Americans’ relationship with religion is changing. After decades of secularization, shrinking church attendance and ascendant atheism, there are suddenly signs of a growing interest in the divine and even mystical.
Since 2019, following years of decline, researchers have seen a leveling off among those who identify as Christian and an upward trend in those joining other faith traditions. Pew Research Center found that in the past five years of polling, the percentages of U.S. adults who identify with a religion or with no religion “have all remained fairly stable.”
Those who study religion and society are reluctant to claim that a religious revival is underway. But author and New York Times columnist Ross Douthat senses a withering in the popularity of New Atheism and a resurgent quest for the spiritual. His new book “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious” speaks to secular people who find themselves searching for meaning and connection. As a devout Catholic, he makes what he calls the rational case for believing in God.
In this conversation with contributing editor McKay Coppins, Douthat explores what led to this rekindling of faith and the role of faith for people, young and old, in modern life.
McKay Coppins: You have spent much of this past year on a book tour talking about why people should be religious. Did anything surprise you in making this case in any of these conversations?
ROSS Douthat: The premise of the book and part of the reason I wrote it was the sense that American culture and maybe especially elite culture was becoming more open to religious ideas and arguments than they had been over the last 10 or 15 years. I still was a little bit surprised by how difficult it was to kind of gin up a really hard-core, stringent atheist attack on my book.
It was fairly striking that I’ve had only a few engagements, most of them publicly scheduled debates, where we just went hammer and tongs over whether religion is ridiculous and God is a myth. And most of the conversations were more in the vein of, “Ross, I am persuaded by this third of your argument and not sure about that third, but I think you’re onto something here.”
COPPINS: You say in the introduction of your book that a decade ago, a lot of secular, liberal readers would write to you ridiculing your belief in God and that now you’re detecting more of a mournful yearning for faith, even among those who don’t believe.
DOUTHAT: I do think there’s been a change. And I would attribute that to three factors. The first is just the basic reality that the New Atheist movement of intellectuals and journalists made some concrete predictions about how much more enlightened and peaceful and rational the world would be as organized religion diminished, and I don’t think anyone believes that happened in the 2020s. I think you have a fair amount of data to demonstrate that people who no longer go to church are just as capable of hating each other or developing reasons to reject science and reason or throwing themselves into crazy ideological causes. You don’t need religion for any of that.
At the same time, I think there’s also been a loss of faith in a certain kind of liberal and secular narrative of progress. You can tell yourself we don’t need religion, and the good news is the arc of history bends toward some kind of progressive, liberal utopia, but then suddenly we start losing elections to right-wing populists. Politics had become a replacement for religion for a lot of people, and I think there is a kind of dark night of the soul experience over the last five or 10 years in the age of populism that undermines the way that politics had been substituting for religion.
Then finally, the world has just gotten a bit weirder. Political, ideological battles have become more intense. Some of it is in the realm of apocalyptic events like we had, such as the first global pandemic in 100 years or so. Then some of it is a partial return of supernatural and paranormal interest that resembles the 1970s, where people are into astrology and UFOs and psychedelics. And you have AI as this kind of scientific but also quasi supernatural shadow over everything. Naturally, a renewed interest in religion is what you would expect in that kind of climate of weirdness and supernatural interest.
People can be drawn into religion through kind of communitarian and social channels. But there is still some hard limit on that pull, unless they also eventually decide it might be real.
COPPINS: A lot of writing about religion in this new, more welcoming era focuses on the pro-social aspects of organized religion. But you confidently make the rational case for religious belief because it’s true, not because it’s good for politics and community and society, but because God actually does exist. Why was it important for you to do that?
DOUTHAT: To be clear, I have made those pro-social arguments myself and there’s nothing wrong with those kinds of arguments. I do think they are something of a crutch for religious writers operating in a secular environment.
I think it’s important to push further, but you also have to have the right environment and moment. And again, this is a moment where the world seems weirder. And for that reason, among others, even secular writers and thinkers are a bit more open to arguments that ask you to consider the more fundamental questions. Does God actually exist? Are miracles actually possible? Is there actually evidence that the world was made in some way with human beings in mind? Timing for those types of questions is important. You’re trying to, as a writer, find a receptive audience. And my sense was that in the mid-2020s, there would be more receptivity to that kind of argument than there would have been if I’d written this book in 2014.
People do often make religious choices on the basis of some kind of pro-social impulse. People do decide to go back to church when they have a kid or get married in their ancestral religion, even if they haven’t practiced it for a while. And people can be drawn into religion through kind of communitarian and social channels. But there is still some hard limit on that pull, unless they also eventually decide it might be real.
COPPINS: Is there a favorite argument for the existence of God in your book?
DOUTHAT: It’s a subtheme of a larger argument about the nature of consciousness that suggests a kind of supernatural pattern and supernatural origin to the human mind. And one of the pieces of that argument is that whatever human consciousness is, it has turned out to have a remarkable capacity to unlock mysteries seemingly well above the pay grade of the kind of early hominid environment in which consciousness is understood to have evolved. I think a lot of people assume that consciousness scales up naturally, it helps you build fires and so eventually it helps you create agriculture. And then eventually it helps you split the atom, figure out E = mc2 and do gene editing.
But part of the larger argument that I’m making in the book is that there isn’t any sort of one slam-dunk, medieval scholastic theorem that settles the debate over God once and for all.
There’s just a lot of converging lines of evidence, converging aspects of our reality that just make it all make a lot more sense.
The ability of the human mind to unlock the mysteries of the cosmos is what you would expect in a world where, as the book of Genesis has it, human beings were made in some way in the image of the mind that created the whole system. It’s just much more likely under those conditions than under strictly materialist conditions, I think.
And there are a lot of examples of this, things that we accept as part of our world that are more likely theism than atheism.
COPPINS: You tell a story in your book about an old clock radio. What is that story meant to convey?
DOUTHAT: This is a story from atheist and skeptic Michael Shermer. One thing that distinguishes him is that he’s always been interested in the stuff that the atheist world doesn’t adequately explain. He had a particular experience that he’s written about a number of times where he and his wife were getting married, and his wife had this radio that had been given to her by a relative who had passed away and who had been a father figure to her. This radio never worked and it was in a drawer in the back of their home. After they came back from the wedding to get ready for the reception, Shermer heard music playing from somewhere in the house and they finally found the radio playing love songs suitable for the occasion. And it continued playing into the evening through the end of the wedding celebration, and then it stopped. After that, Shermer could never get it to work again.
Shermer used this as an example of this kind of residual set of things that happen to people and that are challenging to fit into a purely materialist framework. You can fall back on some kind of law of large numbers hypothesis in that circumstance to explain it and say something like, “Well, you know, given an infinite number of clock radios, one will have its wiring fuse in such a way that it works temporarily.” But at some point, that kind of argument becomes difficult for people to accept, especially if there are enough of these kinds of things that happen. And one of the claims I make in the book is there’s a lot of weird stuff that happens to people and it persists even under officially disenchanted conditions. People keep having religious and mystical experiences, even if they’re in cultures that don’t think that they happen, even if they themselves are not especially religious. And there are some of these things that can be studied a bit and we have actually learned more about them under modern technological conditions. We know more about the weirdness of near-death experiences, for instance, in the 21st century than we did back when we brought fewer people back from the brink of death.
I think there is a kind of dark night of the soul experience over the last five or 10 years in the age of populism that undermines the way that politics had been substituting for religion.
Essentially there’s a lot of stuff that’s part of what it is to be a human being. And a lot of it was predicted to sort of melt away under more secular conditions. If you read, you know, David Hume or Thomas Paine or Voltaire or these kind of late 18th-century atheists, they don’t think people will stop believing in the supernatural, but they really think a lot of stuff will just sort of go away once you don’t have priests empowered to tell you what to believe or force you to read scripture.
And if anything, 19th- and 20th-century history have proven the opposite: As institutional religion decays, you actually get wilder expressions of spirituality and mystical experience. Does this prove absolutely that these things are real connections to a higher realm of reality? I don’t think you can prove that absolutely. But the persistence and resilience of mystical experience is what the religious person would have predicted. Going into a more secular age, the secular person would have predicted the opposite and did predict the opposite. And so the more resilience you have, the more Michael Shermer’s radios and near-death experiences you have, the more you have to give a point to the religious perspective.
COPPINS: We hear a lot lately about the “Great Re-enchantment,” this growing Western interest in tarot cards, astrology, ayahuasca, and I think a lot of people of faith are welcoming that interest in the mystical, and the position I hear from a lot of other religious people is, “Look, that stuff isn’t for me, but it’s going to break the backs of the New Atheists and dominate so much of Western thought in the 21st century that inevitably it will lead a great number of people back to God.” I’m curious if you think that view is true. I’m sympathetic to that view myself, and your book does seem to flirt with it as well, but isn’t there also a danger that people of faith cheerleading this turn toward the mystical might not end up where they think they will, that the interests in Wiccans and horoscopes will not lead to another Great Awakening?
DOUTHAT: I think it’s a concern. I guess essentially when you’re enchanting the world, you play for higher stakes. And generally, since Christians believe that God is sovereign over every level, natural and supernatural, they should have a certain confidence that if you play for higher stakes, there’s more to be won than to be lost. But I also think the concerns are understandable and valid. Christianity says there’s all this enchantment in the world, but a lot of it is bad or dangerous or demonic or fake. And you need to focus on the one true God, and you need to focus on Jesus Christ, and you need to not be sacrificing to idols and going to oracles and so on. This is not a new question.
There are obviously opportunities for traditional believers and traditional churches to interact fruitfully with these impulses that people have. When I talk to priests and pastors, they will say that 15 years ago, someone would become interested in Christianity because they’d read C.S. Lewis’ “Mere Christianity” or they had a spouse and their spouse is religious. And now, suddenly, we’re getting more people who come in to church saying, “I had a really dark supernatural experience, and I’m looking for something to make sense of it.”
COPPINS: You make the case that people who want to begin on a spiritual journey should basically start with the tried and true religions that have stood the test of time and that they’re most culturally connected to. But then you shed the pretense of objectivity and make the case directly for Christianity. Why should people be Christian?
DOUTHAT: Ideally, when you look for a church or a religion, you’re looking for something that offers itself as the place that seems like the most important place where God stepped in, sent a message, delivered a revelation.
And you can say, there have been a lot of revelations, and God has revealed himself in lots of different times and places, but you’re looking for the one that you think is the most important one. That can be then the controlling revelation that you use to interpret the rest of the religious data. And allowing for my own inherent biases as someone who was raised Christian, I just think there’s a really, really strong case for that being the story of Jesus of Nazareth, the four Gospels, the New Testament, the story of his life, death and alleged resurrection.
The weight of evidence suggests that these Gospels are what they purport to be, they’re eyewitness or close to eyewitness accounts of events that a lot of people experienced and that they have at their center. That’s the basic argument: that there is something historically distinctive and also distinctive in historical credibility about the New Testament that, for me, stands out starkly among the religious competitors. It doesn’t mean that God isn’t present in other revelations and other religious texts. But if you’re looking for a moment when you know God reaches in and sort of grabs you by the lapels and says, “OK, listen to me, and now do this,” I think that’s it. I think that’s the place.
COPPINS: Let me ask you about my own faith tradition. So I’m a Latter-day Saint. Where do you place what’s popularly known as Mormonism in the context of your arguments?
DOUTHAT: Well, you have to think about God to some degree as someone who’s telling a story. That is certainly in the Christian tradition. God’s revelation is presented to most people in the form of stories, a narrative of the Jewish people in the Old Testament. The Gospels are narratives and not just theological arguments.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I mean, is just a remarkable story. That in the middle of the United States of America, in the 19th century, you get this claim of a biblical style, angelic revelation, complete with an extra testament of Jesus Christ, an alternative history of the Americas. And then out of that, you get this kind of miniature recapitulation of a biblical narrative where a bunch of people go out on this long journey in search of a promised land. And I’ve been to Utah, I’ve seen Salt Lake City. It is like stepping into this kind of little, biblical America window, where, you know, my gosh, they went and did it. They had an exodus and they found the promised land. And it’s very American in this distinctive way; very apart from American culture in its own distinctive way. I don’t know, I think God is up to something interesting with that story.
Adapted from the “Deseret Voices” podcast, which is released on Thursdays on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, the Deseret News YouTube channel and at Deseret.com/podcasts. Video clips of interviews are posted on the Deseret News social media channels including YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X.
This story appears in the March 2026 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.