Ross Douthat: Why Everyone Should Be Religious

Ross Douthat isn’t what some would expect from a New York Times columnist. He’s religious and also a political conservative. And I bet he’s the first and thus far only Times columnist to write a book that some might term evangelistic. That new book is Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious (Zondervan).

Douthat observes changes in his readers’ attitudes toward institutional religion compared to 20 years ago. The sociological benefits of institutions such as churches have become more widely acknowledged. And some previous skeptics have begun to see that a post-Christian future might not be the liberal utopia they expected.

Perhaps we see a cultural opening to the gospel, then. Or at least we’ve come to a cultural crossroads, and everyone must make a choice. Douthat writes, “The choice this book is concerned with, the choice to become religious or not, is fundamentally a choice between looking around at the piled-up knapsacks and guidebooks that prior pilgrims have carried and used and written, and deciding to see that they might have to offer—or just wandering onward, willfully blind without a compass or map.”

Douthat is a friend of the show and always interesting to interview. So I’m glad he rejoined me on Gospelbound to talk about why everyone should be religious.