What's Tony Thinking

Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious

This is the second in my “maybe summer” reading list. First was Dave Zahl’s The Big Relief: The Urgency of Grace for a Worn-Out World. Third up will be Rowan Williams, Discovering Christianity: A Guide for the Curious. This week it is the recent book by the NYT columnist, Ross Douthat, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. 

As noted in last week’s opener to this series, all three writers and books have in view the secular age and societies of the modern west. But something more. They write for those who have had little or no experience of religion and its organized forms, but who are finding the dominant world-view of secular materialism unsatisfying, even empty. They are, as Williams, says “curious.” And maybe, as Zahl, puts it “worn-out” by modernity’s trademark, constant acceleration.

Douthat is a very smart guy who writes well and possesses the gift that makes for a good columnist: he takes complicated issues and ideas and makes them accessible. He is not afraid to take a position, as his daring subtitle and its unfashionable “should” suggests. But he, perhaps because he knows where he stands, is also able to remain remarkably open-minded and empathetic throughout this book.

Douthat does a number of things in Believe. But bottom line he makes the case for belief in God who has humanity and its welfare at heart. Neither God, nor the world, this God has designed are out to get you. He invites a disposition of basic trust.

In issuing this invitation he confronts those who claim too much for science, namely that science will at some point have all the answers to all the important questions about who we are, why we are here, and how to live your life. Science isn’t actually designed to provide those kinds of answers or that kind of certainty. “Scientism” is the attempt to turn science into the single and ultimate source of truth and meaning. Its offspring, “secular materialism,” reduces everything, including humans, to neurons, chemical substances/ stimuli and brain chemistry. Against this reductionism Douthat poses the wonders and design of life and the world, the ways in which is seems to uniquely lend itself to human existence and exploration, and the possibility of a divine intelligence behind and within it all.

So he lays the ground work by daring to challenge what the apostle Paul calls “the principalities and powers, the rulers of this present age.” He finds, correctly I think, the arguments and presumptions by which God, the supernatural, faith and religion are often dismissed among the elites to be superficial and, in popular form, expressions of group-think.

From there he goes on suggest that we moderns might benefit from considering the accumulated wisdom and traditions of our forebearers about who we are, why we are here and how to live. This in contrast to the ruling dogma, which might be called, “I Did It My Way.” It is, according to this way of thinking, up to each of us to figure out the big questions for ourselves. Anything less is “inauthentic,” though it can be argued that this very prejudice of our times and culture — “I Gotta Be Me” — is the most conformist doctrine on offer.

In this respect Douthat takes account of the realities of our time and speaks to those who are beginning to find secular materialism coming up short. Here’s a pointed excerpt:

“If your reason for avoiding institutional religion is the fear of the Inquisition or the Salem witch trials, or even just the stifling atmosphere of some pre-Vatican II Catholic parishes or Protestant small towns, you are letting a danger that’s increasingly remote push you away from the things that are necessary to mitigating today’s perils, today’s problems — isolation rather than pharisaism, narcissism rather than authoritarianism, a world that leaves you alone in your despair rather than a society that’s always nosing into your business.”

He is, for my money, correctly diagnosing the anomie and nihilism of our time. We are less threatened by repressive religious orthodoxies than by indifference, isolation and crippling self-preoccupation.

Douthat commends to the curious and those who are yearning, the world’s “great religions.” Meaning those that have stood the test of time: Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism and Islam, but he does so without the superficial silliness of, “Oh, they are really all the same when you get right down to it.” No, they aren’t the same, but that doesn’t mean that they are devoid of truth or value. If you find something speaking to you, listen. He’s not blind to or unaware of the failings of each faith, but he’s for not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Moreover, he challenges readers to name any area of human endeavor and engagement that is free of distortion, abuse or failure. I notice that if someone’s income or identity depend on a particular sector they seem able, mostly, to overlook its shortcomings!

In keeping with his characteristic forthrightness, Douthat closes the book with “A Case Study: Why I Am a Christian.” It’s a beautiful chapter, one in which he does something that is also a sign of reading the times correctly. He describes the gospel, Jesus and his story, as “the strangest story in the world” and really quite unlike any other religion. A crucified God? Rather than domesticating Jesus for popular consumption, he sharpens the tensions, the strangeness, the offense.

Aware that many dismiss faith as a crutch or easy source of (allegedly false) comfort — opiate and all that — he writes, “In my own case, though, it’s not really about comfort at all. The kind of religion I might work out entirely for myself — based on my private interpretation of the cosmos, my experiences of life and the general data offered by religious experience — would be something more relaxed and reassuring than Catholicism or Christianity in its major historical expressions . . . And then even those traditions, Catholic and Orthodox and Protestant, can seem more reassuring at times than just the stark words of Jesus . . .” Yes, there is comfort here, but deep challenge as well.

For Douthat neither Christianity nor its central figure, Jesus, are bland, easy or ways to escape life and its challenges. They are evocative and provocative, designed to wake us up. His final words are in this spirit. “I beg of you — awake.”