A review of Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious by Ross Douthat, 288 pages, Zondervan Books (March 2025)

The past few centuries haven’t been especially kind to God or his followers. There was Galileo, then Hume, then Laplace, then Darwin, then Nietzsche, then the Scopes Monkey Trial. (The religious side technically won that last encounter, but it was a pyrrhic victory). Churchgoing steadily waned. Philip Larkin wondered what we’d do with houses of worship once they fell out of use. The early 2000s were especially rough. The Catholic Church was buffeted by a massive sex-abuse scandal. Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins became intellectual rockstars by mercilessly attacking religion. Thousands of people flocked to hear them speak, and thousands more flocked to buy their books. If God was not quite dead yet, He seemed to be nearing retirement.

But religion has been making something of a comeback lately. According to a recent Pew survey, the number of people who identify as Christians—a figure that had been declining for decades—appears to have levelled off, at least for the moment. It hovered around 63 percent in 2019, and that’s approximately where it stands now. In England, church attendance has actually increased among Generation Z. Rather than turning to the Church of England, younger congregants have been joining showier denominations like Catholicism and Pentecostalism. The rise of wokeness and the cult of personality that sprang up around Donald Trump have led some people to speculate that there’s a “God-shaped hole” in contemporary culture. “As religion has receded from people’s lives,” sociologist Jonathan Haidt has explained, “they’re hungrier. As I see it, politics has really taken the place [of religion].”

Some once-stout atheists and agnostics have begun to reconsider their antipathy to organised religion. “Maybe religion, for all of its faults, works a bit like a retaining wall,” the agnostic Derek Thompson recently wrote in the Atlantic, “to hold back the destabilizing pressure of American hyper-individualism.” Another Atlantic writer (and nonbeliever), Jonathan Rauch, has argued that America needs to return to its Christian roots. In 2023, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the famed Islamic apostate and New Atheist fellow-traveller, announced that she, of all people, had found Jesus. “I ultimately found life without any spiritual solace unendurable,” she explained. “Atheism failed to answer a simple question: What is the meaning and purpose of life?”

One of the loudest cheerleaders for the current religious revival is opinion columnist Ross Douthat, a conservative and a Catholic, who for years has used his perch at the New York Times to sing the praises of faith. Douthat has a new bestseller out titled Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, in which he argues that belief in God is not only socially beneficial and emotionally fulfilling—as Thompson, Rauch, and Ali contend—but also scientifically sound. “It is the religious perspective that grounds both intellectual rigor and moral idealism,” he writes. “And more important, it is the religious perspective that has the better case by far for being true.”

Douthat is an intelligent man, and he’s written several well-reasoned books—on the Republican Party, on the decadence of modern society, and on his own harrowing battle with Lyme disease. This is not one of them. He blows past entire branches of science and philosophy in just a few paragraphs, behaving as if he’s solved puzzles that, in fact, he’s barely touched. For instance, the question of why a benevolent personal God would allow good people to suffer has been perplexing thinkers since the Book of Job. But Douthat believes he has that problem licked:

The moral case against Almighty God assumes a version of the very premise it ostensibly denies—that human beings are so distinctly fashioned among all the creatures of the world that we are equipped to stand outside material creation and comprehend it so completely as to make a certain moral assessment of how good and evil are balanced in the cosmos.

In other words, God works in mysterious ways; don’t try to figure it out. Douthat has simply redefined goodness so that anything God deems to be good must be good. Plato pointed out the illogic of this position more than 2,000 years ago. “The point,” he wrote, “which I should first wish to understand is whether the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved by the gods.” The 20th-century philosopher Bertrand Russell summed up the same thought in his 1927 essay “Why I Am Not a Christian”:

If you are going to say, as theologians do, that God is good, you must then say that right and wrong have some meaning which is independent of God’s fiat, because God’s fiats are good and not bad independently of the mere fact that he made them. If you are going to say that, you will then have to say that it is not only through God that right and wrong came into being, but that they are in their essence logically anterior to God.

Not all Douthat’s assertions are this fatuous. He begins the book with his strongest points, starting with the fine-tuning argument—the idea that the universe was designed with life in mind. He cites the religious physicist Stephen M. Barr, who noted just how exquisitely balanced our cosmos is in his book Modern Physics and Ancient Faith. Change the cosmological constant a fraction and the entire universe would come apart. Adjust the gravitational force a bit and stars would never form. Alter the nuclear force a tad and hydrogen atoms would vanish. As Douthat writes, “No hydrogen, no water; no water, no us.” Even Christopher Hitchens, one of the most pugnacious New Atheists, acknowledged that this was one of the better arguments marshalled by believers.