Catholic Fascism Is Not An Obligation, Ross Douthat
Welcome back to Not Everyone Believes Ross Douthat. This is a podcast that covers quite slowly, line by line, in detail, a book by Ross Douthat, called Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.
“Everyone should be religious?” It sounds like a broad argument because religion is broad, as we talked about in the last episode, but actually, it's a lot more specific.
That's something that I want to start with today. I want to start again on page two and page three of the introduction with a couple of passages that we talked about last time, but there's something else hidden within them that I think is really important when you are trying to understand what Ross Douthat is really up to with this book.
We're going to get to page four today, but I need to hang on to a little bit of an idea here that Ross Douthat is bringing up on pages two and three, because he's talking about how “traditional religion” has fallen away. Then, on page three, he's talking about how, gosh, we have discarded an “old and proven source of ritual at a time when we most need it.” On page two as well, he's talking about the “obvious sociological importance of institutional religion.”
Let's take a look at those three ideas together: Traditional religion, institutional religion, and ritual. He's complaining that those things, those kinds of religion have fallen away.
We see already that Ross Douthat is not just arguing for any old kind of religion, and we've seen before that actually Ross Douthat is arguing for Christianity.
He's talking about church. He's talking about that particular kind of religion. So it's Christian, but it's also institutional Christianity, traditional Christianity, and ritual Christianity. You put those things together and we get a pretty clear picture of what Ross Douthat is actually arguing for. It's not religion in general, not even Christianity in general.
It's Roman Catholicism.
We've got that bias already here on page two and three. Ross Douthat is a conservative, traditional Catholic. So we're not even talking here about just Roman Catholicism. We're talking about traditional, institutional, right wing, trad Catholic ideology. That's what this book is arguing for. It's not arguing that you should just be generally open to the idea of religion.
On page two as well. Ross Douthat writes, “Looking at the forces, populism on the right, and wakens on the left, that had taken over Western life as traditional religion fell away…”
Ross Douthat is claiming that “populism on the right” took over Western life as traditional religion fell away. “Populism” is the word that Ross Douthat uses, to describe what everyone else in the United States of America is describing as fascism.
Right wing populism, AKA Fascism, is not something that came to the fore as traditional religion fell away, and Ross Douthat is being factually dishonest with you about that.
If we talk about the fascists, for example, in Spain, the fascists in Spain were aligned with the Roman Catholic Church. In Nazi Germany, the Christian churches supported the rise of the Nazi Party.
Here in the United States, there was a Nazi Party too. There was a guy named Father Coughlin, who was a right wing traditionalist, institutional, Catholic, kind of like Ross Douthat.
You know what Father Coughlin was doing in the 1930s?He was on the radio, one of the most popular people to listen to on the radio, and he was arguing in favor of the rise of the Nazi Party and Adolf Hitler.
There is a really intimate association between fascism and right wing Christianity, Christian Nationalism. No, it's not only Catholicism, however, the Catholic Church has been very strongly implicated in fascist Christian Nationalism.
It's not an accident that the Vice President of the United States under Donald Trump, is a Trad Catholic, just like Ross Douthat.
That constituency has been vital. To the success of the rise of fascism in the United States in our own time.
Let's not forget that Christian Nationalism, with, yes, evangelicals, but also right wing Catholicism, including that weird old organization, Opus Dei. Oh boy, maybe we'll have a chance to get into that later, not today.
That has been linked with the rise of fascism under Donald Trump.
Fascism is all about telling you what to do, telling you what to think, how to behave. It has that in common with traditional institutional Christianity.
When we are talking about in this book by Ross Douthat, believe why everyone should be religious, we’re not just having this argument, this examination of this book in the abstract. It's an important way to understand what is going on in the United States of America, and what Ross Douthat is really arguing for.
Maybe you think, oh gosh, he just wants people to be religious. Why are you being so uptight about this?
Let's turn the page to page four. I'm going to read to you the words of Ross Douthat himself, from the top of page four, describing his book. What is this book for?
“It makes the case that religious belief is not just an option, but an obligation.”
Let me repeat that. “Religious belief is not just an option, but an obligation.”
Ross Douthat is writing this book because he wants to have a world in which everyone is religious, and they're not religious because it's an option to be religious, but because it's an obligation, and obligation is something that you have to do, even if you don't want to do it.
Ross Douthat has spent a lot of time positioning himself as some kind of moderate. We are only on page four of the introduction of this book, but already, what we're seeing is absolutely not moderate.
It is extremist. It is fascist. It is Christian nationalist.
It is arguing for a world in which everybody is a traditional, institutional, right wing Catholic, not because they want to be, but because it is an obligation.
Ross Douthat promises that this book is going to enable you to just think your way into religion, that it's all about rationality and logic, but there is nothing less rational, less logical than to demand that everybody comply, to state that you are obligated, to believe in religion, as a simple matter of reality.
That is not what humans are. That is not how the human brain works, we think for ourselves.
And no, not everyone believes, Ross Douthat.