Offline with Jon Favreau - Peter Thiel's Antichrist, JD Vance's Split with the Pope, and Ross Douthat's Scientific Case for Believing in God

Episode Date: July 10, 2025

Religion in the US has been on the decline for many years, but does atheism make us unhappier? Ross Douthat, New York Times Opinion columnist and author of Believe, joins Offline to explain why he thinks believing in God is a rational choice, why secular humanism feels worse in the age of Trump, and what he makes of Peter Thiel and J.D. Vance’s recent misanthropic comments on his "Interesting Times" podcast.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.  

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Fry and David Bedille. Get Douglas Adams, The Ends of the Earth, now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. There are plenty of people who go through an entire life, 80 or 90 years of life and never have anything super weird happen to them. And I've had friends who read my book and have been like, you know, this is really interesting, but nothing remotely like that has ever happened to me. But stuff like this does happen, in fact, a lot to a lot of people of no religious background in particular.

And it just, you want to have a theory of the world that makes room for it because again, it has persisted in secular environments without the church telling you to believe in these things. And it's just part of what it means to be human is that weird shit happens. I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline. I'm here today with Ross Douthit,

I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline. I'm here today with Ross Douthit, the New York Times columnist and author of the new book, Believe Why Everyone Should Be Religious. This is a book that I picked up over the last couple weeks and it's very fascinated, so I'm very excited to talk to Ross about it. Ross, welcome to Offline. Thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure. I'll admit that when I told folks on our team, I really want to talk to Ross Douthit about his book on why everyone should be religious. Got a few looks.

They were sold. They were sold immediately. Detected some skepticism. The Holy Spirit descended upon them. I will just briefly tell you and anyone who's listening what I told them. So I was raised Catholic, though my family wasn't especially religious. We go to church on holidays and occasional Sundays, where I mostly remember the priests making us feel guilty for not attending church more.

That was sort of the main message I got. The standard, the Christmas day service. Yes, yes, this is my suburb. Lot of new faces out there. Yeah, this is my suburban Boston Catholic church experience. Oh yeah, well, so I should have done an accent then. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But I attended a Jesuit college, Holy Cross,

not because it was Jesuit, but because my acceptance letter came with a scholarship. And well, I can't credit the Jesuits for making me more religious, they do get credit, or maybe blame, for making me more political. And I'd go so far as to say that my politics have been heavily influenced by the Jesuit social teaching

I was exposed to at Holy Cross. But in the 20 plus years since graduating, I've drifted away from the Catholic Church and religion in general for many of the reasons you might expect that you've written about. And to be honest, I've never been fully comfortable with that drift. So your book really spoke to me.

And I guess I'll just start by asking, did you have people like me in mind when you were writing this book? As you know, the subtitle of the book is why everyone should be religious. The working subtitle was why John Favreau should be religious. This is what I figured. We decided to niche audience, as large as your audience is. But yes, I mean, the book is trying to be written, trying to make arguments and sort of, you know, make a case to people who have some kind of loose attachment to religion, who are not vehemently hostile

to it, who've had a positive, you know, in the Jesuit tradition kind of experience, maybe, in your case, but who have various hurdles that seem really hard to overcome when it comes to actually saying, I'm going to practice Roman Catholicism, or Judaism, or Methodism, or what have you, again. And it's trying to remove at least some of those impediments, I think. That's the goal. So, you write about the emails you get from people who read your New York Times column, and note that more and more of your secular readers seem,

quote, unhappy with their unbelief. How do you think we arrived at a moment with so many unhappy unbelievers? I think it's one, it's a combination of a certain kind of inevitable over-promising from some of the people who were the most vehement scourges and critics of religion in the period, you know, 10 or 15 years ago, when we kind of entered into a new era of secularization in American life. So you can think of the decline of religion in America in the modern era is having two big phases, one immediately after the 1960s and then again starting sometime after September 11th, sometime in the presidency of George W. Bush, right?

And the second period was dominated at least for a little while by the new atheism, by figures like Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens, many others who just made really full-throated frontal attacks on religion and made a lot of really sort of concrete arguments about how the biggest problems in the early 21st century world from radical Islam abroad to sort of ignorant fundamentalism at home or something, could just be removed if people stop believing in mythical flying spaghetti monsters and sky daddies and these kind of things, right? And I think we've had a nice run of about,

not quite a generation, but a pretty substantial period of time testing, is a less religious America a more rational America? Is it a less polarized America? Is it a more optimistic America? Is science held in higher repute now that fewer people go to church? I think we can just look around and say the answer is pretty much no, that the decline of religion in America, maybe it didn't cause some of our present derangements, but it certainly didn't help. So there's that there in the background. Then I think liberals in particular have, in part because of the kind of

deep commitment to politics that you describe as having been instilled in you in your Jesuit education, right? I think liberalism struggles kind of existentially when the arc of history doesn't seem to be going its way. It's like, well, there's no God, maybe there's no God, but good news, there is this kind of vision of progress, a sort of unfolding story where the arc of history bends towards justice and so on. I think that's a fairly commonplace liberal perspective.

And it's just harder to sustain in the era of a triumphant Donald Trump and a general climate of political turbulence than it was when Barack Obama was ascending to power, right? So I think those are two forces that have made non-believers, especially liberal leaning non-believers, unhappier than they were. I also think, and this is, of course exists and human beings are supposed to have some stand in some kind of relationship to higher powers, cosmic purpose, these kind of things, then you wouldn't expect human civilization to just sort of carry on merrily when those horizons are foreclosed. It doesn't mean that you can't be good or happy without religion. Obviously people are both good and happy in various situations without believing in God.

But in the aggregate, I think human beings pretty clearly benefit from having a sense that moral purpose is actually written into the universe. It's not just something we make up, right? That the world is not just a sort of tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing, right? Even if you get that vibe sometimes in the Trump era, right? Yeah.

And no, I think that reality is more apparent to people maybe in 2025 than it was in 2006 or something. It's funny you mentioned 2006 and Obama because when I started working for him, it was when he arrived in the Senate in 2005 and one of the first speeches I worked on with him was this speech at the Call to Renewal Conference. It was a speech about faith. And he had just written the chapter, his chapter on faith for audacity of hope. And so we sort of turned that into a speech.

So it was mostly his writing. But I remember him writing this passage still that, you know, where he talks about how people are going about their daily lives, going to work, busy, and yet they're still feeling like there is this hole at the center of their lives and that there's something missing. And talking about this sort of desire for,

in this world of modernity and busyness and where we're just sort of rushing around, are we missing something that grounds us, just like our individual selves, right? Not even forget about the politics of all of it. And I do think that at least for me and a lot of people I've talked to, I think, especially in the last couple of years, there has been this, I think technology plays into this, I think, sort of just the lack of faith in institutions

all over the place plays into this, but people do feel this something missing. I get that part more too. Yeah, I think Obama himself was quite good at trying to always connect his arc of history vision to some kind of religious perspective. I think a lot of people, especially younger people on the left who came up as admirers of Obama

were more likely to just sort of take the arc of history, right? Yeah. And say, all right, you know, well, he's a politician, he has to be religious or say he's religious, but we can leave that out. And that, again, that works, I think, when you're in an optimistic phase of liberalism, but I think we have not been in an optimistic phase of liberalism, I mean, really since like 2013,

I think it starts before Trump, you have this kind of disappointment on the left with the fact that Obama did not usher in a post-racial utopia and that then interacts with populism and just, yeah, creates a landscape where the immediate and secular is, it's not delivering cosmic hope all the time. Yeah, right, right.

And people like cosmic hope, I think. Yeah, I mean, so there's basically two parts to your argument. The first is that it's rational to believe in God. The second is that if you do believe God exists, it's rational to then choose and join and practice a religion, preferably one of the major faith traditions. Let's start with the first part.

Why is it rational to believe in a higher power? Because the world as it presents itself to us gives a lot of converging lines of evidence that make more sense and make sense of one another if there's some kind of mind or purpose behind the cosmos. I don't think there's one, you know, there's an endless list of arguments for and against the existence of God. I don't think that there's one, you know, there's an endless list of arguments for and against the existence

of God. I don't think that there's one slam dunk argument where you open, you know, you open Thomas Aquinas and you pick his third reason to believe in God and you're like, that's it, we've settled the debate. And if there were such an argument, I'm not philosophically minded enough to make it. I think it's more that, you know, you start with basically what to date science has revealed and indicated about the nature of the universe, which is that it is a remarkably law-bound, mathematically beautiful construct that has all of these features that we've only sort of figured out in the last couple of generations that look incredibly fine-tuned to produce our kind of galaxy, our kind of universe, stars, planets, carbon-based life forms, us.

And the odds of this kind of universe emerging by happenstance, again, as far as people can tell, are exceptionally large. Not like one in a thousand, but like one in a quadrillion quadrillion. Which is why sort of modern sort of non-religious scientific explanations for this reality have tended to default to the idea that there must be a multiverse and there must actually be a quadrillion universes that we can't see or touch or reach, but that explain why, how you could get one particularly like ours. I think already at that point, you're in a zone that's quite different from what a lot

of people think of as the traditional faith science clash where the non-believers are presenting the rigorous laboratory data and the religious believers are offering just speculation. I think the multiverse is itself highly speculative, right? So at the very least, there's a kind of clash of speculations going on where it's not at all clear to me that one creative power is more implausible than this sort of infinity of universes we can't see, then I think you move to the nature of our consciousness.

And not just the mystery of what consciousness is and how it works, which is sort of a point of bafflement or limitation for materialist accounts of reality, but also just the fact that our consciousness, our intellect, our understanding can get all the way from very basic forms of reasoning, rudimentary things that you would maybe expect, you know, a sort of early hominid to find useful in survival all the way up to grasping the complexities of theoretical physics, splitting the atom, now rewriting our own genetic code, all of this stuff. There's a kind of excess in human capacity that seems to match pretty well with the evidence for a kind of structuring mind at the beginning of things. Our minds seem to be fitted into a kind of

over, you know, whatever overarching power is there. And then finally, and this is where it gets weirder, and you know, I lose some people, right? You have the remarkable persistence of mystical and supernatural and religious experience under officially disenchanted conditions in landscapes where most people are not raised to believe in that stuff as sort of a persistent feature of human life and yet it recurs and reappears. People have religious and mystical experiences who are not religious in the slightest. They fall on people unbidden.

You have forms of spiritual mystical experience like near-death experiences, which are quite peculiar indeed that we know more about under modern scientific conditions. They don't just sort of evaporate under the light of scientific scrutiny. In fact, if you bring more people back from the brink of death, you get a lot more hard to explain supernatural experiences. So I think that reality is also how you get from the idea that there might be a God to the idea that this God might actually be interested in what we do and some kind of relationship with us, which is obviously important to going from a kind of abstract belief in like God

as a clockmaker who just sets things in motion to God as a person who might, you know, might be interested in your prayers, might care about your, you know, how you donate to charity or, you know, how you raise your kids or who you sleep with for that matter, which is obviously very important to getting someone into, you know, into a synagogue or mosque or church, because if God is just sort of a mathematical abstraction, then the case for practice gets a lot weaker. But I think those lines converge on, again, a very basic religious understanding of the world,

and you can explain all of them without a belief in God, but you have to come up with a whole set of distinct explanations. You need the infinite multiverse to explain the laws of physics. Or the simulation, we're all in a simulation. Or the simulation. Well, the simulation hypothesis, though, just punts, right?

The simulation hypothesis is basically, not to get too in the weeds, but it is basically like second century AD Gnosticism. It's like, okay, we're all prisoners of these secondary gods who are, you know, Silicon Valley bros in some, you know, impossibly infinite constellation. But even there, if you convince me the universe

was a simulation and that we were all being created by Sam Altman, Sam Altman version 8.0, right? I would still, you know, one, you still ask, well, where did Sam Altman come from? And then you really are looking to God. You're like, God, you gotta get me out of, gotta get me out of Sam Altman's 347 trillion simulation. ["The Last Supper"]

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At the same time, he had asked me what happens when we die. So I got all the questions that I was not prepared for getting from him. Oh, yeah, yeah. No, well, that's the other thing, right? Like people who, I mean, there's been sort of some lags in when people have kids. There's sort of, there's, I think a lot of people have ended up confronting those kind of questions from their kids a little later in life and No, I mean that's I mean that's the you know

One of the things I'd fair I try very hard in the book not to do is to just make a kind of pragmatic Case for religion where it's like maybe there's no God, but you should act like there is because it makes life easier But it is certainly the case right that Children confront you very directly with fundamental questions that adults are more comfortable sort of putting in the back of their mind while they go out and, you know, create podcasts and so on. And there is something extremely useful about being able to say with some degree of conviction, you know, we don't know everything, but, you know, someone is

in charge of the universe and when you die, you'll be held accountable for the good and bad choices you make and so on. Like that, I have a number of children and I'm very grateful, you know, I'm not running, I'm not really running a major indoctrination academy for them. You know, they go to mass. No, I... They're baptized and confirmed, but they have questions, and it's good to have some answers. Yeah, and it's interesting because I found the scientific case for religion that you lay out in the book quite compelling, and I read it after I was faced with these questions from my son Charlie.

And, but it's interesting, because I basically landed where you do in the book, not as eloquently, but, you know, when I was a kid and I asked those questions, because I was raised Catholic, the answers were, you know, there is a God, and you know, this is heaven and hell, and all the rest of it. And then as I grew up, you know, this is heaven and hell and all the rest of it.

And then as I grew up, you know, you sort of hear about, like, evolution and then you hear about the Big Bang Theory and all this. And so Charlie's asking all about the universe and the Big Bang Theory because he was like, what created the solar system? What created the galaxy then? Well, then what happened with the universe? And I was like, the Big Bang Theory. He's like, well, how did the Big Bang Theory start? And I was like, well, you know what? We don't know, actually. And there is a people believe that there could be a higher power, a God, when we say God, that's what we mean, that could have created, that could have, you know, facilitated the

Big Bang and everything else. And he sort of sits there and it's like thinking about it for a second. But he's like, yeah, yeah, I guess that makes sense. Because you do, I mean, it's just common sense that you get to a point in the scientific explanation of the cosmos and, as you write, our consciousness, where science can tell you a lot, but it just, it always stops short of explaining like the little magic dust there that sort of starts the architect, as you say, that sort of creates the whole thing. Right. And I mean, I taught a class actually at Yale with a friend who's an atheist philosopher who has forgotten more about philosophical argumentation than I will ever know. But it was sort of on these arguments and on these sort of competing explanations. And his view was basically that it's okay to get back to a set of equations.

If you can reduce it to a set of equations, there isn't per se a reason to say it's better to have God than to just sort of say, oh, well, there's this brute fact of these equations operating on not even material reality, but, you know, whatever precedes material reality. And I don't find that satisfying, but I think I don't find it satisfying in part because I think I'm okay with the idea that mind as a thing has some kind of existence in its own right. You know, we have exposure to two kinds of things as human beings, mind and matter. And we experience mind through our own mind and then through obviously the communications that we can make

in conversation or books and so on with other minds. And then we experience matter. And the atheistic default basically assumes that at the end of the day, matter is what is real because we can measure it, right? We can dissect it. Now, nobody's, what matter fundamentally is, is itself an interesting philosophical question, but that's sort of the default. And to be religious at the end, like, you know, if you listen

to Richard Dawkins, he would respond to your, your response to your son. You say, well, some people think in the end there's, you know, there's some kind of mind, setting it all in motion and Dawkins would say, ah, but you know, then your son should ask, you know, what is that mind made of? Right? Like, you know, and where, where does it, where does it come from? And it's an infinite regress and so on. And I think that that, if you think of mind as something that is cobbled together from atoms, then yes, that, you know, you are in a sort of state of, it's like, well, the mind of God has to be complex in the way that we understand, you know, atoms and quarks and everything else to be. But I think the religious perspective is that, you know, atoms and quarks and everything else to be. But I think the religious perspective is that,

you know, actually, no, mind could be something, mind could be simpler than we think and still quite fundamental. And that's what we talk about when we talk about God. We're not talking about a being who is like constructed of the stuff of the universe. We're talking about a being who has something in common with consciousness as we experience it.

But that is admittedly outside of the box of current secular thinking. Yeah. Right. So you mentioned the sort of the persistence of miracles and supernatural encounters, near-death experiences. I have desperately wanted to believe in an afterlife since I was a kid, and I spent like a sleepless year, maybe, terrified about what happens after we die,

as some kids do. And I think I still do believe in an afterlife, but I also wonder if, and I always catch myself, is this my brain engaging in the kind of motivated reasoning and wish casting that our brains tend to do when confronted with existential angst about what happens to us? And you know, I've always wondered if sort of the most obvious explanation for some of these near-death experiences and visions

is that kind of, are our brains doing that? And I've known people who are not religious at all, that after a loved one passed away, had a vision, had sort of one of these experiences, people that I never would have expected, people that, you know, I mean, I had a close friend pass away when I was in high school and her mother, who was upset with the Catholic Church and had sort of fallen out with the church and wasn't religious, like, had this experience right after her daughter died that was incredibly

hard to explain. And, you know, for all these years, I've thought about that and I'm like, it sounds like I want to believe that that's exactly what happened. And then I'm like, I wonder if deep in the consciousness of her own mind she just wanted that to happen. You know, it's tough to tell. I think people underestimate how commonplace those kind of experiences are because they are not part of the formal, you know, educated elite scripts of American culture.

I think people, including people who have those experiences, people will be like, well, something totally bizarre happened to me, but you know, of course this doesn't normally happen. And I think if you read about like, you know, not just sort of accounts of people who have had loved ones pass, but accounts of people who work in hospices, for instance, who are sort of around dying people

all the time. There is a lot of raw sort of raw material of human experience, right? Before you get to literal near-death experiences, that a pretty straightforward reading of it is that death is not the end and people have, that there's sort of a liminal zone and when people die, people have experienced, people close to them or around them have experiences of stuff sort of effectively crossing the liminal zone. Now, is that potentially, as you say, the result of like, you know, the human mind is really intent on not dying, right? We have a pretty strong Darwinian incentive to want ourselves to continue and just a basic human incentive to want our loved ones to

still be around. And I think there's some segment of that material that is sort of, could be explained in those terms. Or in terms of sort of hallucinations that you might have as your mind is, as you're approaching the threshold of death, right? Like people seeing dead relatives when they're in the last week of life, which is a very, very common thing.

I do think the scale of these things among people who do not hallucinate under normal conditions, one of the books that I quote in my own book uses the term hallucinations of the sane to describe a lot of these phenomena. It's like people who are not mentally ill or not schizophrenic or not prone to any kind of experiences having these very discrete experiences that cluster around death and so on, right?

I think you need a little bit more than just wishful thinking to get to that. You need some sort of like brain hallucination generation module that we've evolved, right? Okay, so maybe, and then when you get to near-death experiences themselves, where people die, are sort of clinically dead and are resuscitated, there I think the evolutionary explanation gets pretty challenging to make,

because these are people who, especially in the prehistoric past, would have just died. It's not like there were hundreds and thousands of people in our prehistoric African environment who were dying outright, having their hearts stopped, and then coming back to life to tell their stories, right? Like that was just much, much rarer. It happened occasionally, but you, the experiences that we're talking about are these incredibly rich, detailed experiences

that are not described as being like dreams or hallucinations, they're described as more real than real. They tend to be associated with dramatic changes in people's life perspectives. After this experience, people certainly report big shifts in worldview and theological perspectives based on this stuff. And so an evolutionary explanation has to be like, well, it was advantageous for people to have these experiences, even though they never would have reported them to anyone

for, because someday far in the future, we'd start resuscitating more people and then people would want to believe, I don't know, it's hard. It's not, again, as with all this stuff, I would not say that you cannot come up with a materialist explanation for these things.

One argument is that people only have them when they're already revived, right? The brain reconstructs it after you've already been revived, right? Maybe that's how you get to an evolutionary explanation. So, people who die don't have these experiences. It's only once you've been brought back that the brain is like, all right, I've got to retrofit this. Maybe. But I think there is a, put it this way, it's really easy to imagine a world without any of these things, right? Like you can pretty easily imagine a nice materialist cosmos, all just, you know just atoms whirling around.

Consciousness is basically an illusion stapled onto people for some evolutionary reason. And you start resuscitating people from the dead and because there's nothing there, nobody reports anything, right? None of these things exist. Or people come back and they're like, yeah, I had a crazy hallucination about a guy in a unicycle and my dead mother and so on.

That's a really easy world to imagine. And if we lived in that world, Richard Dawkins and everyone like him would have a really strong point against, you know, religious weirdos like myself. But since we're in this world, I think the religious weirdos get to at least say, hey, you know, you got to give us a point here, right? Like if it was 1875 and we were saying, all right, in the next 150 years we're going to get a lot better at bringing people back from the dead, what do you expect to happen? The religious expectation would be at least somewhat more vindicated than a strict atheist

perspective has been. I thought that the story you write about in the book about Michael Shermer was quite telling. Just because I think the strongest evidence comes from sort of people who are non-believers or atheists who have these experiences and he's one of them. Can you sort of atheist polemicist in the style of Dawkins and others. Very smart guy and very intellectually honest as far as I could tell from reading his work. He will concede points to the other side when it seems appropriate to him and so on.

And he had this experience when he got married where his wife and fiance had a radio that had been a gift. I may mangle the details, but I believe it was from either an uncle or a grandparent who had played some crucial role in raising her in Germany and then passed away and left her this radio that was just broken. It was like an heirloom, nice thing to have, didn't work. Shermer could never get it to work. They stuck it in a drawer in a back room and forgot about it. And then on their wedding day, they come back to the house and she's feeling sad because they got married in California and it's all his family and friends and she doesn't have any family

there. And suddenly they hear music coming from the back of the house and they go back and open the drawer and there's the radio, which never worked before, playing love songs. And it plays throughout the wedding reception and it's, I think it switches to a different kind of music at some point as appropriate to the evening. And then it stops and never works again. And Schirmer, you know, Schirmer is like, this is a really, I'm trying to be a scrupulous, rigorous guy. This was a pretty weird thing that happened. And, you know, and again, he's talked about, he's written about it a couple times.

He hasn't sort of concealed it. And he, you know, he, at one point he tries, you've seen Interstellar, right? The, right, so Interstellar, the Christopher Nolan movie, has this, you know, this idea of like, you know, I forget exactly how it works, wormholes or, you know, people in different dimensions communicating with each other. And, you know, Matthew McConaghy and his daughter.

And so Shermer is like, well, from a materialist perspective, maybe there is a multiverse, and in some other version of the multiverse, my wife's relative found a way to communicate his love to our version of the multiverse. And my view is that once you're making that argument, you should just say, there's probably a God. But that's, yeah, And again, the reality is that there are plenty of people who go through an entire life, 80

or 90 years of life, and never have anything super weird happen to them. And I've had friends who've read my book and have been like, you know, this is really interesting, but nothing remotely like that has ever happened to me. But stuff like this does happen, in fact, a lot to a lot of people of no religious background in particular. And it just, you want to have a theory of the world that makes room for it because, again, it has persisted in secular environments without the church telling you to believe in these things. And it's just part of what it means to be human, is that weird shit happens. Offline is brought to you by Zebiotics Pre-Alcohol. Let me tell you, if there's a surefire way to wake up feeling fresh after drinks with friends, it's with pre-alcohol.

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order when you use offline at checkout. Zbiotics is backed with 100% money back guarantee so if you're unsatisfied for any reason they'll refund your money no questions asked. Remember to head to zbiotics.com slash offline and use the code offline at checkout for 15% off. I think the other reason I have been wary of fully believing in an afterlife is because that means that things could also go very badly for each of us for all eternity. And that is a terrifying thought to have in our brains. I've heard a lot of your interviews about this book, and you inevitably get to demons and the problem of evil.

And then everyone kind of wants to move on. Um, but I do wonder, I wanted to ask you about it, because I wonder if it's an impediment for some people to becoming religious, sort of that, wonder if it's an impediment for some people to becoming religious. Sort of that, and whether it's conscious or not, just sort of that fear of the evil, of demons, of what it would mean to believe in an afterlife where, you know, you're damned to hell for all eternity. How do you think about that? I think those are separate questions. I think that demons tend to...

When people have an experience... Because people have supernatural experiences that are not just a nice radio playing at your wedding kind of thing. People have some dark, weird dark experiences. And when people have experiences like that or know someone who've had an experience like that, they, that I think is often a push toward religion. It's like, okay, if something spiritual and negative, negative entities is how, like, if you read the psychedelic literature, people will talk about encounters with negative entities. What

should I do when I have an encounter with a negative entity? And I think it's natural if that happens, not everyone does it, but to say, hey, you know, maybe I should go to church, maybe the Catholic priest has a little advice to give here. Hell is different. There's a difference between believing that there might be maligned spiritual entities out there and believing in eternal damnation. And you can believe in one without the other, right? You can think that in the end, you know, hell is empty, even the demons are reconciled,

but also think that, you know, right now they exist. But yes, I think that the idea of punishment and especially eternal punishment, there is a sense of relief that people feel, especially people raised in a religion where that's a really strong point of emphasis, that feeling putting that aside. And you can see this in, you know,

the great anthem of the modern age, right? John Lennon's Imagine is a song that to me, as a religious person, I always listen to it. I'm like, what the hell is he talking about? This is not, it's like, why is it great if there's no heaven? Why is it great if above us is only sky? This sucks, man. But, clearly there is a sense, there's like a weight

that some people feel taken off them by the idea that like, in the end, you know, your choices are not that significant. If you've, you know, your choices are not that significant. If you've, you know, if you fuck up your whole life, it's bad for you, but you know, you'll die. And the story with the story will not have to continue. You won't have to carry, you know, your chains like Jacob Marley, right? All the way through eternity. And, you know, look, I am not, what are the terms here? I'm not a universalist. I think that it makes, you know, given the religious premises I hold, you shouldn't assume

that nobody goes to hell. At the same time, it is really hard for me to believe as a nice modern person raised in liberal environments and so on that there's this kind of, there's like 80% of human beings go to hell or the kind of things that are associated with certain forms of Christianity. So I sort of move back and forth between views on how far to go with that. But yes, some people find a kind of relief in the idea that nobody is watching them and judging them, definitely. Yeah, and it's also, and you've talked about

how you don't believe that God is tricking us, right? Right. And so, because I always think, I remember growing up thinking, and so I was raised Catholic, but my mom was Greek Orthodox, which obviously like similar, but I have these memories of sitting in church. Importantly different, important differences too. And I remember sitting in church and like, you know,

my dad and my brother and I would go up and get communion and then she'd just be sitting in the pews. And I remember like reading the little thing in church that was like, you know, we welcome everyone and someday we hope that we'd be reunited with our Protestant branches and Orthodox branches, but for now we're not. And for other religions, you know, it's like a very hard, and I'm like, well,

wait a minute, if someone has the misfortune then in the Catholic telling of being born, where they're not exposed to Catholicism or Christianity, but are exposed to some other religion or no religion at all, like, are they damned for all eternity just because they were just born in the wrong place? Like, that can't be. That can't be what God wants, right? Right. And I mean, this is where I am, you know, in the standards of religious debates, notwithstanding being a conservative, I am a liberal, right? I think that that can't, if there is eternal damnation, that can't be the reason that people go to hell.

Yeah. Right. It can't be bad luck sucks to be you. You were born in Central Asia, you know, 400 years before Christ and there just wasn't, you know, into kind of the, a kind of Calvinist camp, which just sort of bites the bullet and says, yeah, some people go to hell because of things that seem beyond their control, because that's, you know, that's what God decided from the start, right? And there is an internal logic to that, that sort of matches with the world, but I think doesn't match with my understanding of who God would have to be for him to be

worthy of worship. But that's, you know, it's a lively debate inside Christianity for a reason. But generally, yeah, my assumption is that, you know, people are given a certain kind of raw material to work with in their life and how they relate to God and what happens to their soul is connected with what they do with what they are given, right? And doesn't mean you can't do something very bad and end up in a very bad place, but it's not going to be as simple as, you know, you failed to hear the altar call at the particular moment and that's it for you.

This is somewhat related, but it's slightly different. One thing I hear from a lot of friends who aren't religious is, how could a good and just and merciful God allow so much suffering in the world? And yes, you know, it's a very good question. And we, you know, just like I thought about it this week, like how could, how could a just merciful God allow all those, those girls at a Christian camp in Texas, you know, to drown and it certainly seems like a rational doubt to have. I've heard it over the years. What do you think about that?

I think it's a completely rational doubt to have about the nature of God. I think that it is, I think the arguments for the existence of God and some kind of God as making sense of the cosmos that we find ourselves in are strong enough that confronted with the problem of evil, you should not become an atheist. But you could reasonably say, well, I'm skeptical when Christians say this God is all good in the way we understand goodness.

Right? And I think that again, Christianity and Judaism and other religions, but Christianity and Judaism are the religions I know best, basically encourage a kind of running argument with God about exactly this point, right? That the Old Testament is replete with moments where not just Job, but, you

know, Abraham and others are basically saying to God, you know, are you sure about this? Like this seems like it can't be right. Can't you be a little more merciful here? And then you get to the New Testament and you have, you know, Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane about to be crucified and He's not like, awesome God, good plan, you know, Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane about to be crucified, and he's not like, awesome, God, good plan, you know, we're going to, this is all going to work out great when we save everybody. He's like, oh, are you sure you can't take this cup from my lips? Look, I'm weeping tears of blood, right? Or sweating blood, I don't want to mess up

the scripture. But I think generally religious people, at least in the traditions I know best, are encouraged not to sort of treat the problem of evil as a reason to disbelieve in God, but to treat the problem of evil as a serious problem and a serious question and something that has to have an answer that is more than just like, you know, a kind of mathematical proof. And I guess this is in the end my own specific, part of my own specific attraction to Christianity, right? Which is the idea that you're not just saying, okay, look, we know God is good because He needed to have free will, and to have free will, you have to have the possibility of bad things happening. And so when you do the math,

you've got to have a certain number of campers die in order to have a world with free will. That might be true, but that is not a satisfying answer. Certainly not a satisfying answer to anyone who is going through tremendous suffering, whether it's losing a child or anything else, right? And so to that, Christianity says something which is not a mathematical proof.

It says suffering is real and it can be terrible and God himself knows how real and terrible it is because he has entered into it and shared it with us. And what the crucifixion and resurrection shows is that suffering can be transformed into something that redeems it. And that, I mean, even that is a, I would not say that, I think when you're confronted with someone whose child was just swept away in a flood, you don't say that either.

You just, you are there and you bear witness and you try and help them. You don't, one thing the Bible is very against in the book of Job is anyone who shows up when someone is suffering and says, let me explain to you what God was doing here. I think that is very clearly not what you're supposed to do. But I do think the idea of a God who enters creation,

who is not just sort of a puppet master outside, but who enters creation and participates and so on, is, again, not a mathematical proof answer, but is a kind of answer to that challenge. But it certainly doesn't go away. Like, there are, you know, there are a lot of... One of the things I would say in making an argument like the one I make in this book is there are a lot of hard arguments about religion that don't disappear just because you believe in God. And that extends, it's not just about the problem of evil, it's all of the culture war

debates, you know, should the church, in the Catholic context, like, you know, should the church allow married priests, you know, should it bless gay couples? None of these debates like disappear or are magically resolved if you just start to believe in God. The debates just continue and some of them are not, some of them are not resolvable. You know, theological debates do not just go away, right? But they're having those debates inside a shared consensus that probably God exists. That's what I'm urging people to do, I guess. I mean, well, so now we're into the second part

of your argument in the book, which is, okay, so if you're willing to believe that there is a God, that God exists, that there's a higher power, you know, you should, it's rational to choose a religion to practice. And, you know, it's rational to choose a religion to practice. And, you know, it's a good bet to choose one of the major world religions that have stood the test of time over thousands of years. Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism. So, and this is where, so this is where

my struggle comes in. Because, you know, and you talk about in the book why you became Catholic. And, you know, I hadn't actually realized, you mentioned some of the historical documentation of Jesus's life and the Gospels, and again, compelling. My struggle is like, let's say you fully believe the Gospels represent the clearest roadmap from God as to how we should live. Even within Christianity, as you were just mentioning, different interpretations of the gospel by different people over time have led to entire new branches of the religion. And at some level, these interpretations are subjective because they are made by humans with all of our faults and sins and They have also evolved over time. So

How does being a good Christian or a good Catholic require us to obey the particular edicts of a fundamentally human? Institution if many of those edicts aren't explicitly spelled out in the New Testament Well, I mean first first of all, you, you know, you're a citizen of the United States of America in the 21st century. It is very unlikely that any branch of Christianity that you join and practice, you know, set aside some like cult-like phenomena, right, is going to enforce its edicts in your life in a way that sort of takes away your sense of sort of freedom and your own personal judgment, right? Right.

So, you know, if you look at your own Catholic, you know, your own Catholic background and you say, look, man, I feel like I'm never going to agree with the church, with church teaching about these six issues or something. And you start going to mass again and, you know, going to confession and confessing your sins and all of these things. Like, yeah, you know, at some point you might have a priest who takes you aside and it's like, I saw the podcast the other day, you know, we got to have a conversation about that, right? But But you know, American Catholicism is a pretty big and diverse, internally diverse church. And I don't think it's, I think that it offers at the very least a fair amount of space for people who have that kind of reaction that you're having, right?

Of like, look, I can't, and I have this, you know, I'm more conservative than you are, to put, you know, and I am a conservative Catholic in terms of the church's internal debates. I wrote a whole book, God help me, you know, criticizing Pope Francis. I'm not sure why I did that. Very unwise. My favorite Jesuit. Yeah, exactly. Your favorite Jesuit, right? But I have, in part because of the debates of the Francis era, I feel like I have a pretty strong sense of the uncertainties and contingent

areas in church teaching and the way that, you know, what the church said about lending money at interest in 1620 sure seems different from how the church talks about like, you know, your home mortgage in 2025, right? Like there, you know, it's not just the sex debates. There are a bunch of places where, you know, church teaching seems to have some ruptures and some departures in it, right? And to live inside Catholicism

as a Catholic for me is to basically assume that, look, the reason to be Catholic is, there are these areas of uncertainty, but there are these big things that go all the way back to the New Testament that the church does seem to have really impressively carried on and held on to through total civilizational changes, right? Like feudalism goes away, the Roman Empire goes away, and the church, there's a bunch of basic things the church is still doing that also do seem to trace back, not just to the first century, but generally not just to the first century, but generally to the early church. And then too, and I know this makes, you know, makes, you know, it sounds like this weird numbers game brag, but like, if you think that there is a God of history who's interested in the fate of human beings

and the fact that Catholicism has been the biggest and most influential form of Christianity, again, unless you think God is really just messing, even with his favorite people, then there's something significant going on in there. And just to take the example of your mother, you said your mother was Eastern Orthodox. Right, so when Pope Francis did a few things that I disagreed with, I had friends who were like,

well, I guess you should just go become Orthodox, right? Join one of the Orthodox churches. And my view is basically like, you know, I'm a Christian in the Western world. I'm a Christian in the United States. All of my sort of attachments are to Western Europe. Even from an Orthodox Christian perspective, it sure seems like the Pope is, you know, he's the Bishop of Rome and the Patriarch of the West. This is, you know, this is, even if there is some other form of Christianity that, you

know, that turns out to carry on the legacy of the apostles too, Roman Catholicism in the United States seems like a pretty secure place to stay because it does have really strong connections all the way back to the beginning and really has maintained and sustained what I consider core elements of Christian faith. And so even a conservative like me can end up taking this kind of mixture of liberal and conservative perspectives, but end up feeling like, you know, a big global expression of Christianity with deep historical roots is going to be a good place to be. This is an ad by BetterHelp.

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But I kind of want to get at it this way, which is your interview with JD Vance in Rome in late May. And, you know, you basically ask, you know, how his religion influences politics and specifically the clear sort of disagreement between the Vatican and the White House on deportation policy. And to be fair, he acknowledges that he's trying to weigh the dignity and rights of immigrants as he's making these decisions. But then he justifies their policies by talking about migrants disrupting social cohesion and he talks about immigrant communities

that have gotten used to pre-modern brutality, which you pressed him on for statistics and evidence, and, you know, he suggested there were unreported crimes. Looking back, like, what did you make of J.D. Vance's answers to that question and your other questions about, like, his faith shaping his politics? and your other questions about like his faith shaping his politics. I mean, I guess one, and this isn't specific to the vice president, right? But I think we had, you know, there are people on the conservative side of things in Catholic

debates, right, for a long time have had the idea that liberal Catholics tend to be cafeteria Catholics is the phrase, right? Sort of picking and choosing and saying, we're not, you know, well, abortion and that would, you know, we're going to be pro-choice even though the church says you can't be a good Catholic and be pro-choice, but look, we've got this nice support for Catholic social teaching over here, right? And I think that on the one hand, I think that I agree with that critique. I think Mario Cuomo's position on abortion was wrong and not a solid expression of his

Catholic faith, but I think it's pretty clear that that pull exists on the political right too. And it's a little more complicated on issues like immigration because unlike with abortion, the church doesn't offer this kind of very concrete roadmap. On abortion, the church says, look, abortion is a form of murder and you can have some compromises here and there, but basically you're trying to make it be against the law, or you should. On immigration, the church says, look, you've got to treat migrants with respect and dignity,

but states have a right to patrol and police their own borders. There can be some balance here. And in that, I think Republican politicians right now feel like they have, Republican Catholics, I mean, feel like they have a lot of wiggle room. But in practice, right, when it comes to sort of specific concrete cases and the ones I pressed the vice president on, you know, have to do with deportations to El Salvador. I think basically, you know, it's pretty clear that Trump administration deportation policy

is violating sort of a Catholic view of the natural law. And I think the pressures of politics are such that a lot of Republican politicians just who are Catholic, who are sincere Christians, right, just don't want to sort of look that in the face, right? They want to pull back to the abstract question, should a Catholic politician be willing to police the US border? Right. Yes.

Which is sort of a... But that's sort of like a... Well, it's not... Like, yes, of course. Well, well, well, no. I mean, I don't think it's a yes, of course, given exactly where, I mean, this is a separate argument, but where liberalism and the left ended up in their view of borders in some ways

over the last five years, right? And I think there are people on the Catholic left and some Catholic bishops who go too far in suggesting that all deportation is contrary to Catholic teaching, that can't be right. But once you set in motion a machine of deportation, then as a Catholic, you have a really strong obligation to be constantly scrutinizing it for abuse.

And again, in that conversation, Vance, you know, we took, I think we took the particular case, the Garcia case that everyone has focused on, and he offered a particular concrete defense of administration conduct in that case. But you know, yeah, my view was then and still is that the administration is correct and conservative Catholics are correct, that you can be a good Catholic and support some kind of deportation policy. But there are concrete things

that the Trump administration has done and is, you know, intends to continue doing that the church should criticize. Yeah, I mean, and the criticism you hear from the bishops and cardinals today are not necessarily related. And some of them qualify the criticism by saying, of course, we have a right to patrol,

politicians have the right to patrol our borders and keep communities safe and all that. But, you know, they're using phrases like inhumane, morally repugnant, incompatible with Catholic teaching. And I think, I mean, my person- I haven't heard that before on immigration. Like I know that the Catholic Church has always been more liberal on immigration,

but that to me was sort of like a new level of, yeah, well, forget about the deportations themselves. Like say you agree that we can have deportations in any country. The treatment of migrants, right? The detention centers, the way that they're being, you know, that kind of, all of that part of the deportation regime feels very antithetical to like fundamental Catholic

social teaching. Yeah, I think the bishops would benefit by being as concrete as possible in their examples, because I do think there are bishops who, again, who will talk about, essentially present any deportation regime as an affront to Catholic teaching. And again, I think that argument just, one, I think it's a political loser with a lot of the people the bishops themselves are trying to reach, like sort of conservative leaning Catholics who are like, wait, you're gonna tell me

that we had a breakdown at the border and millions of people came in and you can only deport them if they murder someone, like that, right. I think if I were, you know, if I were Pope, right? If I were a Catholic Bishop making this case, I would focus very concretely on where are you deporting people to and with what kind of process, right?

And, you know, deporting someone who, you know, who was, you know, generally law-abiding to Mexico, you know, maybe you complain about that, but that's not, who was generally law-abiding to Mexico, maybe you complain about that, but that's not, I don't think that's not the most compelling. Indefinite detention in a foreign country. Exactly, no, and this is, yeah, I think there is just a, yeah, I think there is just an important distinction here that if you're a Catholic

who is criticizing the Trump administration, you have an interest in making. And again, that was why I tried to focus on that particular thing with the vice president. I mean, I think, look, the other thing is, as I said to him then, there is, it's not novel at all for Republican administrations to be in tension with the Vatican.

Bush administration was in tension with John Paul II over the Iraq War, and I think John Paul II was right. The Reagan administration was in tension with the Vatican over nuclear weapons and some of its Cold War policies. I think in that case, the Reagan administration was more right. The church is not perfect in all of its own political judgments either. And it's okay to have, to be a Catholic politician

and have an argument with the Pope. But you just don't want to, well, what did I say to Vance? I said, I said, it's a zone of temptation. And I think that's right. I think if you're a Catholic politician, and I think this was absolutely true of Biden too, that it's like, you start out saying, look, the church has these ideals, but I live in the real world. And that's true, right?

Yeah, absolutely. You live in the real world, you have to make choices. But it's really easy for that to become a license for things that, you know, at the beginning you would never have imagined yourself justifying. Right. Yeah, I know. We're used to it on the left, being intentioned with the church on certain issues. But it's the first time I've noticed, at least since I've been in politics, that there's been a, or maybe the most intense split between the right and the church over immigration policy, at least here in the United States. So I thought that was, it was notable.

I got to ask, just before we go, I got to ask a question about your interview with Peter Thiel, because boy, that was a journey. What was more concerning to you? His long pause after you asked if he'd prefer the human race to endure, or his suggestion that Greta Thunberg might be the Antichrist?

So, I mean, as you know, as a podcaster, I'm very, very happy to have had a conversation with Peter Thiel, and I'm not gonna, I mean, as you know, as a podcaster, I'm very, very happy to have had a conversation with Peter Thiel, and I'm not going to criticize him. I think I would say I was not surprised by his pause after that question because Thiel is someone who has always been a kind of transhumanist, right? Meaning someone who imagines the human race continuing, but in some way where we have changed ourselves. And he has a very heterodox reading of Christianity, where these things are sort of compatible.

But yeah, that pause, I mean, I didn't expect it to go on maybe for quite so long, but I wasn't totally surprised by it. I think, you know, I argued with him in the interview. I think Teal had a really strong diagnosis of sort of things that were deeply wrong in Western life in the 2010s. That it was basically like that we thought we were growing really quickly and changing really quickly, but actually we were stagnant and stuck. Technological progress had slowed down. Silicon Valley, where he made his fortune, was under delivering, right?

And then I think connected to that, he folded that together with kind of, you know, what I would call sort of peak woke, right? The sort of assent of Thunbergian, you know, a mixture of, you know, Ibram Kendi racial theory and Thunbergian degrowth ideology that I really think was, to me as a conservative, scarily powerful in the West for a discrete period of time. I don't think, and I made this argument to him, that that's sort of way, like 2025 feels different. It feels like Greta Thunberg is not a central player in the global drama of progressivism. I think whether or not we're really leaving stagnation behind, at least we have some pretty big technological changes happening. And so I'm less sure that the Teal view, I don't know, I felt like I was arguing with

him and saying, you know, we're in 2025. And a lot of his arguments about what he fears most belonged more to 2019 or 2020. Yeah. Although I do- But he has billions of dollars and I do not. So, you know. I will say as kooky as I found the Greta Thunberg thing, the transhumanism does scare me as a human,

also as just a person who has been religious and maybe would like to be more religious. And I do think getting back to the politics of it all, it's like one area where probably religious people on the left and on the right may agree, which is like the advancement of AI and this idea that maybe we can like generate consciousness in artificial, with artificial intelligence and that maybe we can leave our bodies and, you know, Peter Thiel talked a lot about like solving the problem of mortality and you're like solving the problem of mortality. What are we doing here? And it is alarming to me that some of the richest and most powerful people in the world

sort of have that mindset as they develop technology that we're all going to experience the effects of. Yes. And I think that there is a dynamic that has defined our politics in the last few years where you've had this tacit alliance of Silicon Valley and cultural conservatism that is based around, again, this sense that there is this kind of common enemy in woke progressivism and that this is sort of, you know, that progressivism is a threat both to the cultural right and to, you know, Elon Musk and so on. But there is a deep tension that, and honestly, I don't think, like, I don't think Teal is

actually the maximal representation of this at all. I think there are other people in Silicon... Like, Teal doesn't think that we're going to upload our consciousness to the cloud. Like, when Teal talks about transhumanism, it's more like, you know, we're going to have artificial hearts and solve dementia and these kinds of things, right? But there are lots of people deeply involved with AI. I think who do? I think that they're either working towards a full merge of human consciousness and machine

consciousness or that they're creating a successor species for the human race. And that does not seem to me to be fundamentally compatible with my own religious commitments. So you know, we'll see how those alliances look. And I mean, one of the things I always appreciated about Musk was that when he talked about going to Mars, he seemed to want it to be human beings going to Mars, right? Not robots. And one of the more depressing features to me of the whole Doge experience was after he lost, he intervened in Wisconsin, in the Wisconsin

elections and lost. And then he had a tweet the next day, I think, that was like, I guess human beings are just the biological bootstrap for digital consciousness. And I was like, man, you lose one election and you give up, give up on the human race, come on. That was it for him. Yeah. Rastav, thank you so much for joining. The book is Believe.

Everyone should go read it, especially if you're skeptical. Everyone, yeah. If you are skeptical of religion, organized religion, the existence of a God, I think it was just a fantastic book to dig into and gives you a lot to think about. So thanks for writing it and thanks for joining. Absolutely, thanks for having me. It of a God. I think it was just a fantastic book to dig into and gives you a lot to think about. So thanks for writing it and thanks for joining.

Absolutely. Thanks for having me. It was a pleasure. All right, quick message from our friends at Vote Save America. You guys all know that Republicans just passed one of the cruellest and least popular pieces of legislation in history. It's going to kick a lot of people off their health care so that we can afford a trillion dollars of tax breaks just for the richest 1% of people in this country. A lot of the House Republicans who voted for the bill won by very slim margins and they're facing tough reelections next year and we can hold them accountable by voting them out and taking back the House. So Vote Save America, as they always do, has the answers here. They set up a Take Back the

House fund to support must-win house races. And to get more information, you just have to go to votesaveamerica.com slash house. That's votesaveamerica.com slash house. Paid for by Vote Save America. You can learn more at votesaveamerica.com. This ad is not been authorized by any candidate or candidates committee. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, John Favreau, along with Max Fisher. The show is produced by Austin Fisher and Emma Illich-Frank. Jordan Cantor is our sound editor. Audio support from Charlotte Landis and Kyle Siglin. Dilan Villanueva produces our videos each week. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Ari Schwartz, Madeline Herringer, and Adrian Hill for production support.

Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. Thank you.