(RNS) — Being religious is a bit like learning to play soccer, says New York Times columnist and best-selling author Ross Douthat. You can practice all you want on your own, but, at some point, to really learn the game, you’ve got to join a team.
“You can say, ‘I’m going to play soccer by practicing in my backyard alone every day,’” Douthat said in a recent interview. “But let’s be honest, joining a team is a better idea.”
In his new book, “Believe,” Douthat makes a case for name-brand religion, saying the world’s largest faith traditions are like maps for helping us navigate life and the universe around us. They also might just be true. Drawing on the orderly nature of the universe, the persistence of spiritual experience and the science of human consciousness, Douthat works to make the case that believing in God is a reasonable thing to do.
His target audience isn’t hard-core nonbelievers. Instead, he hopes to give folks who are interested in religion — whether the goal is spiritual or social — a reason to give faith a try.
“There are people for whom the idea that religion might be good for them is powerful, but they always have in the back of their mind, ‘but it’s probably not true, right?’” he said. “It’s probably good for my health and marriage and my kids’ morals if I go to church. Or it’s good for my community if I’m participating in my local synagogue. But at some level, there’s always going to be a disconnect between what I’m doing there and what I know to be true about reality.”
The book is a response to the decline of the “New Atheism” of the early 2000s, led by authors like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens. The waning popularity of that movement has created an opening for what’s essentially a new version of theism, or generalized belief in God or a supreme being — which Douthat advocates.
“A very basic and kind of conventional argument, not for Christianity in particular, but for the general likelihood that God made the world, that the supernatural exists, that you’re probably going to meet God when you die, is just a lot stronger in scientific, philosophical and experiential terms than people are taught,” he told Religion News Service.
In the book, Douthat, known for his unapologetic Catholicism, starts with an appeal for theism, then offers advice for spiritual seekers to move from that generic belief to joining up with a specific faith — preferably one of the world’s major religions, such as Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism and other faiths with a long-term track record.
“Even if you can’t know for certain which road leads closest to the truth,” he writes, “you can still assume the better trodden a religious pathway, the more wisdom there is in following after the generations that have trodden there before.”
Douthat’s own belief in God was shaped by family circumstances, his own spiritual experiences and writers like G.K. Chesterton. Baptized an Episcopalian in Connecticut, his family spent time in charismatic Christian circles after meeting a traveling faith healer before converting to Catholicism. Becoming Catholic, he writes, gave him a systematic way to understand and practice his faith and made space for both those who had mystical or charismatic experiences and those like himself, who had not.
Catholicism, he said, while claiming to hold the true Christian faith, also recognizes that other religious traditions have spiritual value, something he argues for in the book. “I think almost all religion in human history has been in touch in some way with a spiritual dimension of reality,” he said.
In recent years, a number of high-profile figures, including Elon Musk, who has called himself a “cultural Christian,” comedian Russell Brand and formerly outspoken atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, have embraced Christian faith or at least championed the importance of religion as a social force. While Douthat is hesitant to criticize anyone’s conversion — pointing out that people change faiths for a number of reasons, including marriage — he hopes readers will pick a faith and dive in. To make that point he draws on several passages from the Bible, including a famed section from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapter 7.
“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you,” Jesus tells his followers. “For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.”
The point, said Douthat, is that faith involves taking action and gives God something to work with.
“I’m trying to get people to a point of investment,” he said.
While Douthat is relatively open to the idea that many faiths have spiritual value, he is critical of do-it-yourself approaches to spirituality, which he compares to wandering blind without looking at a map to know where you are going.
Don’t go it alone, he says. And stick to name-brand religion, rather than trying to create a spiritual path of your own.
After all, he writes, “you are probably not a religious genius.”
