Something is happening. Christianity is having a moment. Our culture is shifting. Whether this change will be minor, temporary, or tectonic, we cannot know. Nor can we know where it will end—or even whether it will be good.
What we can say is that much that was certain is now up for grabs. Much that seemed settled has been shaken up. Old orthodoxies are under assault. Will new ones emerge? Or will the real article, orthodoxy proper, reemerge as the only viable answer to the restless longings of human hearts?
Time will tell. For now, we should be keen to read the signs of the times. Intellectuals are converting. Atheists are softening. Agnostics are hungry. No longer are believers on the back foot, defending alleged irrationality before a hostile consensus. Crystals and hexes, seances and saints, meditation and manifesting, angels and aliens, goop and God—the whole syncretistic bundle is out in the open now. Religion is afoot in the public square.
Not that it ever went anywhere, except underground. It’s true that measurable, institutional forms of religion have been in decline—and not only in Europe, where the loss is most pronounced, but also here in the US, where religiosity has always been more spectacular, entrepreneurial, and grassroots, reveling in its disestablishment.
Scholars like Phil Zuckerman are right to hold Christians’ feet to the fire on this point: Narrowly defined, the secularization thesis is demonstrably true. Millions of people in the West now live lives devoid of formal religion and default to supposing the supernatural is of no relevance to their daily concerns. This is genuinely new in human history.
But the secularization thesis is often overextended into a false story of inevitability and materialism. As it turns out, post-religious people are not thoroughly disenchanted. They may not attend church or pray, but they’re quite open to a spooky cosmos. Indeed, many appear to take it for granted. And because living with Mammon for a master is as soul crushing as Jesus long ago warned, materialism has its discontents. We were made for more. We were made, full stop.
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Why everyone should be religious
Ross Douthat, a Catholic columnist for The New York Times, has written a new book in response to this moment and to the readers he’s trying to reach. In Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, Douthat makes a Pascalian pitch to the curious among the post-secular crowd.
Blaise Pascal was a French thinker who lived 400 years ago. His too was a time of religious and technological upheaval, one straddling the end of the Middle Ages, the Reformation’s fresh divisions of Christendom, and the beginnings of “enlightened” modernity. In such a time, and in response especially to religion’s cultured despisers, Pascal wrote that the first task for Christian thinkers is “to show that religion is not contrary to reason, but worthy of reverence and respect.” This is just what Douthat sets out to do, and he likewise follows Pascal in stressing the existential urgency of religious questions and the necessity of placing one’s wager.
“It affects our whole life to know whether the soul is mortal or immortal,” as Pascal put it. “Anyone with only a week to live will not find it in his interest to believe that all this is just a matter of chance.” And though we may (or may not!) have more than a week to live, inaction is impossible. You cannot choose not to choose. Your life is your seat at the table, and you must play the cards you were dealt. Declining to play is not an option; folding is itself a play.
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Pascal famously chose to wager: “I should be much more afraid of being mistaken and then finding out that Christianity is true than of being mistaken in believing it to be true.” Douthat doesn’t quite take this tack, but Pascal’s confidence and resolution, his unwillingness to let the reader off the hook, are present on every page.
This approach to religion is present in all Douthat’s writing. As a conservative Catholic writing for a liberal audience in the Times, Douthat is an expert at fine-tuning tone to topic and readership. In his previous books and columns alike, Douthat is cautious, coy, patient, and pleasant, ready to present different perspectives or to challenge the assumptions of whoever is reading his words.
Matters of first importance, though, Douthat doesn’t soft-pedal. Morally and politically, he plants his flag on abortionand same-sex marriage. Theologically and philosophically, he refuses to budge on the shortcomings of secularism and the strengths of theism. Atheism and scientism aren’t merely vulnerable to criticism; they’re absurd. The existence of God—indeed, of angels and demons and the whole spiritual realm—isn’t simply plausible or probable. It’s far and away the most rational interpretation of the evidence.
Back in 2012, responding to New Atheism’s cultural influence, Francis Spufford wrote a wonderful book called Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense. For Douthat, there is no “despite everything.”
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A rational argument for mere religion
To understand Douthat’s method, recall a scene from the end of the third Indiana Jones film. Indy is faced with a choice: Let his father die or take a leap of faith. The leap in this case is literal, a physical step into a chasm with nothing to hold him up. He takes the step, and by a miracle of movie magic, doesn’t fall. There was a bridge in front of him all along, invisible to the human eye.
For some, this is a picture of true faith: a passionate, even reckless jump into the unknown, based on blind trust, not reason. Douthat demurs. As he writes, “Joining and practicing [some faith] is fundamentally a rational decision, not just an eyes-closed, trust-your-friends-and-intuitions jump.” You can and should consider the case in your mind.
Moreover, whatever the social benefits of church—and they are many!—they aren’t the place to start. They’re a byproduct of the thing itself, and that’s of interest only if it’s true. That’s why Douthat opts to “start with religion’s intellectual advantage: the ways in which nonbelief requires ignoring what our reasoning faculties tell us, while the religious perspective grapples more fully with the evidence before us.”
This is not a case for mere Christianity, then, so much as “mere religion.” Though Douthat ends the book with a chapter explaining why he is Roman Catholic, his aim is to clear the ground for religious commitment in general, to show why Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, and Jews as much as Catholics and Protestants are not exotic residue of a superstitious past.
“Reason still points godward,” he writes, and you don’t have to be a scholar to see it. Douthat’s self-described “unsophisticated” argument begins by showing why a religious perspective on reality is reasonable, then pushes the reader to grasp why that matters.
His goal isn’t to get readers to Mass. But it is to get them somewhere. Moving from a vague agnosticism to a vague theism isn’t going to cut it. Ambivalence is the enemy. “Life is short and death is certain,” he writes at his most Pascalian. Readers who are spiritually asleep must wake up. Only once they’re awake can they come to considered judgments about the reality they finally see.
Weird religion in an enchanted cosmos
It bears repeating that Douthat is not primarily writing to Christians or even to members of other religious traditions. He is writing to atheists, to agnostics, to open-minded but decidedly nonreligious seekers. More than anything, he is offering a permission structure, from one reasonable modern to another, for people to take their first steps toward the supernatural without feeling as if they are betraying their class, their education, their own minds. And he’s trying to capitalize on this odd moment for as long as it lasts, while strict scientism is in retreat and a broad spiritual openness is on the rise.
If Douthat were preaching, I’d be the choir. But he’s not, so the question is whether he succeeds for a reader who isn’t a Christian, much less a theologian. He does, for at least three reasons.
The first is the modesty of his goal. He isn’t demonstrating with certainty that God exists, in the manner of William Lane Craig or Edward Feser. He’s standing alongside readers, directing their gaze to a transcendent explanation for their own observations and experiences. There’s an audience for precise logical deduction, but the audience for this kind of argument, rooted in ordinary features of daily experience, is bigger by far.
Second, Douthat’s interreligious generosity is unfeigned; he really would prefer a reader embrace a religion other than Christianity than remain irreligious, agnostic, or noncommittal. And Christian convictions anchor this preference: For Douthat, the truth of Christian revelation is not an all-or-nothing affair. Neither the Shema nor the Nicene Creedrequires the total falsehood of every idea, text, and practice of every other spiritual tradition in the world. Much good and many true things may be found there, and adherents are not wrong to prize them.
Further, Douthat believes in divine providence. A step toward Christ outside the church is nonetheless a step in the right direction. In this he takes Christ at his word: “Everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened” (Matt 7:8).
None of this is to suggest Douthat is nonchalant about idolatry or the dangers of the demonic. On the contrary, he warns readers about excessive interest in the occult and defends belief in hell, the Devil, and exorcism. Yet he sees the spiritual lethargy of hard materialism and the listlessness of agnosticism as the true enemy of our time. The same Christ who promises to meet every honest seeker face-to-face also promises to vomit the lukewarm out of his mouth (Rev. 3:16). Douthat wants readers of his book to be hot or cold by the end, with no one left in between.
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The last strength of Douthat’s case is his steadfast willingness to be weird. For this he is unapologetic. Jacques Vallee popularized the term invisible college to describe people who take the UFO phenomenon seriously. In effect, Douthat believes there to be a similarly unseen and equally disreputable society of believers in the uncanny, the ecstatic, the inexplicable. After all, “When intellectuals stopped taking mystical experiences seriously, actual human beings kept on having the experiences.”
It is here that conversations among Christians about enchantment, or “re-enchantment,” are most relevant. As scholar Alan Jacobs has argued, it is not necessarily better to live in an enchanted society than in a disenchanted society. Moderns, for all their faults, do not cut out living hearts to appease the gods, while the enchanted ancients were often dominated by bloodthirsty demons. The gospel announced by the apostles, then, neither enchanted nor disenchanted an otherwise pagan cosmos. It went to war against pagan gods under the banner of Christ. It proclaimed the end of their tyranny and deployed the power of Christ’s Spirit to prove it.
We neither can nor should want to return to a world before Christ’s victory over the powers. But we must recognize that ours is a world still spiritually contested, and Believe does this well.
If, as the church teaches, the arid machine of the materialist universe is false; if, as Jesus’s life and ministry show, angels and demons populate this world; if, as Scripture and tradition hold, spiritual reality is far stranger than even most Western Christians want to admit—then we already live in an enchanted cosmos. Our words and deeds, our preaching and worship should reflect it.
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We should, that is to say, live in the real world, the world the gospel claims to describe truthfully. We should not seek a false shelter in the spiritual vacuum of secularism. There is no such thing. Every God-ridden place turns out to be haunted, in one way or another.
Douthat advises: Wake up and look around you. That eerie presence you sense or suspect is not a fiction. Whether a human ghost or the Holy Ghost or something else entirely, it is all too real. Accepting that is the easy part. The hard part comes next: Place your bet.
Brad East is an associate professor of theology at Abilene Christian University. He is the author of four books, including The Church: A Guide to the People of God and Letters to a Future Saint.
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