NEW HAVEN, Connecticut — Ross Douthat admits he is a little self-conscious about his interest in UFOs. “It’s just sort of embarrassing,” he tells me over burrata and tomatoes at a small Italian restaurant in New Haven.
Not at all, I assure him.
“But yet,” he counters after a pause, “it might not be embarrassing if we really have alien spacecraft locked away in Nevada somewhere.”
It is the sort of subject often assigned to conspiracy theorists, not columnists at the nation’s premier newspaper of record.
But it is this willingness to consider ideas outside the tidy boundaries of elite consensus that has made Douthat, 45, a unique conservative voice from his perch at the beating heart of liberal media, The New York Times.
There, by helping translate conservative ideas to liberals, and liberal ideas to conservatives, Douthat reveals the deeper forces behind the bewildering maelstrom of contemporary politics and culture. A 2023 profile in The New Yorker called Douthat “liberal America’s favorite conservative commentator.”
“He’s very open-minded,” said Harvey Mansfield, a retired professor of government who taught Douthat as an undergraduate student at Harvard University. Mansfield mentioned Douthat’s recent interview with Steven Bannon on a New York Times podcast as an example. “Bannon is sort of regarded as way out on a limb, and that didn’t bother Ross. He got him to say a lot of interesting things which are important for understanding what Trump wants to do and how he thinks.”
Douthat, who is a Catholic, has long written about religion for secular readers. His book “Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics,” published in 2012, detailed the rise of “semi-Christian” spiritual movements in American culture, examining figures like Joel Osteen and Oprah Winfrey. His 2018 book “To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism” delved into internal church battles.
But in his latest book, Douthat takes on the very foundational questions at the core of religious belief.
In “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious,” set for release Tuesday , Douthat is speaking to non-believers and religious skeptics who may recognize the sociological benefits of religion, yet stumble over intellectual and cultural barriers that make belief feel implausible, outdated and even embarrassing. Exploring objections to religious belief — from the scientific revolution to doubt over supernatural experiences to seemingly retrograde moral norms — and then making a case for committing to one faith tradition, Douthat presents a rational argument for why religion remains intellectually viable.
The book arrives at a moment of renewed spiritual openness and curiosity in America. The once-fashionable “new atheism” is giving way to public intellectuals professing faith. Loneliness pervades American life; depression and anxiety rates have soared. In the absence of the groundedness that institutional religion used to provide, some have turned to alternative spiritualities — neo-paganism, astrology, witchcraft. And although organized religion continues to be in decline, it appears that the steep curve of secularization has hit a ceiling — the rise of the religiously unaffiliated “nones” has leveled off at about 28% of the population, according to Pew Research Center.
“We’ve lived through a period of confident secularization, confident non-belief that has kind of run its course and hit a natural limit,” Douthat told me. ”On both the individual level and at the cultural level, people had to go through an experience of a kind of separation from religion before they were ready to consider some of its arguments afresh. And now I think we’re in a different moment.”
And with his new book, Douthat is there to help the doubters and skeptics make the leap to faith, with a safety net of reason.
New Haven beginnings
On a recent January afternoon, I met Douthat for lunch at a restaurant a few minutes away from the home where he lives with his wife, the author and journalist Abigail Tucker, and their five children, ranging in age from 7 months to 13 years old.
He was running 5 minutes late, but kept me apprised of his ETA by text.
When he arrived, wearing a pullover sweater over a plaid shirt, paired with jeans and New Balance sneakers, Douthat sat down, showing no visible signs of the chronic Lyme disease that had once upended his life, which he wrote about in “The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery.”
He’s about 90% recovered, he later told me between bites of his bucatini pasta.
The restaurant where we’re sitting is about 10 minutes from the neighborhood where Douthat grew up.
While close to Yale, the neighborhood was removed from the bustle of the Ivy League university. His father, a lawyer, came from the “middle class paradise” that was California in the 1950s. His mother’s family included a mix of academically minded family members who also worked with their hands — a grandfather who was a public school teacher and also a fisherman; an aunt who worked for the United Nations; and an uncle who is a lobsterman.
Douthat’s great-grandfather, Charles Wilbert Snow, was the son of a lighthouse keeper off the coast of Maine and went on to become a governor of Connecticut and a “second-tier famous poet,” according to Douthat. (Snow was friends with Carl Sandburg and Robert Frost, among other poets of the time.)
Both of Douthat’s parents went on to graduate from prestigious universities: his father went to Stanford, while his mother was in the first class of women to graduate from Yale.
Douthat grew up aware of his parents’ literary aspirations and the fact that they had set them aside after he and his younger sister were born. “I always had this sense of being a writer, maybe foolishly, as a high-level aspiration, as something that my parents wanted to achieve, but hadn’t achieved,” he told me. (Those ambitions later came to fruition: his father, Charles Douthat, is about to publish his second poetry collection — his first was “Blue for Oceans” — and his mother, Patricia Snow, went on to write for First Things, including a recent piece titled “Taylor Swift’s Sexual Revolution.” )
As a kid, Douthat devoured fantasy novels and dreamed of being a filmmaker and a politician. “I never did any of those things, but I could write about politics,” he told me. But like his parents, he continued creative pursuits — on the side, he’s been working on a serialized fantasy novel that he’s publishing on Substack.
The ‘accidental pilgrim’
Douthat often describes his religious upbringing as being on a “tour of American Christianity.” His first family went to an Episcopalian church, where Douthat was baptized as a child. But partly in search of a cure for his mother’s unexplained chronic illness that manifested itself in allergies and sensitivities, the family started attending charismatic services, where Douthat witnessed people speaking in tongues, roaring like lions and shaking on the floor. For three years, Douthat’s mother followed a preacher named Grace all around New England. Young Ross came along, sometimes reading during the services or playing in the halls. The family went on to explore other evangelical and Pentecostal churches.
Although Douthat didn’t doubt the reality of these experiences for the people involved, he said he remained “unravished and unmoved,” an observer at a distance unaffected by the outbursts of the spirit. He describes himself as an “accidental pilgrim” along for the ride in his parents’ spiritual journey.
“I couldn’t not be open to strange spiritual possibilities because they were being made manifest around me,” he wrote in “Believe.” “But at the same time they weren’t my own spiritual encounters.”
After a failed attempt to plant an evangelical church in New Haven, the family converted to Catholicism. Seventeen-year-old Douthat found relief in the reliable structure of the sacraments. Catholicism, he says, offered an “expression of that faith that resonated more with my own ideas and experiences and personality.”
Douthat told me he’s always had a mild “mild contrarian” streak and being a believer in secular settings allowed him to sharpen his ideas and better understand his faith by pushing against the liberal culture. This was especially true of his time at Harvard University, from which he graduated in 2002.
Most of Douthat’s formation at Harvard wasn’t so much intellectual, he told me — instead it was a cultural education in the American elites: How did meritocracy work? How do people get ahead?
“It was tempting you with worldliness in this profound way that I had not been fully prepared for going in,” he said.
Yet, he stood out in his classes. Mansfield still remembers Douthat’s paper on the history of modern political philosophy. “He was so intelligent; he had the means to become a professor, but he wanted to study politics as it was happening,” Mansfield told me.
Douthat became the “token conservative columnist,” as he described himself, for The Harvard Crimson, the campus paper, and later the editor of the “embattled” conservative publication, The Salient. “Our new editor, Ross, is the best writer that we have and he was born to be an editorialist,” said the 2000 announcement.
Writing about privilege and meritocracy as a participant in it, from the very bowels of the culture itself, prepared him for his role as a critic and observer of the forces shaping American politics and culture today. “Trying to relate to readers who disagree with you, rather than just trying to offend them, that was very, very helpful and set the tone for my professional career,” he said.
But that’s something Douthat had to learn over time. After college, he worked as an editor and blogger for The Atlantic, and in 2009, at 29 years old, became the youngest op-ed columnist working for The New York Times. He also writes film reviews for National Review.
In his early college columns, Douthat says, he was more of a “combative show-off,” trying to imitate writers like the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus and William F. Buckley. He’s more measured now — sometimes, he admits, to a fault. “I think sometimes probably as a writer for the Times, I can err too much in the opposite direction, doing endless ' on the one hand, on the other hand, I can understand this, I can understand that’— to the point where, you’ll have readers say, ‘Ross, I enjoy your columns, but I can’t always tell what you really believe’.”
The case for religion
“Believe,” which is Douthat’s eighth nonfiction book, offers a roadmap for navigating the stumbling blocks along the way to belief. “The universe is not a trick” is a recurring theme in the book. In fact, modern science, rather than discrediting religion, has strengthened its plausibility. The fine-tuning of physical laws, the unresolved nature of consciousness and the persistence of religious experiences all suggest that it’s likely that a divine intelligence underlies reality. “Reason still points godward,” Douthat writes.
Douthat makes the case for committing to one religious tradition, even amid uncertainty about its absolute truth. He suggests believers should embrace that “there exist less-true and more-true schools of thought,” all of which advance believers toward an eternal destination.
When choosing a faith, the major religions — Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism — are a good place to start, he says. So is the inherited familial faith. “Permanent open-mindedness is not necessarily a virtue,” he writes. “In the end the meaningful life is usually the committed life.”
Some have taken issue with this emphasis on choice in Douthat’s advocacy for a life of faith. Jeet Heer, who writes for The Nation, wrote on X he agreed with Douthat’s assessment of the overwhelming religious options that exist today, but “thinking of religion as a choice — as a matter of private volition — is itself a surrender to the logic of secularism (and even worse Protestant secularism),” he wrote, adding, “For most of humanity, do we choose a religion or does a religion choose us?”
Cathleen Kaveny, a legal scholar and theologian at Boston College, and a lifelong Catholic, told me she recognizes the “anxiety of a convert” in Douthat’s emphasis on choosing a religion. ” The basic Catholic sensibility is that this is a given — it’s a world that’s chosen you before you’ve chosen it,” she said. “I’m not so worried about other people choosing or not choosing a religion because I see them already as encompassed in God’s love.”
E.J. Dionne Jr., a Washington Post political columnist and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, has known Douthat since his 20s, and like other more liberal Catholics, has disagreed with Douthat’s sharp critiques of Pope Francis and his views on changes to the church after the Second Vatican Council. Still, Dionne told me that he appreciates Douthat’s incisive and thoughtful approach to debate: “He’s someone who does a little bit more than just rote engagement with arguments he disagrees with, and that’s something I’ve respected about him for a long time.”
‘A very big family’
After lunch, I followed Douthat, who was driving his minivan, to the family’s home. With the birth of their latest baby — their fifth and a boy — the family upgraded to two minivans, which are exactly the same model, although not the same year. Douthat preferred the older model, the one with a physical key and no dashboard blazing with information, his wife, Abigail Tucker, told me. “He can’t stand the idea of not having a key,” she said.
Inside, the home has the vibe of a farmhouse featured on a British cottagecore Instagram account: pleated lamp shades, floral wallpaper, checkered upholstered furniture, landscape paintings. On and off, Tucker’s been working on decorating it herself. “It’s a hobby. If you’re a writer, it helps to have a visual hobby, where words are just not part of it,” said Tucker, who is the author of the 2021 book “Mom Genes: Inside the New Science of Our Ancient Maternal Instinct” and an earlier New York Times best-seller about house cats. She’s at work on a new project about animals, a return to nature writing she did earlier in her career.
In the mornings, Douthat does a shuttle run to three schools, dropping off the older children and then, if needed, restocking the house with coffee and other necessities. “Ross in the morning is truly a sight to behold,” said Tucker, who attributes “beyond 50%” of the household work to her husband, although a nanny comes over to help a few times a week.
There is a playful side to Douthat, she said —a “twinkle in his eye” that doesn’t always come through in his columns. For instance, he likes jumping off the diving board in their local swimming club. “On some long road trips, he’ll say ‘kids, I’m going to tell you the history of the world,’” Tucker said. “And then he just does.”
Before publishing his fantasy novel online, he told the story to his children, she added.
With their fifth child, Tucker feels like they’ve crossed into the “very big family” category, which is unusual for the area they live in — except at church, where Douthat’s family fits right in.
The family attends a historic Gothic church on the Yale campus, one previously run by the Dominican Friars and now consolidated with several parishes in the area. A giant portrait of the Rev. Michael McGivney, the founder of the Knights of Columbus, who is entombed inside the church, adorns the front of the church. The parish, which is “liturgically very serious,” Douthat points out, is full of Catholic families from the area — many homeschool and some have more than five children. “At church, we’re a medium (sized) family,” Tucker said.
A more serious approach
Douthat tells me that 70 years ago, Americans were more concerned about their children marrying outside their religion than outside their political party but today, the reverse is true, which he finds concerning. “It’s healthier for people to regard their identity as Catholic, Baptist or Latter-day Saint more seriously than their partisan identity,” Douthat said.
At a time when religion is tightly entwined with politics, Douthat disentangles the two and nudges us toward a more serious approach to life’s biggest questions. “Ross is a kind of throwback in a good way, where he’s arguing about the fundamental religious questions of belief and unbelief, of God’s existence, about what this means to human beings,” Dionne said. “I think he stands out in this era, because he’s not just talking about politics. He’s actually talking about belief itself.”
This conviction extends to Douthat’s broader fascination with belief, including his interest in UFOs and the supernatural —phenomena that, like religion, challenge secular assumptions about reality.
After all, sociological benefits aren’t enough to revive religion, Douthat says. “If religion is good for society, it’s probably because it’s saying true things about the world, not just because it helps people get together on Sunday or Saturday,” Douthat told me. “The only thing that can revive religion is actual belief that it’s true.”