New York Times columnist Ross Douthat did not write his new book Believe for me personally (that honor appears to belong to The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson, who is mentioned in the introduction), but it is at least written for people like me.
“I am a believing Christian,” Douthat says, explaining his motive for writing the book, “but I am not attempting a wholesale defense of Christianity … I think our moment could use something more basic, an argument that tries to lay a general foundation for religious interest and belief, to persuade skeptical readers that it’s worth becoming a seeker in the first place, and to provide guideposts and suggestions for people whose journeys begin in different places or take them in different directions.”
Douthat appears to be speaking to a relatively new group of Americans, the “nones,” although he does not use that term in the book (he has in his columns, though). This category of nones includes atheists and agnostics, but these nonbelievers are actually a minority within a minority. Most nones believe in God. They just don’t identify as belonging to any organized religion. And this unorganized believing mass actually outnumbers any one church. At 28% of all adults, nones now outnumber evangelical Protestants (24%) and Catholics (23%).
As one might expect, the youngest generations are the most likely to identify with the nones. Some 42% of Generation Z belong to the group as opposed to just 21% of the Silent Generation. Unlike atheists, who are overwhelmingly male, college-educated, wealthy, and urban, the nones are more evenly balanced between genders, are not college-educated, and are less likely to vote or volunteer in their communities.
“There are 80 million nones in America today,” political scientist Ryan Burge writes in his book The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are, and Where They Are Going, “and they all got there by a different path.”
Like a growing number of nones, I was raised without any religion at all. My mother was actually a novitiate when she left the Catholic Church years before she met my father in the summer of 1968. Neither of them attended church when they met, nor did they start attending one after they had me 10 years later.
It’s not that they spoke ill of any particular religion. They were both liberal Democrats who hated Republicans generally and Ronald Reagan specifically, but they did so entirely on secular grounds. If anything, they often encouraged me to attend services with believing family friends, so I would have the experience of what religion was like. I mostly enjoyed these services, but I could never shake the feeling of being a tourist.
Mostly, religion never came up, and I rarely thought about it until my father finally lost a long battle with cancer during my freshmen year in high school. At that point, I sought out more spiritually themed material, ultimately coming to the conclusion that God must exist since the direction of both evolution (from single-celled organisms to us) and human civilization (from hunter-gatherer tribes to global empires) revealed an ever-growing complexity that pointed to some higher power that humans, as of now, cannot explain.
Douthat’s first argument for the existence of God makes a similar case, although he stresses evidence that the universe was made for humans specifically more than I feel is necessary or warranted. His later arguments for the existence of God — consciousness can’t be explained through science, nor can the supernatural experiences of other people — may move others toward belief, but they left me wanting. (Dogs and snakes are conscious, too; how does that prove God exists? It’s nice that other people have experienced the supernatural, but that doesn’t help me believe anything.)
Douthat then pushes the reader to move beyond mere belief in God and into a specific religion, arguing that “the idea that you are better off putting together a religious worldview entirely of your own … presumes a lot upon the strength your individual intellect and moral compass, to say nothing of more supernatural questions.”
It’s better to choose one of the older, bigger traditions that have proven through their age and popularity that they represent “an advancement, a convergence, toward a truer picture of reality.”
A good place to start, Douthat argues, is “whatever religious tradition seems to have been placed before you, whether through familial inheritance or social connections or political and cultural affinities, and hope that God placed it there for some good reason.”
Fair enough. My parents were raised Catholic. Most of my conservative colleagues are Catholic. I just wrote a book arguing that the Catholic Church’s teachings on sexual ethics were essential for the birth of democracy. Catholicism seemed like a good place to start.
And, to be honest, there is much to love about Catholicism.
“So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.” Matthew 7:12.
“Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all.” Mark 10:44.
“For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does; likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does.” Corinthians 7:4.
But as much as I may want to believe all of the Catholic teachings, I just can’t. The genealogies in Matthew and Luke are different. The last words of Jesus on the cross are different in Mark, Luke, and John. Who first goes to Jesus’s tomb, what they see, and what they are told are different in all four Gospels. There are explanations that smooth over these contradictions. I’ve read them. I don’t find them convincing.
I want to believe. I just can’t.
There is a moment in Douthat’s book when he recounts a late-night debate with the author and famous atheist Christopher Hitchens, who asked Douthat, “Suppose that Jesus of Nazareth really did rise from the dead … Well, then what exactly would that really prove?”
For me, it would prove a lot. But I want to flip that question back on Douthat. Suppose that Jesus did not rise from the dead. What would that prove? Would the beatitudes be any less true? Would the sexual ethics of the church suddenly be false? Would the parable of the Sheep and Goats be any less of a compelling guide for moral behavior?
If Christianity is a map of reality (an analogy Douthat uses for all religions in the book), is the map worthless without the resurrection?
I truly don’t wish to disaffect anyone’s faith. It is precious. Treasure it. Pass it down to your children. If anything, I am writing to reinforce how hard religious belief can be regained once lost.
After growing for decades, the percentage of nones seems to have leveled off at about 30%. This is good because organized religion does have many benefits for society, including engendering trust among strangers, encouraging civic participation, and supporting young men and women who want to get and stay married.
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And I do hope Douthat and his colleagues are successful in bringing back more into the fold.
I just have my doubts.