The Ricochet Podcast - Journeymen of Light

Episode Date: February 21, 2025

Ross Douthat returns to the Ricochet Podcast to discuss his latest book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. Rob, Steve and James chat with him to get at The Big Everything. Why does a Catholic make the case for broadly-defined belief? Has disillusionment with liberalism provided God an opening to win back lost sheep? Should faith guide us toward practical answers to ordinary problems? Tune in for answers!Plus, the fellas discuss Voodoo Doll research getting the DOGE treatment; they consider the levels of commitment to America First; and they express their doubts that AfD's expected gains in the German parliament portend a Nazi revival.Clip from this week's open: White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller gives the press a civics lesson.

But I think only in Divinity School are they at least approaching the text by saying, I'm not trying to destroy it, I need to love it, and I don't know how to love it. Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Stephen Hayward, myself, James Lallex, and Rob Long is back because we're going to talk to Ross Douthat about his new book, Why You Should Be Religious. So let's have ourselves a podcast. The threat to democracy, indeed the existential threat to democracy, is the unelected bureaucracy of lifetime tenured civil servants who believe they answer to no one, who believe they can do whatever they want without consequence,

who believe they can set their own agenda no matter what Americans vote for. Federal bureaucrats who are defying democracy by failing to implement his lawful orders, which are the will of the whole American people. Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast number 729. I'm James Lylex here in crisp bright minneapolis steven hayward probably somewhere out there in the west coast and rob long is back with us not to say yeah steven right okay but rob how are you i'm doing well how are you stuff how are you james it's the most important question how are you uh well that is a fraught question at the moment uh with uh many facets uh glinting dully in the dark cave of night um but you are so the same basically from that's actually where i where i uh where i i left and you are in uh you are in new york right now and you are where

and the last time we met you of course i am not in new york i am not princeton new jersey oh right is that where you were conducting your your um yeah that's where i'm conducting my cert my uh my studies i don't know how to quite to describe how would i describe it exactly your your studies your theological studies your ecclesiastical studies james so i don't know what that you can call that anything you want an m div master divinity which i've always secretly been but now i really am gonna i'm gonna have the license uh what is the step below master of divinity which i always secretly been but now i really am gonna i'm gonna have the license uh what is the step below master of divinity because master of divinity really does sound like a commanding position from which you can do all sorts of things you've been invested you've

been imbued you are a master of divinity master yes what's below that acolyte of divinity i don't think there is i think you're either a master or you're just nothing. Okay, so we're all just here, journeymen of light. Stephen, how are you today? I am just fine, James. Good and dandy. Well, we have a world to discuss. We could take a couple of angles about it. We could talk foreign affairs.

But I would almost like to reserve Ukraine for another day because it's big and thorny, and I want to see how it all shakes out. And I'm reading all sorts of things, and I understand i understand of course why the president would want some mineral rights because ukraine provides 70 of the neon gas to the world and if we're going to make america great that means a lot of neon signs over you know main streets and hamburger shops and the rest of it uh but the rest of it i'm still trying to figure out what is going on beyond the obvious to talk about israel if we want to put our heart in the gutter, because it seems to be an extraordinarily unfathomably amoral situation on the part of Hamas.

Or we could find something that gladdens the heart of all, and that is the complete and total realignment of the deep state, the swamp, and the federal government. I don't know if you guys saw this yesterday in the flurry of executive orders that came out. There was one implementing the president's Department of Government Efficiency Workforce Optimization Initiative. Sounds good DC-ish. Are either of you guys familiar with this latest EO about how they're going to completely, completely transform the federal government no i've completely missed this although it fits into the larger piece i think that what the trump administration is determined to do is restore presidential control over the entire executive branch meaning the ability of

the president to fire essentially anyone uh and you know this and this will involve overturning at least one old supreme court case the you know Humphreys executor from the 1930s, and we'll get off into the legal swamp there. But I think they have a grand strategy involved here, and I think they're likely to win many of these battles. The administration, you mean? Yes. Yeah.

Yes. I think so, too. Actually, I think it's, I mean, you know, as you know, I have mixed feelings. It is, in fact, a good idea for the executive branch to be allowed to execute and for the legislative branch to be allowed to appropriate and legislate. I mean, that's kind of how it's set up. And we've, you know, the most interesting thing about Doge has been not the waste and the fraud. I mean, the waste and the fraud, maybe. I don't know. I've been hearing that story forever now.. I mean, the waste and the fraud, maybe. I don't know.

I've been hearing that story forever and ever. It's fine. If that floats your boat, fine. Go ahead. But what's been amazing to me is just how much the federal government's doing, how huge the Leviathan has become. And, I mean, I was just driving here, as you know. I was driving around, and I was listening to NPR. This is my want during the day.

And it's a big sob story on NPR about people complaining about the scientific research, scientific research. And, you know, they're going to gut the scientific virtue in Columbia and Columbia University. I mean, not the country. And I came home and I didn't quite get it yet, but I'm going to get it because I thought, okay, Columbia, big university. What is the endowment for Columbia University? And the endowment, it's popping up right now, is going to be as of June 30th, 2024. So as of six months ago, basically. $14 billion.

That's a rainy day fund, though. Yeah, and that's actually small, right? I mean, Harvard's bigger, Yale's bigger, universities are bigger. So there is this giant, vast pool of money that used to be used by universities to engage in research. And all the things that they think are very important um all the all the great scientific discoveries that we have that we people have been talking about certainly on the npr uh show i was listening to um happen outside the realm of the federal government and federal largesse so there is an argument to be made that you know a little

bit of you know breaking some glass and uh shaking things up may not be a bad idea and um and and and that the and that the fact that the american people although not a majority of them but a huge plurality of them seem to be supporting this suggests that um the problem has been lying in the universities and the research organizations and the medical and scientific establishment, which have been telling us all sorts of things for years and years and years and years, like we're all going to die in climate change, or we're all going to die if you don't wear the mask and schools have to be closed, all that stuff, right? That's credibility they lost. They can't come crying now about it. Well, here's an odd bit of trivia that is unknown to just about everybody,

is that for decades, science funding from the federal government has actually risen faster under Republican administrations than Democratic administrations. Lots of reasons why that turns out to be true, and there's lots of problems. But two things right now jump out at me. One is, Rob, you mentioned the discrediting of the scientific establishment from COVID and whatnot. And I have a headline I found this morning from Inside Higher Ed, and I'll just give you the headline. Voodoo doll study explores why scientists get harassed.

So that was probably made for it by a federal grant. Okay, well, I'm in favor of that. We do more research on voodoo in general. It's true, you know. Right. Well, or voodoo economics, right? I course that's the subject for study voodoo doll study as much as i love to say it i want to know where this was conducted was there somehow a usa id appropriation to the vanderbilt university which then gave two million dollars to tides foundation which then gave 150 000 to a haiti group which went out and asked a bunch of people about which kinds of knives and pins they particularly use who who did the voodoo study that voodoo study

you do so well yeah i'll have to pull it up again because i don't have it handy but uh it was some university um where they actually had they actually had people in a room saying uh you know poke a voodoo doll to give in response to questions about scientists and science i mean it sounds perfectly preposterous um but beyond sort of the frivolous things you can point to which you know we can we've done that forever right uh the other thing going on is the Trump administration saying we're going to cap overhead on federal funding for science at, I think, 15%. 50%. The great scandal here is most universities take 40%.

Some take as much as 50%. I've seen 60. Yeah, I know one university where it's 56%. And the point is that this has become a slush fund to cross-subsidize universities. The universities say, oh, we need that to provide the labs and equipment and administer the grants. Well, the labs are mostly built. And any new lab equipment would be part of the grant that goes to the researchers. So I love this.

I think that this is an absolutely solitary development by the government to say, no, you can't, you have universities, we're not going to cross-subsidize your bloated administrations. But before I toss it to Rob again, I have to note that one of the things that this executive order says is that Doge is going to go through root and branch and look at all of the regulations, and there have to, I mean, the man hours required to look at that is extraordinary, that have been promulgated by agencies outside of their specific congressional mandate in other words you guys don't get to make that rule up that's the job of the legislature and the number of encumbrances that have been placed upon innovation and business and you know the rest

of these things because the guys are just throwing these regs out everywhere right that if they have no statutory basis they got to go and i seem to remember that there was a recent Supreme Court kerfuffle about this. So when people talk about the intractability of the deep state, I mean, they're essentially referring to a civil service that regarded itself as being a permanent overclass that does the work of governance no matter who's in the White House. Well, this changes that. And if they move fast and swift enough, we may see the most consequential change, actually, to American governance since, I don't know,

since FDR started, like, you know, draping this stuff and doing what he did back in the 30s. Rob, what say you? Well, maybe. I mean, the problem is that everybody thinks that the government's spending stupid money on everybody else, but everybody thinks the government's spending really good money on them.

I don't. And so there's a lot of this, like, you know, you can go back and forth on all of this stuff but uh you know where the money is is in entitlements and we're not going to touch those um and you know republicans have been flinty and mean about this for years and we get nowhere with it um but if you're under 40 your your social security is going to be different from mine and if you're under 30 it your Social Security is going to be different from mine. And if you're under 30, it's going to be vastly different from if you're under 40. And your retirement age is going to be 70 or 75.

It's not going to be 60, whatever. And that is just the truth. And nobody wants to tell anybody that. They're just hoping it kind of seeps into the groundwater so that everybody under 30, which I think is kind of true. Any smart person under 30, if you ask them, they know it's not going to be there. But nothing's going to change until that happens, until we accept that and really sort of internalize that and stop lying to people about how if you're on the left, if you're a Democrat, how it's all going to be fine. All we have to do is raise taxes on the rich.

Or if you're a Republican, this current president lying to people saying, no, we don't have to touch it. I'm never going to touch it because that's just simply a lie. And as long as we're not doing that, we're just going to be firing some scientists and listening to outrageous, but basically financially, economically trivial stories on talk radio and on Twitter. But we're not actually going to be changing the future direction of this country in the way we deploy resources, because we're still going to be spending a lot of money on entitlements. And then the second thing is, I mean, the other big giant pot, Steve, you chime in here, is defense. And on the one hand, we have an America First policy right now, which is, will you agree with it, disagree with it, is a policy that argues for a much, much, much, much smaller armed forces.

If we're America first, we don't have to go overseas. We just have to protect our borders. So we should be shrink. If we're going to be America first, we should shrink. If we're not going to be America first, we should stop saying because the worst thing in the world to be is America first. But except for some foreign intents, that is that's a recipe for disaster. So we have to as a country and as a policy, we have to sort of unify those two things. well i two quick points one rob i take your point about the waste fraud and abuse theme has been overdone over the years you know the reagan people made a big deal of that and they found there wasn't very much in 1981 and that's why seriously cutting spending then involved changing eligibility formulas however i do think that that is less true today i mean even the biden administration gao found uh what last year sometime, that potential fraud in Medicare and

Medicaid was between $250 and $500 billion. I mean, real money now. So I think there is more going on. And I have a theory on this, that if we do a full-scale forensic examination of the last 15 years, I think we're going to find that the kind of things that just have dripped out now from Doge about USAID and so forth, we're going to find that that kind of, that just have dripped out now from doge about usa id and so forth we're going to find that that kind of you know frivolous uh spending and subsidies for liberal client groups and all kinds of crazy things but that exploded under obama and especially you know that that 800 billion dollar package and it's only grown bigger uh during uh uh the biden administration i don't think the first trump administration was looking hard at this uh and so i think that they're actually if this works that's a big if i think we're going to find substantial savings that then might make possible the conversation about entitlements

because you're right that it won't get us close to where we need to be uh but okay that's point one point two i just talked about medicare before we talk about defense? I mean, Medicare is true, but the Medicare, rises in Medicare costs and waste fraud abuse, all those things. I mean, they accelerated under Obama, obviously, but they always go up because price controls do not work. Right. And Medicare is a price control program. So every time, it takes five years for this big Medicare review, because obviously the healthcare business is really huge. So we have this five-year review

on procedures and what will pay for a procedure. Meanwhile, the procedures become redefined and one procedure is now three small procedures or six procedures. And then the costs always, always, always go up because Medicare is a, is a single-payer program whether you like it or not it's socialized medicine whether you like it or not and we have a federal government a behemoth trying to control prices and that there's only one system in the world that ever accurately and efficiently controls prices and that is a market. And if you don't have a market, it doesn't matter. You can give Elon Musk the keys to the kingdom, and Doge could be given a carte blanche.

It's never going to happen because people don't want it to happen. Look, a lot of elderly people who are walking around with MAGA hats, driving around in their golf carts to the villages, are going to get really, really pissed when they discover that Medicare isn't going to cover this or that procedure that they think they want. Yeah, I'm in heated agreement with you about that. Just quickly on defense, a lot to be said there, but one place where I think we need to think hard is whether we have an America first defense posture or not is I wonder if we can continue to afford having a gold plated military military by that i mean we seem to build the most expensive fighter planes the most expensive ships and we've always thought and this goes back to the cold war years when we countered the superior numbers of the

soviet union in terms of troops with better technology and you know i i you know i don't really have a firm grasp on that but i know there's lots of intelligent criticisms of things like the F-35 fighter plane that's unbelievably expensive. And I don't know, maybe drones are better, but I think there needs to be a top to bottom review. And by the way, Hegseth is seemingly indicating that he's open to some of that inquiry. I disagree with the policy, but I believe that the policy itself has ramifications. And I think that it is one thing to be America first, and that is a completely legitimate policy. You can't be America first unless that's the primary piece, foundational point if you're going to rebuild or remodel the U.S. military. We are not going to be protecting Europe.

We're not going to be protecting Ukraine. We are not going to be protecting Taiwan. We're not going to be doing any of that. That's not America first. America first is the opposite of that. All that's fine, but that means that we don't need a lot of things. What do we really need? We need to protect our shipping lanes, I guess. We need to protect our uh shipping lanes i guess we need to protect our borders and then we're done and if you if the

waiver on that then you gotta then you're on a very slippery slope um the one thing about reagan said is that we are there to protect the world so we're gonna build build build um if we're not there to protect the world we're just here to protect our borders and our country, then we don't need half the things that we buy. We just don't need them. You can't have it both ways. The worst thing for us to be is have an interventionist, even a quasi-interventionist posture in the world, and also have a military that can't handle that. That's just having a big mouth with no follow through. And unfortunately, I believe that describes our current

president, but it's a very dangerous position to be in. It's one thing to say, world, you're on your own. It's another thing to say, world, you're kind of on your own, and we're going to reduce our military, but we're also going to, when we want to get involved in something, we're going to get involved in something. I mean, what do we care if Russia takes over Ukraine? What do we care

if China takes over Taiwan? If we care, then we need to prepare and spend. If we don't care, then we don't have to prepare or spend. Well, it's remarkable. It took six minutes to go from my original point, which was how this is going to impact the housing values in McLean, Virginia, to a projection of power. And Rob, you're absolutely right. My point, to put a bow on the whole thing, is that not that I expect any of what Doge is doing or the executive orders in reshaping the bureaucracy is going to necessarily get us out of the spending problem. I get that. I mean, the deficit is what it is, and you're right, entitlements are what

they are. But it will, in the future, future i think result in a leaner government that has less control and less intervention and less invasive tentacles into the body politic and body economic and social and whatnot and that's a good thing and it's going to be hard to rebuild if they want to do it well the next time they get their their hands on the levers of power but maybe perhaps there's but one lever of power and it is in the grasp of things way beyond our ken and we small little ants here struggling in the muck trying to comprehend our place in the universe oftentimes turn to things that can't be necessarily empirically quantified and that is why we're going to talk to ross ross dow the columnist

from the new york times host of matter of opinion podcast author of many books and most recently as of just last week believe why everyone should be religious ross welcome back it's great to be back i'm and i'm here i'm here to unlock the mysteries of the universe good good it took you so long rob is going to grapple because uh rob is a grappler of these we're all grapplers with these things here and and so i know that i'm going to you don't have to defer to him almost immediately but let me ask you this why everyone should be religious it matters what the religion is doesn't it i mean if you're you know the devotee of some some pithian death cult uh that's not the same as being somebody who's a you know a shaker in iowa i mean it depends you know

what does the pithian death cult really ask of you you know how does it does it does it help your marriage yeah is it good is it good for american politics is there a tokevillian defense of the pithian death cult i mean i think you, I think we have to be open-minded. But yes, obviously, it matters. It matters what religion you are. What I'm trying to do in the book, though, is two things. First, I do think that there is a general religious perspective on the world that is shared by most, if not all, of the entities and institutions that we call religions. And it's not a complete perspective. It, you know, doesn't get to

all the details about who God is and what God wants of you and so on. But the major world religions tend to agree that, you know, the world exists for a reason. Humans exist in some kind of relationship with a higher power. You should probably be preparing for whatever judgment or transformation awaits you after death. These kind of things, right? So there is, I think there is something called religion, even if it is a very general category. And then part of what I'm doing in the book is essentially taking people to the threshold of what I would consider the sort of more specific questions that you ask when you're deciding which religion to join. But a bunch of the book is arguing for why it makes sense, you know, people talk about being spiritual but not religious, right? That's a pretty broad category in American life right now.

And part of the book is a lecture to atheists on why they should be spiritual. And then having persuaded them to be spiritual, I proceed to the lecture on how the spiritual person should really join an institutional religion, ideally a big and old one. And then at the very end, I talk about my own Christianity. But I do think that there is a valuable case to be made before

you get to the specifics of religious doctrine, before you try and solve the problem of evil or litigate the incarnation of Jesus, just about, you know, does it make sense to believe in God? Is the universe made for a reason? Are we an accident? What are we doing here? Those kind of things. And I think you can get some distance on those questions further than a lot of people nowadays tend to think. And you answer all those questions in your book, a chapter for each, I do believe. A chapter, that's right. Every question, every question answered. No, I mean, I don't answer every question, but I do think that it is, you know, there's a slightly apocryphal, maybe not quote from the polymath scientist,

John von Neumann, something to the effect of, there probably is a God. A lot of things make more sense if there is one. And that's a pretty good summary of the first few chapters of the book. There's a lot of things about the universe, about our consciousness, about religious experience that just make a student at the Princeton Theological Seminary, getting an MDiv on my way to ordination, I hope, in the Episcopal Church. So, I totally disagree, obviously. As a good Episcopalian, I think it's so crazy.

No, I mean, they, right, the joke is that, you know, at Harvard Divinity School, they are shocked if you believe in God. But Princeton is actually known for its relative robustness. That's one of those weird things about divinity schools, that you stand out if you kind of believe in god um mostly the default setting is i'm not so sure but i mean the the upside is i get to spend all day thinking about these things the downside is i have to spend all day reading theologians um which is incredibly difficult for me because it's incredibly hard writing and it's very boring except for the really great ones like augine. But there's a French one named Julia Kristeva, and she's a psychoanalyst, and she's a, only a French person could be a psychoanalyst and a theologian. And she says that atheists are people who believe

that they do not believe. Do you buy that? I think there's a lot of different types of atheist. I certainly think that there are atheists who are in a posture of functional rebellion, I think, where atheism is chosen sort of the way, you know, in the Brothers Karamazov, the brother says, you know, even if God reconciles everything, I still have a moral objection, right, to his creation. And there's certainly versions of that style of atheism. I think if you read, you know, someone like Christopher Hitchens at his peak, at the peak of his powers, he's really rebelling against God god not proving his non-existence he's really saying god is a dictator and i you know i reject his authoritarian rule so that's one category of

atheists that partially fits i would just say that chris hitchens wasn't was wasn't an atheist he was a an old testament jew right he right he was he was he had a long list of complaints not only the old testament jews right yeah the long list of complaints um but then you know then there are other types there are people who you know believe in something else right as a substitute for god there's that style of atheism that i think we're very familiar with. I do think, though, that there is a category of atheist who sincerely sort of has, you know, if you're reading theology, right, you're hitting the people who argue for a sensus divinitas, right, the idea that all human beings have a sense of God's presence. I do think that there are people who have found a way to turn that off, whether it was always off, whether they've made certain choices and gone

down certain paths that have taken them pretty far. But, you know, I wouldn't say to every atheist, oh, at some level, you really believe in God, and, you know, and you're just sort of, you've sort of constructed. I think there are people who go pretty far, I guess, in their non-belief. In their non-belief. I know Steve wants to jump in. I just want to read one more quotation to you. I'm letting you push your seminary education to good use. Yeah, it's for my reading this week, so if you have any thoughts, just jot them down and I'll... Slavoj Zizek, a very interesting theologian. Yes.

But it's a great, pithy phrase, right? If once upon a time we publicly pretended to believe, while privately we were skeptics, or even engaged in obscene mocking of our public beliefs, today we publicly tend to profess our skeptical, hedonistic, relaxed attitude, while privately, we remain haunted by beliefs and severe prohibitions. Do you think there was a switch there at some point where we went from being sort of publicly observant? Now, the public face that many of us have is, well, I don't believe that. That's just, I'm not, I'm a,

I'm a rationalist. I don't believe this. Yeah. There was a switch. It seemed to sort of, it seemed to somewhat happen in stages, right? You get, you know, one stage at the end of the wars of religion, maybe a second stage with the Enlightenment and sort of the peak of Voltaire, another stage somewhere with the Victorians when Matthew Arnold starts writing about the sea of faith receding, and then maybe a final turn of the dial somewhere after the 1960s. So, it's not all at once process. But yes, the language of haunting is appropriate, right? Because I'm definitely a disbeliever in true disenchantment, true secularization, in the sense that I think that all of the events that people described as enchanted

in the Middle Ages, or, you know, the Roman Empire and so on, a lot of that stuff just keeps on happening, right? The modern world is filled with people, many people I know, who have religious experiences that would by no means be out of place in the enchanted cosmos of 13th century France or wherever else. What has changed is not disenchantment of experience, but disenchantment of official knowledge, right? If you go on Wikipedia and read Wikipedia pages on miracles and alleged miracles, you don't get to write a Wikipedia entry unless you have a materialist Princeton, right? You go hang out at the law school or the business school, you know, hang out with the people who are not professionally anti-religious, but take themselves very seriously. Their view is the rational person's default is atheism, whatever may happen to you in perfect personal experience. And that is, you know, I think that religion, I think there's a limit to how far any religious revival can go unless you at some point deconstruct that sensibility. I think there's a limit to how far any religious revival can go unless you, at some point, deconstruct that sensibility.

I think every pendulum swing back towards religion in the modern age is limited by the inability to persuade, let's say, the typical reader of the New York Times that religion, you know, might be well and fully true as a description of reality, which is, you know, why I've written this book, right? You know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna solve that problem. Right. And everyone should buy the book, of course, to say again, believe while everyone should be religious. Ross, I just want to get back to something you said about the latest, the latest turn of the knob, being somewhere in the 60s. It's so true. I spent a lot of time looking at old newspapers. And in the 50s, the early 60s, Easter would be a big event for a small-town newspaper because they would get everybody to buy an ad. The gas station, the dry cleaners, the shoe guy, and they would all use clip art,

of which there was an abundance of a happy family going to a church with a very tall steeple. And so, the newspapers would be crammed with this imagery of specific religious activities and obligations and duties and Easter in itself. It's gone by about 1980 or so. It's just gone. And everybody who grew up in that era, even if your family did not go to church, ours did, and then if you fell away from it, even now, all these decades later, Easter and the few commercial trappings that we get still strike a tuning fork inside of you. Now you can say that's cultural, that's memorable, it's sociological, or that is that sense of divine awareness that you're talking about.

But you're absolutely right. It was a distinct decision to get rid of this old kind of weird stuff because it was our parents. And I'm convinced that so much of this is just simply a base rejection of what our parents happened to believe. And until we abashedly crawl back to it and say, you know, maybe those folks did have a point. And you can see this at that point in data in the places where secularization went fastest. It happened faster in Western Europe than here, right?

And so there was, you know, data from Ryan Burge, who's one of the best sort of data analysts of American religion, and recently on, you know, spiritual and religious belief in Great Britain. And it's very clear that the baby boomers are the most secular generation in Britain.

Now, that isn't fully true here. I think the millennials are the most secular generation in the U.S. But in Britain, secularization goes all the way with the baby boomers, and then subsequent generations culminating in Gen Z get progressively a bit more interested in spirituality. And there, what's interesting is that some of the turns of the dial had to do with, you know, sort of scientific argument and debate. So Victorian atheism was shaped by Darwin in a profound way. I think the 60s turn had, yeah, it had a lot more to do with a cultural rebellion based primarily around changing sexual behavior against, you know, against the old order. It wasn't about discovering a new

philosophical argument against the existence of God. It was that, you know, traditional religion strictures no longer seemed to make sense, and it was time to let it go, as they say in Arendelle. Ross, it's Steve Hayward out in California, where, as Walker Percy used to say, has its own peculiar sunshine version of Christianity, right? And other faiths as well. Exactly right. Right.

So, look, I have to gush about your book and give you a dust jacket blurb. It is rightly being compared favorably to C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity. That was my friend Frank Bethwiss's review, which I'm sure you've seen. Frank Bethwiss I was a very kind review, yes. Darrell Bock Well, but I think – I mean, what I'd add to it is it brought back a whole lot of things I haven't thought about for a long time, you know, about the problems of cosmology, the limitations of Darwinism, the riddle of consciousness, the whole domain of what we call natural theology. And the writing is, I'll put it, this has been his praise, the writing is so gentle.

I would have, especially in criticisms of scientists, I would have written a lot of things that would make them mad. But your book on every page invites the skeptical reader to keep going. You have a nice respect and generosity toward them, which I think is a remarkable writing achievement. I just really have two, I could talk all day or hours for you about this, but I have two questions of curiosity, and maybe just one. I do think there's a dog that doesn't bark in the book. And here I'm going back to when I was a young man, finding my way in Christian faith. And one of the big things going on in the world was, for lack of a better term, was existentialist Christianity. It was people like Rudolf Bultmann

and Paul Tillich and Harvey Cox and process theology, hopefully things Rob is not having to suffer through. And we all remember if you're ever... Oh, you'll find it. Oh, you do have it. And we all remember the famous Time magazine cover, Is God Dead?, from 1966. And all this, I thought, was just an attempt to try and reform religion, and specifically Christian religion, to modern scientism, as opposed to science. And I think an unsuccessful and defective attempt. And so, I'm kind of interested if that ever came on your radar screen, or am I right that that has receded because of its sheer implausibility? Yeah, I think a lot of that material has receded. I wrote about that, I wrote a book, you know,

10 or 15 years ago about, sort of about the decline of American Christianity, and that particular moment featured as a cautionary tale on how Christianity can think that it's adapting, right? That it's sort of adapting successfully to a new world. And then suddenly, you know, that style of spirituality is sort of like, you know, high modernist architecture or even brutalist architecture that was the architecture of the future. And now we're in the future and nobody nobody likes it anymore right um and it was an attempt to sort of in a way to evade some fundamental questions right so one of the things i do in the book that you know goes a bit beyond some of the usual arguments for design and so on is i make a real defense of supernatural

experience as a, you know, real part of human life that has to be reckoned with as an evidence for God, right? And if you go back to Bultman and Tillich and a lot of those guys, you know, they had sort of an ineffable concept of like some encounter with the divine, but they really wanted to move away from questions like, you know, I mean, obviously, the most basic one being, okay, you're a Christian, you know, was the tomb empty? Did Jesus actually, you know, did Thomas actually put his finger in a wound and so on? And in a way, my book is actually quite liberal in a certain sense. Like I am, I think you described it well, I am trying to be very gentle, and I'm not telling people to become

Latin mass Catholics tomorrow. I'm saying, you know, if you're drawn to your local Unitarian church, if that's all you can do, you should do that, right? So I'm not unsympathetic to a certain kind of mode of liberal faith, but I do think the mode that tried to just sort of efface or obscure fundamental questions in order to preserve some kind of modern, friendly Christianity clearly just failed. It just failed, and we're living in the aftermath. Yeah, yeah. So one more question that maybe is too broad, but you'll know how to sort it out. James mentioned a moment ago that some of what we saw the last couple generations was youthful revolt against their parents' generation, and I think, of course, that's always a social factor to be pondered with. But I also wonder

if especially the decline of mainline Protestant churches is connected in a deeper way with the whole problem of the defects of the liberal tradition, which is the emphasis on individual autonomy. And I mean, you've written about that previously, but I've often won, and you do see, by the way, that some of the growth in churches right now, among especially young men, is for things like Eastern Orthodoxy, really traditional faiths. And so, I don't know, I keep thinking that the travails of the Protestant church is at some level connected with the problems of liberalism. I think that it is, and I don't think it's a coincidence. I'm trying to write the book into a moment where I think generally the culture is more interested in religion right now than it was 10 or 15 years ago at the hey, you know, in the heyday of Dawkins and so on. And I don't think it's a surprise that there's this sort of interest in religion at a

moment when liberalism itself seems to have either sort of run, you know, run into a wall or been ensnared by its own contradictions, you know, whatever, whatever metaphor you want to use, right, that sort of whatever lies beyond liberalism, it might be some kind of return to religion. With that said, it's really hard to get away from the individualism of modern life, right? So, yes, the mainline churches did end up becoming too individualistic and sort of, you know, individualizing themselves out of existence. But, you know, the most successful forms of Christianity in the U.S. today are non-denominational forms of evangelical Protestantism, which are conservative in some way, but really, you know,

compared to like the sturdy Presbyterians of yore, quite seeker-sensitive and personalized. My own book, as you said, is very seeker-sensitive in spite of my own traditional commitments. And even something like, you know, the Vogue for Eastern Orthodoxy or Latin Mass Catholicism, right? It's like, okay, you have people embracing tradition, but are they embracing, you know, a fully existent hierarchical institution that they're submitting to? Not exactly, right? right there like Latin mass

Catholicism is kind of in Rebellion against the Pope right now right Eastern Orthodoxy you're joining Eastern Orthodoxy is great because you can join this really deep rich tradition and no one can even agree on who's in charge of it right so even even in it's like oh I'm uh you know the right well right it's like I'm but I'm in the Ruthenian branch of the Moldovan Orthodox Church. Oh, well, you're a heretic then. Right. So, like, there is this, I just think there is, as much as we like to critique individualism, or at least I do, right, there is this way in which any religion that succeeds in this

dispensation has to be adapted to some degree to pluralism and individual agency in a way that was never true in, you know, the antique or medieval past. And also, I just, I know I got to wrap up, I wanted to talk a little bit about the mystery, right? I mean, we say the mystery of faith, but also there's a mystery to the Latin mass, there's a mystery to the, if you're not Eastern Orthodox, to the Eastern Orthodox Church. I sat in a lot of them yes um when i was in in jerusalem a few years ago and and there was we had one experience which is sort of about the mystery is that uh i was somewhere outside and there's this korean group turned out they're korean pentecostals they're kind of wandering around and And then at some point, they really got overcome with the spirit,

and they started to speak in tongues. And I turned to our guide, and I said, does this happen a lot? And he says, does what happen a lot? I said, do people come and start speaking in tongues? And he said, is that what that is? It just sounds Korean to me. Because, of course, you know,

anybody else's language sounds like tongues right because you don't understand it anyway um and i just feel and when i tell people that i um i'm i'm doing what i'm doing they're they're the what i was prepared for were people to say to me like really i mean you ran tv shows and really and, what most people have said is, oh, man, of course. Yeah, let me know what you find out, right? So, the longing that we have, I think, is just no longer filled by a culture that has told us that all the longings we have can be satisfied by, you know, a million different things. There's still this empty longing that we have that brings us back to this mystery that isn't really going to give us an answer, but at least is going to address

the part of us that is desperately wondering what it is that we're missing and how we can be whole again. Is that, I feel like that's... That's such a powerful statement. How can I possibly add anything to that? That to me is the strongest fact. I think that's right. I think there is a way in which things do move in cycles and you get, you know, a culture sort of,

religion can only decline so far before people start to have exactly the feelings you've described and turn back towards it. But in a way, the turning back towards it is easier because of the decline, right? It's like, oh, you're not threatened by the big institutional religions anymore. I mean, some people are, you can watch The Handmaid's Tale, obviously, those fears have not gone away. But a lot of people, I think, regarded like Roman Catholicism as a much more intimidating thing in even in like 1997 than today. So there's there's a way you turn back. The last thing I'll say, though, is just about mystery. Yes, we're not you. We turn back to mystery and the old religions especially are steeped in mystery, and you're never going to get

definite, you know, definite perfect answers out of that mystery. But I do want to insist that, like, the point of turning back is to find some kind of answer, right? It's like, you know, in the mystery, like, you're trying to decide how to live your life, right? I'm trying to decide how to live my life. And in the mystery, maybe we don't get the perfect answer to you know why is there suffering in the world or why did god make the cosmos this particular way um but i do think for religion to make good on its promises it does need to provide people with a sense of again that individualism again right but some sense of like what do i I do next? Am I on the right path? Should I get married to this woman?

Should I join, you know, should I join the, you know, should I become an Episcopal priest, right? Like, if God is real, it's okay to say, I need a little help here. I need a little concrete guidance. I think culturally, though, it might be wise for us to sit in confusion and mystery for a while. We're so used to reaching for the solution, and so we're used to Googling the answer, that these are sort of answers and questions that are sort of bigger than we have AI algorithms for. And that's a nice feeling. It's actually a nice feeling to know that there are no ready answers here, that your question is deep enough that the answers are going to be satisfying

if and when they come. Just for some reason, I feel culturally that's very important for me. And then ultimately, I think it's harder, especially in a seminary, especially in culture in general, to understand that the message of Christianity is fundamentally different in many ways that the message of Christianity is fundamentally different in many ways from the message of everything else, which is one of the reasons why this strange, weird sect has lasted, which is that you are important, right?

He will leave the flock to get you. And that gives you a lot of grace. It also gives you a lot of responsibility and it gives you a lot of, I think, autonomy in a lot of ways and a lot of um uh expectation that um it's not about fitting into the tribe it's not about fitting into the dharma it's not about fitting into the sort of big sweep in history it's about um something really personal which uh may never you know you may i'm 60 years old i don't know the answer so that's my that that's my Friday sermon for you. It's not very satisfying, but please give generously.

That's right. By the time you're in the pulpit, you'll have honed it to perfection. I'll have an answer. Speaking of that pulpit, Rod, I'll leave you with an extremely petty question that I have here. A petty complaint, perhaps. Somebody mentioned before, and I think it was Steve, the word cosmology. extremely petty question that i have here petty petty complaint perhaps um somebody mentioned before and i think it was steven the word cosmology and one of the things that just absolutely fascinates me is the depth and the breadth and the variety and the glory and the beauty of the

universe and i you know when i behold these great deep astronomical photos i mean generally i'd say yeah well you know of course god exists this stuff is proof positive to me and i want this is the mystery to me and i want to look at it more. The fascinating aspect that if you look at a very close-up picture of the human retina, it is almost indistinguishable from a picture of a great galactic wall. Everything scales, and you sense this design, and you sense this purpose. And of course, the rational atheist will say, no, that's just simply how it arises because of certain laws applying, because of the Big Bang, etc., etc. I get it. But if your heart and your spirit and your mind are open to the contemplation of the

cosmos as, I know that sounds spiritual, not religious, but what I'm saying is getting into a small building built in 1925 that smells of old candles and a stained glass window seems a constraining thing. And when you add the liturgy and all the other rote things it seems like something that's an impediment to contemplating the great beyond above what do you say to people who have basically the the homer simpson critique of going to church on sunday because you have to wear itchy church pants and a tight shirt and you mean you mean you mean my nine-year-old son that that complaint or your 66 year old friends yes it's funny because you know the last the last at a book signing

someone came up to me um and in a friendly way gave me a long lecture on exactly the terms you've you've given about how there can't possibly be a god because the universe is so big right he was like you know he was all mystery and wonder but in the service of human beings they're too tiny that's like that's like saying there can't there can't be a cook because orson welles is too fat i don't get that one at all no i don't i don't get that argument either but i'm going to just to steal from it to to try and answer your reasonable question, which is to say that like, there has to be, there are different scales of things, right?

And yes, of course it's appropriate to contemplate the majesty and mystery and wonder of almighty God in a sunset, a rainbow, you know, the Hubble, Hubble telescope photos, all of these things. Right.

Um, and, but what is asked of you in church is not, you know, spending your whole life sort of in in a small building saying prayers right i mean if you're catholic you're expected to go to mass once a week plus on on holy days of obligation more you know maybe more you should go more right but that's the basic ask and if god is present in the fullness of the cosmos part of the

point of going to church is to say okay okay, there is a correlation there, right? That these things scale in just the way you talked about with the retina, right? And that's why it's nice to go to a church, I think, that has nice architecture, right? That has good music, that captures some form of that scaling that seems itself to be participating in the heights and depths that you describe. But I think what the like low church Protestant who has skepticism about fancy Catholic architecture would say is that actually you're supposed to see that scaling in your neighbor next to you and to hear it in the word of God preached by, you know, Father Rob Long from the public, right? But like that you shouldn't even need the stained glass windows and the saints and so on right you should be able to get that scaling from your neighbor

next to you and the bible read to you and that's what church is for and i think that's certainly enough it should be enough to get you there you know once a week i think once a week this is what literally what i say to my nine-year-old son. I'm like, God in all his majesty created the entire universe for you to inhabit, and all he asks you to do is wear uncomfortable pants for 57 minutes this Sunday. Can you do it? And the answer sometimes is, you know, come on, Dad. I thought you were about to say that Homer Simpson goes nonetheless.

Yeah. To the only family on television that goes to goes nonetheless. Yeah. To the only family on television that goes to church regularly. Well, God speaks to him in that episode. And one of the great things about it, when God is actually revealed, we see that he has five fingers. Well, as we like to say around here,

a mighty fortress is our Rob. And we will look forward to the next time we talk to you about the next book, or even this one, because it's the topic of our lives. Ross Douthat's new book is Believe Why Everyone Should everyone should be religious and we thank you so much for showing up guys i really appreciate it it's a great book thank you ross take care and you know i mentioned the church um you know built in the 20s the church that i grew up in elam lutheran in fargo north

dakota is an old classic 1920s church with the off-the-shelf stained glass picture of Martin Luther looking very devout and Jesus in the garden and the rest of it. But at some point in the 1950s, they decided, hey, if we want to really be with the times, we've got to modernize a little bit. So they slapped a sort of Perry Mason era swank cool blonde wood stuff all over the place in the pulpit and some of the railings. and so i grew up with a syncretic combination of these things which just made perfect sense to me streamlined pulpit i mean from which the pastor would thunder and i mean thunder everybody and it was wonderful it was wonderful so you're a lutheran yeah yeah i knew i was a jack guy but i was i But I was an altar boy, too.

I believe that, too. And so I put on these robes, and I would have these wands, these wonderful wands with a wax tip at the end. You'd light it, and then you'd play it out a little bit. You'd light all the candles, and then you'd sit there. And the soft fabric of these robes was just absolutely wonderful. And you just feel it. Why do we wear this all the time? I wish I had sheets like that.

But here's the thing, folks. With spring right around the corner, the bitter cold of winter hangs stubbornly. This is literally the greatest transition I've heard. I'm so overwhelmed with the fractal perfection of this transition that I... It's almost mystical. It's almost mystical, Rob, right? Well, I'm just saying

we have a seminary student here, a man studying the divinity, studying the resurrection, and just said that was the greatest transition. I think there are other bigger ones on history, Rob, and maybe you'll come across those.

I didn't say transfiguration. I just said transition. Anyway, the point is... You're good at transing. Put it that way. Oh, good Lord. Reset, Record scratch. Starting again.

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earth we thank cozy earth for sponsoring this the ricochet podcast a few minutes before we got a roll here gentlemen i have to have to have my lunch and then I have 10,000 errands to do. Sounds like a proclaimer song. So we have upcoming German parliamentary elections. And according to Reddit, they got Nazis. The Nazis might win. The Nazis might come in second. Well, yeah, I mean, it's always been the fear, right? right i mean it's very strange that the country itself has been what it's been since 1946 right um most of europe frankly let's be honest whenever the

conservative wins in a european election everyone in the united states reminds everybody well when they say conservative they still mean socialist um it is about time i mean there is this uh probably an idea i don't know whether it's gonna turn out okay it has never turned out okay up till now so maybe you know 19th time is the charm but a certain amount of sort of um from from that big center part of Central Europe, national identity and national pride, which are very, very, very, very ginger things to think about when it comes to the German Republic. But it does seem to me that it is time for European nations to think of what it means to be a European

and what it means to be a european and what it means to be a nation and um those are two different things those are two different things but i i mean that's the problem changes yeah the vast changes culturally in that part of europe uh from immigration um really more than anything else um they're they're never going to go easily and um what you what you don't want to do is is is ignore it and then it kind of leaps out inappropriately um or it leaps out in the historical with historical um precedent so i i suspect that there'll be a lot of screaming and yelling and hand-wringing in certain the obvious places about the outcome of the german election but i suspect that we were in germany the people who voted uh in that if they do in fact vote in that um you know they do vote for that

that party um will won't sound like nazis to us they'll sound like dudes from wisconsin look i mean i i think we should not be trusting the same people who called trump a nazi to say that afd is purely a Nazi party. I think they do have a few bad actors in it. Friends of mine in Europe say, look, they do have some problems. They could clean house more than they have so far. However, I have thought that the party was probably under polling. And I was predicting here the last few weeks that AFD might well win the most votes, which will cause a political crisis in Germany that they richly deserve, for reasons you just stated, Rob. I'm now equivocating a bit,

because I think it's possible that Vance's speech a week ago, which I loved, by the way, but I could see it backfiring. I could see a certain amount of undecided Germans who might be fed up with all the violence they keep getting from their immigrants, their migrants, would have voted for AFD, but now may vote against them because of their latent anti-americanism so it's possible that speech may have backfired at least for this election but i i think i'm with you rob i think the continual exclusion of you know this is a fifth of the country or more is going to say we are fed up with this and for all the other parties to say no we won't talk to you is just simply unacceptable i agree and also i feel like the rule of thumb is uh in general and it isn't just jd vance it isn't just the current administration american politicians

should stay out of european politics and shut up because there's always that european contrarianism which is comes from being a client state essentially that uh you know this is you you you can't tell me nothing and it's better that we just let them discover on their own that um it's a good thing to to it's it's not necessarily a good thing for uh all of germany to um suddenly speak turkish yeah well they will not discover it on their own because they have an entire overclass that's designed to keeping that information and that uh that revelation from being enshrined in the general in general wisdom they won't i mean when you said before they need to start thinking of themselves as europeans and then you added nationalists i

mean that's the problem that's the division there is no we know we all see where nationalism got us so let's have this pan-european transnational identity and it ain't gonna work because people still like to have their folkways and their culture and their language and the rest of it and then within that national polity to hate the people on the other side of the country for different reasons you know and so forth down to the subatomic level we are done ross's book was great we want you to buy it we want you to go to lukashay.com and discuss it and if you're thinking wait a minute isn't that some kind of just civil, civil center, right, political thing? No.

It's the place where people will have an endless comment thread discussing theology in interesting ways. So, yes, Ricochet is all things under the sun. And you really ought to go there. You can read it for free. But the membership, where the friendships form and the interesting conversations happen, a couple of shekels a month. So go there. Rob, it's been great to have you back. Steven as well.

It's lovely to be here, fellas. We would like everybody, of course, to buy cozy earth sheets because that thanks them and you get great sheets. And find some place to leave us a review. Couldn't hurt. What's stopping you? I don't know. All I know is this has been the Ricochet podcast.

We got another coming up right next week, but until then, we'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. See you, fellas. Ricochet. Join the conversation.