Ross Douthat says the promises of a secular society have failed — and this makes religion more appealing.
“You could say that our culture is considering the possibility of a religious revival,” he said, referencing reports of increased religious interest among young adults and teenagers.
Douthat, a New York Times columnist, made his remarks in a lecture at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa on Nov. 20. The event was the first in a new, annual lecture series hosted by the think tank Cardus.
Douthat says that when he joined the newspaper in 2009, the ideas of prominent atheist authors like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris were still popular. They and other atheist writers promised that discarding religion would lead to a more peaceful, rational society.
But that has not happened, Douthat says.
“There was a case made for a less religious society. We ran the experiment, and it didn’t work out,” Douthat said in his lecture, which was inspired by his latest book, Believe: Why Everyone Should be Religious (Zondervan, 2025).
Instead, “the world has gotten a lot weirder,” he said. Artificial intelligence threatens to make jobs obsolete, interest in psychedelics, magic and UFOs is rising, birth rates are declining and political polarization and conflict in the Middle East remain.
Against this backdrop, religion has proven resilient, and may be perfectly suited for the “strange, dark, evolutionary pressures of a digital and technological and now artificial intelligence age,” he said.
Douthat expanded on some of these ideas in an interview withCanadian Affairs reporter Meagan Gillmore before his lecture. An edited and condensed version of their conversation is below.
MG: In Believe you make a case for institutional religion. Why should people be committed to a specific religious tradition in this world of mass deinstitutionalization?
RD: We’re in a world where we have less to fear from institutions having too much domineering power over people’s lives, and more to fear from people having no institutional connection at all.
Right now, people need things in their lives that discipline them, that bring them into real community with lots of other people, and that provide some sustained and serious connection to a coherent tradition that’s larger than themselves and also larger than whatever individual influencer on the internet is likely to put together.
MG: When you talk about religion having a role in public life, what do you mean?
RD: The U.S. has separation of church and state, but we don’t have separation of religion and politics. It’s quite normal to argue in the public square in religious and spiritual terms, to make references to specific religious traditions in arguing for political ideas, social reform.
This persists even in the more liberal and secular parts of U.S. politics. It was impossible not to hear echoes of the Black church in Obama’s speeches, and echoes of a particular liberal form of Catholicism in the way that Biden approached politics.
People tend to be threatened by religion and religious ideas in politics when it’s not their own religion. But when it’s their own religion, they don’t even notice.
I would say that even in more secular environments, like Western Europe [and] Canada, you can’t really understand secular progressivism in the late 20th and early 21st century if you don’t understand that it descends from a particular kind of social gospel, human-rights oriented, universalist Christianity.
This is the thing conservatives always say, but I’m still going to say it: certain kinds of liberalism and progressivism, the more they cut themselves off from that [religious] connection, the thinner some of their arguments become.
MG: Often when we talk about religion’s involvement in public life, what people hear is conservative Christianity, and that often gets interpreted into support for a conservative political party.
When you’re talking about religion’s role in public life, you’re not necessarily making a partisan statement about which party someone should vote for.
RD: The reality of life in a democratic society is that to get people to go along with your ideas, you have to convince people who don’t necessarily share your faith commitments. There is always a limit on how far you can go just with religious arguments.
When things are contested — as they are with debates about abortion in the United States or euthanasia currently in Canada — the religious person is not going to [win] the argument by saying, ‘Christianity says suicide is wrong,’ unless they convince a lot of people who are secular or nonreligious or non-Christian that those arguments have sort of general force.
The crucial issue, as always in society, is: Can you get a large number of people to agree with you? If you can, then you’re not imposing anything. You’re just practising normal democratic politics.
MG: For your New York Times’ podcast Interesting Times, you recently interviewed [pastor] Doug Wilson and [conservative evangelical podcaster and influencer] Allie Beth Stuckey, individuals who are well-known among evangelical Christians. Why is it important that the broader American society engage with these figures?
RD: Lots of well educated, secular, liberal people who consider themselves cosmopolitan very rarely have a direct encounter with the arguments and personalities that are actually influential in the lives of many of their fellow citizens.
There’s just inherent value in encountering those ideas directly and understanding them, even if you find them horrifying and disagree with them.
I definitely think — as someone who moves back and forth between religious and secular worlds — that the religious world understands the secular world sometimes better than the secular world understands the religious world. You have to have more engagement with the figures and influencers and worldviews that are actually shaping people’s ideas.
The other thing that’s important about someone like Stuckey is that we’re in a religious landscape where religion is still quite potent, but institutional religion is quite weak. Understanding that shift is really important for religious people too.
I think Wilson fits into a slightly different story, which is that because of the crisis of the political establishment, because of the internet’s role in fragmenting and removing guardrails and gatekeepers, there’s just a lot more ideas and figures who would have been considered outlandishly extreme 20 years ago who have more influence today.
Some of those figures are secular, and some of them are religious. Some of them are on the far left and some are on the far right. I interviewed Doug Wilson the week after I interviewed Hasan Piker, who is a livestream Twitch star, who is a far left influencer who is always getting in trouble because he seems to be calling for violence.
I thought of him and Wilson as a useful pairing, because they’re both characters who mainstream normie culture in 2007 would have considered really extreme: a Calvinist from Idaho calling for theocracy, and a would-be Marxist Twitch streamer calling for political revolution.
But they have more influence in the world we’re in now. All the extremes do. It doesn’t mean everything’s falling apart and we’re going to have revolution or theocracy. But in terms of what people are consuming and experiencing and believing, the extremes matter more in 2025 than they did in 2005. You have to understand that larger reality to get what’s happening in our politics.
MG: You mention how you go between both worlds, the faith world and the secular world. You’re a conservative Catholic at the New York Times. How does it feel to occupy this position at work?
RD: I was hired specifically to represent and embody a particular point of view that obviously most people at the Times don’t share. I think most people who I work with understand and appreciate that and would not expect me to be on the same side as all of my fellow opinion columnists, or the editorial page.
It obviously can be tiring to be always engaging with readers who are likely to disagree with you. But at the same time, it’s also a tremendous opportunity. Most people who write and work in the media are operating in an environment where they’re writing for people who agree with them, because that is how the media landscape is set up.
Whenever I feel a little tired or am inclined to some kind of self pity, I have to remind myself that I get to try and persuade people just a tiny bit to have a different view of the world.
I appreciate both my liberal friends and my conservative friends, my religious friends and my secular friends as people. In terms of being able to move back and forth successfully between different worlds, the first and most important thing is you have to like something about both worlds. Otherwise you’re just going to end up feeling like you’re a spy or an enemy agent behind enemy lines in half your life, which is no way to live. Just ask the CIA.
