Review of Ross Douthat’s Believe
On contemporary apologetics, the comforts of modernity, and why better arguments may not revive religion
Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious By Ross Douthat • Zondervan • 2025 • 240 pages • Buy
If you listen to the arguments religious believers most often make today, you could be forgiven for thinking that the strongest case for faith is essentially utilitarian: it is better, for individuals and for societies, if we are religious. The decline of traditional religion, we are told, drives people toward worse alternatives, where political ideologies or lifestyle cults become quasi-religious. Surveys report that, on average, more religious people say they are happier and healthier. They tend to have more children and seem less prone to the diseases of modern anomie, like loneliness and despair.
But for a genuinely religious person, this cannot be enough. A purely utilitarian defense makes faith look like a noble lie, a useful fiction we adopt not because it is true but because believing it produces good outcomes. This defense collapses the moment one encounters people who have found happiness and prosperity without being religious—and such people are not hard to find. To defend religion as not merely useful but true, something more is required.
Ross Douthat, the New York Times columnist, tries to offer that in his book Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. “[It] is the religious perspective,” he writes, “that has the better case by far for being true.”
Douthat starts with the fine-tuning argument: the idea that the universe appears designed for life, since it would not exist in its current form if the constants of nature were even slightly different. He moves through the mystery of consciousness and the explanatory gaps that materialism cannot seem to close—arguments that have been made for centuries, respectable though they have equally respectable replies. More interesting is his emphasis on mystical experiences, encounters with the supernatural that persist even among educated people. Disenchantment, he suggests, was always more ideology than description; even secular moderns keep having experiences that resist a strictly materialist worldview.
There is something shrewd in this approach. We live in a time when the news is often stranger than fiction, when the confident pronouncements of experts have been humbled again and again, and when physics reveals a reality far stranger than common sense would allow. In such an environment, why not take seriously the insights that billions of people across thousands of years have kept arriving at, the persistent human sense that there is more to reality than atoms in the void?
And yet it is hard to imagine this book persuading many people on rational grounds. The god-of-the-gaps arguments remain vulnerable to their familiar objection: unexplained phenomena are not evidence of the divine, only evidence of what we do not yet understand. The appeal to inexplicable and mystical experiences proves both too much and too little—too much because every religion and pseudo-religion can claim its own miracles, too little because personal experience, however vivid, cannot serve as public evidence. And when Douthat faces the genuinely difficult questions—why a benevolent God permits the suffering of innocents, for instance—the rational apparatus begins to falter. We cannot judge how good and evil are balanced in the cosmos, he suggests, because we lack the capacity to comprehend the whole. This is an ancient answer, and he does not make it more convincing.
What the book actually demonstrates—perhaps despite itself—is that the utilitarian case remains the strongest one available. Douthat is at his most persuasive when he describes the decadence of modern secular life, the loneliness and purposelessness that afflict so many. If your life feels meaningless, religion will give you meaning. If the path you have chosen leads to declining birth rates and civilizational ennui, religion offers a remedy. This is compelling. It is also, still, a utilitarian argument.
The deeper problem, which Douthat touches on in his work but does not fully confront, is that modernity’s greatest assault on religion may not be intellectual at all. It is not simply that modern science has produced arguments against God. It is that modern life has transformed the material conditions under which belief naturally flourishes.
Organic, unforced religiosity has tended to arise under certain conditions: an intimacy with the elements and with unjustifiable suffering and painful, premature death; lack of optimism about material progress in this world; a comfort with things rough and elemental; an unquestioned adherence to inherited duties and authorities. These conditions are now rare—certainly in the developed world, and increasingly in much of the developing world as well. We are buffered from premature death, insulated from nature, liberated from tradition, educated into naturalism, habituated to progress. It is telling that even theocratic societies, where religion retains political power, are increasingly marked by the same symptoms that afflict secular ones, such as falling birth rates. The problem, it seems, is not simply secularism. It is modernity itself.
This is the unspoken melancholy beneath the project of Douthat and his fellow travelers. They are trying to reason people back into faith in an age when the conditions that make faith feel natural have largely vanished. But if the main obstacle to belief is not bad arguments but material comfort, then the path back to faith may not run through better apologetics. It may run through catastrophe. If what dimmed the religious instinct was progress, then what might rekindle it is the undoing of progress—a prospect that even those who long for belief to flourish can hardly welcome.
Keep Reading:
→ Review of Tyler Cowen’s Stubborn Attachments
→ Michael Shermer on Morality and Science (podcast)
→ A Conversation with Garett Jones on DemocracyOther Projects:
→ Universal Open Textbook Initiative (free, multilingual textbooks)
→ Aesthete (curate your culture — iOS app)