Ross Douthat’s “Believe”: An Unsophisticated Book For Your Unsophisticated Friends (And Your Unsophisticated Self)

Ross Douthat’s new book Believe makes sense – commonsense even.

I’ve just started reading the latest book by New York Times columnist, Ross Dothan, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.  And it’s off to a pretty good start, and I’ll explain why in a minute.

Douthat is that increasingly rare beast at the NYT, conservative and Catholic. And also not a culture warrior. He’s sane, sensible, and firm in his convictions. And for those who think that makes him a bit on the weak side, just read the comments section on his articles.

If most of you received three or four of the often hundreds of derisory comments that he receives from hard progressives and anti-theists, you’d be curled up in a ball in the corner, rocking gently with the odd tear trickling down your face. Public square it might be, but boxing ring it feels like.

But here’s why it’s off to a good start (and admittedly I’m hardly out of the gates yet): Douthat isn’t really convinced that the apologetic task of the believer – especially in our context the “Christian” believer – is to raise the intellectual bar so high that the average skeptical unbeliever admits defeat and either fails or refuses to jump it.

Such thinking goes like this: We may not win them over, but we show them that we can always go one more round. We demonstrate that even if they match us in the spiritual card game, we can always raise them. Why do we do this? Or why are we tempted to do this? Because we do do it and we are tempted to do it.

Here’s why. For too long the get-out clause for Christians in the age of New Atheism was to pitch the argument that your work colleague, or your running mate, is incapable of landing fully on their atheistic position because, well because Kierkegaard, or whoever. Find a Christian thinker who is so famous that we know him centuries later, and boom, you’re in the clear.  That was clearly a tactic by Christians who had read a bit more than the average non-Christian, but not too much more.

How much more is enough? Well, have you seen the play by Irish playwright, John Millington Synge, “The Playboy of the Western World”, about Irish provincialism in the 19th century? Let’s just say  if you assume that you can be the Playboy Apologist with a captive audience,  you may well be found out when the Atheist Philosopher from the big smoke comes to village and dismantles your pretensions, and in front of others too. Sometimes our bluff is called and our hand turns out to have been pretty worthless.

All we are doing at that point, I would suggest, is setting ourselves up for failure. That failure could be that someone actually has read the gloomy Dane and knows a lot more about him and his work than you do.

Or it could be that they have read counter-argument to the faith that are far more lofty intellectually than you can manage to leap yourself.  Or worse – and I think this is the biggest charge against this “high bar” attempt – it will leave your friend or colleague convinced that belief itself takes a lot of time, buckets load of intellectual inquiry, and the type of life that is given over to ideas rather than the day to day trenches of adult life (work, kids, marriage, onscreen time, bills, housing costs).

So it was encouraging to read this in the introduction as I settle in with coffee and something not too fattening to eat:

…there are sophisticated and subtle philosophical arguments for religious belief. But this book offers a more straightforward and sometimes unsophisticated case. I have personally never read Eriugena on subjectivity, I defer to others on the proper interpretation of Duns Scouts, and we won’t be reckoning with the ontological proof of God’s existence or seeking a resolution to the debates over divine simplicity. Instead we will begin with the basic reactions to the world that lead people and cultures towards religion, and argue that these are solid grounds for belief – indeed more solid than was apparent at earlier stages of modern history and scientific progress. Reason still points godward, and you don’t have to be a great philosopher or a brilliant textual interpreter to follow its directions. Ordinary intelligence and common sense are enough.

Phew! It’s like Douthat has suddenly given us permission to have normal conversations about normal concerns around Christianity with normal people who can be convinced by normal arguments.

The “tell” of course is that the one thing that we (I?) absolutely fear as middle class evangelical Christians in the modern West, is being thought of as unsophisticated. We hate that idea more than the idea that we might be hated.  And it’s been used as a weapon against us from time to time, and in our experience, most recently in the God Delusion-esque debates.

We are suckers for being considered sophisticated. We don’t want to be left behind. We eschew fundamentalism and get a warm rush when our non-Christian friends tell us we are different to how they expected Christians to be, and that clearly we’re too sophisticated to believe in crazy stuff like resurrections and male and female only marriage.

See the problem? To be considered sophisticated – whether intellectually or in terms of style – has such cultural cache, that we will cling to that long after we have let go of many other things. After all, in the words of that great sage, Buzz Lightyear, “This isn’t flying, it’s falling with style.”  The result is that we can fudge on central theological matters such as the resurrection, or critical ethical matters such as humanity gender identity and sexual practice.

But put that aside for the moment. Douthat goes on:

One of this book’s recurrent themes is that if the religious perspective is correct, its merits – and with them the obligation to take religion seriously – should be readily apparent to a normal person, to a non-genius and non-mystic experiencing human life and observing the basic order of the world.

In other words, the people you work with, swim with, have coffee with, go to a book reading club with.  And for me, definitely the people I run with (had to get the fact that I am a runner in there somewhere).

So I can think of four people I have run with ranging from ad hoc to long term committed marathon training partners, all of whom are tertiary educated, earn solid wages, hang around middle class ghettoes, and are not Christian. And none of them, not one of them, is asking the sophisticated questions that require me to pull out the big guns at the end of a thirty-five km long run on a Saturday morning.

Those four runners range from two lapsed Irish Catholics (a male and a female), a cast-iron personality Asian bloke who is an exceptional runner (sub 2:30 marathon) and solid in the corporate world, and a long-term “question-asker” mate who has had his fare share of family heart-ache, and ten years of sub-three marathon running. Four people with grit, worldly savvy and mostly well read.

What are their questions? The usual suspects actually!  Suffering. Why only one way to God? What about people who have not heard? What about the Bible? Why church when it’s so bad so often? Heaven and hell? Good people versus bad people? Paedophile priests? Nothing high and lofty there. And of course you can give high and lofty answers to these questions, but here’s the point: you don’t need to! take Douthat at his word – much of the common garden variety stuff is compelling.

Of course, the perspective Douthat doesn’t lean into – not so far in the book at least – is that there is something else going on apart from the need for plain words. The Bible reminds us that the primary problem with humans rejecting the gospel is not intellectual, but moral and spiritual. And both of those problems, while they affect the intellect of every human being – in that our fallen nature is not what it could have been prelapsarian, nor what it will be post-resurrection- , are not intellectual problems.

Humans love darkness rather than light, we read, not because of intellectual reasons, but because the light will expose their deeds. It’s moral!  And we are also told that the god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers to keep them from seeing Christ. Badness and blindness.

Which means that prayerfulness is required. Only God can expose badness and call people to effectual repentance. Only God can open blind eyes so that people see Jesus. And God has been doing exactly that for millennia.

This is great news. It tells me that a common sense understanding of the world and its mechanism, enlightened as it is by the riches of the wisdom of Christ, is more than enough for this Average Joe.  For you – Average Joe! Or Josephine for that matter.

Even in terms of how he defines religion, Douthat sweeps away the cultural analysis of the political social researcher intent on a PhD in Taylor Swift Studies:

This of course raises the question of what defines “religion” or a religious perspective on the world. Is Taylor Swift-ism a religion? Scientology? Rastafarianism? But just as I’m defending the simpler and commonsensical arguments for becoming a believer, I’m also defining religion in the basic way that most people would recognise and understand: a system of belief and practice that tries to connect human beings to a supernatural order, that offers moral guidance in this world and preparation for the possible hereafter, and that tried to explain both the order of the world and the destiny of humankind.

And unless you work in the Humanities Department of most major Western Universities where commonsense lost tenure a couple of decades ago, the “Taylor Swift-is-a-Religion” question is pretty much moot. Okay, okay she’s great and people line up and hang on her every word, dress like her and call themselves “Swifties”. At least they do in the West, because, as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs reminds us,  we and we alone have got the luxury of indulging in cosplay.

So let me put it to you – or at least let the introduction by Ross Douthat put it to you – leading people towards religious belief, and specifically Christian religious belief, is not intellectual or complex. It’s just hard. Hard because those people are your friends. Hard because the gospel message might offend them. Hard because, as we know, the medium IS the message, and YOU might become offensive to them.

I like the way Ross Douthat has started this book.  So too, apparently, do the sophisticates in the Big Apple, as it has hit the New York Times best seller list.

I’ll keep you posted about the book as I go.