Mere religion

Arguments for religious faith often serve as windows onto their times. In 1799, Friedrich Schleiermacher published a treatise to persuade the Enlightenment’s “cultural despisers” of the validity of religious experience. C. S. Lewis’s BBC broadcasts during the Second World War and Billy Graham’s postwar evangelical crusades drew on still widely shared concepts such as sin and salvation to help people embrace faith in Jesus of Nazareth. Early-twenty-first-century apologetics braced themselves to withstand the tidal onslaught of New Atheism.

That wave, too, has ebbed. And Believe, by the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, signifies the arrival of a new spiritual sensibility. If Lewis argued for “mere Christianity”, Douthat makes a case for “mere religion”. The main rivals to traditional faith today aren’t scientific objections or secularist proposals, but the surge of interest in emergent spiritualities, self-help literature, mindfulness gurus, a fascination with AI, politicized religion, conspiracy theories, psychedelics, the lure of the occult and, ultimately, the prospect of a neopagan age. As G. K. Chesterton is thought to have put it: “When men stop believing in God they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything.”

Douthat’s guide to faith addresses topics included in similar books. Among the arguments for religion, he analyses the universe’s remarkable design, the mysteries of human consciousness and the pervasiveness of supernatural experiences even in supposedly disenchanted societies. And he briefly answers common objections to religion such as the problem of evil and suffering, the moral track record of religious institutions and their teachings on sexuality. But the book’s most timely argument is its case for faiths that have survived the test of the centuries over fads and novelties: “it’s a reasonable bet that the big, resilient, long-enduring faith traditions – Christianity and Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism – are more likely to stand in a strong relationship to the truth about existence than religions that flared and died, that subsist in cultural isolation, or that came into existence the day before yesterday”.

In previous books, Douthat has assumed the perspective of a social critic to decry the effects of religious decline in modernity. These effects include the development of “bad religion” that customarily mixes faith with unholy elements such as political agendas, material greed or individual autonomy, and the ways in which societies become more decadent when religions are regarded as private phenomena, but not recognized as contributors to debates about the common good. In Believe, by contrast, the author adopts an apologist’s perspective. He invites readers to consider the enduring merits of old-time religion and to rate them above the novel charms of “bad religion”.

Some readers might not find his case personable enough. And his personal journey as a Roman Catholic, recounted in the book’s final chapter, isn’t as, well, dramatic as the born-again testimonies and come-to-the-altar appeals that move hearts in evangelical churches. But Douthat’s clarity guides readers across the complex terrains of religious diversity and the debates around science and faith. He is explicit about his Catholic commitment while remaining even-handed towards other traditions. And he genuinely puts himself in the shoes of a would-be seeker surveying the present landscape.

Believe is a concise resource to help educated inquirers sort through the relevant intellectual questions. Staunch sceptics and religious readers might have other interests, but those in between – open to spiritual possibilities, but reticent to commit – might appreciate a calm exposition of the choices that could lead them to participate in a historic faith.

“Once you concede that the universe might be a bit more than just a collision of atoms doing meaningless expansions and contractions”, Ross Douthat writes, “you are standing in the same place that generations of human beings have found themselves before: at the beginning of a journey, a quest, a pilgrim’s progress, that you have good reason to believe is going somewhere quite important, somewhere of ultimate significance.”

René Breuel is the author of The Paradox of Happiness, 2013, and the Founding Pastor of Hopera, an evangelical church in Rome

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