reason why we should reach for a “supreme intellect” to explain them.

The Unseen World

Douthat next turns from the evidence of the material world to the argument that our immaterial consciousness requires a creator. He is certainly right to echo the Christian philosopher David Bentley Hart in urging that materialist and physicalist explanations have failed to dissolve the miracle of consciousness. Our experience of the phenomenal world remains personal to us and wholly incommunicable. Even if consciousness could be fully correlated with the firing of neurons, materialist explanations fail to account for its subjective nature. If our minds did, in fact, emerge accidentally from natural selection, it is startling to find no apparent limit to the realities they can grasp, far above what our survival requires. But to note that our minds are amazing to us hardly commits us to calling them “supernatural.”

The idea that “the cosmos was intended” is then more an article of faith than the first step towards belief. As the best exponents of natural theology once knew, arguments from design are best used not to beat down skeptics, but to cheer up believers by itemizing God’s benign ingenuity. Douthat soon shifts tack in any case, from the probable to the improbable. He suggests that mystical experiences, by which he tends to mean paranormal ones, hint at the existence of the beings that religions venerate. This turn to experience is an all-American move, which the philosopher William James first championed just when Charles Darwin’s challenge to natural theology began to bite. By Knox’s day, the ascendancy of Sigmund Freud and the developing history of religions had jeopardized its value, by suggesting that people who saw the Virgin Mary or talked with God did so at the prompting of their subconscious or under the power of cultural suggestion.

And yet the persistence of such odd experiences suggests to Douthat that they cannot be entirely explained away. The weirder they are the better, because the harder it is to psychologize them. An agnostic anthropologist’s bike lights explode in her backpack just as she contemplates the consolations of religion; just as a young woman gets married, her long-dead relative’s radio sparks into life; Catholics who pray to the saints recover from illnesses that baffle their doctors. Douthat is particularly drawn to the many modern, secularized Americans who have met UFOs, because it suggests that paranormal encounters are not induced by religions but precede and generate them. He resembles James in concluding that demons and ghosts are not hangovers from primitive times but inescapable companions of human life: if you go looking for them, even today, you will find them. To Douthat, as to James in some moods, our brushes with these beings are not just freaky, but message bearing: they point us to unseen realities.

But why would someone who has had a paranormal experience want to join an organized religion, even if they suspect that God had given them “a wink”? Even if the world remains a profoundly and irreducibly mysterious place, why should joining a church — or a cult for that matter — be the best response to it? The second half of Believe seeks to bridge this gap from religiosity to religions. Douthat warns against dismissing the benefits of a church or movement’s benefits without experiencing them firsthand. We wouldn’t think it fair for a person to cast shade on ice hockey or water color painting if they had refused to try these activities, still less immerse themselves in them. To show us what he means, he gives us a biographical sketch of his own early journey to becoming  a Roman Catholic, which Knox might have found Protestant in its naive conviction that belief stems from the verifiable truth of the Gospels. But Douthat is not too worried about whether or not many follow his path. It is enough to back any of the major faiths. He honors the liberalism of the Second Vatican Council, which saw all the historic monotheisms as developing truths that find their completion in the Church, and adds to this a generous respect for polytheisms too.

Try Before You Deny

The irony of this perspective is that it is too charitable. Douthat cannot find any bad reasons for entering a religion — they all get a “permission slip.” When the polemicist Ayaan Hirsi Ali recently announced her conversion to Christianity, much of the criticism that she attracted came from committed churchgoers. They felt that her religion was too generic: it seemed to suppose that the main value of Christianity was the support it offered to the “civilizational war” in which the West was engaged, rather than the beauty of its Scriptures or the truth of its doctrines. But even this nakedly pragmatic example does not faze Douthat: deploying the circular reasoning common in religious apologetics, he argues that if a reason led you to faith, then it was most likely a good one. The important thing for Douthat is not to leave the “Bookstore of all Religions” empty-handed but to come out with a bestseller , whether that means “looking to the East” and turning Hindu, or returning to the New Testament that you let drop in childhood.

It is tempting to say that you can “relax” into a religion as you might do a comfortable armchair. Yet religions do more than offer choices — they presume to exercise authority. As Douthat notes, they offer “maps” hallowed by long usage, which oblige believers to take prescribed routes to salvation. Although his book extols the joys of “commitment,” it is very American in taking the perspective of the individual consumer and explaining what is in it for them. Douthat does not convey much awareness of world religions as social systems, which still matter politically because they compel adherents to adopt moral stances that may put them at odds with their society — or even harm their interests. The closest that Douthat comes to such a view is when he acknowledges — but defends — his own church’s punishing sexual ethics. Better, he thinks, to worship a God who watches closely over what we do with our genitals than to be “enslaved to pornography” or “unhappily celibate” in fallen modernity.

Knox saw that a boom in religion does less to shift patterns of religious practice than to inflate and dilute discourse about faith. He feared that interwar efforts to save religion by evacuating it of dogmas would merely turn it into a preachy “humanitarianism” more or less indistinguishable from the fashionable nostrums of industrial society. By suggesting that the more religion there is, the  greater security we have against “tribalism, superstition, and despair,” Douthat downplays the crucial importance of divisions within religions about whose word is decisive. As the flame war between Vance and Francis suggests, such contests still have serious moral and social implications. American religions remain sufficiently robust not to need support from mere religion. Fifty-two million Roman Catholics still live in the United States, nearly half of whom tell surveys that their faith is very important in their lives. For Catholics, the pressing task seems less to add to their numbers than to decide how to respond to an administration that drapes its authoritarianism with the symbols of their faith.