Ross Douthat: Everyone Should Believe in God

Religion in a secular age is a private affair. That’s why the courts, media, and other cultural gatekeepers respond with incredulity when believers claim constitutional protection for their right to practice religion in the public square.

When we conflate faith with passionate commitment, we worry (maybe in unspoken ways) that young people will actually believe us and become fundamentalists, turning on the a-religious with such force that, like Phinehas, they turn to violence or become zealots who are impossible to relate to or defend.

Reason is a crucial and irreplaceable way to help us weigh competing beliefs. But it is impossible to claim that we should believe only what is proven and that therefore, since religion can’t be proven, we shouldn’t embrace it. All of us have things we believe—including things we would sacrifice and even die for—that cannot be proven. We believe th

Young people need churches that are more serious about securing souls than filling up seats. They need pastors who help them to follow Jesus as we Christians live as exiles in this world instead of putting our hope in politicians to make our culture the way it once was.

The other problem we have addressed is that many secular people base their nonbelief on a rigid and simplistic view of reason. They will not acknowledge that there are different, contested approaches to rationality and that all of them include the exercise of faith.

But he and Keller both see a limit to how much longer secularists can demonize the religion of our Western inheritance.