The atheistic interregnum is over, but much of its work is done.

Of the four New Atheists who made a splash in the noughts, with books with titles like God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, The God Delusion, and The End of Faith, two (Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens) are no longer with us and one, Richard Dawkins, has declared himself to be a “cultural Christian.” (Sam Harris, the fourth, is still going strong.) In a sense, though, they got what they wanted. Increasingly, America’s problems seem to have less to do with religion than with the lack of it—especially the cratering of denominational Christianity among white Americans.

Mainline denominations’ cultural and spiritual influence collapsed in the latter half of the twentieth century. For a while, white evangelicalism took up the slack, but in this century, it, too, has fallen off a cliff. According to the Pew Research Center and the Public Religion Research Institute, the share of white Americans who identify as evangelical Protestants declined from 23 percent in 2006 to only about 13 percent in 2023—a level right on par with mainline Protestants. Meanwhile, the percentage who affiliate with no religion—the so-called Nones—grew from 16 percent to 27 percent.

The result is a “great dechurching” that is without precedent in American life. According to Gallup, the share of Americans who were members of a church was stable at around 70 percent from World War II until the turn of this century; since then, it has plummeted to below half. The number of adults who never attend religious services almost doubled in only 14 years, from 45 million in 2008 to 85 million in 2022, according to the religious demographer Ryan Burge.

When I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, the first question people often asked a new acquaintance was not “Where do you work?” or “What college did you go to?” It was: “Where do you go to church?” No one would think to ask that today. Watching what can only be described as a transformation in the American way of life and a journey into uncharted waters of faithlessness, I am among a small but growing band of atheists who are concerned—even alarmed.

Twenty years ago, I took a very different view. I thought the decline of religiosity would reduce strife in civic and political life. After all, isn’t religion one of history’s main engines of dogmatism, intolerance, and ignorance? In The Atlantic I even celebrated what I called apatheism, “a disinclination to care all that much about one’s own religion, and an even stronger disinclination to care about other people’s.”

That article was, officially, The Dumbest Thing I Ever Wrote. (Including my confident prediction in 2015 that Donald Trump would never be president.) The space left vacant by organized religion has been filled not by a resurgence of Enlightenment rationalism or a new dawn of social harmony but by an upsurge of nihilism, anger, and alienation. The place yielded by institutional Christianity has been filled by a welter of paganized, politicized, and polarizing pseudo-religions like QAnon, MAGA, and Wokeness. None of the substitutes is remotely capable of the job which the Founders counted on religion to do, because none inculcates the virtues required by a liberal republic. None even tries. So here I am, in 2025, the atheistic homosexual Jew, arguing that America’s liberal democracy won’t thrive and might not even survive if Christianity can’t repair and renew itself—and that secular folks like me have a stake in Christianity’s renewal.

When I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, the first question people often asked a new acquaintance was not “Where do you work?” or “What college did you go to?” It was: “Where do you go to church?” No one would think to ask that today.

The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat—a practicing Catholic and the author or coauthor of six previous books—recognizes the social and personal value of faith. But he has bigger fish to fry. In Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, he insists that the case for faith is not, and must not be, merely instrumental. Yes, church life can provide community and connection; it can offer personal uplift and help through hard times. (Also, as any LGBT American of my generation can attest, it can propagate bigotry, ignorance, and hate.) But Douthat sidesteps that conversation. The only good reason to believe in a religion, he stipulates, is because it is true.

And, he goes on to say, the case for God is conclusive; irresistible, in fact. “Religious belief is not just an option but an obligation,” he writes. As an empirical matter, “the raw data of existence implies religious obligations and matches up to religious assumptions.” The New Atheists faded because they were just plain wrong. “The scientific revolution has repeatedly revealed deeper and wider evidence of cosmic order than what was available to either the senses or the reasoning faculties in the premodern world.” As the structure of our world is revealed, Douthat says, God comes into focus. “God is not trying to trick us,” he writes. “If the universe offers us clues to its purpose we should follow them with confidence.”

What kind of clues? Douthat’s list includes:

·  Spiritual encounters. Miracles and spiritual phenomena are so widely and credibly attested to that dismissing or discounting them is anti-empirical.

·  God of the gaps. There is much that science has not explained and probably never will; to exclude God as a possible cause is prejudicial and irrational.

·  Anthropic principle. The universe is so minutely and improbably tuned to allow for human existence that it must have been created with people in mind.

·  Intelligent design. The orderly, even beautiful, symmetries and regularities revealed by science cannot be random and attest to divine creation.

·  Occam’s Razor. Divine influence can explain the improbabilities we witness every day in a simpler and more plausible way than can convoluted, purpose-built hypotheses such as the claim that we live in one of an infinite number of universes.

·  Lock and key. The human mind cannot be explained as merely the firing of neurons and the product of evolution; like a key which fits only one lock, it is exactly suited to perceive and worship God.

·  Burden-shifting. It’s up to atheists to prove that God does not exist, lest they be as dogmatic as those whom they accuse of dogmatism.

·  Pascal’s Wager. The downside of incorrectly not believing (hell, or at least alienation from God) is much worse than the downside of incorrectly believing (being wrong but happy), so why risk it?

Nothing on Douthat’s list is remotely new to us in Atheist World; his arguments date back generations, if not centuries. Take my word for it, atheists have retorts. We see invoking miracles and divine intervention not as explaining anything but as nullifying the very possibility of rational explanation; we see the universe’s mysteries as warranting research, not supernaturalism. We are awestruck by the cosmos, and for that very reason we don’t believe it was created 14 billion years ago for the benefit of recently arrived primates on one tiny planet. We want to know why a beneficent, all-powerful God would create and countenance blatant evil and innocent suffering, a question to which Douthat replies with a five-page shrug.

So here I am, the atheistic homosexual Jew, arguing that America’s liberal democracy won’t thrive and might not even survive if Christianity can’t repair and renew itself.

More interesting than wading into that debate, though, is to observe that there is something dusty and dated—can I say jesuitical?—about arguing back and forth over the evidence for God, as atheists and apologists used to do in the heyday of Madalyn Murray O’Hair. One wonders: by seeking to rationalize faith, might Douthat be diminishing it?

I have logical, epistemological, moral, and aesthetic reasons to object to the concept of God or gods or demons or angels or other immaterial beings whose magical powers supposedly explain our puzzling, confounding world. Really, though, the reason I don’t believe is that I can’t. As far back as I can remember, my psychology was wired to reject anything disorderly, unpredictable, or non-material. It can’t have been a coincidence that in grade school my fictional heroes were Mr. Spock and Sherlock Holmes.

For a while, I was smug about not needing the crutch (as I saw it) of childish myths and magical thinking. Later, though, exposure to sophisticated religious thought and truly spiritual people convinced me that I am the one who is missing out. While I was right to believe that religion can be a fount of bigotry, ignorance, and cruelty, I came to see that for many it is an influence for the betterment of themselves and others. I came to believe that, with all due respect to the late Mr. Hitchens, people make religion stupid, not the other way around.

And I came to understand that people who are capable of living fully rational lives while also being attuned to spirituality—people like, I assume, Ross Douthat—have access to a dimension of life which is imperceptible me. Like a person who is colorblind, I do not receive the spiritual wavelengths which are visible to Douthat and others.

I am happy being who I am. (Really, Christians, I am!) I don’t mind knowing that I am an evanescent lump of protoplasm living in a purely material universe. But I also realize I am weird. I wind up where William James lands in his seminal 1896 essay “The Will to Believe”: if you can manage the trick of being both spiritual and rational, and of being religious without being blinkered or bigoted, then more power to you! You are graced with a gift which I was not given.

The readers Douthat seeks to reach are not, I suspect, lifelong unbelievers (like me) or undoubting, dogmatic believers. He addresses readers who want to believe in something transcendent and identifiably religious, but who wonder if those hoary old civilizational faiths really have a place in our modern, postmodern, and now post-postmodern world. If he can give such people reassurance to discover and embrace a religious tradition that can enhance their lives and elevate their souls, I wish him every success. If, in doing so, he can nudge them away from toxic substitutes like QAnon, MAGA, and Wokeness, God bless him.

Still, I wonder if Douthat is barking up quite the right tree. While some doubters may seek empirical reasons for faith, many others seek moral and spiritual reasons—and right now, many aren’t finding them. They see, rather, watered-down consumerism in mainline Protestant denominations, scandalous misbehavior among Catholic and evangelical clergy, and idolatrous partisanship among white evangelicals. They see people who claim to be Christians exhibit public gracelessness, rage, and hunger for power and “retribution.”

That criticism is not my own; I borrow it from a growing chorus of alarmed Christians. One of them, Russell Moore, has written: “The church is bleeding out the next generation, not because ‘the culture’ is so opposed to the church’s fidelity to the truth, but just the reverse.” Moore, the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today and author of Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America, continues: “The culture often does not reject us because they don’t believe the church’s doctrinal and moral teachings, but because they have evidence that the church doesn’t believe its own doctrinal and moral teachings. They suspect that Jesus is just a means to an end—to some political agenda, to a market for selling merchandise, or for the predatory appetites of some maniacal narcissist.”

So, yes, American Christianity is in crisis, and America is becoming ungovernable partly as a result. Ross Douthat’s concise but ambitious (and gracefully written) book arrives at a moment when it can do some real good. It deserves a warm welcome. Even so, the answers to Christianity’s crisis will not be found in arguments against scientific materialism and the now-old New Atheists. If Christians want to know why America is losing its religion, they might start by looking in the mirror.