New theism: Review of ‘Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious’ by Ross Douthat

The critic, raconteur, and religious iconoclast Christopher Hitchens once parried claims about the alleged meaninglessness of nonreligious life by writing: “A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called ‘meaningless’ except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so.”

Point taken. Taken, in fact, so for granted that in recent decades, it’s hardly been considered in public intellectual life. For most of the 21st century (and much of that preceding it), Hitchens’s brand of earthy, morally charged materialism has reigned supreme, its most prominent critics either woo-like “spiritual” entrepreneurs or tweedy, indignant Christian intellectuals such as — wait for it — Hitchens’s brother, Peter.

However, something is stirring. Ross Douthat, the New York Times columnist, Catholic, and author of the audaciously-titled Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, writes in its introduction that “More and more of my readers [have] seemed to experience secularism as an uncomfortable intellectual default, not a freely chosen liberation,” citing growing awareness that “populism on the right [and] wokeness on the left” have called free thinkers to allegedly sturdier intellectual and metaphysical ground. 

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, in a 2023 essay for UnHerd, described the latest step on her journey from fundamentalist Islam to pugilistic atheism to Christianity as intellectual realpolitik, writing, “We can’t withstand China, Russia, and Iran if we can’t explain to our populations why it matters that we do.” Vice President JD Vance wrote in 2020 of his discovery that “a part of me — the best part … took its cues from Catholicism.” (Douthat’s fellow New York Times columnist David Brooks took an even fuzzier approach, writing in a December 2024 column that he’s “had to accept the fact that when you assent to faith, you’re assenting to putting your heart at the center of your life.”)

Douthat’s book is not subtitled Why Everyone Seems To Be Religious All of a Sudden, but Why Everyone Should Be Religious. The author sees this moment of ferment as an opportunity to muscle Hitchens’s materialist default from the cultural pinnacle. 

There’s only one reasonable standard for a critic to judge him by: How does he do?

For a book about (again, allegedly) universal law, the answer turns out to be in the eye of the beholder. The vastness of religious experience — Abrahamic faiths, eastern polytheism, lifestyle neo-paganism, Scientology — reflects the vastness of human experience. Douthat opens his pitch by addressing the Big Questions, condensing the thought of fellow modern Christian apologists such as the scientifically minded Claremont Review of Books editor Spencer Klavan or the woolly, polymathic David Bentley Hart, on the answers religion has to offer basic questions about mind and existence of the kind often posed by children. (“Why is there something instead of nothing?”) 

The effect here is somewhat wan, if only because the scope of these investigations can almost definitionally not be supported by a sub-200-page popular treatise. The discursive pirouettes of writers such as Hart require a certain amount of Sturm und Drang for their persuasiveness. Douthat’s attempts to distill them into pithy explanations, such as “a baseball franchise exists to us but does not exist to itself,” fall comparatively flat.

This is where, in the interest of fair play, the reviewer should lay his own metaphysical cards on the table. I am, after all, more or less Douthat’s target audience: a lapsed Catholic, a member of the coastal laptop class, sorely dissatisfied with modern intellectual currents, values, and assumptions. Amid my own investigation of the arguments for religion on offer, it’s (surprise, surprise) pointy-headed philosophical ones such as Hart’s that have most cracked my received materialist defaults. Human consciousness, with all it enables — Hitchens’s “friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music” — is the closest thing in my developing spiritual taxonomy to a miracle.

It was no small amusement, then, to discover that Douthat’s book truly comes to life in his description of what he calls the “enchanted” world. He affirms the reality of numinous intrusions into the everyday, real miracles. Douthat’s previous book, The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery, recounts with uncanny self-awareness and candor his struggle to define and treat his own chronic Lyme disease, eventually finding solutions straight outta Der Zauberberg — and laying the groundwork for his argument here that our assumptions about the separation of the spiritual and material are far too pat.

He acknowledges that open-mindedness about these and other paraphenomena such as Catholic miracles, UAPs, and near-death experiences are often the most difficult part of the program for the hyperrational New York Times-reading audience to swallow. However, his sincere insistence on their importance gives Believe both an emotional liveliness and a concrete connection to “the beyond” that distinguishes it from other recent texts, such as Robert Wright’s Why Buddhism Is True, that keep their feet more firmly planted in the material world.

Such trivialities as the nature of existence and reality being out of the way, Douthat devotes the second half of Believe to other quibbling matters such as “which religion is actually true” —  or, at the very least, where the hell does one begin? In contrast with the book’s lofty stakes and subject matter, his advice is comfortably prosaic, amounting to “wherever you feel most comfortable” with a mind toward seeking “the truest religious school within a continuum where many options have some validity.”

Still, let’s be serious: Douthat has a dog in this fight. He describes a late-night encounter with the late Hitchens himself, in which the eager pugilist cornered him at a Washington party and asked: “Suppose Jesus of Nazareth did rise from the dead — what would that prove, anyway?”

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Douthat’s riposte marshals the book’s main pro-“seeker”-ist arguments in favor of Christianity, combining the enduring historical resonance of its core figures with his own belief in numinous spirituality to argue its “literal-minded” explanation is the best one: “That the resurrection really happened, that here God intervened in human affairs decisively, that this is the defining revelation of His purposes in whose light the larger run of mystical and spiritual experiences across cultures and civilizations should be read.” It recalls Garry Wills’s poetic assertion that one can judge Jesus of Nazareth’s influence “as I would gauge the size of a vessel that has passed, by the turbulence of wake it left behind,” his “impact on the best and purest lives I know or have heard of,” its intellectual influence and, finally, “a desperate process of guessing and hope.” 

The skeptic — or merely the non-Christian — would argue that such cases could be made for any major religion, something Douthat acknowledges in Believe. In that light, the book’s achievement might be to crack the door open for an open-minded reader to acknowledge such beliefs and participation in such traditions are, at the very least, not incompatible with the worldly gusto of the Hitchens-Bourdain-Vonnegut secular pantheon. Explaining Why Everyone Should Be Religious is an impossible bit of publisher-imposed puffery. To give the curious reader an accessible permission structure for their religious questing, however, is a tough goal in its own right. Douthat pulls it off with panache.

Derek Robertson co-authors Politico’s Digital Future Daily newsletter and is a contributor to Politico Magazine.