Fare Forward: You have professed an interest in what you call non-conversion stories, stories of people who have religious experiences of some kind, without being led into Christianity or Islam or some other defined religious tradition. Where does this interest come from and where does it lead you intellectually?

Ross Douthat: Well, part of it is personal, in the sense that my own religious trajectory was shaped profoundly by personal religious experiences—not my own, but those of my parents and particularly, my mother. For all of the importance of intellectual argument and everything else, I wouldn’t be a Roman Catholic or a Christian today if it weren’t for some profound and hard to explain spiritual experiences that my parents had in the orbit of Charismatic Christianity when I was a kid.

So having that as a part of my background, and having been an observer of but not really a participant in strong religious experience as a kid, I have a certain interest in how people respond to that kind of thing intellectually. Because clearly one of the most important reasons that religion is resilient in our supposedly disenchanted world is that people keep on having religious experiences. So the different ways that people react to them is a place where thinking about my own personal experience bleeds into the sociology of modern religion.

Charles Taylor argues famously that the modern self is buffered rather than permeable, that it’s self-protected against a lot of experiences that people in past eras and societies would have defined as supernatural. And I’m interested in whether that argument implies that something has literally changed in our experience, or whether something has just changed in how we respond to experiences. A big, a big unanswered question about our world is: What do we mean when we talk about secularism? Does that mean a world actually denuded of religious experience? Or does it mean mean a world where religious architecture is missing but people still keep having the same experiences?

If you look at data on Europe and the United States, you can see a lot of evidence for the Chestertonian contention that the collapse of a specific belief in God leads people to believe in all kinds of wild things about the universe that aren’t Christian doctrines. Sally Quinn’s new book [which talks about witchcraft] is really interesting in that regard. Francis Spufford had an interesting review essay in First Things a couple of years ago where he took on Barbara Ehrenreich’s quasi-spiritual memoir and Sam Harris’s writing about meditation. Those are a kind of category in between: They’re not exactly non-conversion stories in the sense that Harris thinks meditation is really good and valuable and practices it—he just continues to reject Western monotheism. And similarly, Ehrenreich seems to be some kind of pantheist rather than an overt atheist.

FF: Spufford in his First Things piece says at one point, “If what we have managed to extend in her [Ehrenreich’s] direction seems to be only an offer of authoritarian parenthood, or a resistible politics, then we have made a mistake of our own about the place we allow for the wildness of God.” What role do you think Christian failure might play in this?

RD: I’m of two minds about his perspective because on the one hand, yes, there are many churches, my own Catholicism sometimes included, that have seemed to reduce Christianity to a framework for culture war and a narrow set of religious rules. And people pretty naturally reject it. At the same time, there are also many, many churches that have gone to the opposite extreme and have emphasized the centrality of experiences of the divine and de-emphasized the idea that you can draw a consistent, rigorous moral code from them.

Those churches are quite available to Barbara Ehrenreich and anyone else who’s had these kinds of experiences, and yet they are not often there—sometimes they are, but they are not often where such people seem to end up.

And there is a sense in which no matter how open you are, Christianity does imply a kind of moral code, it does imply a kind of judgment. So the extent that what we call secularism is really characterized by a wealthy and hedonistic society rejecting the Decalogue, it’s hard to know exactly how much that’s the fault of churches and how much it’s just the nature of our society, that people don’t want to leap from the experience to the possibility of rules because the rules seem very hard and onerous and unpleasant.

FF: Turning from some secular Americans to Christian ones, it’s been five years since you released Bad Religion and diagnosed what you referred to as heretical trends or developments in American Christianity, such as the prosperity gospel. Five years out, has your thinking about the topics covered in Bad Religion changed?

RD: I’d say it’s been confirmed in certain ways and undercut in others. It’s been confirmed in the sense that quite a few of the pathologies that I described have been visible in conservative politics, especially over the last couple of years. The phenomenon of Donald Trump sits at the intersection of prosperity theology and Christian nationalism, and the idea of a God who blesses the successful and the idea of a God who blesses American nationalism as thoroughly as He would have blessed the Israel of the Old Testament—those are ideas woven deeply into an important segment of Trump’s support. And they go a long way towards explaining how and why religious voters ended up not just voting for but, in certain cases, enthusiastically supporting, such a seemingly irreligious and even anti-Christian figure.

So in that sense, I think the book offers a very useful blueprint for understanding a lot of things that surprised a lot of people, myself sometimes included, over the last couple of years.

At the same time, some of the trends we’ve seen have suggested that I was a little bit too quick to say that Christianity’s influence on American life was still really, really strong, even as people were drifting away from institutional forms of religion and any kind of common orthodoxy. I think that trends in the last five years suggest that there’s a stronger case for the post-Christian, or “headed towards post-Christian,” description of American religious life than I allowed for.

In Christianity’s social eclipse, among especially the working class, you can see a further weakening of Christian influence just in the last five years. And then in the realm of activist politics, I think that both on the further left and the further right, in campus movements and the overtly racist pro-Trump fringe, you’re seeing at least intimations of a post-Christian politics in the U.S., in a way that wasn’t as true with Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and so on.