Two new books make very different cases for the religious life

What do we lose when we lose organized religion, which has been in steep decline across the globe since 2007? Two new books offer very different answers — and very different approaches — to this central question.

In “Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever: A New Generation’s Search for Religion,” the English journalist Lamorna Ash sets out to investigate “the varied landscape of contemporary Christianity in Britain.” For three years, Ash traveled across the United Kingdom in search of young adherents and fresh converts, attending an evangelical Bible studies course in London, a silent retreat hosted by Jesuits in rural Wales and more. Along the way, she encountered all sorts of Christians: a man suffering from severe mental illness who turned to evangelicalism to make sense of the voices in his head, an atheist Quaker who marched in a climate protest alongside his fellow congregants, a family who left their Pentecostal denomination because of its sharp turn to conservatism. In writing this book, 30-year-old Ash hoped to gain a deeper understanding of the more devout members of her generation — and thereby of herself and her initially mild but increasingly fervent Anglicanism.

New York Times opinion columnist and noted Catholic Ross Douthat had more practical missionary ambitions when he got to work on “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.” The aim of his book is to bring readers into the fold — ideally, one sometimes senses, his Catholic fold. Still, he is at pains to assure readers of his lowercase-c catholicism, and he emphasizes repeatedly that any tradition is better than none, just as long as his readers come to embrace the joys of one religion or another.

This makes Douthat’s project somewhat anachronistic, better suited to the heyday of New Atheism in the early aughts than the contemporary landscape. Douthat is one of the more capable representatives of Christian conservatism writing for a public audience today, and his arguments in “Believe” are often nimble enough — but why is he making them now? The chorus of very-online atheists that clambered so loudly and persistently in the early 2000s has since fallen silent, and I very much doubt that many of Douthat’s current readers regard the findings of modern science as inconsistent with anything other than the most unimaginative and literalist variants of religion. Why, then, does he devote nearly a third of “Believe” to demonstrating that faith does not in fact require its champions to reject physics or evolutionary theory? Douthat’s reasoning is often plausible — neuroscience no doubt remains “powerless” to explain the mysterious phenomenon of conscious experience, and the Big Bang no doubt fails to rule out the possibility of a divine creator — but they are so unsurprising as to be downright obvious.

That isn’t to say that all of the claims in “Believe” are appealing or easy to swallow. I am not sure that scientists who regard the world as knowable must therefore accept that it is “made with human beings in mind,” nor am I compelled by the notion, advanced by Douthat in his attempt to talk readers into joining a major world religion, that we should assume there is something wise about long-standing traditions just because they are long-standing. (Plenty of patently foolish traditions are long-standing, too.)

Ross Douthat, author of “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.”

But the real problem with “Believe” is not its argumentation, most of which provokes and entertains even when it does not persuade. The real problem is Douthat’s presumption that religion is the sort of thing one can be rationally compelled to accept. Plenty of theological giants over the centuries have begged to differ. Augustine of Hippo famously told his followers, “Crede ut intellegas,” or “Believe that you may understand.” If faith is a prerequisite for intellectual enlightenment, he suggested, then we cannot grasp an argument in favor of belief unless we believe already. And as the great medieval Islamic philosopher and mystic Al-Ghazali pointed out in his 12th-century treatise “Deliverance From Error,” “If your faith were based on a carefully ordered argument,” it could be “broken by an equally well-ordered argument.” The only enduring basis for faith, then, is mystical experience. “A way exists to grasp these things which the intellect does not normally grasp,” Al-Ghazali concluded.

So Douthat’s arguments in “Believe,” like all arguments for the truths of religion, fail to provide lasting, rebuttal-proof evidence of God. Perhaps even more crucially, however, Douthat fails to offer a workable antidote to the more practical issue at hand: declining religiosity. He cannot confront and resolve this concern because he all but ignores the primary reason that organized religion is leaching adherents. The church is repelling younger congregants not because millennials and zoomers fear that the Gospel contradicts Darwinism or because materialism is such an unquestionable orthodoxy (Douthat’s own book convincingly demonstrates that it isn’t), but because young people lean left, especially on gender issues, and organized religion has by and large not gone with them. In many cases, it has pivoted in the opposite direction and plowed uncritically on.

Arguing for religious belief, Ross Douthat writes, “In the end the meaningful life is usually the committed life.”

At a conference for former churchgoers who have “deconstructed,” or left their denominations, Ash found that “many of those present had left their churches in reaction to conservative teachings on subjects like sexuality and sex, race and gender.” She soon came to the realization that “the less our institutions acknowledge and permit each person’s unique and infinite dignity, the more followers they will lose as this century goes on.”

Douthat neither acknowledges nor permits any such thing. In a book of around 200 pages, he addresses only a cursory five of them to those who harbor concerns about the homophobia, transphobia and sexism that are endemic to many religious traditions. Though he concedes that “rules about sexual morality aren’t just incidental to the great traditions,” he lacks the courage to endorse or reject any of the particular doctrines that are likely to dismay prospective converts. Instead, he proffers evasive and mealymouthed bromides like “the broad idea that what you do with your genitals doesn’t matter to the condition of your soul … is not nearly as intuitive as many modern people seem to think.” He weakly instructs those who “doubt that the old religious rules make sense” to “extend a little bit of the same skepticism to the world that’s being made by societies that have tried to simply throw them off.”

So does he think that trans people can be trusted to identify their own genders or not? That women should be consigned to subordinate roles or not? Prevarications are not likely to provide much comfort to those who feel God is calling them to lead a more, not less, expansive life.

Ash’s gentle, lovely book has a different epistemology altogether. Where Douthat strives to induce certainty — to convince readers so totally that they emerge inured to doubt — Ash’s faith is at its core a matter of curiosity. “In a finite lifespan, replete with urgent moral choices and destined to end with a voyage to the undiscovered country, permanent open-mindedness is not necessarily a virtue,” Douthat writes. “In the end the meaningful life is usually the committed life.” But what if open-mindedness is itself a commitment? At Quaker meetings in London, Ash learns that the group sits in silence unless God commands a worshiper to speak. The point of the practice is to cultivate unflinching openness to divine directives.

“The less our institutions acknowledge and permit each person’s unique and infinite dignity,” Lamorna Ash writes, “the more followers they will lose as this century goes on.”

Ash started working on “Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever” when she was only 26, but the tender grace of her tone makes her seem much older, perhaps because she writes from the vantage point of newly discovered faith. In addition to a journalistic portrait of many young believers, “Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever” is a memoir of sorts, charting Ash’s passage from doubt to a refreshingly fluid and undogmatic brand of Christianity.

At the start, she is gravely concerned by the conservatism of many of the churchgoers she meets. She has every reason to be: When she began reporting for the book, she was “dating women for the first time.” Many of the churches she visited were openly hostile to queer congregants. As she traveled the country, she encountered many casualties of their bigotry: a trans man forced out of his denomination, a gay man who succumbed to severe anorexia when his church would not accept him, and a priest who converted to Catholicism when — and probably because — the Church of England allowed women to be ordained.

Yet even when she is exploring the cruelest and crudest forms of Christianity, Ash often finds something of value in them. Of two conservative evangelicals she met at a Christian training school in the countryside, she observes: “They were weird. They made me laugh. They loved each other in an admirable, simple way.” It is harder to reconcile their silly sweetness with the brutality of their beliefs than it is to reconcile Darwinism with divinity, by a mile.

In the end, what Ash cannot abide about more regressive forms of Christianity is their stridence, which is antithetical to her conviction that religion should alter and unsettle us. At an evangelical class, she was told that the Bible contained “all the lessons we needed for how to live now” — that it was no more than a fount of settled doctrine, not a living text. The students were “required to put its verses in a chokehold.” But this is not how Ash prefers to read. “When you come open to a work of art, actually, earnestly open,” she writes, “it should set off a chemical reaction.” Like a conversion, it should be like “a volta in a person’s life.”

Lamorna Ash, author of “Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever: A New Generation’s Search for Religion.”

Over the course of “Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever,” Ash becomes an example of the kind of radical openness that reading (and religion) should demand: By the end, she is a regular at local church services. The resounding last passage of the book proclaims: “My belief is not founded on certainty, and I don’t want to persuade anyone else of it. My desire for a more certain faith doesn’t mean I’ll ever get there. But I’ll limn the waters anyway. I’ll try to sing in tune with my cracked voice. I’ll pray for my mother. I’ll pray for the world.” This is a kind of faith Douthat seems incapable of imagining.

Perhaps because convincing and converting are not Ash’s intentions, she did a better job of showing me why and how I might become religious than Douthat did. I have been in search of “a fluid, unbounded sort of believing” that I couldn’t picture in any detail until Ash sketched it for me. “I don’t think I’d know how to become a Christian on my own,” she muses. This, then, is what we lose when we lose organized religion: groups of people who show us ways we might worship — ways we would not have been able to imagine by ourselves. It was a service that Ash, in all her glorious uncertainty, performed on the page for me.

Becca Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic for The Washington Post and the author of “All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess.”