Join host Mark Turman and Dr. Ryan Denison on the Denison Forum Podcast for a compelling conversation with Ross Douthat, New York Times opinion columnist and bestselling author. In this special episode, they dive into Douthat’s latest book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. Explore the dynamic relationship between faith and reason, the impact of secularization, and the crucial role of communal and institutional religious practices. Gain insight into Douthat’s personal faith journey, his critique of atheism, and his reflections on how to navigate today’s challenges to traditional Christian teachings. Whether you’re a believer, a skeptic, or somewhere in between, this episode offers thought-provoking perspectives on why religion continues to be vital in our modern world.
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Topics
- (00:37): Meet Our Special Guests: Dr. Ryan Dennison and Ross Douthat
- (01:16): Discussing Ross Douthat’s Latest Book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious
- (03:53): The Rise of Secularization and Its Impact
- (09:15): Religion vs. Spirituality: Understanding the Differences
- (16:55): The Rational Approach to Faith
- (44:40): Challenges in Modern Christianity
- (48:19): Ross Douthat’s Personal Faith Journey
- (53:39): Final Thoughts and Encouragement
Resources
- Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious
- Ross on X
- Ross Douthat: New York Times
- Why Jesus? -Dr. Jim Denison
About Ross Douthat
Ross Douthat has been a New York Times Opinion columnist since April 2009. Previously, he was a senior editor at the Atlantic. He is the author of The Deep Places; The Decadent Society; To Change the Church; Bad Religion; Privilege; and, with Reihan Salam, Grand New Party. He is the film critic for National Review. He lives with his wife and five children in New Haven, Connecticut.
About Dr. Ryan Denison
Ryan Denison, PhD, is the Senior Editor for Theology at Denison Forum. Ryan writes The Daily Article every Friday and contributes writing and research to many of the ministry’s productions. He holds a PhD in church history from BH Carroll Theological Institute after having earned his MDiv at Truett Seminary. He’s authored The Path to Purpose, What Are My Spiritual Gifts?, How to Bless God by Blessing Others, 7 Deadly Sins, and has contributed writing or research to every Denison Forum book.
About Dr. Mark Turman
Dr. Mark Turman is the Executive Director of Denison Forum and Vice President of Denison Ministries. Among his many duties, Turman is most notably the host of The Denison Forum Podcast. He is also the chief strategist for DF Pastors, which equips pastors and church leaders to understand and transform today’s culture.
About Denison Forum
Denison Forum exists to thoughtfully engage the issues of the day from a biblical perspective through The Daily Article email newsletter and podcast, The Denison Forum Podcast, as well as many books and additional resources.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
NOTE: This transcript was AI-generated and has not been fully edited.
[00:00:00] Dr. Mark Turman: Welcome to the Denison Forum Podcast. I’m Mark Turman, your host for today’s conversation. As we seek to equip you in our fourth year of podcasting on the Denison Forum Podcast, we want to equip you to think biblically, to live holy, and to serve eagerly in the places where God gives you an opportunity to not only know him, but to walk with him and serve him. And we are grateful for you as our podcast audience and eager to serve you in great ways in the coming new year. And we hope to do that in a great way today with our special guests. Joining me for today’s conversation, as he does from time to time, is Dr. Ryan Denison, who is our senior editor for Theology at Denison Forum, and we’re joined today by a very prolific author and great thinker, our friend Ross Douthat, who you may be familiar with. He is a New York Times opinion columnist and has held that position since 2009. Prior to that, he was with the Atlantic as senior editor. He is also the author of a number of books, including the deep places, the decadent society to change the church, bad religion. And today we are talking with him about his latest work called believe why everyone should be religious. You may also encounter him as the film critic at national review and he would Also let you know that he is married, has five children, and they make their home in New Haven, Connecticut.
So, Ross, welcome to the Denison Forum Podcast. We’re glad to have you.
[00:01:40] Ross Douthat: It’s, it’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks so much for having me. I don’t, I don’t know if I would let everyone know that. It’s more like, you know, the five children sort of handle the letting everyone know part of, part of that.
[00:01:52] Dr. Mark Turman: Right. Yeah.
I, I, I heard my favorite comedian say recently after his fifth child was born, he said it’s, it’s like treading water and about to drown, and then somebody hands you a baby. That’s what it’s like having five children, . So yeah, that, that, yeah. My mother had eight kids, so I could imagine what the challenges it holds.
[00:02:13] Ross Douthat: Right. Well, at, at, at eight. At eight, you just start handing them off to the older children, though, . Right, exactly. The challenge, the challenge. five is that the oldest child is, you know, still debatable whether they’re a competent adult ready to receive a baby. But I’m told that beyond five, it’s just much easier.
You know, that, that 10 is easier than five for that reason. I don’t think we’re going to find out.
[00:02:36] Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I had three sets of parents at least for sure. But well, we are really super excited to have you with us. We are fans of your work and have followed it for a number of years, and you’ve helped us to understand faith and to understand the world in a better way.
And we’re grateful for that. And we hope that this conversation, both Ryan and I. have had a chance to, to read a preview version of your book. And we’re really impressed by that, really helped by that, really stretched by that in some ways. And so we’ll get into that a little bit. And as we often do on this podcast, if we go down rabbit trails and just take off in other directions that’ll be even the better.
So I’ll try to keep us on track and and see if we can be helpful to our audience. But give us a little bit of the backstory about what this book is about. The title is pretty revelatory in and of itself. But give us a kind of a thumbnail overview of the book and what the backstory is that inspired you to write it.
Who’s it for? Those kinds of things.
[00:03:41] Ross Douthat: Sure. So You know, as, as the title suggests, this is a book about why people should be religious. I, I think there’s sort of two related points that it takes off from, right? The, the first is that we, I think as a culture right now in the early 2020s, we’re in a moment where you know, a kind of big wave of secularization has washed over Western and American life in the last 20 years or so.
You’ve had the rise of the so called nuns, people without religious affiliation, not Roman Catholic nuns. You have, in a way, you know, the younger generation in American life right now is the least churched generation, arguably, in all of American history. So you have this, this sort of secularized landscape.
In that landscape, you have a lot of, I think, sort of renewed interest. in religion among people who, you know, some of them maybe were influenced by the new atheists, by figures like Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens, right? And, you know, had for a while had the idea that you know, if you just strip religious ideas out of society, everything will be sweet enlightenment and, you know, science and, and peace and so on.
And I think people have sort of, Abandoned that idea for pretty obvious reasons over the last 10 or 15 years, a world with weaker religion has not turned out to be a more peaceful world, a less polarized world, anything like that. Instead, if anything, it’s a more, the country’s more bitterly divided.
There’s more, I think, existential unhappiness, depression, anxiety, a lot of different forces like that, especially among younger people. So there’s a sense, I think, That, you know, maybe, maybe secularization was something of a mistake. Maybe religion has more to offer. But I think there’s a lot of people who have that impulse and Some of them just don’t know where to start, right?
Like, these are not people who were, you know, raised Christian, went to Sunday school and drifted away from their, the faith in their 20s, but just feel like, okay, I can just go back to church, right? These are people who were raised with no exposure to the Bible, to Christian teaching to sort of a religious framework generally, right?
So there’s, there’s people like that. And then. There are people who may have a little more a little more familiarity with religion and religious arguments, but sort of take it as a given that to be religious is to sort of give up on reason, science. You know, sort of modern, a lot of modern ways of thinking about reality and the world, right?
And so, if they’re drawn to religion, they tend to think of themselves as being drawn towards this kind of suspension of the intellect. This sense of like, okay, religion is good for society, maybe it’s good for me personally to believe in a god and I just need to sort of try it, suspend my reasoning apparatus and see what happens.
And, and you get, I think you get a lot of books and arguments about religion that sort of give advice along those lines that say, look, religion is a practice, it’s a relationship, it’s a communal experience, don’t worry too much at first about whether it all makes sense, just try it and see what happens.
So this is a book written for people in both of those categories, I think. People who, who need sort of an introduction to why someone would be religious in the first place and what religion means. And also for people who think they want to be religious, but that it requires giving up on their reason.
And so the book is in a way, especially from a Christian perspective, trying to be. incredibly basic. It’s not C. S. Lewis’s mere Christianity. It’s something even more basic than that. Like what, what is a religious perspective on the world? What is it that unites the major world religions that secular society doesn’t have?
But then along with that kind of basic introduction, it’s trying to convince people, convince the reader that in fact, you don’t have to suspend your reason or give up on your intellect or put aside your science textbook in order to. become a religious person and to embrace a religious perspective on the world.
In fact, there are a lot of ways in which both what we’ve, what we know about the world from scientific progress and also what we know about the world just from the experience of modern life make religion not just reasonable but in certain ways more reasonable than ever. So that’s sort of the, the argumentative part of the book.
Is trying to persuade people that there is, in a way, almost an intellectual obligation to be interested in religion because the basic religious perspective on the world does a better job describing reality than a purely atheistic, naturalistic, materialist perspective. And that
[00:08:46] Dr. Ryan Denison: was one of my favorite parts about especially the introduction to the book is where you laid that out and how you really kind of highlighted how, and I sense a lot of Christian apologetics have made a mistake by almost allowing, allowing us to be forced to try and prove our faith to be 100 percent true when there’s really not any other realm of existence where we rely on 100 percent certainty to believe something.
The rational approach is if. If it’s more likely than not, then that’s the rational way to believe and kind of to that end, one of the distinctions you make early on that I thought was really helpful was the difference between being religious and being spiritual. And I was wondering if you could talk a bit more about how you see how you see those differences playing out and kind of why religious is, maybe not necessarily preferable to spiritual, but why you were tackling the idea of religion versus spirituality.
[00:09:40] Ross Douthat: Right, so that’s first I, I really, I really appreciate the kind words, obviously. I think on that point, one of the, one of the things that tends to happen when you have a society where, People feel like they’ve moved beyond religion and religious institutions feel like they can’t go back or don’t have any connection that would enable them to go back, but want some of the things that religion supplies, both a sense of sort of meaning and purpose and understanding of cosmic order, but also just on the personal level, right, a kind of And I think that’s really important.
You know, an experience of the mystical, the numinous, the supernatural. You get this category that people, you know, it’s, it’s almost, almost, it is a cliche of American discourse, right? The idea that I’m spiritual but not religious, right? Which can mean all kinds of things, but in practice it might mean, I believe in some higher power, but I’m not sure what that higher power is.
I dabble in astrology, and, you know, bits and pieces of Western and Eastern mysticism play around with tarot cards, you know, say some Christian prayers, but, you know, but also, you know, burn some, burn some incense and, well, as a Catholic, not that there’s anything un Christian about incense, you know, perish the thought, but, but you, you know, you know what I mean, right?
That have a sort of, like, a potpourri, a kind of mix and match of spiritual practices. without either a kind of dogmatic structure or a kind of institutional commitment. And I’m not sort of against that approach as a kind of starting place, again, for people who, you know, I’m talking to people who have not had, you know, from a Christian perspective, a personal experience of Jesus Christ.
You know, they have not had a kind of conversion moment, right? They’re just sort of looking at the world and trying to figure out what they should do in it. And you know, to some degree, yes, you, in that environment, you have to do some kind of experimentation, right? You know, it’s by no means crazy to, you know, read a bunch of different scriptures, try out a few different spiritual practices, all of that makes sense to some degree, but your goal in doing that.
should not be to make that your permanent default approach to, you know, to sort of ultimate questions. The goal should be to find guidance and direction that leads you into some kind of institutional commitment and practice where your spiritual practices Are embedded in a something, you know, something larger than your own creation and, you know, I offer a few reasons why this would be the case that, you know, the most basic is that you the individual are probably not a once in a generation religious genius.
Right? You are probably not graced with a unique revelation from God or the universe, right? You probably can stand to benefit and learn, as in other areas of human endeavor, from those who have gone before, from systems and structures that have been worked out collectively. It’s really hard to do anything.
Solo, purely individually, and there’s no reason why an encounter with ultimate reality would be any different, right? It would be very, just as it would be very strange to say, I’m going to become a soccer player, but I will only play by myself in my backyard, kicking the ball against the house. I will never join a team.
It would be strange also to never seek out communal practices and shared practices that, you know, that where you have people supporting you on your journey, where you have sort of obligations that you’re expected to meet. Like, you know, I, I, I know that I would be a much worse Christian if I didn’t feel an obligation to get up and go to church.
on Sunday morning, right? Like, and then finally, and I think this is particularly important in the kind of landscape we’re in now where there’s so little institutional structure and so much experimentation. But, you know, if you take religious possibilities and spiritual, spiritual realities seriously, you have to take seriously the possibility that there’s actual dangers out there.
That the spiritual landscape, no less than the natural landscape, is not just a realm of sweetness and light where every being that you might encounter might have your perfect good in mind, right? And so I’m, you know, I know people in, in my world who, you know, who take psychedelic drugs, right? And who think that they’re having encounters with spiritual realities by taking psychedelic drugs.
And some of those encounters with spiritual reality are seem very positive. People come away feeling almost converted to a, you know, a religious perspective on existence, but sometimes they’re quite negative. Sometimes people have encounters through taking these drugs that it. You know, from a Christian perspective seem frankly demonic, right?
And the structure, the structures of institutional religion, Christianity in particular, but other religions as well, all take for granted the idea that wandering in spiritual landscapes without a guide, without a map, without rules for thinking about what you might encounter is incredibly dangerous and that the soul If the soul exists, it’s also important to conceive of it as something that can go astray and get lost.
And that’s something I think especially that does not come across in a lot of kind of warm bath, new age spirituality, right? A lot of the spiritual but not religious landscape just doesn’t Take seriously danger and the possibility of, yeah, of, of getting trapped or getting lost while being out there on your own.
[00:15:30] Dr. Mark Turman: And that’s a great reminder. And as you said, one not often talk about that, that the stakes are real here, that and as in other areas of life, whether it be science or either other aspects of materialism, that, that there are real. dangers and real costs and a life of endless experimentation does have real risk involved.
Ross, I wanted to go back to this idea of believing in religion as obligation. And, and let me kind of wander through here. There might end up being two or three questions and what I want to say, but this book talks a lot about some of the dangers, as you just mentioned, and drawbacks of disbelief.
Tease out this idea that one of the threads I saw in the book is that it is better to believe something rather than to believe nothing and then kind of matched up with that you make a great argument because we at Denison Forum, we talk a lot about loving God with all of your mind, as Jesus said.
Love God with all your mind, all your heart, all your soul, and all your strength. And so we, we love that idea of approaching God, not by turning your brain and your rational thinking off, but by engaging it fully. in these questions of ultimate reality and the person of God and the purposes of God. So in, in this pursuit of believing in something rather than nothing, why, why do you argue that pursuing it rationally as opposed to a process of feeling or emotion or even practicality Why is rationality perhaps the healthiest way to engage the journey of faith?
[00:17:17] Ross Douthat: Well, I think you want to think of it as a kind of, it’s a foundation, right? So Christianity in most of its forms has always said, look, there are things about God and about the universe and human destiny that we can only know through revelation, right? That you can’t just, you cannot reason your way all the way to the doctrine of the Trinity.
Before Jesus, you know, was born in Bethlehem, you couldn’t necessarily reason your way to the doctrine of the Incarnation, right? And in a similar way, in the human relationship with God, you can’t just think your way into into that relationship, right? Divine grace enters in. Right, whatever, you know, whatever you think about, you know, wherever you fall on arguments about free will and how human beings cooperate with grace and so on, there’s no question from a Christian perspective that you, you can’t just sort of sit, you, you have to, you have to assume that God reaching down plays an essential role.
And you can’t get all the way through your intellect alone. So those are both really important points. However, you don’t want to leave out the concurrent reality that Christianity says that you can reason your way some of the distance, right? You can reason your way towards the reality that And this is, this is at least the argument in my book, right, that the universe appears to have been made by someone does not appear to be Random or accidental it appears to be ordered by some kind of mind human beings for various reasons based on everything from you know what we know about the fine tuning of the physical laws of the universe to the fact that our consciousness is capable of not just apprehending reality, but understanding the universe and exploring it.
All of that suggests that the universe was made for us in some sense. Now, I don’t think you can say through reason alone, it was made only for us, right? Maybe there are other sentient beings on some other planet for whom the universe was also made. You can’t rule that out, right? But at the very least, you can say human beings The universe was made for something.
Human beings play an important role in what that something is, and then through religious and mystical experience, we get intimations of and encounters with realities higher than our own. That’s sort of the three part, the three part argument I make of things, you know, things that without, without revelation and without, you know, you know, the inflow of divine grace, you can still get that far, right?
You can say we’re here for a reason, something God, you know, creator God, maybe a pantheistic God, you know, there are different arguments there, but some higher being is responsible for our fate and there’s evidence that the higher being or beings want to communicate with us. To me, that is enough to create an obligation to be interested in religion and to try and have a religious attitude and approach toward the world, especially when you consider the further fact that we’re all going to die.
And if there is an ultimate reality that hold, that wants something from us and holds us to account, we’re going to encounter that reality, whether we want to. or not, right? So that, and now that, again, from a Christian perspective, that argument is insufficient, right? Again, it is a kind of, it is, it is less than mere Christianity.
It is just mere religion. I think having that attitude as your foundation is, important, even if you then, you know, feel that you’ve advanced beyond it into grace and revelation, into the realm of overt Christian belief. Because if you don’t, if you don’t have the foundation, then, you know, then your, even your higher level of belief, your commitment to Christianity itself is going to be weaker and more vulnerable.
than it otherwise ought to be, right? And this is, I think, sometimes the, the downside of telling people, well, you need to just have an experience of you know, experience of faith and experience of God and not worry about the reasoning part, the rational part, right? Because yes, those experiences are available.
God makes those experiences available and they can lead to real conversion, but they can also lead to sort of, you know, Temporary conversion followed by disillusionment, and I think that’s much more likely to happen if you think of religion as something that’s, that’s separate from your basic obligations as a reasonable person in the world.
Whereas if you think of the experience of grace and conversion as something that builds on this basic foundation, then the experience of conversion and grace is more likely to stick and more likely to be permanently transformative, I think. That’s helpful.
[00:22:27] Dr. Ryan Denison: Ross, one of the things you talk about in the book is how there’s almost a reluctance at times with people coming back to the idea of religion.
And I was curious, to what extent do you think a basic recognition that your current world view is flawed is kind of a necessary starting place for beginning that journey?
[00:22:46] Ross Douthat: I mean, I think it depends on the, the individual and, but it also, I think American culture right now contains different, Different groups, right?
I think if you go out a little bit from the world that I’m in a lot of the time, which you might call, you know, the world of the intelligentsia I think you find a lot of people who just have a kind of open ended worldview, who are, you know, who think there might be a god, the universe might have a purpose, I’m not sure what it is and I’m open to different ideas.
And for those people, I think it’s less about deciding that your worldview is wrong and more about sort of accepting that you should have a worldview, right? That you should have a practice, an institution. And this is why I spend that time that I just, you know, spent talking about, you know, moving from the movement from being spiritual but not religious to being religious doesn’t necessarily have to feel like a rejection.
It can feel like the fulfillment of the Very, you know, the sort of vague and sketched out worldview that you had already. That is different, however, from the perspective of, you know, just to take the example of where I live, the average, you know, member of the Yale Law School faculty, right? The average member of the Yale Law School faculty does not believe in God, I think it’s fair to say, and regards not believing in God as a kind of constituent part of what it means to be.
an educated person. And again, I think the number of people for whom that’s true is not actually that large. I think most people who are quote unquote secular have not read, you know, Richard Dawkins and flung it down and said, that’s it. You know, I’m, I’m done with God. He’s not real, right? No, most people who have secularized have drifted away from religious practice in, in a way that is not an intellectual commitment.
But Yeah, among the kind of the most educated, most credentialed Americans, there is this default and this idea that to be a serious person, to be in, you know, that like the price of intellectual seriousness. is disbelief. And that is a, that’s a very powerful idea. And it is one, I think, that puts a limit on the kind of ground that religion can regain sometimes, right?
That like, you know, American life, Western life, it moves in cycles. You have periods of secularization, and then you have periods of renewed belief. That’s, that’s been part of the pattern in American life for a long time. And we’re in, I think, again, a kind of period of renewed interest in religion right now.
You definitely see patterns where, among intellectuals especially, the swing back to religion often has some limit on it, where, where people will think to themselves, well, I can go back to an appreciation of religion. I can go back to a respect for the role religion plays in society. I can go back to a sense of the usefulness of some kind of belief in God, but I’m not going to go all the way to Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead, right?
And I do think that religious believers need to push against that attitude, right? And actually try and pull people in. further pull people who have a kind of, yeah, a kind of belief in belief, but also a limit imposed by their kind of class identification, right? On that belief, a sense of like, well, I am not the kind of person Who really believes in a God of miracles, right?
And that, I mean, that’s something, I have a whole chapter in the book on the supernatural, right? And, you know, the interesting thing about the book is that in certain ways it’s a kind of, it’s a kind of liberal book in the sense that I am. offering encouragement to a lot of people on different religious paths, right.
I’m saying, you know, the important, really important thing is to make that initial decision to go out in search of God, right. And so I’m trying to give advice to people who might start out in, you know, Buddhism or Hinduism rather than Christianity. So that’s sort of the liberal side of the argument. But the more traditionalist side of my argument is that, you know, miracles are probably real.
The supernatural is probably real. Smart, educated people should accept that, should not rule that out. a priori, right? And I think like, if you could get to that point, that would actually be a real, a real change in American society that we haven’t seen during this kind of ebb and flow to get the intelligentsia to be open to the supernatural and the miraculous again.
I don’t know if it can happen, but that’s That’s part of, part of the goal of my, of my argument.
[00:27:51] Dr. Ryan Denison: I think in a lot of ways it was kind of a gradual path to rejection of that. And so maybe it will be something of a gradual path back. And I think there’s a lot to say for starting that, for not being dogmatic about you have to start that path in one particular place.
And just kind of trusting that God is capable of guiding people along a number of paths back to himself. And that if Christianity really does hold the ultimate truth like we claim it does, then we shouldn’t be afraid of people beginning a path to truth that might start in places we wouldn’t be comfortable with and just kind of trust that God can still find them along that path.
God can still lead them along that path. But also I think it speaks to the, does a great job of speaking to the importance of just never reaching the point where you feel like you understand God so well that you don’t need to continue that pursuit. I think even within Within Christianity, I think there’s a similar motivation if not, even if it plays out very differently.
It’s what you described with the intelligentsia. It’s where we become so comfortable and so identified. With a particular understanding of our faith that we begin to see that as the totality of who God is or and kind of close ourselves off to the idea that there’s still more that God could teach us.
And I was curious that kind of as a follow up to that, I was curious, like, what advice would you have for Christians who are trying to engage with this book, not just on a, so we don’t read the stuff and we don’t read what you’re writing and walk away thinking, yeah, if only everyone else could believe this, we’d be good.
But in terms of applying those principles to our own relationship with God, are, is there any advice you would give us for that? I mean,
[00:29:26] Ross Douthat: one, one piece of advice would be this, well, this reflects a little bit my own, sort of my own shifts. over, you know, my 25 odd years of adult life, right? Which is that, you know, so I’m, I’m Roman Catholic.
I became Roman Catholic along with my family as a teenager in my late teens, after a period when we had been evangelical and Pentecostalist. So we did a kind of tour of parts of American Christianity and ended up Catholic. And there was a phase, there was a phase in my life as a Catholic convert, where my sense was like, Catholicism was obviously the truest form of Christianity, right?
You know, this is what converts are supposed to think, right? It’s obviously the truest form of Christianity, and I found it easier to understand how someone could be an atheist than how they could be a Protestant. Right, that was like 24 year old Ross had that, had that sensibility. And I would say that like, you know, I, I think this is a reflection of maturity.
Not everyone would agree with this, but I think it reflects maturity that now I would say I find it less easy to understand how people are atheists. I have less sort of respect for atheism as a choice and perspective. than I did as, as a young man. And that come, I think, comes through in this, in this book.
I think atheism is actually a quite, quite, it’s much more intellectually weak a position than a lot of people think. But I have a lot more understanding of, Why people who are Christian disagree with one another, why people, not just why Protestants are Protestants and evangelicals are evangelicals, why everyone isn’t just, you know, convinced of the the perfect, you know, the the perfect truth of the Catholic faith, but, but faith, but even within Catholicism, you know, in the endless civil wars that we have in the Catholic Church between liberals and conservatives, and I participate in those civil wars.
I am a conservative Catholic. I’ve wrote a whole book. critiquing Pope Francis, which is an absurd thing in a way to do, to do as a, you know, your Catholic convert. And then you’re like, ah, the Pope, you know, he’s really messing it up, guys. You know, but, but I, I, I, I, jokes aside, I stand by most of the arguments I made in that book.
But part of making those arguments was recognizing, you know, there are reasons, good reasons why Catholics disagree with one another. And not all, but many of the questions that divide. Christians divide Protestants and Catholics divide Protestants from each other and Catholics from each other are in fact they create divisions because they are genuinely hard questions on which just you know based on a kind of empirical theology alone independent of personal experience and you know revelation and grace and so on reasonable people could could disagree and that that’s something that Again, also applies beyond Christianity to why Christians and Muslims disagree or why Christians and Hindus disagree.
And I think, yeah, I think I am, I am, I think my perspective on those, those kind of disputes is that you know, in places where you have hundreds of years of persistent argumentation among people who share a basic disposition toward the world, either a basic religious disposition or some shared commitments to Jesus Christ as the Son of God, who, you know, died and rose again to save us.
If these disagreements persist, you should have charity within those disagreements, and you should, you should seek, without giving up your own commitments, that like there are right answers to these questions. This is, this is, I think, the balance that’s really hard to strike, right? Like, you know, it’s very easy to slide from I have respect for other religions too.
I think all religions must be equally true. I don’t think all religions are equally true. I don’t think all forms of Christianity are equally true. But I do think I have a better understanding than I did 20 years ago of why everyone doesn’t just agree with me and where the lines of disagreement come from.
And I think, yeah, trying to maintain that balance of sort of not just becoming a relativist, believing that, you know, the questions have answers. There’s a right side and a wrong side to most important arguments, but also, you know, we, what does St. Paul say, right? We, we see through a glass darkly and then until we see face to face Charity for people who see things, who see the same thing somewhat differently is really helpful and important, I think.
Yeah,
[00:34:13] Dr. Mark Turman: really, really
[00:34:13] Ross Douthat: helpful. But no, but no charity, no charity for atheists. Not, not . No, no. I’m just charity for atheist too. .
[00:34:23] Dr. Mark Turman: Well, and, and you know, sometimes like you said all of these questions are, are a good, many of these questions are really hard questions and that, that may be where some of the compassion for atheist and agnostics come in and.
Ross, my, my story is both like and unlike your story. I grew up in a large, very highly dedicated Roman Catholic family that then drifted away from faith when I was about 10 years old. And then I ended up coming back into faith or coming into faith for the first time through a very conservative Protestant Baptist world.
And I would have been in a place where I would have described my faith in my twenties as I think I’m in the truest form of Christianity and I can’t understand why anybody would be Catholic still.
[00:35:11] Ross Douthat: Right.
[00:35:11] Dr. Mark Turman: And how you’d probably be better off being atheist than being Catholic. And that you can imagine some of the interesting conversations that created for me and for some of my at, at, at the holiday, at the
[00:35:21] Ross Douthat: holidays.
Yep.
[00:35:23] Dr. Mark Turman: at, yeah. Around the table. It could be a, a bit interesting at, at that point because I just knew I’d come into the truest form of Christianity at that point and, and and, and. Tried to make that very clear to all of them and they, they weren’t necessarily in
[00:35:37] Ross Douthat: agreement. They were so grateful.
[00:35:40] Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah, they were, they were so grateful for me to be enlightened, but, but what I want to, what really is helpful especially in this conversation, and I hope that this really does motivate people to read this book.
It’s really helpful to hear you say, Hey, this book is a step or two back from mere Christianity. Our founder, who you just met. You know, so much of his story and our story is anchored in C. S. Lewis and anchored in mere Christianity and to hear you describe this book. Okay, let’s step back a step or two back from that because we’re dealing with a generation that is emerging, doesn’t even have a context to appreciate C.
S. Lewis and mere Christianity. That’s, that’s enormously helpful, but just what you and Ryan were talking about, I had, I had this thought that my pastor used to say, he said, you know, it’s It’s easier for God to direct a fanatic than it is for him to resurrect the dead. And, and so if somebody will simply take the initiative of saying, you know what, this matters, this whole line of thought and consideration and pursuit of the reality of God matters.
And if it is, if it is, as we would say, real, it matters more than everything else. Which kind of leads me to what I want you to explain a little bit more. This part, this moment in the book when I was reading it was kind of an epiphany and also a wave of hope that really helped me. I think the simple phrase was we need to understand the world is not a trick.
Tell us what you mean by that. You’ve been already alluding to it, but tease that out a little bit further when you’re trying to say to these people start down this road. If you have no orientation at all, or you think that Or you think that you just have to kind of blindly close your eyes and hold on and suspend your reason and it’ll hopefully work out.
Explain what you mean when you say it is not a trick.
[00:37:39] Ross Douthat: Yeah, I mean, I think that that idea, yeah, I come back to that a number of times in the book. And that, that idea starts with this, what I think is a, in a way, a strong, you know, skeptical complaint made to religious believers, right? Which is that, you know, if this thing If this thing is so important, right, you know, if there is a God who made the world, didn’t just make the world, made us, didn’t just make us, wants us to do particular things, has a list of do’s and don’ts, you know, wants us to be in some kind of relationship with him.
If all of that is, is real, then, you know, shouldn’t it be a little more obvious, right? Like this incredibly important thing. And yet, you know, it’s hidden from us. Why, why is it hidden from us? And there are religious arguments that sort of lean into the hiddens. Right? And, and some of those are powerful arguments, but I think it’s useful to go the other way and say it’s not all that hidden.
Right. The, the universe, yes, it does not present to you every day in flaming leathers. You must have a relationship with God, the father almighty. If I look up at the sky right now, I, you know, I don’t see those words, but the universe provides a lot of strong indicators that direct you toward that possibility.
And you know that, and those indicators are, you know, the familiar ones that religious believers have tended to invoke over the years, but they’re familiar for. A reason the, you know, the order and beauty and harmony of the world is a, is a basic reality that points you in a particular direction. The nature of human experience, the nature of the self and consciousness is a particular reality that points you toward God.
The possibility of mystical experience, whether it’s, you know, the strongest, the strongest kind St. Paul knocked off his horse, or just, you know, the kind of, you know, more. More uncertain feelings of oneness and mystical encounter and so on that lots and lots of people have and that if you don’t have them Other people have them and can tell you about them, right?
You can read about them in books that are available in bookstores, right? all of that is there pointing you in a particular direction and so it’s it’s just not the case that You know, the world is this total mystery, this unfathomable mystery that we just have no idea how to react to the reason that religions exist, the reason that religion is a central part of the human experience across cultures, across civilizations, the reason that the major world religions have tended to converge, not in all things, but on a certain set of ethics that are shared across major religions, certain perspectives on the world.
There are overlaps between, you know, sort of even the Hindu idea of Brahman and the Abrahamic conception of divinity. They’re different, but they aren’t completely different, right? That those overlaps exist for a reason. The resilience and persistence of religion, all, all, all of these things are You know, it’s not that you can’t argue against them, you can, but I think that they are a, they are adequate indicators that the world, you, you as a human being have not been plunged into some sort of trap from which you cannot possibly escape.
And, and this, this relates to, to like questions about, you know, if you decided to become religious, where would you go from there? Right? Like, you know, Richard Dawkins and others make much of the idea that if one religion is true, all the other religions are false, completely false. Right? And so how are you possibly going to find that one religion?
You know, when 99. 9 percent of all religions that have ever existed have been false. I don’t think that’s the right way to look at it at all. Right? Like, like most religions. From a Christian perspective or any other, probably contain some elements of the truth. They may not contain the complete truth, but they contain elements of the truth.
And by binding yourself to one of those traditions, you probably will get closer. You may not get all the way, but you’ll probably get closer to where you’re supposed to be than if you just sit still and do absolutely nothing at all. So yeah, the sort of Dawkins perspective is the world is a trick because it asks you to believe in God, but it gives you a hundred gods and you can’t possibly know which one is the real God.
And I just don’t think that’s, I don’t think that’s true to, you know, the convergences between different religions. I don’t think it’s true to the role that religion plays in human culture. I, I think that the decision to enter sincerely into religious exploration in any time and place is just, I think we have good evidence that it will get you closer to where you’re meant to go.
than throwing up your hands and despairing of of this human situation.
[00:42:33] Dr. Mark Turman: So good. So good. Well, there’s a ton of more questions I’d like to ask, but I’m going to defer to Ryan to ask another question or two. We get, we could keep going for an easy other, another hour and our audience would, would would not know what to do with us.
So Ryan, you had a question maybe about the influences of Darwin, Copernicus, or, or one of your other thoughts that you might
[00:42:56] Dr. Ryan Denison: Well, I, and a lot of what I, I like about what you’re saying there is that I do think a lot of that the flaws in the arguments from Dawkins and Hitchens is like, they do almost presume that God should make himself abundantly clear to the point that there is no doubt about who he is, about his nature or anything like that.
And I think if you look at human nature, the. As soon as we begin to think that we understand something, we kind of get bored and move on. And I think it would be, in a lot of ways, it would be counterproductive to our relationship with God if we ever reached the point where we did fully understand Him, if that we’re even capable.
If we’re even capable of that, which we’re not. But I think one of the things we have to guard against is becoming so identified with our beliefs. And we talked about, we touched on this a little earlier that we begin to, Be so confident to the point of pride almost that we have it right to the exclusion of other people.
And in the book, you talk about how one of the ways that Christians got into a bit of trouble in the late 1800s and early 1900s was with Darwinism. And then that echoed back to Copernicus, where the church or Christianity encountered ideas that challenged things we believed and got defensive in response.
And I was curious if there, if you saw any areas in Christianity today where we’re maybe making a similar mistake, where there’s challenges to the way Christians have traditionally believed. And we almost give credence to those by responding in defensiveness versus responding to the arguments on their merits.
[00:44:27] Ross Douthat: Well, I think, yes, although I think it’s, they’re not cases always where I have my own sort of you know, clear, best way that Christians should respond. Right. So, I mean, I think, you know, one of the biggest challenges for Christians and Witness in 21st century America is the sexual revolution, right? And everything, everything associated with it.
It’s a new challenge. There isn’t an equivalent in the 15th century or the 5th century AD. It, and it’s a challenge that’s not about Like, you know, is there a God? What is the design of the universe, right? It’s a much more personal sociological challenge, right, of how do you, how do you live out a Christian sexual ethic in a society where, you know, for various reasons it doesn’t seem to fit with the way that people, the way that people live now.
I am a theological and moral conservative who thinks that, you know, broadly speaking, the attempts to just adapt Christian teaching to the sexual revolution have not gone well, right? So I, I would not look at that environment and say, Oh, Christians are just too defensive. We just need to recognize that the Holy Spirit is doing something new and we need to shift Christian teaching on, you know, same sex marriage or, in the case of my own Catholic church, divorce and so on.
In fact, I think there’s a lot of evidence that the post sexual revolution culture is not headed to a good place and needs critique. from Christians needs a Christian alternative. But with all that being said, it’s, it is also the case that there is no Christian confession that can stand up and say, Oh, we’ve figured, we figured this out, you know, here’s the exact right way to.
adapt to this new landscape and witness to and minister to people who are, you know, not living in the world of 1940, right? People who come from broken homes and have divorced parents and, you know, have gay friends or attracted to the same sex themselves. Like there’s, there, there’s no sort of simple blueprint for how you operationalize the traditional teachings that I believe in, in this landscape.
Right, so that’s, it’s a somewhat different example from Copernicus and, and Darwin. I don’t think that the sexual revolution like, you know, used a telescope to, to open some unfathomable new perspective on the world. It’s more about sociology and economics and a lot of, a lot of other, you know, and technology, the birth control pill.
But I do think it requires more, much more than a simple reiteration. of Christian teaching on those, on those issues. It requires sort of, again, experiment, exploration, and charity in how you deal with the complexities that this new landscape has opened up.
[00:47:23] Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah, a lot to, a lot to think about there. And something that’s very important in our work and in thinking as well.
There’s again, so many more questions that both Ryan and I want to ask Ross, but we’re going to be respectful of your time, but we want to maybe land in a couple of places. If you could, you included in this book some of the story of your own faith journey. Can you give us a word about that? Why, why you included it and maybe a highlight or two in your journey of what’s brought you to the place of faith that you’re in now.
And then maybe a bit of advice of besides encouraging somebody to read the book, which we would all be in favor of. But where would you encourage someone to start? If they encounter your book and they’re like, okay, I’m going to get serious about this and I’m going to really pursue this, where would you suggest that they start?
Let’s see if we can land on those two ideas.
[00:48:18] Ross Douthat: Sure. I mean, in terms of my own personal journey, I’ve written about it in different ways. A few times. It’s an interesting case because I was, I was a kind of childhood observer. Of my parents and especially my mother’s much more intense religious pilgrimage and journey and exploration, right?
So once we landed on Catholicism, I have remained Catholic since. I’ve, my views on certain things have changed. I’ve, you know, lived my life and had experiences and so on. But I haven’t been on a sort of intense pilgrimage in my adult life. But in a way, I think that gives me an interesting perspective because I was, I mean, my parents were, again, in sort of charismatic and Pentecostalist circles.
People were speaking in tongues, being slain in the spirit. I was watching this as a seven year old, right, and as a child. And so I, in a way, I sort of developed this kind of like, William Jamesian interest in the varieties of mystical experience from childhood, not having the experiences myself, believing them to be real or corresponding to spiritual realities, and just being interested in trying to think, trying to sort of reason about them and treat them as a real part of the world that, you know, that, that you need to fit into your world picture.
Right? And I think, you know, I spend a certain amount of time talking about this in the book, but just generally, I don’t think The secular and materialist world picture, in addition to its other failings, has adequately encountered and thought through what religious experience is, why it persists, and what it suggests about the nature of reality.
So in that sense, that’s something from my own childhood that’s important to how I think about arguments about religion and irreligion. today. You know, in terms of, in terms of further advice, I, I think it honestly, it depends on, in a way, like which part of the argument is most interesting and what, and also like sort of what your immediate, you know, what, what you are immediately looking for or feel like you’re being impelled toward in religion, right?
Which is going to vary for reasons you guys were, you know, describing just in, you know, the difference between our, our respective experiences, right? You know, I think there are people for whom I, I would say like, if you’re really interested in You know, the arguments about fine tuning, right? And, and the, and the cosmos, right?
These sort of areas where I think, you know, science is actually pointing the way back toward religion. Then there’s, you know, Books that I would, that I would recommend on, on that, that subject, just, you know, one I wrote about that just came out in the last year, a book by Spencer Clavin that’s that’s about sort of ultimately how quantum theory and what quantum theory suggests about the role of the mind in the cosmos it’s called light of the mind, light of the world.
Right? Like that, you know, if that’s sort of your particular thing, if you’re like, wow, I hadn’t really thought about sort of the connection between modern science and ancient, ancient faith. Right? You know, you can follow some of the footnotes in, in my book to other arguments in that area. So that, you know, but then, but then, then there are also people for whom the best advice is, you know, just to go to church.
Right. And, and this is, this is, and, and this, in a way, this sort of brings me back to the very argument that I started out critiquing a little bit, right? The idea that you know, oh, you know, you don’t need to, you don’t need to have a rational foundation. You should just start going to church. And I’m saying, no, you know, you, You should have a rational foundation.
You should have confidence that going to church makes sense. But then you still have to do it. Right? Like, you can read a book like mine and say, Man, there probably is a God. And, you know, religious arguments are really interesting. And just sort of stay with that for a while. And never actually start doing, doing it, like putting yourself in a position where you might actually encounter God.
Or if you don’t encounter God exactly, right, or you don’t, it’s still just like doing the thing that you think God wants you to do. So in that sense. Yeah, sort of, you know, if you don’t have some definite conviction that this branch or that branch of Christianity is the one true church, you still probably have a church somewhere that you have some connection to through friends or your neighborhood or your family or your ancestry.
And going there is as good a place to start as any.
[00:53:17] Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah, great word, great word. And we would absolutely here at the beginning of the year, strongly encourage folks to do that. And as you said, get started. Do something. Do something. Yeah, and this is way more important than renewing your gym membership. So, that’s right.
That’s a, that’s a good thing, but this is way beyond that in, in a big way. So we would encourage you, the book is Believe Why Everyone Should Be Religious by Ross Douthat. And we hope you’ll pick up a copy or grab the audio version, whatever format works for you and that you’ll pick it up and, and journey along with Ross in this conversation.
Perhaps use this resource to pass on to others as well can be very, very helpful in that way. Ross, thank you for joining us. Ryan, thank you for helping us with our conversation today. And as we always say, we’re very grateful for you, our audience, and we hope that you’ll join us the next time on the Denison Forum Podcast.
God bless you, and we’ll see you soon. Thanks so much, guys. It was a pleasure.
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