On a balmy day in New Haven, Connecticut, a few hundred metres from Yale University, over chicken salad and raspberry iced tea, the most famous conservative columnist in the world was urging me to believe in ghosts.
“Do you know people who think they’ve really seen ghosts?” Ross Douthat, who writes for the New York Times, asked. I know someone who thinks they have seen a ghost, yes. “Of course, because ghosts are real.”
Ever since David Hume wrote those who believed in ghosts were indulging their imagination, the spiritual world has been in retreat. Hell morphed from a place where Satan planned sorties to tempt us away from faith, into a place where God was simply absent. Stories of crying statues of the Virgin Mary or cyclones sent by God to punish us for homosexuality became taboo. Tom Wolfe’s 1996 piece on the wonders of neuroscience was headlined “Sorry, but your soul just died”.
Yet Douthat believes encounters with the supernatural are a reason to believe in God. His new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, is an appeal to sceptics to look to the heavens. It ticks off what you’d expect from a Christian-accented defence of theism: various theodicies, the historical case for Jesus of Nazareth. Less usually, ghosts, spirits, UFOs and visions of angels during near-death experiences haunt the pages. “[Spirits] may appear as trickster gods in one context, as elves or fairies in another,” Douthat writes, “and in our times, perhaps, as extraterrestrials captaining mysterious UFOs.”
Douthat is the leading Catholic voice in the American media. A Trump critic who railed against the liberal reforms of Pope Francis, he is in many ways the liberal’s conservative – an independent thinker, who takes issues on their own terms, without deference to the party line.
Douthat rebuffed my hour-long defence of materialism: that souls, demons and djinn do not exist and, more uncertainly, that matter explains the subjective experience we label “consciousness”. He pointed to the vast number of reported encounters with the up-high as proof that they must be true, and that something exists beyond what we can touch.
What of artificial intelligence? Wouldn’t a man-made machine that resembled a human mind suggest consciousness was material? “I don’t think trying to build a computer that can answer lots of questions is inherently an offence against God. I don’t think there’s anything anti-Christian about wanting to build a spaceship to explore a planet next door. God might not let us do it,” Douthat said. But “trying to upload your mind to the cloud and live forever in the cloud is anti-Christian”.
“I’m very conscious of the dangers, but the human story has to proceed to the next act, and maybe the next act is some great disaster that will culminate in a Frank Herbert’s Dune-style Butlerian jihad, where we have to overthrow the machines,” he said, pushing his salad around with a fork. “I’m totally open to that possibility. But I don’t think you can foreclose it in advance and say, sorry, we’re just going to stop here.”
The question of whether AI is a Cartesian automaton or is, in fact, truly conscious does not unnerve Douthat. He thinks any simulacrum of consciousness shown by an AI is probably just that – a simulacrum. And even if machines acquired souls, Catholicism is comfortable with non-humans having them. “[AI engineers] are in the position of doing a bit of magic, right? Summoning, conjuring,” he said.
Douthat’s belief in a spiritual realm fits with his faith. But it is also rooted in his childhood. In another part of New Haven in the 1980s, a young Douthat watched his mother, a writer, drag secular friends to healing services where they would have apparent religious experiences. She wrote that something “came into me with a roar, and clamped onto me… as if I were alone with God, or His Spirit”. Douthat was immune to such ecstasy, but found a home for his mysticism in Catholicism.
What explains Maga’s Catholic tinge? JD Vance converted in 2019 and his politics is drawn in stark religious lines. Kevin Roberts, the executive of the Heritage Foundation, which authored the Project 2025 blueprint for Trump’s second term, is also Catholic. “It’s the last strong institutional form of Christianity that still seems to take its own claims seriously, and has the kind of intellectual heft and firepower that people educated at places like Harvard and Yale or Oxford and Cambridge want. If you’re going to be a Christian in the intelligentsia, it feels like Catholicism or nothing.”
Douthat offered me a lift to the station in his minivan – a “pronatalist automobile”, he joked, as I put my bags between the various car seats; he has five children. I asked him whether he regrets the Enlightenment. “I regret the Reformation,” he replied, before caveating that he could never regret any part of God’s plan.
In Douthat’s telling, the US was a Protestant nation before it was a liberal one. Some militant Catholics believe in integralism, the idea that their loyalty should be to the Vatican over Washington. But Douthat thinks no number of Catholics in the government could ever overwhelm America’s innate individualism, pointing to the revolt against restrictions during the pandemic. “This is America. Even the right-wing Catholics are, in some sense, functionally Protestant,” he said. “It’s easier for me to imagine America ceasing to be liberal [and] having a dictator than it is for me [to imagine] Americans submit[ting] to the Pope,” he said. “It would still be a dictator who preached a kind of individualism, personal agency – it would be an Emersonian dictator.”
Like Vance, Douthat thinks liberalism is responsible for society’s decadence. But doesn’t Trump’s battering of constitutional rights demand a liberal revival? Even then, Douthat thinks liberalism lacks a metaphysics, an explanation for the universe which would breathe meaning into concepts such as free speech.
As I left the natalist-mobile, a Confucian saying came to mind about not pondering the afterlife when we don’t even understand this one. But for America’s premier conservative columnist – who sees Trump as a force of history, an unstoppable wave we are destined to watch crash – religion precedes politics.
Douthat noted that I was his first materialist interviewer, putting this down to my Britishness. Indeed, if a British conservative columnist – Peter Hitchens, say – defended self-proclaimed UFO abductees, they would be lampooned. But conspiracy theories, the occult, angels and demons increasingly bedevil American public life. Trump’s followers worship him with mystical reverence; the president himself has ascribed surviving an assassin’s bullet to the hand of God.
In another interview for his book, Douthat compared the president to the Babylonians sent by God to punish the sinful Israelites. He said something similar to me: “Trump is an expression of discontent with a stagnant and decadent order whose resilience and ability to avoid defeat by the forces of the establishment has, I think, already yielded a world-historical shift into a new era.”
Throughout our conversation, Ross Douthat’s sanguine tone never wavered. He parried niggling questions by pointing to God’s providence. He is resigned to what unfolds and has lost faith in the power of the public intellectual – however famous – to dam the flow of history. But he is also grappling with his hope that Trump’s chaos awakens America from its decadent slumber. For Douthat, that does not make Trump good. But it might make him necessary.
[See also: One hundred days of autocracy]
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This article appears in the 07 May 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Peace Delusion