Take the First Step
Douthat provides a refreshingly candid take on why the religious journey is the proper response to the human experience.
Review by Jake Casale
Apologetics, typically defined as the act of putting together a reasoned defense of something, usually a religious belief or doctrine, is a curious phenomenon. As in most forms of communication, the speaker’s tone in apologetic work influences the shape of the whole enterprise. The difference between a conversational or combative approach can be the difference between an engaged audience or an empty room—and while my general preference is toward the former style, the folks who wake up itching for a fight in life are bored to tears without the latter (bless ‘em). There was a stretch of my spiritual journey where I eagerly sought out apologetic writing, hoping to amass a well-stocked library of points and pathos that I could whip out during any discussion about faith that might come my way. I like to think that I wasn’t as insufferable as I could have been during this phase, but I definitely shoehorned inelegant remarks about Jesus and Christianity into conversations that weren’t nearly as helpful to my friends as I wanted them to be. Real human interaction is always messier, more littered with surprises and swerves, than any script.
In recent years, I’ve felt the attraction to certain apologetic approaches wane as my mental model of the spiritual journey has grown more complex. In fact, I don’t remember the last time I picked up a book that bore a passing resemblance to apologetics before my recent foray into Ross Douthat’s Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. The subtitle immediately caught my eye—just “religious”? Not “Christian”? I had a cursory familiarity with Douthat’s work as a New York Times opinion columnist, so I knew he was Roman Catholic and didn’t exactly play coy about it. What was the angle here? Would this book be structured around a head fake, drawing readers into a “gotcha” moment where the author’s Christian bias was revealed, or was it a work of perennialism—the idea that all religions share the same underlying philosophy? I’m used to this type of text presenting its aims straightforwardly (as in, on the cover), so I was actually quite thrilled at the prospect of a little mystery—and pleasantly satisfied when I saw where Douthat ultimately took his argument.
The real angle winds up being neither subterfuge nor bland reductionism. Indeed, Douthat maintains admirably consistent candor throughout the book about his hope: he wants to sketch a case for why taking a religious journey is the proper response to honest engagement with the experience of being human and of reality, a more appropriate and high-integrity path than atheism or perpetual agnosticism. He intends it to be “useful for readers who might take many different religious paths,” while also acknowledging that his own Christianity inevitably shapes his presentation of the options available. And while I noticed this tension at various points in Douthat’s writing, I was struck by how non-anxious a tension it was; never does it feel like Douthat is haunted by a guilt-tinged evangelistic impulse as he attempts a dialogue of intellectual openness and respectability. In fact, this might be the least guileful book I’ve ever read. Douthat carries a refreshing authenticity as he spills most of his ink arguing that some kind of religious engagement is better than none, while also being forthright—mainly in his last chapter, by design and clearly signaled in his introduction—about why he finds the reasons for Christian commitment to be uniquely compelling. I kept my eyes open to the last word for a whiff of manipulation, and simply didn’t see any; of course, we’ll leave on the table that my own Christianity could be influencing that.
Douthat gives no pat answers and displays a tone consonant with the book’s overall aim—to show that curiosity, wrestling, and exploration in the context of a religious quest is a more coherent response than forgoing the quest entirely.
Douthat moves inductively toward the case for religious commitment, his first three chapters focusing on categories of evidence for the real presence of divinity and the supernatural: the structure of the universe, the mystery of human consciousness, and the realities of reported supernatural encounters throughout history, particularly in post-Enlightenment societies. He outlines how the burden of evidence suggests that the supernatural dimension of reality is not indifferent to the world and the humans that inhabit it, implying that humans should care about the story in which they find themselves and seek to live in light of it. For all of his intellectual substance, Douthat’s synthesis in later chapters is often reified at the level of stark practicality. For example, with a generous helping of qualifications and nuances, his argument for commitment to a religious tradition over a DIY approach turns on blunt statements like “You are probably not a religious genius”—simple claims that land well precisely because he has mapped out the unlikelihood of the alternatives in such a disarmingly level-headed manner.
He then proceeds to navigate through how the major religious traditions both agree with and depart from one another on central concerns like the nature of God (or gods), the eternal stakes of human life, and how divinity interacts with human history, with a chapter reserved to give particular attention to modern stumbling blocks like the existence of suffering, the faults of religious institutions, and why those institutions seem to care so much about sex. Those last three get just a few pages each, which might strike some readers as surface-level to a fault given how laden these topics are, but Douthat gives no pat answers and displays a tone consonant with the book’s overall aim—to show that curiosity, wrestling, and exploration in the context of a religious quest is a more coherent response than forgoing the quest entirely.
Indeed, an appeal to holistic integrity is the deepest throughline in the reflections that Douthat has assembled in Believe: the notion that surveying the raw data of human experience and knowledge throughout history makes not just religious belief, but rearranging one’s actual life in response to that belief, an appropriate exigency for the rational human being. Yet this flavor of appropriateness is not just intellectual, even as it is deeply affirmative of our ability to reason; it empathetically recognizes and lauds the rich human capacity for questing, a venture that involves our whole beings, rarely proceeds along a linear path, and somehow brings us into deeper fullness even before a destination is in sight (which is not to say destinations don’t matter—they do!). In how it extends this invitation to quest, Believe carves out a distinct space among its apologetic peers, underlining with clarity and earnestness why such a journey is worth taking.
Jake Casale lives in Boston, Massachusetts. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 2017 and has worked on public health/health systems strengthening efforts both domestically and abroad. He currently works for digital health company Cohere Health.
Believe: Why Everyone Should be Religious was published by Zondervan on February 2, 2025. Fare Forward appreciates their provision of a review copy. You can purchase your own copy from the publisher here.
