Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, by Ross Douthat. Zondervan, 2025, xiii + 216 pages, $29.99.

For years I have tried to imagine one of my family members sitting next to me in church. My family is populated by marvelous people, most of whom do not profess any kind of faith. My imagination tells me the person would not be hostile. He would simply wonder what planet we came from! The songs in our church are cutting edge (!) soft Rock from the 1970s. The sermon would be a foreign language: so true but making sense only to the tribe. And the smiling faces would show we are nice people, but essentially aliens. Put simply, the Christian faith expressed in my church, and many others, is irrelevant. I do not mean to say our churches do not do much good, for they do.

To his credit, Douthat recognizes that we are not only populated by the “nones.” There are still well-informed skeptics who need to be answered. Yet such skeptics used to command a greater hearing. As Douthat and others have correctly remarked, the once popular atheism of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and the like is in the rearview mirror. Those holding to this type of atheism are not the main audience, however.

Thus, Ross Douthat has written a book which is meant to address, among others, the nones, that is people with no particular religious commitments, be they Christian views or other. There is some debate as to whether this demographic group is growing or holding steady. There is no debate about the pews in our churches being emptied. A book with apologetics that addresses such people is most welcome.

The way we used to evaluate sermons in a homiletics class when I was an active professor is that we began with the positive features, and then moved on to the problems, as I see them. The first positive is not so much about the book but about the New York Times being disposed to hire this unashamed Roman Catholic Christian as a regular columnist. He is not the only believer on those pages. Evangelicals David French, Peter Wehner, and Esau McCaulley are also regular contributors. David Brooks, who considers himself a Christian, has been writing for the Times since 2003. Such inclusions would be unremarkable except that the general editorial policy of this paper, as well as the readers polled, is liberal. The word is loaded, as it can mean many things: a nineteenth-century political doctrine, a brand of theology, or, as for the Times readership, views that are left of center. To many Americans this kind of liberalism means abandoning traditional values. If that is so, it is a good thing there are voices that challenge that view.

The book itself has many virtues. One of them is that it was written! While, as you will see, I take issue with much of Douthat’s methodology, it requires boldness to proclaim so unabashedly the essence of one’s Christian faith to a hostile world. To boot, his writing style is enviably lucid. Few people possess the gift of digesting complex ideas and explaining them to laypersons. Douthat has it. The result is that we are being addressed by a master communicator. Consequently, as it is, we are left in no doubt about what Douthat believes we all need: It is some version, preferably his own, of Christian belief.

Yet another virtue is how well-informed the author is about issues in the orbit of science. He is well-versed in the history of science, refuting, for example, the worn-out view that Copernicus and Darwin put the Bible in its place. Quite the opposite, he argues, if one reads both science and the Scriptures fairly, Christian faith emerges victorious not threatened. He does acknowledge that full-fledged Darwinism gives pause. But no valid view has put the Bible to rest. Douthat bravely marshals the Big Bang theory as evidence for a Creator God’s origination of all things. Impressively, he culls from modern mind science, especially from Erik Hoel, the contemporary neuroscientist whose work on human consciousness points beyond pure biology to something like a soul. Drawing on specialists such as Stephen Barr, he contends for the “anthropic” principle, the idea that only a very few universes, perhaps only ours, could have produced observers such as we humans.

Douthat makes wise remarks on anything claiming to duplicate, or even surpass, the human mind. He has a section on Artificial Intelligence (AI). Here the author brings to the surface practitioners of this increasingly widespread tool who are confronted with evidence that there is something like a mysterious consciousness that cannot be duplicated, no matter how sophisticated the experts may be.

The bulk of Douthat’s arguments in the first section of the book sets forth the unlikelihood of a world, and a humanity, devoid of transcendent qualities. This he does by giving us many examples of the insistent presence of the inexplicable. He admits not everyone who stumbles here will necessarily persevere step-by-step toward a robust belief. Some get halfway there but fall short. He mentions the popular Jordan Peterson, who comes close to the mark. The term agnostic comes to mind. Though the label sounds humble and properly tentative, in fact, most agnostics are sure they cannot believe. Thomas Huxley is said to have coined the term, by which he meant being “hopelessly ignorant” about matters of which metaphysicians and other “dogmatists” are sure, including the existence of God. Douthat cites these folks to support his argument that pure materialism cannot work.

Douthat is on a crusade—not to convert people per se, but to needle them. There is here an avalanche of indicators showing that secularism is not to be trusted. They include scientists, as we have mentioned, but also celebrities who have stumbled on the big questions, near-death experiences, and even those open to UFOs. Is he saying we need to revisit a noumenal sphere? Douthat resists the popular argument that we need to reenchant the world or throw in a dose of mystery. In a section titled “Romanticizing the Numinous” he disavows any discovery of the supernatural that is able to be refuted. Instead, he wants people to be confronted with irrefutable evidence for the supernatural.

However, as the Scots would say, there’s the rub. If the modern materialist can no longer safely inhabit his secular worldview, how do we get him from his doubts about atheism to certainty about the Christian faith? To put it in the terms of the Van Tilian method, Douthat is intent on showing the “impossibility of the contrary,” but then he is hesitant to affirm that this is because the “contrary” is true. He is hesitant to proclaim the Christian answer with “thus saith the Lord.” It may sound disingenuous to say he is “hesitant” because in the last chapter, which he calls “A Case Study: Why I Am a Christian,” he courageously explains the gospel and why he believes it. He explains it, but does he preach it? His tactic appears winsome. Without saying “you must believe,” he says, “consider this.” Am I being too harsh? Is it not enough just to be glad the New York Times wants a contributor such as Douthat?

We have here the quintessential Roman Catholic approach to apologetics. There are two levels for faith, the one reason can handle, and the other needing revelation. Although in a very different universe, Thomas Aquinas proceeded in the same way: first, prove the existence of God without revelation, then jump to what can only be understood by faith (the Trinity, the atonement, etc.). But it is not clear on what authority he arrives at the certainty of the gospel. I do not wish to disparage the many valuable ways in which both Thomas and Douthat have shattered atheism. In various interviews I have watched, Douthat is aware of a generation arising that “knew not Joseph,” and he means to address it. As I suggested, today in the West people are often not thoughtfully opposed to this or that view, but they literally do not know anything about the Christian faith. Many of them assume, because it is in the air they breathe, that religion has been discredited. Or worse, that it may be dangerous. And many Christians can only respond, “Sorry, but this is what I believe.” Douthat engages in conversation with anyone who ignores religion.

But he does not show the necessary link between doubting materialism and affirming the Christian position. He starts with dismantling unbelief, followed up by appealing to “religion,” and then setting forth the option of Christian faith. To put it technically, he is banking on natural theology rather than the authority of Scripture. Again, to put it in Van Til’s terms, he is engaging in “blockhouse methodology,” that is, getting someone partly there by reason, and then all the way there by faith.

Some reviewers have compared Douthat to Blaise Pascal. The seventeenth-century apologist (and scientist) wanted to propose unbelievers engage in a “wager” or a risk in opposition to the false comfort of their indifference and their resistance to the big questions through distractive entertainment. But Pascal was much more prone to declare the Christian faith to be true, no wiggle room, full stop.

Is this a fatal weakness of the book? I am unwilling to relegate it to the trash heap. There is so much great stuff here, much of it useful to dismantle simplistic materialism. I have used many similar probing arguments myself. And his invitation to consider the Catholic faith is sincere, even compelling. I do not want to sound patronizing here. How many of us wish we had the kind of platform he does? Still, how much more powerful the book could have been had he been more forceful.

William Edgar is a minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and emeritus professor of apologetics and ethics at Westminster Theological Seminary, Glenside, Pennsylvania. Ordained Servant Online, June, 2025.