Trialogue #2 - Fantasy, Technology and the Future of Belief

Ross Douthat, Luke Burgis, and Jordan Castro.

Introduction

In recent years, author and New York Times columnist Ross Douthat has been a singularly incisive commentator on cultural trends at the intersection of religion, politics, and art. For our second Trialogue, Luke Burgis and I emailed with Ross about the emerging alliance between technologists and traditionalists, the role of art in contemporary culture, and his new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. The conversation took place from January 23, 2025 to February 24, 2025, and is presented here in its entirety. - Jordan Castro

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Luke Burgis:

Let’s start with your book that was just published, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. It probably comes as no surprise that my favorite line in your book is “God can do infinitely more with imitation than with no activity at all.”

You go beyond traditional apologetics of religious belief and grapple with the reasonability of peoples’ decisions to practice a particular religion that might not satisfy the most zealous: because their parents practiced it, because their spouse had a profound conversion to it, because it’s the religion of your favorite novelist whom you deeply respect, or because your favorite civilization sprung from it. It seems like people expect metaphysical purity of choice. God knows my own conversion was messy.

So let’s admit that there are good reasons, including social reasons, to become religious. But are there bad reasons to become religious?

Ross Douthat:

I would say that it is a bad thing to join a religion with expressly dishonest, subversive or sacrilegious purposes. That is, it would be a bad thing to convert to Orthodox Christianity under orders from the KGB to infiltrate and subvert the churches of the USSR for Stalin's purposes. It would be a bad thing to convert to Roman Catholicism because you believe in Satanism and intend to avail yourself of Catholic materials for the purposes of Devil worship, a Black Mass. It would be a bad thing to convert to evangelical Christianity with the intent to deceive and bilk the devout via some kind of televangelist-style scheme.

But this is a pretty narrow set of examples. Beyond such cases of express deception, where the conversion is entirely false and exploitative, I think that almost all conversions should be given the benefit of the doubt. This encompasses conversions for the sake of your spouse and religious unity in the household, conversions undertaken out of various kinds of psychological desperation, or conversions where the desire to be religious for some secondary reason—friendship, cultural solidarity, even political alliances—is more important to the leap than a definite theological conviction. Historically highly-contingent, utilitarian-seeming conversions shadowed by politics and pragmatism have often borne substantial long term fruit: Christianity has spread through such imperfect forms of belief as much as through the more fervent and thoroughgoing sort. So long as in becoming religious you are giving God something to work with: we're all on a continuum of messiness, and let he whose conversion is without some element of imperfection cast the first stone.

But you do have to actually convert and (to whatever extent possible) believe. The act of merely identifying with religion, of expressing some sort of general belief in belief rather than professing the creed or being baptized, of declaring yourself a cultural Christian but never darkening the door of any church—that positioning is much more suspect, because it instrumentalizes the faith without rendering anything up to God. Almost everyone is guilty of instrumentalizing religion to some degree, but the imperfect convert who says "Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief" has a real claim upon his faith even when he's misusing it. But the desire to have *others* convert and believe so that you or your society can reap some cultural or moral or political benefit—that gives God nothing, and reaps nothing in reward.

Jordan Castro:

My wife Nicolette had a radical experience of God right before we started dating, and one of the hardest things I wrestled with before converting—after reading a lot, arguing, going to church for years, etc—was whether or not I was “legitimately” coming to believe, or whether my ongoing reckoning with Christianity was just some sort of elaborate cope because I was in love. I told the priest at my grandma’s funeral about my predicament, and he said, “God knows the right bait to use.”

Still, it took years. I didn’t understand what it could even mean to “be” a Christian, but I think I rightly understood the gravity of what was at stake. It was overwhelming. But above, you seem to be saying that the most important thing is to decide, to convert.

I know you converted to Catholicism as a teen, a year after your mother, because you thought it was true. Your book deals with rational arguments. But what did you struggle with?

Ross:

Yes, I do think it's more important to convert while the iron is hot and the bait is being dangled (to mix a couple of metaphors) than to try to work out all your difficulties and make sure you're joining for the right reasons, with full awareness and certain belief. This is my own private opinion, not the official position of my church: I've known priests who turned away would-be converts who were coming in for contingent reasons and didn't seem to have some deep faith, and of course Catholicism asks converts to formally assent to all that the church believes and teaches, not just the big-picture stuff. But human beings have mixed motivations, our psyches are so complex and yet so fragile and windblown, that to hover on the threshold of a potential relationship with the Absolute while waiting for perfect certainty about whether you should go forward seems like a waste of time and life. As C.S. Lewis puts it, most worthwhile human things are just inevitably done in difficulty and uncertainty—because "favorable circumstances never come."

As to my own struggles, they've inevitably changed over the years. When I was younger the biggest challenge was not belief but behavior: To sign up for Catholicism's package of teachings at the age of seventeen was a recipe for predictable tensions between what I professed and how I lived, not just in terms of the church's sexual strictures but also in broader ways, because my college years and twenties were an extremely worldly and ambitious period. To the extent that I had doubts, they were about God rather than the Church itself: I was quite confident that if a God existed He obviously subsisted more in the universal-seeming territory of Catholicism than the Protestant alternatives I had experienced as a kid; I had the usual Catholic convert's sense that it was atheism or Rome, the One True Church or nothing.

Today it's a bit different. Certain temptations have faded with parental exhaustion and mid-career overwork, and my Catholic triumphalism has been tempered by the experience of the sex abuse crisis and the theological debates of the Francis era; without turning Protestant I definitely think certain important Catholic teachings are more contested and unstable, and multiple positions therefore more understandable, than I thought as a young John Paul II-era convert.

But if I have more sympathy for different schools of Christian thought, I have less time for atheism (as my new book makes clear) than I did as a younger man: I'm more of a latitudinarian about doctrine, but a zealot about the fundamental implausibility of materialism, the sheer unlikeliness of the reductionist accounts of human existence, and the weakness of the contemporary nonbeliever's brief.

Luke:

I'd like to pivot slightly away from the book itself and situate it in the context of current events—specifically, the emergence of the new “tech right” and the “Tech-Trad Alliance,” which you've written extensively about. I want to focus on how this new alliance plays out in terms of the effect that it might have on traditional religious belief.

I could see things going in a myriad of different directions, depending on whose influence ultimately wins: A more widespread transhumanism, a Baconian Christianity where the New Atlantis resumes a place in the American imagination, a new form of techno-religious syncretism….Or maybe JD Vance is going to be a powerful enough figure that he pulls everything nominally in the direction of traditional Catholicism.

Who, or what, do you think is the center of gravity? Your book puts a finger on the scale at a critical juncture, and might help to begin certain conversations that nudge the movement away from certain vectors and toward others. And yet I feel so much of this realignment is happening at the pre-rational or subconscious level—so trying to situate and name the center of gravity, the primary forces acting to create this new dynamic, is important. Is it being driven by ideas, people, politics, economics, or merely power? Help our readers understand what is driving this convergence so that we can understand what place the rational case for belief occupies within it, or which course of the meal it should be served as.

Ross:

Luke, I don’t necessarily think there is a center of gravity at the moment, and the primal forces you describe are sometimes rowing (do primal forces row?) in different directions and sometimes seeming to converge. When I talk about a tech-trad alignment, I’m mostly talking about agreement around a mixture of specific political issues–anti-wokeness, American industrial ambition, maybe the importance of birthrates (though that’s more specific to Elon Musk than Silicon Valley writ large)–and then one fundamental premise: The shared idea that the universe is intelligible and meaningful, that human efforts are not in vain, that paths open before our feet if we make the correct choices. This, set against the forms of existential pessimism and even despair that wokeness and secular progressivism have ended up nurturing, where if climate change doesn’t kill us all, even so the traditional forms of human society are too cishetero-imperialist and patriarchal to deserve to continue.

But that convergence might be provisional, an alliance against the left that yields itself to a deeper conflict of visions. Musk himself contains multitudes, and when you look beyond him to other figures in the tech world–I’m thinking of the would-be A.I. tycoons above all–you see an ambition that may be incompatible with traditionalism in any form. The hope has to be that some of those ambitions are simply impossible, rooted in errors about the nature of consciousness and selfhood; if the supposed transhumanist “merge” of mind and machine ever came to fruition we would be in territory that Christians could only consider demonic.

So why should traditionalists be interested in or aligned with this world at all? In part because I think there is a true contestation for the soul of the tech world, with darker and lighter directions for its ambitions, and the tradition-minded should wish for and help the more humane ambitions in what will be, no matter what, the great power center of this age.

And then in part because the strategies of intentional resistance to the technological future–apart from total Amish-level exit–seem either ineffective or stagnant or unfruitful (e.g., most of Europe in both its socialist and nationalist forms), while the zones of technological dynamism (in America above all) also tend to be zones of religious interest, Christian resilience, metaphysical hope. That makes me think that maybe, maybe, there is a path here that we’re supposed to walk, under God’s providence, where religion is crucial to a taming and directing and shaping of the future, where all those Silicon Valley guys naming their companies after details from Tolkien’s legendarium are picking up on what America is supposed to be: Not the Shire and not Mordor, but Númenor in splendor, sending out starships instead of seafarers.

Is that way too hopeful and utopian? Well, then balance it with the equally compelling possibility that the tech-trad convergence is God offering a lifeline to the techlords, a chance to serve the good instead of saying non serviam, and that if they reject it then the text that matters won’t be Tolkien, but C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength.

Jordan:

You mention Tolkien and Lewis. What role might art and literature play in shaping a new cultural imagination, especially now given the shifting political tide?

Ross:

I grew up in a world where film and television were dominant forms, the novel was still influential if less significant than in the past, and then there were the boutique forms—poetry, dance, opera, the fine arts—that seemed to matter more as history than as living shapers of the culture. As a child of that era, I naturally still think of the movies and TV and books as the key forms—but now I'm not sure what form, if any, actually plays such a major culture-shaping role.

Cinema has clearly lost its hold on our common life, undermined and undone by all manner of economic, technological and political forces. TV had a brief peak of influence and aesthetic success but now seems to be declining into mediocrity again. And I just don't know what to say about the future of the novel—and I say this as someone serializing a novel on the internet right now!—or how it might recover even the influence it still enjoyed in the early 2000s.

Sometimes I think that what is needed is a cultural counter-revolution or transformation, a shaking-off of the bad ideas and ideological strictures of a decadent progressive consensus, to widen the room in which artists and storytellers can work. Sometimes I think we are looking for a new or remade form of art that's more suited to a digital age. Sometimes I think that what is required above all are habits and structures and institutions that help us *resist* the digital experience—that art simply can't flourish under very-online conditions, and so to renew the culture we need a baseline of non-digital habits before we can expect a new set of great novelists and filmmakers to appear. (A renewal of public art and architecture, the garden and the monument and the museum, seems like it might be one place where art itself can help create those non-digital conditions.)

I will say that persistence of Lewis and Tolkien as influences on Christians especially is notable and interesting: The story, the fictional sub-creation, seems to exert a religious pull in our own era akin to the pull of theological disputation or the lives of the saints in past eras, and so far I don't see any new form coming along that is capable of displacing it. And that's part of why I suppose I still look to movies, novels and TV serials, notwithstanding their weakening influence: For our society the good story remains the master key.

Luke:

Let's close with a question that has been haunting me lately: Does the decadence of our society in the present age mean that it will take another world war—Tolkien experienced the horrors of both of them—or a global catastrophe for an artist to conjure up something as epic as The Battle of Helm's Deep (in the film The Two Towers)? I certainly hope not, but it feels like we're very far away from anything with those existential stakes being made. I can't even imagine it. And I wonder if this question is not unrelated to the question of belief, like war itself. What do you think?

Ross:

Your question gets at an issue I've often wondered about—namely, why did fantasy (arguably encompassing space operas like Star Wars as well) end up as such a defining genre of our age? Clearly it has something to do with the sense of diminished stakes under decadence, a need for other realities in which the stakes feel more epic and metaphysical. But it can't just be that we're trying to escape back into worlds that seemed to have more existential stakes, since Tolkien himself was writing in the shadow of both World Wars, and then under the shadow of nuclear annihilation by the rings of power forged in Los Alamos—and yet he still reached for the fantastic, for secondary creation, to tell a story for his age. The turn to fantasy began before we entered fully into decadence, in other words, when we were still performing feats of human daring.We reached the moon fifteen years after Return of the King's publication, after all.

I'm not sure exactly what that means. Maybe fantasy works so well in our time because it serves a dual purpose—an escape backward out of technological modernity's decadence and a pre-modern alternative to the fearful side of technological acceleration, making it relevant when we're stagnating and also when we're speeding up. Or maybe it's that fantasy is concerned above all with civilizational transitions, an age of magic giving way or maybe unexpectedly coming back, and the modern person, confronting nuclear weapons and the space race and now AI (and UFOs and re-enchantment and who knows what else), naturally feels themselves to be existing in an extremely liminal time, where the varying possibilities of Númenor, Mordor or some kind of collapse back to the Shire and Rivendell are all very much in play.

Maybe we'll understand the role of the mid-20th century fantasists fully when we're on the other side of some strange transition yet to come—standing boldly on Mars, hanging out in Hobbiton, or wiping our hands at the end of the Butlerian Jihad.

Luke:

Thanks so much Ross, we’ll wrap it up here.

Jordan:

Thanks guys. [addressing the reader] Don’t forget to check out Ross’ new book, here.