Twenty years after the new atheism coursed triumphantly across the West, its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar is upon us. No less than Deity-denier Richard Dawkins marked the transmutation last year, via a viral video in which he called himself a hymn-and-small-c-church-loving “cultural Christian.” That secular confession tracks with broader reality. God may not exactly be back—the decline in both churchgoing, and church-knowing, trudges on. But tempo, that great imponderable, seems uncannily aligned on the side of the faithful these days, at least in the United States.
Consider some signposts: Post-pandemic, homeschooling and classical Christian-minded academies have grown explosively. Their superiority can only mean that in a generation, believers will be represented disproportionately in leadership and scholarship. Higher education, even in the Ivies, is now home to a slew of new religious initiatives including FOCUS (Fellowship of Catholic University Students), Thomistic Institutes, the Protestant outreach EveryCampus, Tikvah Chapters, and more.
High-profile converts, intellectuals among them, are no longer unicorns in the Anglosphere (J.D. Vance, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, A.N. Wilson, Paul Kingsnorth). The American flock is increasingly inspirited by unanticipated wins favoring religious freedom—to say nothing of the transformative Dobbs decision. Even the data on plunging birth and marriage rates throw momentum toward the believers, as people ordered to be fruitful and multiply try to, and humans without God continue to morph into humans without kids. Contrary to what most would have predicted two decades ago, we live in an unexpectedly auspicious moment for men and women of faith—one might almost say, for a new theism.
Ross Douthat’s latest book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, is a manifesto for this moment, as archetypal of the new theism as Christopher Hitchens was to its opposite. As in his day job at the New York Times, Douthat speaks reason and civility into a public maw roiled by delirium and snark. The book’s quintessentially Burkean argument is that “[r]eason still points godward, and you don’t have to be a great philosopher or a brilliant textual interpreter to follow its directions. Ordinary intelligence and common sense together are enough.”
Refreshingly, the author dismisses from the outset an argument that’s become common among some: that faith should be embraced for its earthly outcomes alone, such as increased happiness and fellowship (or for that matter, longer life, better health, and fewer psychological woes). The book’s touchstone is not sociology but truth, and how we know it when we see it. The benefits of churchgoing, he observes, “accrue precisely because religious perspectives are closer to the truth about existence than purely secular worldviews.”
Believe is vintage Douthat, marked by genial narration, lightly worn erudition (and lots of it), and authentic concern for readers. “The Fashioned Universe,” a chapter summarizing the argument that science points toward God, sweeps through modern physics to remind us that the conditions required for reality as we know it are almost unimaginably peculiar. From the structure of atoms to the rate of expansion in the cosmos, it amounts, statistically, to “the most improbably winning number in the largest Powerball drawing in the history of the world.” Another chapter, “The Mind and the Cosmos,” deploys philosophy and new science to attack materialist accounts of consciousness, demonstrating again that the place in which humanity finds itself is “strangely suited to both our bodies and our minds.”
In a chapter on miracles, Believe tackles a truism widely taken for granted: “the idea that modernity means the death of miracle and magic.” To the contrary, “[m]odern human beings continue to have the kinds of experiences that are fundamental to religion.” Citing consistent accounts of near-death experiences, Douthat frames an interesting point: “the fact that many dying people really have all their memories brought back to them and replayed under a frame of moral judgment.” Surely, he reasons, “faith has won a provisional point from atheism” here. Later pages take up questions of conversion, religious diversity, and the meaning of Jesus. Believe concludes with an engaging discussion of the author’s own faith, and an appeal that readers consider anew what amounts to Pascal’s wager.
Douthat’s authorial affability does mean pulling punches here and there. In a discussion of theodicy, for example, he gently makes the point that “there is no good evidence that religion has been a special source of violence in human history.” That is a much milder proposition than, say, “atheistic humanism was responsible for the worst crimes of humanity, against humanity: the Holocaust, the Gulag, the Great Leap Forward, Pol Pot”—which is also true.
The book is similarly circumspect about the centrality of sex in our contemporary chaos. Though it suggests that “no one can agree on precisely when” religious belief went over a cliff, this is not quite right. Sociologists broadly agree that religiosity—which was in notable revival across the United States, Europe, Canada, and the antipodes after World War II—began its steep descent beginning around 1963. I have argued elsewhere (in How the West Really Lost God, 2013) that the hinge moment is the widespread adoption of effective contraception. The promise of sex without consequences disrupted homes on a scale never seen before, and with them, the transmission belts of religious belief. It also intensified the temptation to jettison ancient teachings. This double whammy, far more than Copernicus or Darwin, is what has been emptying churches from the mid-1960s onward.
The author seems both to sense this, and to avoid dwelling on it. In a section called “Why Are Traditional Religions So Hung Up on Sex?” he observes in passing, and without elaborating, that our supposedly liberated time is pockmarked by new scars like pornography, the incel thing, romantic mayhem, and the rise of unhappiness and suicide. Plainly, Believe goes out of its way to alienate as few readers as possible without compromising principle. All of which raises an interesting question about strategy. What is more likely to persuade a secularist these days—friendly sparring that resists the occasional roundhouse punch; or a knockdown accounting of secularism’s shortcomings, which alone are sufficient to make a (backhanded) case for faith?
“The reader wants his grace warm and binding, not dark and disruptive,” observed Flannery O’Connor. The truth is that the world needs some of both. In his own review of Believe, George Packer, one of the more incisive writers on the liberal side, doubled down as unconvinced: “The universe remains random, empty, cold. We’re alone in the dark, nothing means anything until we give it meaning, and death is the end.” For a reader with that kind of conviction, maybe only dark and disruptive grace will persuade.
For others, the warmer approach of Believe should spark new interest in the whys of religious faith at a moment when its predicted obsolescence has proved provincial. If any Catholic conservative can reach secular liberals, Ross Douthat can. Meanwhile, the flaws of atheism remain what they’ve always been—ineradicable bleakness impossible to square with loves that are experienced as eternal; and the unanswered conundrum of finite bodies, longing unbidden and passionately for infinity.
Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious
by Ross Douthat
Zondervan, 240 pp., $29.99
Mary Eberstadt is a senior research fellow at the Faith and Reason Institute.
