Ross Douthat is a New York Times columnist who writes about religion, society, and moral values. He is also the author of several thought-provoking books, including Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, and a memoir of his personal struggle with a debilitating sickness, The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery. His latest book is Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. Ross joins the podcast to discuss how decadence is shaping society and whether religion has a vibrant future.

Transcripts of our episodes are made available as soon as possible. They are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.

Tom Burnett: Welcome to the show, Ross.

Ross Douthat: Thanks so much for having me. It’s great to be here.

Tom Burnett: I want to start with some personal questions. I’m wondering, going back to your childhood, what are some of your fondest memories growing up?

Ross Douthat: I would say my childhood was defined by an obsessive, obsessive fandom of the Boston Red Sox.  I was six years old in 1986, which was, the year that, you know, the ball went through Bill Buckner’s legs and the Red Sox lost, the World Series in this absolutely Heart rending fashion that confirmed that the franchise was cursed and I was awakened by my parents and they brought me downstairs and put me in front of What was then our small black and white TV and said Ross?

The Red Sox are about to win the World Series for the first time in 70 years You got a watch, and I sat there and watched as it all came down and collapsed, right? And so that sort of instilled in me This, profound obsession with the tragedy of, of the Red Sox.

Tom Burnett: Yeah. True New England childhood.  I’m wondering, did you grow up in a religious family?

Ross Douthat: I did, a somewhat unusual, although maybe very American kind of religious family where we started out as kind of lukewarm mainline Protestants and then, thanks to some very intense experiences in charismatic Christianity, went on a kind of tour of Pentecostalist and Evangelical. churches and forms of Christian faith before ending up converting to Catholicism as a family, when I was about 17 years old.

I have an unusual relationship to my own Catholicism, because, you know, there’s this sort of divide, sometimes friendly, sometimes not, in Catholicism between the cradle Catholic and the adult convert, right?

And I’m neither, in the sense that, I didn’t make, purely personal decision for Catholic faith at the age of 42. I came in through the agency of my parents and their religious journey. But I was old enough to be making my own choice, and I also didn’t have a six-year-old experience of Catholic First Communion.

I, hopefully, that helps me mediate, maybe, a little bit between, The true cradle Catholic and the true adult convert, I’m not sure.

Tom Burnett: I want to turn next to your, academic interests. What kind of subjects did you gravitate towards when you were child, adolescence, going into high school? I mean, what are the things that really captivated you in school?

Ross Douthat: I think it was mostly, history and, and novels. my intellectual world in high school was basically bounded by intense reading about the American and European past and an aspiration to write the great American novel.

Tom Burnett: Oh, wow, that was so, from an early age, you, you saw yourself as a writer.

Ross Douthat: yeah, I mean, I had, you know, like a lot of kids who are interested in history and thereby interested in politics, there was some part of my mind that, imagined a career in politics.

But I think the primary impulse was. was always toward writing. I came from a family where both of my parents had aspired to be, novelists or writers of creative fiction when I was a kid, and neither of their careers took off, my father was a lawyer and my mother was, for a while, just at home with us.

interestingly, both have become professional writers in different ways, once the kids were out of the house. my mom is a religious essayist. You can read her essays in First Things Magazine. My father is a published poet. He has a new book of poetry coming out.

but so, there was this idea, I think, implicit in the household that like to become a creative writer of some kind. Ideally, I think a novelist was sort of like the fulfillment of our family’s potential or something like that. so that was very much a powerful idea in my youth.

And then when I went to college, I majored in History and Literature, and it was only you know towards the end of college that I was pulled at all into political philosophy and stuff that honestly ended up maybe being more relevant to my eventual work as a political journalist and newspaper columnist

Tom Burnett: at what point I don’t know, did it begin to emerge in your mind that you could make a living as a professional writer,

Ross Douthat: I mean, I’ve never made a living as anything else. So, there wasn’t some pivot point.

Tom Burnett: Yeah.

Ross Douthat: My extracurricular activity in college was primarily journalism. I edited the conservative newspaper and then wrote the token conservative column for the Harvard Crimson, thus preparing myself for my future vocation.

Tom Burnett: Many of our listeners know you from your columns in the New York Times, but I want to direct our conversation today towards two of your published books: The Decadent Society and your new book, Believe, Why Everyone Should Be Religious. As I was reading those two together, I started to see some commonalities, and I would like to explore that with you.

For our listeners, let me just kind of postulate how you laid out a decadent society with some of its leading indicators. You’ve mentioned that a decadent society may have economic stagnation, institutional decay, and cultural and intellectual exhaustion at a high level of material wealth and technology.

You published this book five years ago, and I feel like it fits the bill even more now than it did before. So, I want to just actually just dive into a, few specific areas, and ask you questions there.

One of them is the issue of, low birth rate. And I noticed even in the last couple of years, seeing stories that the birth rate, not just, In Western Europe and East Asia, as we’ve heard for a long time, but also in the United States and Latin America and elsewhere, there’s a precipitous drop-in birth rate.

There are many explanations for it. There’s a lot of hand-wringing at some parties, celebration at others, and maybe people who are concerned about environmental impact. But you explored a few areas that I had not heard explored before, and one of them was this: You suggest that a low birth rate can exacerbate inequality in a society.

How does that play out?

Ross Douthat: so, the way that plays out, is that one of, the mechanisms whereby concentrated fortunes are broken up and divided and dispersed is by rich people having heirs and

Tom Burnett: Mm hmm.

Ross Douthat: right? So, someone comes along, they have four kids,

They each inherit a fourth of the founding parent’s estate. They make something with it, right? But then each of them has, let’s say, three or four children. And so, again, even with some more productivity, the initial fortune. over the course of two generations is spread out.

As family size shrinks, it just becomes a lot easier for certain fortunes to avoid a kind of traditional dispersal, and this applies not just to the super-rich but to the upper middle class.

Like, so much energy. In upper middle-class life in America is devoted to transmitting your own social position to your child.

You aren’t super rich, but you have assets, you have wealth, you want your child to have the same position, and you want to be able to transmit your assets to them. And it’s not a coincidence that, a lot of upper middle-class families think of themselves as, like, pushing tons and tons of investment into one to two kids, and would regard having four or five kids as economically irresponsible.

I don’t think that’s at all the biggest driver of inequality. I just want to be clear, but it’s an interesting feature of a low birth rate society that you just get more concentration and less dispersal of certain kinds of, of wealth.

I think the last five years have been interesting in that they have destabilized some of the forms of decadence that I’m describing in the book, right?

Ross Douthat: the story that I tell you, you’ve got it exactly right. That civilizations get rich, they get stuck. They repeat themselves; their economic growth stagnates, they lose faith in the future, and they have fewer and fewer kids. But

You can be decadent for a long time, because you are rich and stable and no one has a strong incentive to upset things, right? To change things too much.

Okay. I think what’s happened in the last five years is, on the one hand, you’ve had a deepening of decadence in some areas to the point where you must question its sustainability, right?

Birth rates are the key example. In the late 2010s, when I was writing the book, it seemed like many rich societies were converging on a birth rate of, let’s say, 1. 4 kids for every two adults. So, that’s a trend that, over the long run, leads to a bunch of decadence-enhancing factors.

It leads to a slowdown in population growth, eventually, without immigration, population decline, society gets older, older societies are less dynamic. Right, they are less open to new ideas, all these things. at the same time, going from 2 to 1. 4 with a little immigration thrown in, that’s a slow population, decline, right?

What we’re seeing now, in a lot of places, East Asia is the prime example, South Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan, but also in parts of Europe, Southern Europe especially, but elsewhere, is a rapid decline from that level.

So South Korea is the extreme example. South Korea isn’t at 1. 4 births for every two people. It’s at 0. 7.

Tom Burnett: Wow.

Ross Douthat: every two people. Now, that’s different. That is decadent, but it’s a decadence that points toward eventual collapse.

So, if South Korea, let’s say, has 60 million people today, at that rate, it will have, 20 million people, in an imaginable time horizon, right? and there you’re in, territory of like vacant cities, you know, wolves wandering past empty apartment buildings. So that’s an example of how Decadence looks less sustainable today than it did when I was writing the book then a counter example is in Technology right when I was writing the book we were in this long period of clear technological slowdown apart from The big initial boom of the internet, there hadn’t really been that many genuinely transformative technologies, really since the 1970s, all technological innovation was concentrated in your smartphone, but it wasn’t at all like, the Industrial Revolution, or something like that. do think that there are scenarios where what’s happening with AI especially, could have a much more revolutionary effect on our common life over the next, 40 or 50 years, or even sooner. than any of the technologies of the last 30 or 40 years.

if AI effectively strips away, Millions upon millions of jobs that people do right now. It will have incredibly disruptive effects on society that go beyond what we’ve seen lately.

If it changes social life, where tons and tons of people are living in relationships with virtual people, that too is just a radical transformation. So, that’s an example. of greater acceleration, I would say, right now than what we had in the 2010s when I was working on the book. So, decadence is deepening in some ways.

and then there are places like Hollywood and pop culture where I think Everything, I said five years ago is still true, and we’re just sort of stuck

Tom Burnett: You talk about the possibility of religious revival in your book.

What makes you think that a religious Revival might be a viable path forward, and not, as some critics would say, a backward-looking sentimentalism?

Ross Douthat: I think we’ve come to the end of a certain period of religious decline in American and Western life. over the last 15 or 20 years you’ve had a wave of disaffiliation from religion. people who used to describe themselves as Methodists or Baptists now say they have no religious affiliation.

You’ve had a dramatic weakening of the institutional power, and credibility of religious institutions. The Catholic Church with its sex abuse scandal is the primary example, but you can pick out other examples. the Mormon Church has struggled because

Younger Mormons can suddenly go online and read critiques of Joseph Smith that they never saw before. There have been numerous institutional challenges for religion right?but I think we’ve reached a limit of that process And this is why it’s not just a backwards looking thing because the society that it’s being forged Without institutional religion is not happy with itself So the younger generation that the first generation American history where millions of people have come of age without any kind of know Basic Sunday school connection to religion is also the unhappiest Emerging generation in modern American history, right?

Tom Burnett: Yep.

Ross Douthat: There’s a general sense that clearly, the idea that like our politics would become way more rational and scientific and tolerant and peaceful if we just got rid of religion, right? Just looks ridiculous to people now.

So, there’s just a bunch of sorts of immediate social facts, unhappiness, polarization, and so on, that make people unhappy with the secular world, right?

the institutions are so weak. that people aren’t threatened by them in the same way anymore, right? and people can sort of take a new look at religion, separate from some of the culture war battles of, the 1960s and 1970s. And then also there’s more of an interest in the mystical and the supernatural. where people are looking not for God, capital G God, but for sort of supernatural powers that they can get in touch with to help them in life you know, New Age and occult spirituality, tarot cards, Wicca, astrology,

People are really into Psychedelics chemically mediated supernatural experiences are part of the culture now and then finally the AI stuff sort of occupies this liminal zone between science fiction and supernaturalism, I think, where the people in Silicon Valley, they joke, but they aren’t really joking when they say we’re going to build the machine god, right?

Like they are trying to build a form of higher intelligence, right, that has power over, society potentially.

So, all of that is sort of in play in new ways that provide good reasons to think that the late 2020s and 2030s are going to be more religious, in some way, than were the 2000s and 2010s.

Tom Burnett: Yeah, I want to pivot now to look specifically at your new book on why everyone should be religious you said that this book is intended for two different kinds of non-religious audience. Could you tell our listeners the two different non-religious groups you had in mind and maybe is one of them perhaps going to be more amenable to your arguments than the other?

Ross Douthat: the most direct appeal that the book is making is to people who are in this zone I was just describing of sort of having passed through an age of secularization and coming back to a potential interest in religion. But feel like, one, you can’t become religious without giving up on rationality and science and adult seriousness. and two, who feel like even if you do become religious, there’s no way to think through All of, the various options, there’s so many religions in the world, how would you possibly go forward, right?

So, the book is trying to be helpful in that zone by saying, first, no, you don’t have to give up your reason to become religious. In fact, there are very good reasons to think that a religious account of reality where the universe was, the cosmos was made by a higher power and made for a reason that includes us. There are good reasons to think that’s probably true. and in fact, it is more serious to start with that assumption than to start with materialism and atheism.

And then beyond that, this is sort of more the self-help portion of the book saying, Okay, and Once you have that assumption, there are reasonable things you can do next to approach, all the different religions, try to figure out where you should start, how you go deeper into them, what kind of choices you should make, and so on.

it’s also a book for the person who already practices a religion, but may feel like, their faith exists in a way that isn’t, fully grounded in, reason and science and modern rationality, right? in a lot of religious communities

You’ll get sort of a period of, of deconstruction, that’s a word that Evangelical Christians use a lot now where you say, okay, I have these faith commitments, but when I expose them to certain kinds of arguments, you must deconstruct, you must figure out, oh, well, this wasn’t true.

And this wasn’t true. And so on. and in a way, what Believe what the book is doing is trying to put a floor on that saying, okay Yes, you know, maybe you were wrong about that or Maybe your church messed up in this way and treated people badly and it’s good to go through all that kind of argument but at the end of the day There’s still basic good reasons to be religious, and to join in and be part of, not just a church of one or an individualized spirituality, but some larger religious tradition.

Tom Burnett: Mm hmm. what’s the value in adopting a religious worldview and belief system instead of just the practices, which seem to have certain benefits in people’s life?

Ross Douthat: Well, first, the fact that the practices have benefits, right, is an indicator that They probably connect to some actual true reality, you know, if you had a set of diets turned out to be good at helping people get fit.

and lose weight, you would assume that those diets exist in some kind of like, you know, actual relationship to the reality of biology and

Tom Burnett: Yeah.

Ross Douthat: right? So, if you have a set of practices that seem to lead to greater human flourishing and, people being happier in their relationships and, creating more beautiful architecture and, you know, whatever, whatever list of benefits of religion, worldly benefits you want to have.

You shouldn’t just assume that that doesn’t tell you anything about whether religion is true.

But then, that actual connection is important because, what is religion for ultimately, right? Religion is not just for building, societies where people have happy marriages and take care of the poor and have, nice architecture, right?

It is preparing human beings for Our actual relationship to ultimate reality, which, will be, if not consummated, at least changed in some profound way. when we die, and if it is the case that There might be life after death, and I think there are good reasons for thinking that it might be the case.

Then, in fact, you should care strongly about what a particular religion says about that life after death, about how you prepare for it, what kind of life you might live in the context of either eternity or reincarnation or both.

but all of this does hinge on the idea that, there are good reasons to think that the truth claims of religion map onto reality, right?

I think there is good evidence for that. I think people should look at that evidence, take it seriously, and that that ultimately is a better reason to guide your religious choices than this attempt to sort of build a complex structure while you’re indifferent to the foundation that it sits on.

Tom Burnett: Sure. Why do you think somebody should consider joining a larger, enduring faith tradition and community, instead of just picking and choosing elements from different traditions that suit them the most.

Ross Douthat: I mean in part for the just the same reasons that you would join something larger than yourself in any other area of human life. If you think that sports are important, you can go in the backyard with a soccer ball and kick it around and, watch World Cup matches and have some kind of relationship to the game of soccer that way.

But I think everyone would agree that the person doing that, has a less intense and meaningful relationship to the game of soccer than someone who goes out on the weekends and plays a pickup soccer game, to say nothing of someone who joins a team, a club, and makes it a deeper part of their life, right?

I mean, just to take a simple example, like prayer. Let’s say you think prayer is important. Right? you should pray. There’s probably a God. You should be in touch with God.

Tom Burnett: Mm hmm.

Ross Douthat: Are you more likely to pray if you are doing it entirely on your own in a system that you have invented and set up on your own?

Or if you belong to a religious institution that asks you to do certain set things that have been, built up over generations by lots of other human beings before you in ways that are supposed to fit, the normal run of a human life. I mean, you know, obviously there are individuals who aren’t part of religious communities, who pray a lot and have intense spiritual lives, and maybe may stand in a better relationship to God than I do.

I don’t want to judge that. I’ll just say for myself that if I wasn’t a Catholic, and if the Catholic Church didn’t say, you must go to Mass every Sunday, no matter what’s going on, no matter how tired you are, how busy you are, you’ve got to get to Mass. I would pray, you know, 70 percent less in each week than I do.

The one other point that, I make in the book, which is connected to this, if you think, Spiritual realities exist.

There’s no reason to think that they’re all safe, right? and again, like, an individual person setting out to do something in the natural world, to explore, to go out into the American prairie or the Amazonian jungle, you know, it would be very strange to say, I’m just going to do this, not going to take a map, not going to have any guides, just going to hang out in the Amazon, see what happens, right?

Maybe good things will happen. but there are predators in the Amazon, there are hostile powers in the Amazon, and every major religious tradition, this applies to Buddhism and Hinduism as much to Islam and Christianity, has always taken for granted that there are spiritual forces that don’t have it.

So, um, yeah. your good in mind and one thing the established traditions try to do is keep people safe and to make sure that they are doing their spiritual experiments and exploration in a structure where they’re not just throwing themselves open to whatever spiritual forces might be out there that might not have their good in mind.

I’m wondering, given how many different faith traditions exist, how does a person who wants to explore, who finds your book compelling, how do they avoid decision paralysis think there’s, several important sort of mental choices you can make. The first is you winna, assume that the world is not trying to trick you, that God is not out to get you.

There must be something available to me. In my life that will get me closer to God, right? So that’s one way to think about starting out. It’s like, okay, you know, yes, there are a million religious traditions in the world fine What is available to me right now?

What is right there as a place to start so you need some confidence that again, it may not be the truest faith of all, but there’s something there that God can work with, whatever, God may be.

Then you can also say, yeah, there are a lot of religions in the world, but really there aren’t that many big ancient religious traditions that have hundreds of millions of followers. It’s basically, you know. Four, Judaism is sort of its own category, right, because it’s ancient but small, but, you know, it’s really Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity, right?

Again, if you think that history manifests God’s action, and religions that do well and convert a lot of people are more likely to have some connection to ultimate reality than those that sort of fade and flame out and disappear.

Tom Burnett: Yeah.

Ross Douthat: You don’t have to paralyze yourself by saying, Oh, Lord, you know, the Presbyterians and the Baptists can’t agree, and how am I going to know if I should be a Presbyterian or a Baptist, right? You can say, okay, I’m going to look at Christianity and Islam and Buddhism and Hinduism and try and figure out which seems more credible, which seems to be calling to me in certain ways, and save the particulars for whatever the next step is, right?

Tom Burnett: Yeah. So, one step at a time. related. Does, making a commitment to one religious tradition imply a rejection of the others?

Ross Douthat: I mean, it implies rejection at some level, right? So? Obviously, to choose to be a Christian is to say, I don’t think Muhammad was the seal of the prophets in the final revelation of God. You are not, though, you’re not doing two things. First, you’re not rejecting the possibility that God operates and acts through other religious traditions, right?

If you’re a Christian and you read Muslim mystics and philosophers, you will encounter Ideas about God that overlap with some Christian ideas. There’s a reason that Thomas Aquinas, drew on Islamic medieval sources in his work, right? And you’ll find mystical Accounts and descriptions that seem to be describing some of the same things as some Christian mystical encounters and experiences.

And then, the second point is that, during your lifetime, making a particular religious commitment, does not foreclose the possibility that you might make another religious commitment in the future, right?

So, I think, the religious searcher must be open to that possibility and to see that sometimes, you can’t get anywhere.

Unless you make an initial commitment, and if you make that commitment, then eventually maybe you’ll figure out I need to move beyond this commitment to somewhere else. But often that initial commitment gets you moving in a way that like just, having a bookshelf of seven religious traditions and waiting for the perfect revelation to come might not.

Clearly. If there is a god, he operates through these kinds of mechanisms, I think,

Tom Burnett: gotcha. You wrote a memoir about suffering from chronic long-term illness, and to me it almost reads like a horror novel. And I wondered, with this struggle with, Long-term pain with acute pain. how has it shaped how you view your personal faith, and perhaps how has it shaped how you view religion more generally?

Ross Douthat: Yeah, so, right, a couple things, right? So one is that I still have to some degree, though I’m a lot better, a long-term chronic illness that is very poorly understood, by modern medicine. And there’s debate about whether it even is a real illness at all, right? There’s no debate to me since I’ve experienced it.

And so having an experience like that, one, it changes your perspective on kind of official knowledge. and received wisdom, about the world.

I think the experience that made me more open than I had been before to the deep weirdness of the world, I guess, is the way, to put it, right?

and then the other thing, I don’t think there’s anything about suffering, about the human reaction to suffering that sort of proves the existence of God. but when you are experiencing that kind of suffering, a belief in God A belief in purpose and meaning.

A belief that, you are getting up in the morning and doing the things you have to do, as painful as it is to be alive for a reason. those beliefs are incredibly helpful. And I have no idea what I would have done without them. They were incredibly important to my ability to maintain myself as a husband, as a father, as a journalist, as just a person.

Tom Burnett: I want to thank you for taking time to talk to me today. we’ve covered a lot of ground. I think that the decadent society, resolved a lot of a lot of problems of existence just in the last hour. So, thanks for taking the time to talk to me today.

Ross Douthat: Thanks so much. It’s been a pleasure.