Mark Labberton:
Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment magazine and Fuller Seminary. I’m Mark Labberton. Welcome to Conversing.
It’s a great honour today to have Ross Douthat as our guest on Conversing. Ross is known to many of you, perhaps, as a New York Times Opinion columnist, which he’s been doing for the last 15 years. He’s also the co-host of a New York Times podcast called Matter of Opinion. He’s written a number of significant books. The one that’s probably most relevant to our conversation today is a book which he wrote in 2018 called To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism. It’s a great joy to have him, and I am really pleased to be able to welcome him. Ross, thank you so much for joining us today on Conversing.
Ross Douthat:
It’s a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
Mark Labberton:
Well, I’ve been a fan of your column for many, many years and have benefited a lot from your perspective and the particular angle that you write from, which I find to be deep and substantial theologically, often as well as culturally and politically. And you’re one of the voices that I think is just a remarkable gift to the nation, actually. So I’m very honoured.
Ross Douthat:
That’s what I tell my kids. They say, “What do you do dad?” And I say, “I’m a remarkable gift to the nation.” But no, you’re very kind. I really appreciate it.
Mark Labberton:
Yeah, it probably doesn’t work too well with the kids.
Ross Douthat:
There’s always a first time.
Mark Labberton:
Yes. One of the things that distinguishes your voice, of course, is that you are a confessing Roman Catholic and a practicing Roman Catholic, and that you weave your faith in commentary and in reflection throughout your writing in very, very important ways. I wonder if you could just start by telling us about your own early development as a child spiritually and in the Roman Catholic Church.
Ross Douthat:
So I had an upbringing that, I think, maybe would seem less unusual to your listeners than to some readers of the New York Times, but it was fairly unusual. I was born and baptized Episcopalian, and then grew up in Southern Connecticut, where back then being a sort of mainline Protestant was still a very normal middle class safe thing to be.
But at a certain point when I was just a kid, my parents got pulled into a world of charismatic Christianity, faith healing, Pentecostalism. There was a woman who had a kind of healing gift who held services in high school auditoriums around Connecticut that we attended. We did things like we drove from Connecticut to Toronto for the Toronto Blessing.
Mark Labberton:
Blessing. Right.
Ross Douthat:
Big Pentecostalist revival moment in the early 1990s. So we had a fairly, I guess I’d call it sort of Supernaturalist experience of Christianity as a young person. I should say it was much more my mother and my parents who had the actual charismatic experiences. I was sort of a somewhat awkward preteen and teenage observer of this stuff.
Mark Labberton:
Right.
Ross Douthat:
But that was sort of the point of origin for our family’s religious journey, which then through some twists and turns ended up with us becoming Catholic when I was about 17 years old. And I think for my mother, maybe there was more of a kind of mystical bridge where she became very interested in Catholic mystical writers. So there was some sort of connection, I think, there between her experiences and the life of the Catholic Church.
For me, there was probably more of a kind of teenager’s feeling of relief at joining a tradition where no one would lay their hands on you and expect you to shiver and fall down. No one was asking me to testify to how the Holy Spirit was working in my heart. I mean, there are people who move from Catholicism to evangelical Protestantism or charismatic Christianity and will say, “Oh, Catholicism was all just rote memorization and just saying the same prayers over and over again.” My 17-year-old self was very excited about that. I was like, “Yes. Rote memorization. A church where I can sit in the back pew.” And that all seem normal.
So yeah, I read C.S Lewis and G.K Chesterton and a lot of the fairly predictable writers at that point. And so I sort had a kind of converts perspective on Catholicism. I was attracted to its sense of continuity and antiquity, its intellectual seriousness and so on. But then I also had, in the background, this experience of the Wilder side of American Christianity that was always with me, and I think has sort of maybe mattered more to my analysis as I became a journalist and a newspaper columnist maybe than I would’ve expected. Because I came into Catholicism, John Paul II was still Pope. There was this real sense confidence in conservative Catholicism, this sense that we’d been through the second Vatican council. There had been some problems in the 1970s, but basically John Paul II and then Benedict XVI had sort of figured things out. And Catholicism was sort of there as a kind of bulwark of intellectual consistency and coherence in an era of relativism.
And then the next 20 years featured the sex abuse crisis, which obviously changed a lot of Catholics level of confidence in the hierarchy of the church. It certainly changed my own. And then the era of Pope Francis when a whole lot of debates that the conservative side of the church had considered closed ended up sort of reopened. So we’ve been sort of doing this 1970s all over again in Catholicism in the last decade. None of that sort of unsettled my commitment to being Catholic, but it certainly unsettled some of my certainties. And then it sort of coincided, I think, with changes in the wider culture where you first had this wave of really strong secularization, the rise of people with no religious affiliation, the so-called nuns. Not the good kind of nuns, the other kind. But also, and this is something I’ve just become more and more interested in, the rise of various kinds of post-Christian spirituality, sort of weird, weird forms of mysticism and pseudo mysticism, the return of psychedelics, the internet and all its consequences, the return of UFOs.
Anyway, there’s been a lot of unsettlement in American religion since the John Paul II era that has in a way, made me, I think, appreciate ways in which the stranger parts of my upbringing prepared me for that kind of unsettled, supernaturally-haunted environment that I think we’re more in now than we were a decade ago.
Mark Labberton:
Right. Ross, when along the way as your parents made this move, first of all, did it just… Besides bringing you relief from the back pew, what else was that moment about for you? Did you feel as though this was really just a kind of functional thing? Or did it seem to you like reality had somehow now been recast by moving into such a dramatically different tradition than the context of churches that you and your family had been attending?
Ross Douthat:
Well, I mean, since we did start out as Episcopalians, in that sense, I was not coming to Catholicism without experience of sort of a liturgical church with a priest and something that sort of looked somewhat like the mass. So it wasn’t there are people who move from evangelicalism to Catholicism for whom it’s this sort of sharp break. And there was more continuity for me. I think what there was certainly was a sense of largeness, right? That if you’re operating in the realms, that we were in in charismatic circles of high school auditoriums, the vineyard, the revival that I went to in Toronto that I mentioned was held at an airport. It was called the Airport Vineyard, and it was sort of a church in a strip mall right by the Toronto Airport. And then my parents were involved in, there were sort of house churches. They were involved in a church at Yale, then New Haven where we were that had 12 people in it.
So going from that to Roman Catholicism. I remember the first time we went to Rome when I think I was about probably the year after we converted, and just I would say the scale, the sense of, this is sort of a Catholic thing to say, but the sense of universality that you can get in Catholicism where you travel the world and there’s a Catholic church almost everywhere and someone is offering the mass. That I think was not the only change, but one of the more profound changes that I felt. And again, as I said, it was sort of the John Paul II era. So with that universality, there was a sense of real confidence in the office of the Papacy, that again, I think has been sort of weakened for a lot of Catholics since, but was certainly part of the feeling that I had then. The two most famous Christians in the world at that moment, let’s say the three most famous Christians were Billy Graham, John Paul II, and Mother Teresa. And that was just the landscape of 1997.
Mark Labberton:
Right. Right. Was there a catechetical period where you were particularly being taught about Roman Catholicism or was that something just that developed through your own readings and through your experiences of the church?
Ross Douthat:
I mean, we became Catholics at St. Mary Parish in New Haven, which was then run by the Dominican order. So there were a couple Dominican priests there who were sort of very intellectually serious and did some preparation for… Well, actually I think my mother went through the full right of Christian initiation for adults process that you go through when you convert as an adult. I had some sort of private instruction with the priest because I was neither a cradle Catholic nor an adult convert, right?
Mark Labberton:
Right. Right.
Ross Douthat:
That third category. So there was that. But honestly, if I think about the formative influences, it was much more sort of my own personal reading. It was, if I was going to name four writers who I think of as sort of dominating my Catholic mind at that point, it would be Richard John Neuhaus, who was the editor of First Things magazine, a Lutheran convert to Catholicism who was a leading intellectual of that time. Probably the first really serious… It was the first serious intellectual journal that I ever, ever read. He wrote a third of the issue basically. So he was influential. Chesterton was influential, another convert.
And then I was a big novel reader. So the early 20th century kind of miniature Catholic Renaissance in literature was important. So that meant Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene. And if you’re a late teenager or early 20-something and you become a Catholic and you realize just how many rules the church has about sex, reading Greene’s novels can be very helpful and you can realize, “Well, there are other people who have struggled with this.” Now, Greene didn’t end up in a particularly good spiritual place in the end, so you don’t want to take that too far.
But those were the kind of writers who I was reading at that point. But all very cerebral and intellectual, right? I was not reading Teresa of Avila and Thérèse of Lisieux and John of the Cross and so on. I was much more a sort of, I was a system seeker. Catholicism is a great systematizing religion. All of that was very attractive to me.
Mark Labberton:
Yeah. Yes. Right. Yeah. That’s a very, very interesting journey. Tell me about the links that brought you to a point of what I think you would consider yourself a conservative Roman Catholic. I don’t know if you own that label or-
Ross Douthat:
No, no, I do. I mean we were… Well, it’s interesting. We were political liberals when I was a kid. My parents were Democrats. My earliest political memory is my mother going to cast a very lonely ballot for Walter Mondale in 1984. We supported Bill Clinton. Those were the first campaigns I really, really remember. But then we were operating in a religious landscape that was quite theologically conservative. I mean, I’m not sure exactly what the theology of the Toronto blessing would’ve been, but certainly there were books by Pat Robertson for sale in the little book table that they had there.
Mark Labberton:
Sure. Different from Richard John Neuhaus.
Ross Douthat:
Different from Richard John Neuhaus, but certainly not liberal, right?
Mark Labberton:
Yes.
Ross Douthat:
And all of the sort of evangelical encounters we had were pretty conservative. So there was always a sense in which… Well, there was a period where we were sort of Democrats who were conservative Christians in some way. And without having this being spelled out in great detail, but just in the sense of you’re trying to take the Bible seriously, you’re trying to take the traditions of the faith seriously, and also just taking the supernatural seriously. Now, it’s certainly possible to be a supernaturalist and also be theologically liberal. Such people exist. I have met them. But if you were just doing sociological generalization and you said, “Okay, people who have seen their parents speak in tongues and believe in a literal virgin birth, liberal or conservative, it’s going to be conservative.
So I think where I sort of moved back and forth was more on the political side where I’ve always been a political conservative since I was 17 or so, but I’ve always had a kind of complicated relationship with political conservatism. But I’ve always been, I think, some kind of theological conservative in the sense that that seems to flow from thinking that the core stuff in Christianity really happened, right? There tends to be a connection there. And Catholicism being, again, a systematizing religion sort of asks a lot of you, when you become a conservative Catholic, right? It’s not just like virgin birth, resurrection. It’s also, “Here’s the 17th codicil to a papal bull from 1322. Do you ascent or not?” Right?
Mark Labberton:
Right.
Ross Douthat:
I’m exaggerating, but there is some of that. On those grounds, I probably have become a little more liberal over the last 10 years, which is an odd thing to say since I’m well known for being a conservative critic of Pope Francis. But I think just the act of sort of finding yourself crossways from the supreme pontiff of the church, I think inevitably makes you have a little more sympathy for the liberals who were crossways from John Paul II and Benedict. I do think that the actual nature of Catholic teaching is a bit more unstable and uncertain than most conservative Catholics would’ve said 20 years ago or so. And saying that is a kind of concession to the Liberals, though not as large a one as they would like from me.
Mark Labberton:
Right. Right. So I’m curious if you could briefly take us through the journey you think that has occurred since John Paul II to Francis and what it is that has caused the concerns that you’ve raised. For people who have read your column regularly, I think I understand what those are. But I think for the audience that’s listening to this, it’d be nice to have you kind of give us a picture of how that change and transformation took place and why it raises the concerns that it does for you.
Ross Douthat:
Yeah. So I mean, Catholicism, like every branch of Christianity, has struggled mightily to adapt itself to a post-sexual revolution landscape. And in Catholicism, sometimes these things can be sort of sharpened because there’s this one huge institution that everyone is fighting over, right? Everyone’s sort of stays in it because everyone wants… No one wants to give up the chance. This is a cynical way of putting it, but no one wants to give up the chance to be in charge of the one holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic church, right?
Mark Labberton:
Right. Right.
Ross Douthat:
So you’ve had fewer sort of breaking aparts and schisms and Catholicism than you’ve had in some forms of Protestantism since the ’70s. But the basic divide of issues has been similar. The same issues that have split the global Anglican communion or the United Methodists and that have ended up dividing evangelicals and exvangeicals and people in between in the last 20 years are questions of how do you respond to issues, to a landscape where it’s sort of taken for granted in the culture that people will have premarital sex, people will get divorced, that gay people will be out of the closet, that same-sex marriage will be legal. What is the church’s response to all of that? And then relatedly, how do you balance that aspect of Christian teaching with everything else that Christianity is supposed to be about wealth and poverty, war and peace, care for the environment and so on, right?
Mark Labberton:
Right.
Ross Douthat:
Catholicism has the particular challenge of making a bunch of claims about how the church never changes. Officially, the church does not change its teachings. And of course, from an evangelical perspective, solo scriptura, the Bible doesn’t change its teachings either. But with Catholicism, you have this institution that’s made specific statements.
And so there’s a lot of very kind of, I don’t know exactly how to describe it, but there’s a lot of argument about gray areas in Catholicism, right? Like, “Well, how far can we go in changing the way the church approaches issues without actually changing the teaching?” And so there are liberalizing Catholics who will just come out and say, “No, look, the church was wrong about homosexuality, wrong about divorce, maybe even wrong about abortion, certainly wrong about contraception, and we should just change the teaching.” But most of the time you’re dealing with people making arguments that are like, “Well, we’re not changing the teaching. We’re just changing pastoral practice. So officially, the church still opposes divorce and remarriage. It’s just that pastorally, we’re not going to act as if we oppose it.” Right?
Mark Labberton:
Right.
Ross Douthat:
And that has been sort of, I think the method of liberal Catholicism in the Francis era. Again, if I’m going to offer my liberal side, church has to live in the world, the world has all of these realities in it. I live in the world. My parents are divorced, my grandparents are divorced. I have close friends who are gay. The church does have to act pastorally in those situations. You can’t just sort of build a fortress and say, “Oh, your son got divorced and is getting remarried. Well, if you go to his wedding, you’re a heretic.” Right? There are all kinds of ways in which I think the church does have to be pastoral.
At the same time, I think that there is tremendous pressure from the ambient culture to go beyond being pastoral and to just make these teachings disappear entirely. And related to that, to say, “Well, Jesus talks a lot about poverty, and he doesn’t talk a lot about sex. So isn’t it truer to Christianity to care about poverty more?”
My basic view is that in our culture, this is not true everywhere in the world, but in the United States, in an incredibly rich, developed society that actually many, many of the problems in our culture and the reasons for people’s unhappiness are related to issues of sex and relationships and marriage and divorce and all of these things, that these issues loom larger in a way the richer a society gets, and it’s not actually untrue to the gospels to focus on them. And also that Jesus says incredibly stringent and strenuous things in the gospels about sex that I myself have certainly failed to live up to, but that are clearly actually quite important to a Christianity that takes his word seriously.
And so if you dropped me back in 1872 and you said, “How much should the church talk about sex versus how much should it talk about the ravages of the industrial revolution?” I might have a different perspective. But in America in the 2020s, I think if the church stops having some sort of countercultural message on those issues, then it won’t actually be speaking to the big challenges and derangements of our time. I mean, we’re a society now. This is one of my hobbyhorses as a columnist, but all of the developed world is heading over this demographic cliff because after going through this period of libertinism in the ’60s, let’s call it the ’60s through the 1990s, now, we’ve entered into this period where people aren’t getting married anymore. They aren’t forming relationships anymore, they aren’t having kids anymore. This just seems like obviously one of the most serious issues of our time, and the church has a lot to say about it, but the things it needs to say are, to some degree, at least conservative things.
So anyway, that’s sort of a circuitous way of saying why I identify as a conservative. I think sex is important and the church has to be countercultural about it, which means being more conservative than most people would like it to be, maybe.
Mark Labberton:
I’m Mark Labberton. Thanks for listening with me.
One of the things that’s very interesting about what you just said is that the Roman Catholic Church has to hold onto what all of the Christian Church has to hold onto, which is this sense of deep continuity and the ownership of the tradition, the faith once delivered and passed on, and the constant change of culture, context, settings, demands, questions, issues, crises, and different traditions handle that double-pronged challenge in different ways. I think what you’re saying about the tradition, let’s call it the John Paul II tradition is a tradition that is simply focused more on the depth of continuity and then the pastoral sensitivity. Whereas what I think your critique of Francis has been centreed in is a feeling that pastoral sensitivity has equaled concession in various ways with less concern about continuity. But is that a fair summary or-
Ross Douthat:
Yeah, I think that’s fair, although the other thing that makes it complicated in terms of internal Catholic debates, and again, I think this has parallels in Protestantism, is that John Paul II was himself a modernizer, right?
Mark Labberton:
Yes. Yes. Right.
Ross Douthat:
He was looking for a synthesis and basically saying, “The church can endorse liberal democracy, it can endorse religious liberty. It can break with some of the things that popes in the 19th century said about political liberalism.” And the church changed a bunch already to get to the John Paul II-
Mark Labberton:
Era.
Ross Douthat:
… sort of environment. And there are people who were, and certainly are, to John Paul II’s right, right? Just as in the landscape of evangelical Protestantism, you have a range from, it’s not just fundamentalists and modernists, right? There’s a big range of voices.
One of the interesting things, one of the big flashpoints in the Francis era has been Francis’s attempt to basically squelch the traditional Latin mass, which was John Paul II was not a Latin mass Catholic at all, right? He was perfectly content to have the mass be in English, to have all the changes of Vatican too. But by essentially sort of being a bit more liberal than John Paul II, Francis has made conservative Catholics become more traditionalist. You’ve had a lot of conservatives who say, “Well, we thought John Paul II had this synthesis, but now it seems to be breaking down, so we’re going to go back.” And that too is sort of part of the weird dynamic of our times. It’s not just that you’ve had sort of people pushing for greater liberalization within Christianity, that in turn creates more of a push for traditionalism sort of more anti-modern perspective and so on. That to me is part of the story of the last 10 years too.
Mark Labberton:
Right. Right. So if we switch gears a bit and say you bring all of this rich Roman Catholic tradition, particularly the richness of Roman Catholic social teaching, and you are a New York Times columnist and you’re commenting on the most up to the moment dynamics in the craziness of the American political scene with evangelical voices that are thronging at different times around Trump, and then this scattering of others who really would want to separate themselves from Trump. Meanwhile, the racist in the last two weeks taking these dramatic terms, and were on the cusp of launching into a whole new season. So how does Roman Catholic journalists approach a moment like this in a way that you think reflects the harvest of your Catholicism as you’re a thinker in a cultural observer and voice?
Ross Douthat:
Well, I mean, you don’t want to overstate sort of the theological side of the job, right?
Mark Labberton:
Right.
Ross Douthat:
A lot of being a columnist is responding to often extremely unexpected events. That’s a big part of the job. I mean, over the course of my career, I have tried to spend a lot of time with the idea that Catholicism, in particular, and I think Christianity in general should stand a little bit outside of partisan categories. The chances that one political party or faction in a particular time and place has sort of stumbled on the exact synthesis demanded by Almighty God is pretty low. Probably the side you’re on is getting some big things wrong, and you need to be aware of that.
And so just in a lot of the writing I’ve done, for instance, about policy, I’ve spent a fair amount of time writing about ways in which I think the Republican Party could become friendlier to the needs and problems of the working class. The Republicans have traditionally had this reputation as the party of the rich, and that should be a somewhat uncomfortable place perhaps for a Catholic or Christian to land. And so to the extent that that stereotype has any reality, you should be trying to correct it to sort of push back against the side of the Republican Party that genuinely is sort of dismissive towards people who are struggling and things government can do to help.
So that, if I were distilling my long-term approach in terms of sort of Catholic social teaching, that would probably be it. But one of the things about the whole Trump era is that I feel like it should give us all more of a sense of how much of history is happening in ways that are outside of our capacity to necessarily perfectly influence and predict, right?
Mark Labberton:
Yes.
Ross Douthat:
Providence has its purposes too. So with Trump himself, I was against Trump in 2016. I was a Never Trump, or whatever that means. But Trump was in a way, a fulfillment of the thing I had been asking for. I had said, “Wouldn’t it be great if the Republican Party was less dogmatically libertarian, less focused on cutting entitlements, talked more about the forgotten man and the working-class?” And God said, “Okay, here’s Donald Trump” doing exactly that. And that realizing that didn’t mean that I had to support Trump, but it I think gave me a somewhat different view of what the Trump phenomenon represented than some of my fellow conservative friends who were never Trump, who had been just more comfortable with where the Republican Party was before Trump, right?
Mark Labberton:
Right. Right.
Ross Douthat:
You can see the entire era of populism and Trumpism as a kind of judgment on both the elites of both political parties who have been constantly surprised, befuddled, and undone by these strange forces and this strange figure of Trump. And I think there are pro-Trump Christians who look at that and take it too far and say, “Well, this means God is on Trump’s side. He survived the assassination attempt, and so God must want to vote for Trump.” I think that’s incredibly presumptuous. You don’t know what God is using Trump for, right? You want to be very careful about saying, because someone is playing some role in this story, you have to be on his side. I don’t think that’s always true.
But I do feel like history in the last 10 years has seemed more to show more signs of God having a sense of humor, for one thing. But yeah, it’s been a little more Old Testament, wouldn’t you say?
Mark Labberton:
Yes. Yes.
Ross Douthat:
We’ve had plagues and chastisements and unexpected events and all the rest. And of course, as a Catholic, I think all of this happened because Pope Benedict resigned. A pope should not resign. And by resigning, he set the levers of history back into motion or something. That’s sort of one of my pet supernatural hypotheses about the last decade. But whether you accept that or not, I think that I look at the landscape of American life and sort of global history right now with more of a sense of God’s control and less of a sense of my own personal agency as a newspaper columnist than I would have 10 years ago.
Mark Labberton:
And that’s been conditioned because of, in a way, these shockwaves that have gone through the system that seem-
Ross Douthat:
Right. You’ve had much more of a sense of the extent to which man proposes and God disposes. Sometimes God Delivers things that you could sort of see coming, but not in anything like the way that you expected, right?
Mark Labberton:
Right. Right.
Ross Douthat:
Sometimes he delivers things you didn’t see coming at all. But you don’t want to say at his mercy, but we’re under God’s power, I think, the God of history, to a degree that is easier to appreciate in 2024 than it was in the world of total American supremacy and a sort of greater sense of secularization. I just also think some of what I mentioned before, that the world has grown weirder in general in the last decade than it was when I was in my 20s, let’s say.
Mark Labberton:
Right. Right. Thank you, Jim Wallis. It’s a weirder connection. So this makes me want to know a little bit more about your theory of history and of the providence of God, because the things you’ve just said would be, in Protestant terms, it feels to me, in Protestant terms, it would be pushing toward a fairly high Calvinism that would really see God’s hand as providentially orchestrating the politics in some sort of way. But I’m not sure that that’s what you’ve just said. So I wonder if you could…
Ross Douthat:
Well, I mean, I don’t want to go all the way to the Jonathan Edwards theory of the freedom of the will or the lack thereof. I would say it’s more than like, if you look at a phenomenon like Trump, it is that this weird phenomenon is presented to people, Christians and non-Christians, as something to engage with, react to, something that can reveal character, whether you’re somebody who’s absolutely supporting Trump or absolutely opposing him, to what extent do you hold onto your original convictions through that process? To what extent do you get warped? And again, I think people can get warped by their support for Trump, and they can get warped by the way they oppose him too. But I feel like there’s been a lot more testing of not just the culture, but sort of individuals, I don’t know, individual souls, I guess you could say, in response to these phenomena.
And of course, there are people who look at the way I’ve moved back and forth on these issues and would say, “I’m failing the test,” right? I’m not saying I’ve passed the test and other people have failed it. I’m saying it is a unique kind of test that as a non-Calvinist, I would say people have a certain freedom in how they respond to it, but it also seems to reflect a kind of providential shaping.
I mean, to me, this book I wrote just before Covid came out, before Covid hit the box office. Just before the pandemic began, I published a book called The Decadent Society. The argument then was that the western world, and really the whole planet was sort of stuck, stagnant. We’d achieved this incredible level of wealth and technological power. We’d filled the earth and subdued it to some degree, but we were suffering from uncertainty, malaise, ennui because we didn’t know what to do next.
And then I ended the book with a little providentialist talk saying there’s been this story that starts in Genesis where God tells us to helps the human race to fill the earth. And then you get to the Gospels, and Jesus is talking about preaching the Gospels to the ends of the earth. A story is set in motion there. And from a certain perspective, we’ve come to an end point of that story. And even from a secular perspective, you don’t have to believe in the Great Commission or the Book of Genesis to see that human beings, we’ve reached a certain level and we aren’t sure what the next level is. I think that’s a really interesting moment. It’s part of what interests me in figures like Elon Musk and his quest for space travel, that’s sort of a secular answer to this challenge. It’s what interests me in, again, there’s people getting into stranger forms of religion.
I think a lot of people in the current spiritual landscape are looking for sort of help. But not help from God, help from some other power that’s sort of intermediate between us and God. I think that’s what people are looking for from aliens and UFOs. I think it’s what people are looking for from AI, right? It’s like, “Well, we can’t get any further, but if we build the super intelligence, that will help us. That will cure cancer. That will teach us how to cure aging and become immortal. That will get us to Mars.” I think there’s a lot of that right now. People feeling like human beings have gone as far as they can go, and we need some kind of other help, and we aren’t comfortable asking for it from Yahweh, Jehovah, right? So maybe there’s someone else we can ask for help from or invent or create in our own image.
Mark Labberton:
Right. Right. These all opened up such important questions about humanness, human meaning. I think that the texture of your columns that I want to return to for a moment is specifically this feeling that you are deeply working the soil of both the moment as a journalist in a way that you need to with a backdrop that is richer theologically, historically, philosophically than is always presented. And that out of that, from my point of view, your columns bring forth a perspective that is quite distinctly your own perspective. Not meaning you, personally, but a distinct perspective, which doesn’t sound like any of the other columnists. Whereas when I read the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, these various newspapers, I have to say, one of your articles is almost always the one that I find the most distinctive in the voices. And I’m curious if you would own that, or if you just think that’s an overreach. I’m not trying to just provide adulation. I’m trying to understand, I think, the bearing that you’re bringing.
Ross Douthat:
I mean, you are coming as a reader from notwithstanding our theological differences, sort of a similar perspective to my own. I mean, I can imagine someone with a very different perspective who would find another columnist to be sort of saying the most resonant things. So you don’t want to sort of overstate that.
I think for religious readers and Christians, but not only Christians, I think the work that I do is maybe more resonant than a lot of other columnists. And I do think that I… We’ll put it this way, I think that as the world has grown weirder, I’ve felt a little more comfortable being weird myself, and that so far hasn’t gotten me fired, right?
Mark Labberton:
Right.
Ross Douthat:
Yeah, I think that that stands out, not completely. I mean, my colleague, David Brooks, went through a kind of religious conversion-
Mark Labberton:
Yes. Absolutely.
Ross Douthat:
… and wrote about that. There are other people writing about religion the Times, we ran a piece a year ago or so by Molly Worthen, who’s a convert to evangelical Christianity, about sort of healing and prayer and so on. I remember when that ran, I was like, “I wonder what the readership thinks about that.” So I’m not the only person writing in this territory. But yeah, I think I am, not to brag, but yeah, I’m probably the weirdest columnist at a major American newspaper. So I’ll own that at least.
Mark Labberton:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, here’s to weirdness, partly-
Ross Douthat:
I would call myself weird before we entered the world where Democrats were attacking Republicans for being weird. I just want to say I’m not trying to associate myself-
Mark Labberton:
Yes, I understand.
Ross Douthat:
… with that partisan argument.
Mark Labberton:
But I, nevertheless, like the affinity. Well, what makes it significant to me is that I approach things from a much bluer point of view than a redder point of view. And my faith, which developed as an adult, greatly informed and shapes my sensibility about the issues in the world. I’m not really a member of a party, but I certainly listen carefully and reflect deeply on the things that are going on. I think it’s partly because of your faith and being Roman Catholic and being conservative that ends up providing for me a really good grist for my own thoughts and actions. And sometimes I’m in great agreement, sometimes I’m not. But either way, I feel like I’ve benefited.
So in closing, we’re coming rapidly toward the national election in the beginning of November. And if you were to offer a blessing to the readers, a blessing for their experience between now and election day, what would your blessing be?
Ross Douthat:
Well, I mean, again, I will be providentialist, right? For listeners or readers who are capable of having faith that the world is a story being told, not just sort of one damn thing after another, that faith should give you confidence that the events in even the most fraught and contested election in the strangest time in the world, even in that environment, that there is a kind of divine hand on the thread.
Again, obviously you don’t want to take that too far because the divine hand clearly allows terrible things to happen. It might be that there is an outcome of this election that leads to something truly terrible. I don’t want to be Pollyannish about it, but I guess I would marry that statement to a kind of more secular blessing, which is to say that I think that life in the United States right now is kind of an underrated good that Americans have become very pessimistic. Very pessimistic, very unhappy with each other, sometimes unhappy with themselves.
I think actually beneath that difficult surface, America has a lot of real strengths and real resilience. And American culture is better positioned, I think, than a lot of cultures around the world to navigate the next 50 to 100 years of human history. So I think that should give people some confidence. So I guess the blessing would be a certain degree of faith in providence and a certain degree of confidence in America. And may that combination not be overwhelmed by some disaster.
Mark Labberton:
That’s a wonderful blessing. Ross, thank you so much again for being a guest today. This has been a rich conversation, and I’m really appreciative that you would join us.
Ross Douthat:
Of course, it was my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
