Speaker

Ross Douthat

Ross Douthat

American opinion columnist at The New York Times, and author of several books on religion, politics, and American culture, including Bad Religion, The Decadent Society, and, most recently, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious (2025).

A practising Catholic, Douthat writes from a conservative, religiously engaged position within a mainstream secular publication, and has spent much of his career arguing — against the grain of elite opinion — that religious belief is intellectually defensible on its own terms rather than a matter of private comfort or inherited custom. He also serialises an original fantasy novel, The Falcon’s Children, on Substack, and hosts discussions at The Times under its ‘Interesting Times’ banner. He has appeared on Conversations with Tyler three times; this episode discusses his newest book directly.

Core positions

  • Probabilistic supernaturalism, not proof of a creed. Douthat’s case for religion does not claim certainty about any specific tradition. It argues that the balance of evidence — cosmic fine-tuning, the unsolved hard problem of consciousness, and the cross-cultural persistence and patterned consistency of religious and paranormal experience — points past bare deism toward a cosmos with real supernatural structure, intermediate powers, and a soul that survives death. The further, separate step to Christianity specifically is a personal argument he makes only at the end of the book.
  • Convergent religious and paranormal experience is primary evidence, not an embarrassment. Rather than explaining away visions, near-death experiences, and reports of psychic phenomena, he treats their persistence and cross-cultural patterning as data that any adequate theory of reality — materialist or religious — has to account for.
  • Cultural inheritance of belief cuts both ways. He accepts that religious belief tracks upbringing, but argues this is equally true of secular convictions (including his interlocutors’ economics), and that unlike an inherited soap brand, religion changes through argument and conversion — which is why he thinks the argument is worth having.
  • Less apocalyptic than some of his peers. Against Peter Thiel’s preoccupation with the Antichrist, Douthat reads recent candidates for global, singular false rule (2008-era Obama popularity, ‘woke’ institutional dominance) as brief flares that collapsed under competing pressure, not evidence of an imminent, comprehensive false rule.

In the wiki