Ross Douthat promised to build a rational argument in favor of religion, but in chapter 5 of his book he is telling readers that whenever they get a momentary feeling about a religion, it’s a magical omen coming straight from the creator of the entire universe, a supernatural message crafted specifically for them. Belief in omens is the opposite of rationality.
Welcome back for another episode of Not Everyone Believes Ross Douthat. This is a podcast that reads through a book that has the title Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.
Imagine that, living in a world where nobody makes the decision to step away from religion and look at it from the outside. It seems like we would be missing something in that scenario. That's definitely the case with this book.
The author is Ross Douthat. He is an ideologically extremist right wing Christian Nationalist pundit on 60 Minutes, a TV show that used to be regarded as a serious journalistic endeavor, but has been taken over by Donald Trump and his supporters on the threat of losing the FCC licensure and a whole bunch of other punishments from the federal government.
The United States federal government under Donald Trump as president, and Donald Trump personally, were threatening to persecute and prosecute CBS, because they didn't like what 60 Minutes had to say about Donald Trump through accurate reporting. They didn't like what 60 Minutes had to say about certain political truths, so they hounded CBS. They threatened the television network until CBS gave in, surrendered, and allowed a right wing ideologue, Barry Weiss, to come in and to appoint Ross Douthat as a member of the new team at 60 Minutes, which would be friendly to Donald Trump. It was a sad day when that happened.
What we're dealing with right now, though, is this book, Believe which Ross Douthat had published in 2025 to coincide with the inauguration of Donald Trump's second term as president, as a Christian Nationalist, and telling everyone that they should just go along with it and believe in this religious ideology of extremism.
We're now on page 146, and on that page, we have Ross Douthat, telling us once again that when you're choosing a religion, you shouldn't choose a smaller religion. As he says, “You don't have to pull every text off the shelves of a bookstore of all religions. The big books will do for a start.”
Ross Douthat never gets beyond that start. He argues that the bigger an idea is, the more popular it is, the more likely it is to be true. According to him, that's a sign that Christianity is true, because it's the most popular religion ever. Yeah, the most popular is necessarily true.
What we're going to see moving forward in this chapter is that Ross Douthat is always referring to major religions. Major religions are of a certain variety because they are associated with social power. Major religions are tools of social control. They are, therefore, elitist kinds of ideological tools. They are not from the outside. Christianity in our society is in control of the U.S. Federal government, and has the support of 60% of the population. If you are looking for an elite in the United States of America, look for a Christian.
Certainly, if you want to be in Donald Trump's cabinet, that's what you've got to be. Donald Trump's cabinet is supporting Christianity directly, even though we're supposed to have a First Amendment, under which we're not supposed to have the government promoting religion in general or any religion specifically. Nonetheless, Christianity has got the full endorsement of the U.S. Federal government and kids are being coerced, families are being coerced to join back into Christian churches.
That's the context of why we're reading through this book. It's not just out of idle intellectual curiosity or a persnicketiness about the truth. It's because Christianity right now is the dominant ideology of power.
Christianity is not just a bunch of ideas. It is a propaganda machine. It is a tool to get people to obey, to conform, to join in and do what seems to be popular.
Today we're going to go on to page 147, where Ross Douthat is making a claim here that seems kind of wild to me.
He's saying that when it comes to choosing a religion, you just ought to let things leap out at you, to kind of strike you as ideas, and if they do, that's a sign from God.
Once again, Ross Douthat is rejecting rationality. He's rejecting logic. His argument in this paragraph at the top of page 147 is that if an idea or a religious sect or a religious leader grabs your attention, then it's probably a supernatural magical message from God.
Here's the text as he wrote it:
“If you've never experienced belief before, if you feel yourself to have a completely open mind and suddenly a specific text or figure leaps out at you, a story speaks to you like nothing else, then you should take the possibility that God is speaking to you very seriously. At the very least, it's a strong signal that this is where you're supposed to start.”
This whole idea that your life has something that is supposed to happen, and that when happens, it's because it's part of a plan, that you're living within a story that was written by a magical creature, is running throughout Ross Douthat's book. It's an idea that has absolutely no evidence to back it up.
This is classic wish fulfillment. It isn't rationality. It's a kind of irrationality. It's a kind of delusion.
Ross Douthat is supporting this idea in order to say that if you're religious, you should just follow wherever your attention happens to lead, and if you happen to hear a message that's Christian, for example, well then that's a signal from God that you're supposed to be a Christian. Of course, in the United States where the majority of the population, 60%, not a big majority, a shrinking majority, but it's still a majority of the population is Christian, and Christian churches are everywhere, and Christian churches are allowed to go without paying any taxes, and Christian is the ideology that is in charge of our fascist government, guess what message you're going to hear: Christianity.
Ross Douthat knows you're going to hear this message, and he's telling you that whenever you hear about Christianity, it's an omen. It's an omen. It's a message from God, from the universe speaking just to you. It’s been arranged by the ruler of the universe for you to hear that radio show, to pick up that book, to see that billboard that promotes Christianity. It wasn't an accident. There was magic involved getting your brain to pay attention to that.
In this claim, Ross Douthat is going back way, way back before the development of logic, before the development of reason and rationality. Before the development of science. He's going way back to this magical thinking where whatever happens is supposed to happen, so you should just kind of let things happen to you and presume that they're good, that everything is a good idea whenever you hear a message.
Just believe. This is the message that is underneath this book, the idea that you should just be gullible. You should just believe, believe, believe, whenever you hear a message. Believe, when you hear that message from authority, especially.
You should just believe. Don't think. Don't doubt. Don't have skeptical inquiry. Don't examine ideas. Just go along with it.
This is the ideology of fascism, of religious totalitarianism, which, of course, Ross Douthat is a servant of. That why he's at 60 Minutes.
That, Ross Douthat, is why not everyone believes.
I'm not going to pretend that there are no people in the United States of America who are willing to go along with Ross Douthat's proposal that you should just be gullible and just believe whatever people in power tell you, just go along with a dominant ideology and don't think about it too hard, don't worry your little head about anything. No, in fact, we know that quite a large number of Americans are willing to go along with that sort of thing.
Still, not everyone believes. Not everyone believes. Half of the American population, when they're willing to work at it, when they're willing to think real hard, they understand that you can't just take the the word of your political leaders, of religious organizations, of religious ideologies for granted.
You can't just go along with whatever the priest tells you to do, because you know that the priests have often told you to just give them all your money. Give away all control over your own personal life. Maybe they've told you to do rather unscrupulous sexual things, or maybe they've told you to go on and abuse others in the name of their God.
Throughout chapter five, Ross Douthat is of making a real scatter brained argument about what kind of religion you should have. He's pretending to be open-minded, even though we know that at the end he's going to be arguing that you actually should go with Christianity and everything else is wrong.
We know that his Roman Catholic religion in particular teaches that Roman Catholics are right and everyone else is wrong, and you should not belong to any other religion, and that's it, period. Catholics teach that they’re right, they have the Truth.
In this chapter, where Ross Douthat is saying, well, if you like this idea, you should just go along with, maybe try out this religious path, or if you like another idea, well, if you like that, then you should try another religious path, and maybe you should just try a whole bunch of different things, and, you know, commit to something that feels right to you, sort of, you know, as in this paragraph, if a book or a TV show happens to pop up, well, then you should take that sign from God that that's what you should do. It's really kind of loosey-goosey. It's not consistent with the standard he promotes in the rest of the book.
Ross Douthat can't keep an idea straight in his head. He claims that there is an absolute Truth, a master designer, the supernatural, magical being or fantastical. He claims that this designer of the universe has set things up, everything up so that you will find the one true religion, and now he's saying, you should just follow your nose. Do whatever.
The choices Ross Douthat is making in the language as he writes this book are not loose and free and accidental. In chapter 5, you will find that Ross Douthat is referring consistently to any idea of a transcendent reality or a divinity or any kind of religious path in any sense as “God”. He's using that name for it, and I want you to keep in mind that that is a Christian name for the Christian divinity, for the Christian magical supernatural creature that is supposed to have created and controlled the universe.
“God” is not a neutral term. Again and again, even in this chapter where Ross Douthat is pretending to consider that there might be possibilities other than Christianity for some religious people, Douthat is making the Christian god the default the natural destination for all religious paths.
Ross Douthat chose the title for this book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. What he really means is that everyone should be Christian. Ross Douthat is trying to tell everyone to conform not just to religion in general, but to his particular religion.
In a time when that religion is very closely linked to brutal, violent, anti-democratic fascism, we all should be suspicious of that command to conform. That's why not everyone believes Ross Douthat.