On page 114, in chapter 4 of his book Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, Ross Douthat argues that if everyone else is jumping off a cliff, you should do it too. Also, Douthat writes that he has a map that takes you from Bangor, Maine to an invisible city that probably doesn’t exist. Yes, Ross Douthat’s book is that kooky.
Welcome to Not Everyone Believes, Ross Douthat. This is a podcast that covers a book that was written by Ross Douthat. Ross Douthat is a right wing Christian commentator on the right wing TV show 60 Minutes. We didn't used to call it that, but it's been taken over by Donald Trump.
Ross Douthat’s book is called Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. The book claims that it can offer a rational argument for belief in religion, but here on page 114, Ross Douthat is now arguing exactly the opposite.
I suppose we shouldn't be surprised by that, because what Ross Douthat is now doing in the second half of the book is trying to get you to become a conservative Christian, a Catholic specifically. He's trying to get you to join his religion.
This is taking up half of the book that he promised would not be about promoting one religion over others.
Anyway, Ross Douthat starts on page 114 with the argument that you should join in with a specific religion, because a lot of other people have done it, qnd therefore, it must be a really good idea. No kidding.
Here’s what Ross Douthat writes: “The better part of wisdom lies in assuming that the web,” the web of ideas within a religion, that the web, “evolved this way for a reason, that there's wisdom to be found in the crowd.”
There's wisdom to be found in the crowd.
Ross Douthat is arguing that you should join a specific religion that has a lot of followers, and you should do that because, well, everybody else must have had a reason for doing it, so therefore, it must be a great idea. Ross Douthat is saying, You know, if all those other lemmings are jumping off the cliff, yeah, you should do it too.
This is a kind of argument that most people mature out of after they've left middle school. Let's say they're 12 or 13 years old. By the time you're that age, you should know better than just to follow along with the herd, assuming that everybody else must have a pretty good reason for doing it. In contradiction to that, Ross Douthat says, you should join a religion and a very specific one, because it's got lots of other members and it's got a long history, and all those other people must have been pretty smart, so you should do it too.
We could spend an entire episode critiquing that. I don't think that you need me to do that.
Instead, we're going to be focusing on another idea that's here on page 114 and 115 in Ross Douthat’s book. That is the metaphor of maps.
Ross Douthat is arguing against the idea that you should just generally accept that religion is true without committing to a particular religion. He's arguing that religions are like maps.
I’m going to read this part to you.
“If you take the optimistic view that all the religious maps, or at least most of them lead to the same destination in the end, lots of people who are moderately favorable to religion, but disinclined to pick one faith and stick with it, offer this justification for their dilettantism. But it doesn't really hold up to scrutiny. Suppose you were in Bangor in 1887, and you wanted to reach Topeka, and you were told that there were five excellent maps, from very different map makers, offering very different itineraries, that would all eventually lead you from Maine west to Kansas. Would it make sense to say, well, since they all get you there eventually, I'm sure I can just draw my own map and get the same result.?Would it make sense to stitch pieces of them together, rejecting the boring or grinding parts of each root on the theory that this way, your journey would be nothing but fun visits to neat roadside attractions? Of course not. If you want to reach Topeka, the fact that you respect all the different map makers equally doesn't absolve you of the requirement to choose one to follow, to submit. This submission also doesn't require total certainty about the tradition that you're joining.”
We'll go on to the next part tomorrow.
This is really weird. What Ross Douthat is arguing is that the last thing you should do.
If you're taking a trip, take a look at the places that you want to go, and then so long as those places are along the general route that you want to take, go to those places.
Ross Douthat is saying not to do that. He is saying that if you're planning a trip, let's say between Bangor, which is a city in Maine and Topeka, which is a city in Kansas, you should not go to the places that you want to go that are between them. Instead, you should follow a route that has been set for you by a map maker, like a map maker would in 1887.
The thing is, in 1887, when they made maps of the roads or the railroads, or maybe you want to go partially by boat on the Great Lakes, whatever, they weren't setting down prescribed routes that you must take between Bangor and Topeka. I don't think that there probably ever was a map that dictated, particularly how to get from banger to Topeka and then telling you which route specifically to go. That's not how maps worked back then. So, already the metaphor is falling apart.
Mapmakers just provided maps of the country with, you know, some of the roads, not all of the roads.
Here’s where you wonder if Ross Douthat has ever actually traveled using a map back before we had these phones, these smartphones with GPS systems. Do you know how people traveled around? They traveled around using a series of different maps. They would have a map for one state, and then they would have a map for the next state, and they would have a map for the next state. They would also have a map for the entire nation that you were in. Those different maps showed things at different scales.
So, we didn't use one map. We used different maps, and often people would have a lot of different maps in the glove compartments of their cars. They would cobble their journey together from different maps, different routes.
Then sometimes people would discover on the way that something happened, like a road was closed. Maybe a bridge was washed out in a flood, for example. So, we adapted, and we might have to go down to Pennsylvania instead of going through Ohio, or something like that. We’ll go ahead and take that route, you know, and we'll change. We will adapt to the circumstances so we don't get set to one specific route.
It's really bizarre, this metaphor that Ross Douthat is using. He is ignoring the fact that everyone had glove compartments with different maps in them, many maps, all at the same time.
Ross Douthat is also ignoring that people, back then before GPS devices, tpretty much just followed the roads and road signs. Road signs would tell you which way way to go. If you wanted to go in one direction in general, you would memorize roughly where the different cities and the different states were, and then you would travel down the road and you would get these signs saying it's this many miles to this city, and then they would say, hey, we're going to have a split here in 10 miles, and if you want to go toward this city, go on this part of the road, and if you want to go on to this other city, take that part.
People wouldn't even use maps all the time. People would just kind of pull off by the side of the road and ask for directions. They'd say, “How do you get from here to there?”They'd ask someone locally who actually knew the landscape. “What's the best place, the best way to get from here to there?”
So, in actual fact, people didn't always rely on maps. They used multiple maps when they had to. They relied on their own observations of the landscape, rather than being dependent on paper maps in the way that we are dependent upon GPS.
I think Ross Douthat when he's writing this, publishing it in 2025, is depending on younger people's ignorance of how using maps actually works. The metaphor just doesn't work. It's not plausible, the idea that you have to submit to one map and one map, only by one map maker, and you have to stick with that one.
And that's his metaphor for religion, that's why you have to stick with one religion, and you can't just pay attention to what's going on with different religions.
The metaphor fails, but also, he's talking about this in terms of religion. Religion is all about, it claims to be about, Christian religion in particular, getting you salvation, which means that God won't torture you.
This is a religion that believes that the default is that God wants to torture you. The creator of the universe hates you, despises you, thinks that you're filthy and awful, just because you're a human being.
By the way, the same religion says that God was the one that created people, the way that they are. Oh boy, that's sadistic, but okay, let's put that little moral caveat to the side.
So the whole idea is that Topeka, the city of Topeka, Kansas, in Ross Douthat's metaphor, is salvation, and God sees that you've been working hard and trying and you've been staying to the one true path, the one true path between Bangor, Maine and Topeka, Kansas. Now you have arrived by that one true path, the one road that's the right road when all other roads are wrong and sinful, and God hates them. When you get to Topeka, yay, you are at one with God, and God shows up and he's there, and he loves you, and everything's great.
Here's the problem: No one has ever been to that kind of place and provided any evidence of it. Nobody has ever been to that Topeka. Nobody has ever been to God, arriving at the destination and taken a photograph of God, or a movie. I mean, we are all carrying these phones around, the smartphones have cameras in them, so, we can take video of God. We could take photographs of God, right? Why does no video or photograph or God exist, then? No one has even gotten like a toenail clipping of God as some kind of evidence that, yes, God is at the end, the destination. Instead, We have a complete absence of the idea of this Topeka actually existing(Topeka being God, and salvation by God). There's no evidence that this place actually exists.
It's not like a map from Bangor, Maine to Topeka, Kansas. It's more like a map of how to get from the city of Bangor Maine, which we know exists, and that's where we are right now, Bangor being reality, and everybody's been there, and there are postcards, and there are books about Bangor main, and there are movies and all kinds of things about it. There is clear evidence that Bangor, Maine exists.
What Ross Douthat is arguing is that you should accept just one map, as the true map, to get you from Bangor, Maine to Atlantis, the lost city of Atlantis on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, or maybe it's in the Mediterranean Sea. Maybe it's somewhere else. Nobody really knows, and that's because the lost city of Atlantis is just a legend. It's just a legend that was told in ancient times, a little bit before Christianity was around a few 100 years before that. It even has precedence over Christianity. Compared to the lost city of Atlantis Christianity is the new kid on the block.
It’s an old story that was told by the ancient Greeks, that there used to be this island, and it had a city on it, and it was a lovely, lovely place with a perfect civilization, but then the whole island sunk, because I guess because it offended somebody, some god or something like that, right? Atlantis is a mythical place. It doesn't actually exist. I hate to get everybody down on this, but Atlantis, as far as we can tell, it was not a real place. It was a kind of literary fiction that was used to describe what an ideal society might look like. It was just made up.
So, if you want a map from Bangor, Maine, to the lost city of Atlantis, that's going to be a made up map. Furthermore, it's going to be going taking you down to the bottom of the ocean, and nobody knows how to do that if you’re traveling in a car. What do you do? Get in a submarine to go all the way to your destination? I mean, nobody can do that. Well, I guess maybe the U.S. Navy could do that, but the U.S. Navy has looked around and they aren't seeing any Atlantis.
So this, this religious map that Ross Douthat is describing is really more like a goofy map showing how to get from Bangor, Maine to Atlantis because we don't have any evidence that the lost city of Atlantis exists now or ever was real, and the same thing is true of the Christian God. The same is true of any sort of divine enlightenment with magical beings that can do you special favors, cast magic spells of blessing, or whatever it is that you feel like you need that is supposed to be in the destination of your religious path, right?
Nobody has ever been seen to reach the end of that religious path. In fact, after certain points of that religious path, strictly speaking when you cross over the border between life and death, nobody has ever been seen to go past that and to come back and live to tell the tale.
Ross Douthat’s map shows a path that ends in death, and there's no evidence of where it goes after that.
It's not like a map, really. What Ross Douthat is describing is a fantasy, and you can't map a fantasy.
Now, look, I know Ross Douthat believes that it's true. Nonetheless, the fact is that Ross Douthat promised that he was going to give us rational reasons to believe that this path of his is not just faith. He promised he was going show that his path it's actually a real thing and we have good logical reasons to believe in it.
Ross Douthat has provided no evidence for that.
Instead what he has he told us on this same page is that we should just follow a path that takes you to the lost city of Atlantis, which is underwater, and don't worry about breathing while we’re underwater, because a whole bunch of other people are also on that path, and the fact that there are so many people on that path, walking into the Atlantic Ocean and going underwater to reach the lost city of Atlantis, even though none of them have ever come back, but so many of them have gone there, the number of people walking into the ocean and never coming back shows it must be a good idea, right?
That’s Ross Douthat’s wisdom of crowds. If lots of people think something, it must be true, Ross Douthat says.
That is, of course, the exact opposite of rationality. It's the exact opposite of logic. There's no evidence in Ross Douthat’s argument, no factual basis. It's a map to a fantasy land that doesn't exist.
That's why not everyone believes, Ross Douthat.
Along those lines, there are increasing numbers of Americans who don't believe in Christianity. 60% of Americans are still Christian, but it used to be 80, 85%, 90% maybe, depending on how you measure it.
Increasing numbers of people are stepping away from religion. In fact, Ross Ross Douthat has described some of that dynamic in his book. He's admitted to some of it. He doesn't like to talk about all the details, but he himself complaint that gosh, so many people are leaving religion.
But then, right here on page 114, Ross Douthat is saying that this kind of large scale social shift alone should let you know that maybe it's a good time to leave religion. After all, Ross Douthat claims there is wisdom in crowds, and if lots of people are leaving Christianity, maybe there's a good reason for that. So you should just go along without having to think about it.
That's Ross Douthat’s point of view. I would never promote that point of view.
I would never tell anyone to leave Christianity just because a lot of other people are doing it, and therefore they must all know something and be smarter than you.
That's Ross Douthat's argument, not mine
The argument I want to make with this podcast is that you should actually pay attention to your own eyes. You should pay attention to your own experience.
Don't let people like Ross Douthat bully you into believing. Don't let them tell you that you're too stupid to understand how to get from one place to another, and that they have a magical One Map that's gonna get you from one place to another.
You know that there are many ways to go. A lot of them work, so long as you're not going into fantasy. Once you start going into fantasy, none of the maps are going to be effective.
That is why we're not buying Ross Douthat’s map. Not everyone believes, Ross Douthat.