Book Review: "Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious" by Ross Douthat

Most preachers can relate to the scenario wherein you find yourself desperately trying to convince an audience that faith in Christ means more than being a “good” person. Many times, in this situation, a presentation of the gospel might sound like a critique of moral living. A preacher might find himself, given the appropriate audience and the appropriate context, saying something like, “Pharisees only repent of their sins, but Christians repent for the very roots of their righteousness, too.”

Of course, this isn’t a criticism of good works. It’s a criticism of trusting in them instead of trusting in Jesus. To the unprepared listener, though, this type of talk can sound subversive, and not in the good way. It can sound like naivete, foolishly taking for granted the incredible benefits to self and society of upright behavior. It could sound godless, like a therapeutic Christianity that leaves aside good and evil for better feelings. Fine indeed is the line between morality and moralism, as some evangelical skirmishes over the benefits (or lackthereof) of “civil religion” demonstrate.

But of course, much of this kind of argument is just a matter of getting our interrogatives clear. “Repenting of your righteousness” means something very different depending on to whom it is preached, and to where.

Educated Emma

I can see an evangelical like me having some discomfort with Ross Douthat’s book Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. There are passages in the book that sound a lot like a comparative religion textbook. There is overstatement of the symmetry between Islam and Christianity, and understatement (from a Christian perspective) of the eternal stakes of accounting for Jesus Christ’s work, death, and resurrection. Some pages feel “squishy,” “pluralistic,” and “interfaith.”

But I actually think these qualms resolve with, again, some interrogative clarity. To whom is Douthat writing? It’s pretty clear: He’s writing to a secular audience with intellectual assumptions and aesthetic preferences that preemptively exclude, at least at first, the mere possibility of becoming a Christian. Douthat’s target reader is not a pious personality limping between traditions, but the kind of New York Times reader who, in 2025, feels the barriers of respectability and choice paralysis when it comes to religion.

This reader—we’ll call her Emma—has an interesting relationship to religion. Unlike her Gen-X relatives, she is not angry at a God that doesn’t exist. Hers is not a personal, Christopher Hitchens-esque unbelief. She has merely assumed, alongside her teachers, authors, and NPR streams, that religion is not for someone like her. How can a truly thoughtful person believe, as Bill Maher put it once, in “embarrassing anachronisms from the Bronze Age”?

On the other hand, it seems pretty clear to Emma that there are things out there that can’t be explained on a scientific chart. Where do beauty and love come from if everything is just atoms in motion? Why do religious buildings and religious art seem to mean something that pop music and corporate skyscrapers don’t? But even if Emma, educated and earnest as she is, wanted to do something about this vague spirituality that’s been needling her lately, how in the world could she actually pick something? Why not just grab a few paperbacks from Barnes and Noble, do some self-care, and make it up as she goes?

In response to Emma’s question, I’d hand her a copy of Believe. Douthat doesn’t say everything that a Christian needs to say. But he says enough of what a person like Emma needs to hear. The closer you look at what he’s doing in this book, the more you see that the actual evangelistic pull isn’t toward the Christian gospel per se, nor is it really even toward religion in general. Readers are invited to consider both, but that’s not where Douthat’s real power is. Rather, Believe is a tract against chronological snobbery. It’s an altar call to repent from the sin of secular self-congratulation.

Against Bespoke Spirituality

One of my favorite parts of the book is where Douthat tells the spiritually curious reader that they should not assume they’re smart enough to piece together the mysteries of life by themselves:

But the idea that you are better off putting together a religious worldview entirely on your own, simply taking a bit here from one faith or a bit there from another, presumes a lot upon the strength of your individual intellect and moral compass, to say nothing of more supernatural questions. It may be theoretically possible to generate a healthy way of being religious in this way. But unless you have a very high opinion of yourself, or of God’s special favor, it’s not the natural way to bet.

The chapter in which this paragraph appears is titled “The Case for Commitment,” in which Douthat tries to slow-roll the reader into accepting that the path toward both metaphysical truth and personal well-being almost certainly lay with organized religion.

Again, audience matters here. A well catechized Christian might look right past the significance of this line of argument. But the kind of person that Douthat has in mind here are the college students that Tim Keller talks about early in The Reason for God, the ones who could not fathom why a Jew, a Muslim, and a Christian (Keller) would affirm jointly on a panel that there were “irreconcilable differences” between the three religions. Keller writes:

One student insisted that what mattered was to believe in God and to be a loving person yourself. To insist that one faith has a better grasp of the truth than others was intolerant. Another student looked at us clerics and said in his frustration, “We will never come to know peace on earth if religious leaders keep on making such exclusive claims!”

What Keller captured (but did not point out) was more than pluralism; it was hubris. Where in the world does an undergraduate get off telling a panel of religious scholars that they misunderstand the fundamental natures of their own faiths?

And yet there’s an even deeper layer. Beyond the hubris lay a question: “Well, if the claims of these ancient faiths are not good enough for you, what will you actually do?” And that’s where the Oprah, TED Talk, eat-pray-love industrial complex comes in. For the last several decades, what elite society has held out to spiritual seekers is a kind of bespoke religious buffet.

But it turns out this fare is pretty flavorless. There is a limit to how much of this spiritually sensitive people can consume, before they start wondering if the more ancient, less tailored forms of religion might have a point. And when that happens, particularly when surrounded by rapid increases in church going or apologetics discussions on elite media programs, you call it a vibe shift.

Close Encounters

This is not the only way in which Douthat’s book troubles elite religious judgment. One thing that Douthat emphasizes that was a little novel for me is private numinous experience. Interestingly, this was not the way I was taught to dialogue about faith. Appealing to spiritual experiences was at best shaky ground, because it’s not “evidence” in the scientific sense. At worst, appealing to them cuts off Christianity’s legs from the get-go, since every member of every worldview testifies to some kind of “burning in the bosom.” Giving attention to experiences and affections is, I was told, asking to be defeated.

But Douthat’s book makes me rethink this. For one, while a very religious culture may indeed need to move beyond private experiences to adjudicate truth, a culture like ours has the opposite problem: The preemptive ignoring of all such experiences. “As Official Knowledge has marginalized the mystical,” Douthat observes, spiritual openness “coexists with the opposite sort of pressure—to dismiss supernatural experiences, even one’s own supernatural experiences, lest one appear deluded or disreputable.” An apologetic that doesn’t make space for supernatural experiences—for hearing them, for taking them seriously and asking opponents of faith to likewise take them seriously—unwittingly plays into materialist hands, and discourages spiritual seekers from thinking more deeply about their own lives.

Two, spiritual experiences matter not least because a lot of people report having them. Douthat recounts famous atheist Michael Shermer’s own testimony of a mystical encounter that left him stumped. The story is interesting and I’ll let readers dive into the book to discover it for themselves. But the broader point is that, if even those with presuppositions that work against such experiences admit to having them, then logically, the odds that these experiences actually do mean something go up. Each near-death encounter, each vague but unforgettable sensation of something beyond the material realm, is a potential aid to Christian faith, not because these events are ready-made belief systems in and of themselves, but because each one opens a tiny crack in the materialist mentality. Put them all together, and the mandate for Emma is clear: Her quest for the truth about reality needs to account for this.

A Changing Spiritual Landscape

My hope for Emma in reading Believe would be that the comforting assurances of self-made spirituality would seem less reliable, less trustworthy, and less satisfying. I might interject a few times to say that Douthat overstates the continuity between religions, that his encouragements to see the teachings of Jesus as distant cousins to Buddhism aren’t quite right. I would probably point out that Believe is a book about religion, not a book about Jesus, and that Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection force a more uncomfortable confrontation than what Douthat is offering.

And I might take a moment to consider whether someone like Emma—pluralistic by nature, intellectually deferential by training—is perhaps a dying breed. There were times reading Believe where I wondered how relevant a case for faith like this is going to seem in a few years. The Year of Our Lord 2025 is not, after all, the peak of Official Knowledge and Shared Consensus. Ours is the age of the fringe: Generation podcast, where elite political and scientific narratives fall on a daily basis.

From my angle, it looks like the best, most durable parts of Douthat’s case for faith are the most directly challenging ones: The parts where he’s holding secularism’s feet to the fire with data and stories and inductive reasoning. But in terms of helping people find their way to actual truth, I wonder if the ground has already shifted somewhat, and fewer people are interested in finding the shared DNA between the world religions, and more interested in unlearning what Official Knowledge has taught them. In another universe, there is a version of Believe that straightforwardly confesses the moral and intellectual superiority of Christianity, and instead of slow rolling unbelievers into a posture of acceptance, assumes that, for myriad reasons, they’re already there. The book in that parallel reality is less gentle and deferential, but I wonder if it’s more…realistic?

But the fact is people like Emma do exist. They read The New York Times, they listen to NPR, and they are wondering about God. Believe is a very good book for them. And it’s a pretty darn good book for you, too.