Ross Douthat, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. Zondervan, 2025. $29.99. 240 pp.
Why would anyone bother believing in God? Ross Douthat’s Believe takes up this perennial question to persuade people that belief is worth it. Note, already, the curiosity here—his task is to persuade readers that belief is “worth it”—not that it is true or that God is real or that hell is a given. Pascal’s wager once suggested that a gambler would be better off betting on God. If real, God might provide eternal reward, and if false, could do nothing anyway. Similarly, Douthat’s argument is that belief is the better of the options available to modern man. He has two audiences in mind.
The first are those who were influenced by the late Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and other thinkers associated with the New Atheist movement. The New Atheists place the logical weight on disbelief instead of on belief. They assume that scientific causes always trump theological ones and that the universe is a product of material effects that, even if they could not be tracked, shows no signs of external meddling. No proof of a divine reality functions as proof, because the lack of logical reason to believe in God serves as evidence against God’s existence.
The second audience is the sort of eager, self-starting young person who might attend a lecture at Yale and read Douthat’s column in the New York Times. I say this, because the traits that Douthat appeals to—a desire to improve one’s life, an interest in intellectual consistency, a search for meaning and a plan of action to pursue it—are certainly not traits that are universally shared. Were you to have them, you might find Douthat’s proposal compelling. Otherwise, the book would ring hollow.
As far as God is concerned, Douthat argues that the “burden of proof” for God’s existence has shifted to the “no’s.” But for years the burden rested with the affirmative, with God’s existence assumed a given. It was God who brought the rains and the harvest or who punished the world with fire and flood. Our modern estimation of such assumptions prevails against the simplicity of this view of the divine, but this does not make it false. Up until very recently, gods simply were.
Modern man’s inclination to bet against God shows up in forms of materialism, which assume that “all that there is” is all that there is. Philosophers such as David Hume reinforced this view, when he said that “supernatural and miraculous relations” were “observed chiefly to abound among ignorant and barbarous nations.” Hume’s bias against the supernatural is here combined with elitism to make a version of anti-supernatural bias similar to the one we adopt today.
However, Douthat does not buy the disenchantment thesis. Nor does he mimic Hume’s elite biases. We moderns have our tarot cards read and watch the cycles of the moon and dabble in yoga and ayahuasca. Supernatural experiences themselves have not ceased, even if they lack the dramatic scale that Moses enjoyed. Experiences ranging from charismatic mystical encounters to levitating saints are reported from ancient history to the modern day. But these experiences exist underneath a plausibility structure that seeks to explain them away. Perhaps they were figments of your imagination or a sign of low blood sugar. Either way, seeking for a neurological or physical cause for the mystical experiences that do occur reveals our materialist bias.
Douthat has two primary strategies for disabusing this materialist logic. The first is to take to task the assumption of “no meddling.” The world, in his view, reveals a universe that is too exquisite to be without referent. Douthat begins with several arguments that have long been used to ascertain the existence of God (or, at least, god). The world’s natural complexity and beautiful order seem to prevail against a reductive materialism. The “systems don’t just manifest a crude functionality; they often seem beautiful, graceful, and sublime, offering visions that even on an ordinary day can stir extraordinary awe, that both inspire and exceed the human capacity for art.”
Further, reflective humans might discern their “own subordination within a higher order.” They might perceive a sense of relation between what we are and what the gods are—moral, rational, agential, creative—then tracing these qualities back to their true origin in the divine.
Finally, we might discern that the world is a little bit enchanted in its beautiful and mysterious workings.
All of these arguments have fallen flat in a modern world that relies on purely scientific causes for the universe’s origin and its design. But Douthat works across multiple religious traditions to try to examine these arguments apart from the jaded bias that denizens of modernity bring to them.
But there is a second argument for religion that crops up throughout Douthat’s book. It seems he’s got the spooks. For as often as Douthat relies on reworking classical arguments for the existence of God, a second set of arguments works to promote belief in the existence of God, but with a different motivation. Douthat frequently inveighs that if supernatural realities do exist, we are naïve to think that they are entirely and uncomplicatedly good and seeking our benefit. If God exists, so too do spiritual realities like demons who seek our harm. Pursuing the truth about God in this context imbues the process with more than a little dread. Choose wisely, Douthat whispers, or be left to your peril.
This haunted world that Douthat speaks of is little known to his readers. His preoccupation with its reality is one of this book’s charms and puzzles. For as much as Douthat is clear that the world is enchanted, and that its spirits sometimes seek to do us harm, he is reticent to insist upon one religion’s superiority over others. He does insist that his readers should choose only one among the world’s great religions, but he does not weigh in terribly much regarding which one. Indeed, he is consistently (and refreshingly) able to speak of the benefits of many of the world’s religions, from the religions of the East to Buddhism and Islam and Judaism, Christianity’s closer cousins.
Douthat himself is a practicing Roman Catholic (“practicing” is a significant adjective here, as we will see). What is most important to Douthat is that people choose a religion and commit to its teachings—but he is quite content that they choose any religion for this purpose. Any religion, with its acknowledgement of a higher power and its strict demands on human living, is better in the end than no religion. And any religion is more likely to lead you to a True religion, whatever it is, than practicing no religion at all. But this in itself is a bit of a logical red herring. If God really does exist, and if by being “religious” we might pursue something of the truth about him and about the world, then wouldn’t it matter quite a lot which religion we commit ourselves to? If dark forces do exist, might they seek to deceive us about this truth and lead us astray? And is there in fact in the end any good that comes from the practice of religion, if the religion itself is not about God?
Douthat gets at this second concern with the pragmatic thrust of his book. He frequently asks his readers: What have you got to lose? It’s a modern version of Pascal’s wager. If God is not real, betting on him cost you little. But if God is real, there is no less than a relationship with God himself at stake.
And yet, if the god that you bet on is not, in fact, the real God, it seems that you might have quite a lot to lose, after all. Therein lies the problem with Douthat’s argument not for committing to the right, true God, but simply committing or practicing at all as better than simply remaining afloat. Douthat writes: “In the end the meaningful life is usually the committed life; the dilettante’s posture must yield at some point to the active choice. Better to face the consequences of even a mistaken commitment or decision than to hear, at the last, the fateful judgment ‘because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.’”
This was for me the most puzzling angle of the book. Douthat wants his readers to commit to belief in God. He wants this because God is real. The weight of the arguments against God’s existence has been overblown. Instead of giving into the crass materialism of the modern world, Douthat aims to persuade us to give religion a try.
But the point of God, it seems to me, is that he exists. Not only this, but that he exists in such a way as to make demands upon us. These demands are various—submit, repent, obey—but the demands only pertain because the God who makes them is the real, active and living God. Were he otherwise, his commands would be null and void. Following these commands, were he not real, would make you nothing but a fool. There is little to be gained, I think, from committing to practicing a religion tied to a false god.
Douthat is a sophisticated thinker and a beautiful writer. His book clearly arose from many conversations and engagements with people (young ones, I suspect) who were seeking guidance for their lives. But in engaging passionately the arguments for the existence of God, Douthat fails to speak of such arguments in religion’s own vernacular. He makes religion, in turn, something we might try on like an overcoat, to see if it suits us. He wants us to do so because he himself thinks religion is true and has found it both beautiful and useful. But simply arguing that religion might suit us, or that we might try it on for size, seems to me quite the wrong reason to be religious—and all the more so, if there are real ghosts around.