‘Serious people should take religion seriously’: Ross Douthat on why religion is making a comeback in the West

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On this special episode of Hub Dialogues, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat spoke to The Hub’s editor-at-large Sean Speer while in Ottawa to deliver the inaugural 2025 Ian Shugart Lecture on Faith in the Public Square, hosted by the Cardus Institute. In the conversation, he discusses the key topics from his lecture, from the current moment of religious reconsideration in the West to why secularization has plateaued and the benefits of religion itself.

He also covers the relationship between declining religious faith and political polarization, and how the rise of artificial intelligence may interact with these trends. Finally, Douthat explores some of the interesting intellectual and political debates occurring within Anglo-American conservatism.

You can listen to this episode on Amazon, Apple, and Spotify.

Program Transcript

This is an automated transcript. Please check against delivery.

SEAN SPEER: Ross, thanks so much for joining me.

ROSS DOUTHAT: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be back with you this time with a more dramatic backdrop like that, delivering some kind of oration, I feel like.

SEAN SPEER: Well, it’s a good segue to what I want to talk about because for our listeners who can’t see you, you’re coming to me from Ottawa at the offices of Cardus, a think tank with whom the Hub works closely. You’re there tonight delivering the inaugural Ian Shugart Memorial Lecture Series that Cardus has just launched to honor and recognize former Senator Ian Shugart, someone who lived at the intersection between his personal faith and public life. This conversation, Ross, will come out tomorrow after you’ve given the lecture. So you’re not you’re not giving up the details before tonight’s address, but why don’t you talk a bit about why you said yes to the request from Cardus to be the inaugural speaker and what you’re going to cover in your lecture?

ROSS DOUTHAT: Well, I mean, I said yes because I have done things with Cardus in the past. I’ve always appreciated my voyages to our cousinly nation to the north. And it just seemed like a tremendous honor and opportunity. So it was an easy thing to say yes to. I will say that my plane to Ottawa was turned back last night because of fog, and I spent last night in Syracuse, New York, and arrived in Ottawa later. So, you know, various forces have conspired to make it difficult for me to give this, give these remarks, but that only makes it that much more existentially important that I do. So. But no, for the talk itself, I’m going to try and put a few different ideas and arguments together.

I’m saying this before the talk. Your listeners will hear it after. And if there are rumors filtering all over North America that I blew it, they can assess those for themselves. But I’m going to talk a little bit about sort of where religious culture is in the Western world right now. I think it’s a really interesting moment of sort of religious reconsiderations and interests that have not yet reached the level of being an actual religious revival. There’s some sort of differences between the landscape in the US the landscape in Canada, the landscape in Western Europe. But I also think there’s Sort of a shared, shared experience where we sort of lived through about 15 or 20 years of a kind of new wave of secularization that reached a limit sometime around the time really that the COVID pandemic hit.

And the last few years in the culture have been a period of renewed interest in an argument about religious ideas. A lot of anecdotal stories about conversion, sort of prominent intellectual conversions, stories about young people, especially young men, going back to church. What the data shows basically is that Western countries are no longer getting less religious at a rapid pace, but they aren’t yet getting more religious. So I want to talk about sort of why that’s happened, why the drivers of secularization have sort of hit a limit right now and why there is this interest, but why it also is still sort of uncertain where, where, where it will go and what forms it can take. And the fact that, you know, you have a lot of different competitors for the religious marketplace right now is also important.

It’s not just the case that if you have a religious revival, it has to be a Christian revival. I think there are lots of ways in which we’re in a somewhat 1970s style moment with interest in the supernatural and the paranormal and small G gods that isn’t necessarily identical at all to interest in Christianity or Judaism. So there’s a lot of interesting forces in play. So I’ll talk a little bit about that then I’ll talk a little bit about some of the arguments that I make in the book that I think is maybe the main reason I was issued this invitation.

I just wrote a book called why Everyone Should Be Religious that is itself sort of an attempt to lean into this moment and say, here’s why serious people should take religion seriously. Here’s why the arguments for being religious seriously, traditionally religious, not just sort of spiritual in some way are stronger than you think. Here’s why the Western intelligentsia is making a mistake if it sort of persists in assuming that there’s probably no God when there probably is a God. So I’ll talk a bit about that. But I didn’t want to turn the whole lecture into just sort of a brief for religious faith.

So then I’m going to end by talking about the future that we’re headed into and why I’m bullish on the resilience of religion in this future. I think we’re entering into a landscape of kind of sustained pressure on human beings and human cultures that is pushing a lot of normal aspects of human life toward obsolescence. I Think we’ve already experienced this to some degree with the Internet and the smartphone and the digital age, where it’s getting harder and harder for people to sort of do basic things in the real world that sustain human cultures, from building institutions, joining institutions, creating art and music and literature that people read, to the most basic thing of all of just like getting married and having kids.

And so you can see all across the developed world this sort of tendency towards. Yeah, towards a sense that normal human life is obsolete. Maybe sort of extreme and radical forms of human life are not, but normalcy just isn’t going to make it. And I think artificial intelligence is going to just increase that pressure in pretty powerful and important ways. And people are. It’s not going to be as simple as, like, all the jobs go away or the machine, God kills everybody, I hope. But it’s more going to be a sort of slow, sort of subtle, but powerful extension of what we’ve already experienced where just like figuring out how not to just kind of drift through life, how to make concrete commitments and choices that enable families and countries and civilizations to survive, is going to be a lot more difficult.

And I think in that environment, the religious perspective on the world is likely to be, you might say, selected for in a way that wasn’t necessarily the case in the late 20th century, 20th century. That, you know, there’s a. There are a lot of different ways, obviously, to find your purpose as a human being and to feel a sense, a desire for. To sort of preserve the best of the past and build something productive for the future. You don’t have to be religious to have those impulses, but what religion does, what it says to individual human beings about their significance, their cosmic significance, what it says to people about the importance of strong and powerful commitments to family or to religious life or to missionary work. All of these things, I think, are likely to be more valuable in terms of basic human survival in the next hundred years than they were in the prior hundred years. I think that really intense religious communities like the Amish and the Mennonites are going to have a very good 21st century. And the big question is whether people who don’t go all. Don’t go quite that far right. Normal, normal religious people can also find in their traditions resources to resist obsolescence and disappearance. You know, since we’re in Canada, I’ll probably make some references to the lure of euthanasia, the lure of that. This is not just about sort of old people confronting death. It’s about a whole culture that sort of is struggling to figure out what is its reason for being, what is its reason for continuing. I think those are the big questions of 21st century life and I think they tend towards religious answers, even if they don’t guarantee them.

SEAN SPEER: Yeah, that’s outstanding, Ross.

ROSS DOUTHAT: Well, it sounds good in a five minute summary, but we’ll see how it sounds good at 45 minutes.

SEAN SPEER: Well, but just a rich set of ideas and topics. And what a great way to honor Ian Shugart and to kick off this series which hopefully becomes an important institution in Canada for grappling with these fundamental questions about faith in the public square. The nascent religious curiosity that you talked about at the outset of your answer is something that you also cover in the book. And I want to ask you about how it’s intersecting with some of the interesting political developments that we’re seeing play out.

We’re speaking on the 20th of November. Your latest blog post in the New York Times talked about the rise of what is sometimes characterized as post liberalism. How are you thinking about the interrelationship or the interaction between these, on one hand cultural or spiritual trends and on the other hand the political ones?

ROSS DOUTHAT: Yeah, I think they’re deeply connected. I think that there was a consensus narrative of both culture and politics in the Western world after the Cold War down into the 2000 and tens that was a fundamentally optimistic narrative about human progress under broadly secular and liberal conditions. Not necessarily anti religious conditions. It wasn’t all Richard Dawkins, but just a sense that the institutions of Western liberalism were well equipped to usher all of humanity into a broadly egalitarian, harmonious and prosperous future. And I think all kinds of forces have delivered shocks to that consensus. This is not, you know, the things people write about all the time. Right. This is not a surprising take, but, but those shocks have in turn both sent people looking for alternative modes of political engagement that I think a term like post liberal is useful to describe precisely because it’s sort of broad and vague and uncertain.

Because you have to cover a lot of different things from, you know, sort of Catholic integralism and Christian nationalism to, you know, Zoran Mamdani is, you know, becoming a socialist, a socialist mayor of New York, to even the sort of weirder ideologies associated with Silicon Valley that don’t really fall into any kind of right left bucket. Right. So there’s a, there’s a lot of different stuff at work in the political sphere that, yeah, is sort of following sort of connected to the same impulses that are making people reconsider religion.

The sense that we don’t have the narrative that we had is not delivering in the religious sphere. It’s like, well, if you have this political narrative of sort of progress and it fails, then maybe politics itself isn’t the right place to look for your fundamental narrative. I think that impels some people toward religion in a kind of, in a kind of reasonable way. But yeah, it’s all, it’s all mixed up together. You have a sort of a lack of, a lack of any kind of consensus narrative that can ground optimism about human progress.

And so you have a search for alternative answers. And in the political as in the religious, it’s not like they’re sort of a set consensus alternative. Like there’s a lot of different kinds of post liberalism. There are post liberalisms of the kind of managerial center as well as post liberalisms of the populist right. You have religious post liberalisms and nationalist post liberalisms.

And in the same way in, in religion you can say that like certain, there’s, there’s attraction in certain areas, right? There seem to be a lot of young men converting to Eastern Orthodoxy or you know, there’s a lot of American elites at elite schools who are suddenly interested in Catholicism or non denominational Christianity is doing really well at a time when the old Protestant denominations are failing. But all of these things are sort of fragments. They’re, they’re not, it’s not like we can say, ah, the 21st century will belong to Eastern Orthodoxy. Right? And then finally, there’s also a way in which all of these things are themselves subject to the same pressures that cracked up the liberal consensus, including the pressure towards like just a kind of, you know, sort of fake, virtual performativity.

Which is, you know, I think a kind of obvious temptation for anyone trying to engage sincerely in this moment. There’s always a question of like, am I engaging sincerely or am I just creating more content for the algorithm? Right. Like in becoming a Catholic and posting about Catholicism on the Internet, am I building up the actual church as a concrete alternative to a, to the digital flood, or am I just creating a Catholic stream inside the digital flood? Right. And that’s, yeah, that’s the political question and the religious question in that sense are similar in that you’re like, is there something concrete beyond post Cold War liberalism that is like a home that people can live inside? Or are digital conditions just such that it’s all sort of performativity all the way down?

SEAN SPEER: You talked earlier, Ross, about people being drawn to religion because they reached the conclusion that 21st century liberal, democratic, capitalistic society and culture didn’t satisfy their questions about so called first things. And that may explain part of the reason we’re seeing these nascent religious trends. I wonder how much the post liberal movement, as broadly defined as you say it is, involves some people searching for those same first things in politics. Why don’t you talk a bit about that and the potential risks of, of investing too much of our metaphysical identities in politics?

ROSS DOUTHAT: Yeah, and I think that is clearly part of the story of the last 20 years in terms of understanding polarization and derangement in politics. It’s that you have a increasingly secularized culture in which people are still looking for narratives of profound meaning and purpose. And politics is available in a way that religion isn’t for a lot of people. I think initially more on the left, but I think in the Trump phenomenon, you can see that it works just as well on the right. Yes, too. And so, yeah, you can, you can tell a pretty straightforward story, I think, where the decline of religious structures of meaning leads to an over investment in political structures that in turn leads to polarization and political enmity, sort of invested with apocalyptic themes and Manichean frameworks as a fundamental part of our politics right now.

And then the question becomes, does renewed interest in actual religion get us out of that, or does it just get fed back into the same loops? Do people say, oh man, you know, politics isn’t enough. I need to go become unorthodox Christian or practice Orthodox Judaism or convert to Catholicism. But then they do that and then they just take, they take whatever energy they’ve drawn there and feed it back into. And now I will be even more forceful, you know, in my condemnation of the evils, of the evils of the other side.

I think that’s the big, a big challenge for religious people and religious institutions is how you make sure that people who are coming to you, who are missing something in their political lives aren’t just sort of stealing your, stealing your energy and feeding it back into political obsessions. One of my colleagues just wrote a story in the Times about young men converting to Eastern Orthodoxy. And that was framed in this, I think rightly, in this zone. It’s like, guys don’t know, you know, what does it mean to be a man under 21st century conditions who will give you a structure? Who will, who will say to you, here’s what God wants you to do?

Well, these sort of, you know, sort of serious liturgical churches seem to do that. But then you get these young men who then want to take that and immediately politicize it, right? And say, okay, great, and you know, I’ve become orthodox and this is now my blueprint for, you know, smiting the secular or the liberals. And so from the point of view of people running these communities for priests and other leaders, right, the question becomes in a way just how do you get people to sort of stay with the religious elements of their conversion and not, not. And again, not that. Not that it’s bad to have your politic, have your religion, inform your politics, you absolutely should, but not have religion, just be one more stream feeding back into rivers of political enmity.

SEAN SPEER: Penultimate question. You’ve written a lot over the past several years about the exposure of public institutions as being non neutral in the era of wokeism or identity politics or however one one talks about it. I think in fact, in a previous episode we discussed the politicization of public health and the extent to which it as a result lost its trust as a source of expert ideas and analysis. On the subject of the rise of post liberalism on the right, there is, it seems to me, a tension or debate about whether the aspiration should be to, or to restore, to aim to restore neutrality, to use state power to restore neutrality, or to push beyond neutrality and to reshape these institutions in a conservative or post liberal image. Talk a bit about that tension or debate and how you’re thinking about it.

ROSS DOUTHAT: Yeah, I mean this is a, a sort of hedged and unsatisfying answer maybe, But I think that the post liberal insight that first, there’s no such thing as perfect neutrality in institutional life, that all institutions have some kind of set of values that they are biased towards and that shape them. That insight is broadly correct, but it has to be balanced with the reality that functional institutions need to function for diverse pluralist and complex societies. And one reason that wokeness sort of hyper politicized progressivism seems so powerful and then seemed to sort of lose public support incredibly quickly is that it basically took the post liberal insight, not that it thought of itself this way, right.

But like took the post liberal insight was like, oh, we’ve got these institutions and actually we control them. And they have sort of been inculcators of liberal and progressive values for a long time. Why not go further, you know, why not do more with them? Why not make them, you know, sort of, why not make them more profound reshapers of society? It turns out that in fact, no, you can only use institutions to reshape society so much before people see what you’re doing and rebel. So conservatives coming in the aftermath of that, I don’t think should be thinking, ah, now we will just sort of restore perfectly neutral institutions.

It’s totally reasonable for them to say, actually these institutions were always somewhat biased against us and we can do things to, let’s say, in American higher education. It’s perfectly reasonable for the Trump administration to say, look, all these universities get tons and tons of public funding and they never hire a single conservative faculty member. What’s up with that? Right? Like, that’s not sort of an authoritarian thing to say. That’s a reasonable part of democratic politics to say, you know, publicly funded institutions can play, can and should be responsive to conservative political concerns. But in doing that, in trying to effectively tug those institutions to the right, you need to also be thinking about how do you create a stable setup that a diverse and pluralist society will actually accept and that the institutions themselves can accept.

That Ivy League universities can actually accept and go along with. And I think where the Trump administration is failing is in some ways, in the same ways that Wokeness failed of, of basically not thinking enough about how you take the initial insight that institutions do play some shaping role and can’t be perfectly neutral, but balance it with the knowledge that they have to be neutral enough to command general respect. Right? Like. And not, you know, the Trump administration, like, to take a different example.

They’ve done this thing in refugee policy, right, where they have basically tried to cut all refugee admissions, except they’re accepting, you know, accepting refugees who feel threatened or persecuted as whites in a chaotic South Africa. And it’s like, okay, you’re, you could say plausibly, maybe that under progressive dominance, immigration sort of refugee policy didn’t pay enough attention to certain groups. Maybe white people in South Africa maybe persecuted Christians. Right. And so on. Right. You needed some rebalancing of refugee policy. But if you just do it as a troll, if you’re like, ah, we’re not taking any, you know, we’re not taking any refugees except these, you know, these white guys from South Africa. You’re not building something that then is going to outlast your administration. You’re not building something that is actually like a foundation for refugee policy that could survive across multiple administrations. You’re just giving your enemies the middle finger. And so I think if, yeah, the post liberal insight can only work if it is married to a sense of sort of prudent leadership. Right. Which is sort of an incredibly boring thing to say in a moment of so much polarization. And enmity, but like prudent, a sense of prudent stewardship would really help both progressives and conservatives, I think right now and has been in short supply on both sides.

SEAN SPEER: Yeah, great, great answer. I said that was a penultimate question and I should end with an easy one about, you know, what are you going to do in Ottawa, your brief visit to our national capital. But I just can’t resist the temptation.

ROSS DOUTHAT: Going to skate on the canal. It must be, must be frozen right?

SEAN SPEER: Felt pretty. But I can’t resist to ask you a question along the lines that we’ve just been discussing. Washington Post columnist George Will famously wrote a book early in his career called Statecraft as Soulcraft. In the ensuing decades, he’s moved in a much more libertarian direction that I’d say skeptical or doubtful about the role of government, cultivating certain virtues. This, it seems to me, is another fault line within the world of Anglo American conservatism these days. How much should public policy be about, or government policy be about opening up spaces for people to pursue their own conception of the good life or human flourishing or whatever? And those, particularly among post liberals who think the state, that we ought to be using the instruments of state power to advance more particular conceptions on those issues, how are you thinking about that debate and how are you personally thinking about that question?

ROSS DOUTHAT: I mean, I’m still on the non libertarian side generally, more closer to Will, the original George Will rather than a libertarian George Will. I think that part of what happened that has produced this kind of chaotic maybe post liberal moment is that post Cold War liberalism, its libertarian side was expressed more and more and more as we sort of went deeper into the 21st century, reaching a kind of maybe a logical endpoint in issues like marijuana legalization and sports gambling legalization that didn’t even attract much conservative opposition. Opposition. It’s an interesting thing, right, that like conservatives were focused on other issues and those issues just sort of in the United States just sort of sailed, sailed through.

And I think those, those are issues that are sort of outside the culture wars a bit, but clearly cases where a pure libertarianism is potentially not potentially, it’s just sort of actually disastrous for the capacities, the capacities of ordinary people to resist the kind of maximization of temptation that is delivered by a kind of algorithmically perfected vice industry. Right. So just on that example, if it’s post liberal to want gambling reined in and US cities not to smell like marijuana, then I’m a post liberal. I don’t know if that’s the right Phrase. But I think that that would be a concrete example where, an important example where the problem is still in a way, too much sort of alleged individual freedom under conditions where the individual is subjected to these dehumanizing forces. And the state does clearly have some important role to play in protecting actual individual freedom and agency from those kind of forces. But again, the question is, how do you do it prudentially in a way that commands broad national support? And just this will be my last example.

It’s like, you know, conservatism under Trump won victories in reaction to a progressive attempt to radically recast the national narrative in the United States to sort of focus on the US Primarily as this kind of settler colonialist enterprise that was, you know, sort of wicked from the start. And this certainly applies, I think, to Canadian debates. Debates as well. Right. And, but, so that, but that, that’s an example of where, you know, someone is going to set education policy. You’re going to have a, a way of teaching history. And it may vary from state to state and province to province, but it is a political battle. How you teach history is a political battle. There’s no escaping the kind of soulcraft element of, like, what you teach kids about your country’s past shapes their relationship to patriotism, their sense of identity and belonging and so on.

But the question then is, okay, what is the narrative that governments and leaders can push and frame and support that is plausible as a unifying narrative? So if the Trump administration is just saying, we’re going to teach history exactly the way a conservative classroom would in 1957, it’s not actually going to be fully responsive to the moment. The question is, can you have a national narrative that incorporates the elements that progressives have pointed to without letting them sort of run roughshod over patriotism? And I don’t, I don’t think there’s a certain answer, but that, that’s, that’s an example. Like, there’s. I don’t think there’s any escape from the obligation to soulcraft, but how you actually do it is not as simple as winning elections and just imposing your views on the other side, which is how some people on the right have thought about the current moment, I think.

SEAN SPEER: Tremendous insight, Ross. I regret that I’m not going to be there for tonight’s lecture. I’m in Victoria, British Columbia. But if today’s conversation is any indication that the people there, hosted by Cardis, are in for a treat. Ross Douthit, New York Times columnist.

ROSS DOUTHAT: Here’s hoping. Great to talk to.

SEAN SPEER: Wonderful speaking with you.

ROSS DOUTHAT: Thank you.

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On this special episode of Hub Dialogues, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat spoke to The Hub’s editor-at-large Sean Speer while in Ottawa to deliver the inaugural 2025 Ian Shugart Lecture on Faith in the Public Square, hosted by the Cardus Institute. In the conversation, he discusses the key topics from his lecture, from the current moment of religious reconsideration in the West to why secularization has plateaued and the benefits of religion itself. He also covers the relationship between declining religious faith and political polarization, and how the rise of artificial intelligence may interact with these trends. Finally, Douthat explores some of the interesting intellectual and political debates occurring within Anglo-American conservatism. You can listen to this episode on Amazon, Apple, and Spotify. Program Transcript This is an automated transcript. Please check against delivery. SEAN SPEER: Ross, thanks so much for joining me. ROSS DOUTHAT: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be back with you this time with a more dramatic backdrop like that, delivering some kind of oration, I feel like. SEAN SPEER: Well, it’s a good segue to what I want to talk about because for our listeners who can’t see you, you’re coming to me from Ottawa at the offices of Cardus, a think tank with whom the Hub works closely. You’re there tonight delivering the inaugural Ian Shugart Memorial Lecture Series that Cardus has just launched to honor and recognize former Senator Ian Shugart, someone who lived at the intersection between his personal faith and public life. This conversation, Ross, will come out tomorrow after you’ve given the lecture. So you’re not you’re not giving up the details before tonight’s address, but why don’t you talk a bit about why you said yes to the request from Cardus to be the inaugural speaker and what you’re going to cover in your lecture? ROSS DOUTHAT: Well, I mean, I said yes because I have done things with Cardus in the past. I’ve always appreciated my voyages to our cousinly nation to the north. And it just seemed like a tremendous honor and opportunity. So it was an easy thing to say yes to. I will say that my plane to Ottawa was turned back last night because of fog, and I spent last night in Syracuse, New York, and arrived in Ottawa later. So, you know, various forces have conspired to make it difficult for me to give this, give these remarks, but that only makes it that much more existentially important that I do. So. But no, for the talk itself, I’m going to try and put a few different ideas and arguments together. I’m saying this before the talk. Your listeners will hear it after. And if there are rumors filtering all over North America that I blew it, they can assess those for themselves. But I’m going to talk a little bit about sort of where religious culture is in the Western world right now. I think it’s a really interesting moment of sort of religious reconsiderations and interests that have not yet reached the level of being an actual religious revival. There’s some sort of differences between the landscape in the US the landscape in Canada, the landscape in Western Europe. But I also think there’s Sort of a shared, shared experience where we sort of lived through about 15 or 20 years of a kind of new wave of secularization that reached a limit sometime around the time really that the COVID pandemic hit. And the last few years in the culture have been a period of renewed interest in an argument about religious ideas. A lot of anecdotal stories about conversion, sort of prominent intellectual conversions, stories about young people, especially young men, going back to church. What the data shows basically is that Western countries are no longer getting less religious at a rapid pace, but they aren’t yet getting more religious. So I want to talk about sort of why that’s happened, why the drivers of secularization have sort of hit a limit right now and why there is this interest, but why it also is still sort of uncertain where, where, where it will go and what forms it can take. And the fact that, you know, you have a lot of different competitors for the religious marketplace right now is also important. It’s not just the case that if you have a religious revival, it has to be a Christian revival. I think there are lots of ways in which we’re in a somewhat 1970s style moment with interest in the supernatural and the paranormal and small G gods that isn’t necessarily identical at all to interest in Christianity or Judaism. So there’s a lot of interesting forces in play. So I’ll talk a little bit about that then I’ll talk a little bit about some of the arguments that I make in the book that I think is maybe the main reason I was issued this invitation. I just wrote a book called why Everyone Should Be Religious that is itself sort of an attempt to lean into this moment and say, here’s why serious people should take religion seriously. Here’s why the arguments for being religious seriously, traditionally religious, not just sort of spiritual in some way are stronger than you think. Here’s why the Western intelligentsia is making a mistake if it sort of persists in assuming that there’s probably no God when there probably is a God. So I’ll talk a bit about that. But I didn’t want to turn the whole lecture into just sort of a brief for religious faith. So then I’m going to end by talking about the future that we’re headed into and why I’m bullish on the resilience of religion in this future. I think we’re entering into a landscape of kind of sustained pressure on human beings and human cultures that is pushing a lot of normal aspects of human life toward obsolescence. I Think we’ve already experienced this to some degree with the Internet and the smartphone and the digital age, where it’s getting harder and harder for people to sort of do basic things in the real world that sustain human cultures, from building institutions, joining institutions, creating art and music and literature that people read, to the most basic thing of all of just like getting married and having kids. And so you can see all across the developed world this sort of tendency towards. Yeah, towards a sense that normal human life is obsolete. Maybe sort of extreme and radical forms of human life are not, but normalcy just isn’t going to make it. And I think artificial intelligence is going to just increase that pressure in pretty powerful and important ways. And people are. It’s not going to be as simple as, like, all the jobs go away or the machine, God kills everybody, I hope. But it’s more going to be a sort of slow, sort of subtle, but powerful extension of what we’ve already experienced where just like figuring out how not to just kind of drift through life, how to make concrete commitments and choices that enable families and countries and civilizations to survive, is going to be a lot more difficult. And I think in that environment, the religious perspective on the world is likely to be, you might say, selected for in a way that wasn’t necessarily the case in the late 20th century, 20th century. That, you know, there’s a. There are a lot of different ways, obviously, to find your purpose as a human being and to feel a sense, a desire for. To sort of preserve the best of the past and build something productive for the future. You don’t have to be religious to have those impulses, but what religion does, what it says to individual human beings about their significance, their cosmic significance, what it says to people about the importance of strong and powerful commitments to family or to religious life or to missionary work. All of these things, I think, are likely to be more valuable in terms of basic human survival in the next hundred years than they were in the prior hundred years. I think that really intense religious communities like the Amish and the Mennonites are going to have a very good 21st century. And the big question is whether people who don’t go all. Don’t go quite that far right. Normal, normal religious people can also find in their traditions resources to resist obsolescence and disappearance. You know, since we’re in Canada, I’ll probably make some references to the lure of euthanasia, the lure of that. This is not just about sort of old people confronting death. It’s about a whole culture that sort of is struggling to figure out what is its reason for being, what is its reason for continuing. I think those are the big questions of 21st century life and I think they tend towards religious answers, even if they don’t guarantee them. SEAN SPEER: Yeah, that’s outstanding, Ross. ROSS DOUTHAT: Well, it sounds good in a five minute summary, but we’ll see how it sounds good at 45 minutes. SEAN SPEER: Well, but just a rich set of ideas and topics. And what a great way to honor Ian Shugart and to kick off this series which hopefully becomes an important institution in Canada for grappling with these fundamental questions about faith in the public square. The nascent religious curiosity that you talked about at the outset of your answer is something that you also cover in the book. And I want to ask you about how it’s intersecting with some of the interesting political developments that we’re seeing play out. We’re speaking on the 20th of November. Your latest blog post in the New York Times talked about the rise of what is sometimes characterized as post liberalism. How are you thinking about the interrelationship or the interaction between these, on one hand cultural or spiritual trends and on the other hand the political ones? ROSS DOUTHAT: Yeah, I think they’re deeply connected. I think that there was a consensus narrative of both culture and politics in the Western world after the Cold War down into the 2000 and tens that was a fundamentally optimistic narrative about human progress under broadly secular and liberal conditions. Not necessarily anti religious conditions. It wasn’t all Richard Dawkins, but just a sense that the institutions of Western liberalism were well equipped to usher all of humanity into a broadly egalitarian, harmonious and prosperous future. And I think all kinds of forces have delivered shocks to that consensus. This is not, you know, the things people write about all the time. Right. This is not a surprising take, but, but those shocks have in turn both sent people looking for alternative modes of political engagement that I think a term like post liberal is useful to describe precisely because it’s sort of broad and vague and uncertain. Because you have to cover a lot of different things from, you know, sort of Catholic integralism and Christian nationalism to, you know, Zoran Mamdani is, you know, becoming a socialist, a socialist mayor of New York, to even the sort of weirder ideologies associated with Silicon Valley that don’t really fall into any kind of right left bucket. Right. So there’s a, there’s a lot of different stuff at work in the political sphere that, yeah, is sort of following sort of connected to the same impulses that are making people reconsider religion. The sense that we don’t have the narrative that we had is not delivering in the religious sphere. It’s like, well, if you have this political narrative of sort of progress and it fails, then maybe politics itself isn’t the right place to look for your fundamental narrative. I think that impels some people toward religion in a kind of, in a kind of reasonable way. But yeah, it’s all, it’s all mixed up together. You have a sort of a lack of, a lack of any kind of consensus narrative that can ground optimism about human progress. And so you have a search for alternative answers. And in the political as in the religious, it’s not like they’re sort of a set consensus alternative. Like there’s a lot of different kinds of post liberalism. There are post liberalisms of the kind of managerial center as well as post liberalisms of the populist right. You have religious post liberalisms and nationalist post liberalisms. And in the same way in, in religion you can say that like certain, there’s, there’s attraction in certain areas, right? There seem to be a lot of young men converting to Eastern Orthodoxy or you know, there’s a lot of American elites at elite schools who are suddenly interested in Catholicism or non denominational Christianity is doing really well at a time when the old Protestant denominations are failing. But all of these things are sort of fragments. They’re, they’re not, it’s not like we can say, ah, the 21st century will belong to Eastern Orthodoxy. Right? And then finally, there’s also a way in which all of these things are themselves subject to the same pressures that cracked up the liberal consensus, including the pressure towards like just a kind of, you know, sort of fake, virtual performativity. Which is, you know, I think a kind of obvious temptation for anyone trying to engage sincerely in this moment. There’s always a question of like, am I engaging sincerely or am I just creating more content for the algorithm? Right. Like in becoming a Catholic and posting about Catholicism on the Internet, am I building up the actual church as a concrete alternative to a, to the digital flood, or am I just creating a Catholic stream inside the digital flood? Right. And that’s, yeah, that’s the political question and the religious question in that sense are similar in that you’re like, is there something concrete beyond post Cold War liberalism that is like a home that people can live inside? Or are digital conditions just such that it’s all sort of performativity all the way down? SEAN SPEER: You talked earlier, Ross, about people being drawn to religion because they reached the conclusion that 21st century liberal, democratic, capitalistic society and culture didn’t satisfy their questions about so called first things. And that may explain part of the reason we’re seeing these nascent religious trends. I wonder how much the post liberal movement, as broadly defined as you say it is, involves some people searching for those same first things in politics. Why don’t you talk a bit about that and the potential risks of, of investing too much of our metaphysical identities in politics? ROSS DOUTHAT: Yeah, and I think that is clearly part of the story of the last 20 years in terms of understanding polarization and derangement in politics. It’s that you have a increasingly secularized culture in which people are still looking for narratives of profound meaning and purpose. And politics is available in a way that religion isn’t for a lot of people. I think initially more on the left, but I think in the Trump phenomenon, you can see that it works just as well on the right. Yes, too. And so, yeah, you can, you can tell a pretty straightforward story, I think, where the decline of religious structures of meaning leads to an over investment in political structures that in turn leads to polarization and political enmity, sort of invested with apocalyptic themes and Manichean frameworks as a fundamental part of our politics right now. And then the question becomes, does renewed interest in actual religion get us out of that, or does it just get fed back into the same loops? Do people say, oh man, you know, politics isn’t enough. I need to go become unorthodox Christian or practice Orthodox Judaism or convert to Catholicism. But then they do that and then they just take, they take whatever energy they’ve drawn there and feed it back into. And now I will be even more forceful, you know, in my condemnation of the evils, of the evils of the other side. I think that’s the big, a big challenge for religious people and religious institutions is how you make sure that people who are coming to you, who are missing something in their political lives aren’t just sort of stealing your, stealing your energy and feeding it back into political obsessions. One of my colleagues just wrote a story in the Times about young men converting to Eastern Orthodoxy. And that was framed in this, I think rightly, in this zone. It’s like, guys don’t know, you know, what does it mean to be a man under 21st century conditions who will give you a structure? Who will, who will say to you, here’s what God wants you to do? Well, these sort of, you know, sort of serious liturgical churches seem to do that. But then you get these young men who then want to take that and immediately politicize it, right? And say, okay, great, and you know, I’ve become orthodox and this is now my blueprint for, you know, smiting the secular or the liberals. And so from the point of view of people running these communities for priests and other leaders, right, the question becomes in a way just how do you get people to sort of stay with the religious elements of their conversion and not, not. And again, not that. Not that it’s bad to have your politic, have your religion, inform your politics, you absolutely should, but not have religion, just be one more stream feeding back into rivers of political enmity. SEAN SPEER: Penultimate question. You’ve written a lot over the past several years about the exposure of public institutions as being non neutral in the era of wokeism or identity politics or however one one talks about it. I think in fact, in a previous episode we discussed the politicization of public health and the extent to which it as a result lost its trust as a source of expert ideas and analysis. On the subject of the rise of post liberalism on the right, there is, it seems to me, a tension or debate about whether the aspiration should be to, or to restore, to aim to restore neutrality, to use state power to restore neutrality, or to push beyond neutrality and to reshape these institutions in a conservative or post liberal image. Talk a bit about that tension or debate and how you’re thinking about it. ROSS DOUTHAT: Yeah, I mean this is a, a sort of hedged and unsatisfying answer maybe, But I think that the post liberal insight that first, there’s no such thing as perfect neutrality in institutional life, that all institutions have some kind of set of values that they are biased towards and that shape them. That insight is broadly correct, but it has to be balanced with the reality that functional institutions need to function for diverse pluralist and complex societies. And one reason that wokeness sort of hyper politicized progressivism seems so powerful and then seemed to sort of lose public support incredibly quickly is that it basically took the post liberal insight, not that it thought of itself this way, right. But like took the post liberal insight was like, oh, we’ve got these institutions and actually we control them. And they have sort of been inculcators of liberal and progressive values for a long time. Why not go further, you know, why not do more with them? Why not make them, you know, sort of, why not make them more profound reshapers of society? It turns out that in fact, no, you can only use institutions to reshape society so much before people see what you’re doing and rebel. So conservatives coming in the aftermath of that, I don’t think should be thinking, ah, now we will just sort of restore perfectly neutral institutions. It’s totally reasonable for them to say, actually these institutions were always somewhat biased against us and we can do things to, let’s say, in American higher education. It’s perfectly reasonable for the Trump administration to say, look, all these universities get tons and tons of public funding and they never hire a single conservative faculty member. What’s up with that? Right? Like, that’s not sort of an authoritarian thing to say. That’s a reasonable part of democratic politics to say, you know, publicly funded institutions can play, can and should be responsive to conservative political concerns. But in doing that, in trying to effectively tug those institutions to the right, you need to also be thinking about how do you create a stable setup that a diverse and pluralist society will actually accept and that the institutions themselves can accept. That Ivy League universities can actually accept and go along with. And I think where the Trump administration is failing is in some ways, in the same ways that Wokeness failed of, of basically not thinking enough about how you take the initial insight that institutions do play some shaping role and can’t be perfectly neutral, but balance it with the knowledge that they have to be neutral enough to command general respect. Right? Like. And not, you know, the Trump administration, like, to take a different example. They’ve done this thing in refugee policy, right, where they have basically tried to cut all refugee admissions, except they’re accepting, you know, accepting refugees who feel threatened or persecuted as whites in a chaotic South Africa. And it’s like, okay, you’re, you could say plausibly, maybe that under progressive dominance, immigration sort of refugee policy didn’t pay enough attention to certain groups. Maybe white people in South Africa maybe persecuted Christians. Right. And so on. Right. You needed some rebalancing of refugee policy. But if you just do it as a troll, if you’re like, ah, we’re not taking any, you know, we’re not taking any refugees except these, you know, these white guys from South Africa. You’re not building something that then is going to outlast your administration. You’re not building something that is actually like a foundation for refugee policy that could survive across multiple administrations. You’re just giving your enemies the middle finger. And so I think if, yeah, the post liberal insight can only work if it is married to a sense of sort of prudent leadership. Right. Which is sort of an incredibly boring thing to say in a moment of so much polarization. And enmity, but like prudent, a sense of prudent stewardship would really help both progressives and conservatives, I think right now and has been in short supply on both sides. SEAN SPEER: Yeah, great, great answer. I said that was a penultimate question and I should end with an easy one about, you know, what are you going to do in Ottawa, your brief visit to our national capital. But I just can’t resist the temptation. ROSS DOUTHAT: Going to skate on the canal. It must be, must be frozen right? SEAN SPEER: Felt pretty. But I can’t resist to ask you a question along the lines that we’ve just been discussing. Washington Post columnist George Will famously wrote a book early in his career called Statecraft as Soulcraft. In the ensuing decades, he’s moved in a much more libertarian direction that I’d say skeptical or doubtful about the role of government, cultivating certain virtues. This, it seems to me, is another fault line within the world of Anglo American conservatism these days. How much should public policy be about, or government policy be about opening up spaces for people to pursue their own conception of the good life or human flourishing or whatever? And those, particularly among post liberals who think the state, that we ought to be using the instruments of state power to advance more particular conceptions on those issues, how are you thinking about that debate and how are you personally thinking about that question? ROSS DOUTHAT: I mean, I’m still on the non libertarian side generally, more closer to Will, the original George Will rather than a libertarian George Will. I think that part of what happened that has produced this kind of chaotic maybe post liberal moment is that post Cold War liberalism, its libertarian side was expressed more and more and more as we sort of went deeper into the 21st century, reaching a kind of maybe a logical endpoint in issues like marijuana legalization and sports gambling legalization that didn’t even attract much conservative opposition. Opposition. It’s an interesting thing, right, that like conservatives were focused on other issues and those issues just sort of in the United States just sort of sailed, sailed through. And I think those, those are issues that are sort of outside the culture wars a bit, but clearly cases where a pure libertarianism is potentially not potentially, it’s just sort of actually disastrous for the capacities, the capacities of ordinary people to resist the kind of maximization of temptation that is delivered by a kind of algorithmically perfected vice industry. Right. So just on that example, if it’s post liberal to want gambling reined in and US cities not to smell like marijuana, then I’m a post liberal. I don’t know if that’s the right Phrase. But I think that that would be a concrete example where, an important example where the problem is still in a way, too much sort of alleged individual freedom under conditions where the individual is subjected to these dehumanizing forces. And the state does clearly have some important role to play in protecting actual individual freedom and agency from those kind of forces. But again, the question is, how do you do it prudentially in a way that commands broad national support? And just this will be my last example. It’s like, you know, conservatism under Trump won victories in reaction to a progressive attempt to radically recast the national narrative in the United States to sort of focus on the US Primarily as this kind of settler colonialist enterprise that was, you know, sort of wicked from the start. And this certainly applies, I think, to Canadian debates. Debates as well. Right. And, but, so that, but that, that’s an example of where, you know, someone is going to set education policy. You’re going to have a, a way of teaching history. And it may vary from state to state and province to province, but it is a political battle. How you teach history is a political battle. There’s no escaping the kind of soulcraft element of, like, what you teach kids about your country’s past shapes their relationship to patriotism, their sense of identity and belonging and so on. But the question then is, okay, what is the narrative that governments and leaders can push and frame and support that is plausible as a unifying narrative? So if the Trump administration is just saying, we’re going to teach history exactly the way a conservative classroom would in 1957, it’s not actually going to be fully responsive to the moment. The question is, can you have a national narrative that incorporates the elements that progressives have pointed to without letting them sort of run roughshod over patriotism? And I don’t, I don’t think there’s a certain answer, but that, that’s, that’s an example. Like, there’s. I don’t think there’s any escape from the obligation to soulcraft, but how you actually do it is not as simple as winning elections and just imposing your views on the other side, which is how some people on the right have thought about the current moment, I think. SEAN SPEER: Tremendous insight, Ross. I regret that I’m not going to be there for tonight’s lecture. I’m in Victoria, British Columbia. But if today’s conversation is any indication that the people there, hosted by Cardis, are in for a treat. Ross Douthit, New York Times columnist. ROSS DOUTHAT: Here’s hoping. Great to talk to. SEAN SPEER: Wonderful speaking with you. ROSS DOUTHAT: Thank you.

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