30+ Ross Douthat Quotes (Provocative, Refined And Insightful)

Ross Douthat is an American conservative political commentator, author, and New York Times columnist. He is the author of several books, including Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics and To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism. He is a senior editor at The Atlantic and a former senior editor at The New Republic.

Top 10 Ross Douthat Quotes

1. It's not always clear where a healthy patriotism shades into a dangerous nationalism.
2. I do think that evangelicals in general need to think seriously about how you pass on your faith across generations and over the long haul.
3. The Democratic Party's rigidly pro-choice stance is one of the more unyielding positions in contemporary American politics.
4. What replaces Christianity isn't going to be Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and so on. It's going to be something else and something secular people may not like very much.
5. The fact that institutional churches have gone into decline doesn't mean that we're going to enter some purely secular age. Secular people need to be aware of that.
6. The idea of a post-religious society is a fantasy, ultimately. Human beings are, by nature, religious in various ways.
7. Many things about American life, that even secular people consider good, have flowed from the presence of a robust, resilient institutional Christianity.
8. I read a lot of G.K. Chesterton. It was a fairly conventional intellectual path to the Catholic church, I would say.
9. You start reading C.S. Lewis, then you’re reading G.K. Chesterton, then you’re a Catholic.
10. Every young writer, I imagine, has their first intellectual magazine, whose essays and articles are devoured all the more greedily for being slightly over one's head. Mine was First Things.

Ross Douthat Famous Quotes And Sayings

America's problem isn't too much religion or too little of it. It's bad religion: the slow-motion collapse of traditional Christianity and the rise of a variety of destructive pseudo-Christianities in its place. — Ross Douthat

It's just silly to look at the incredibly steep decline in the mainline and the clear institutional weakening of Catholicism in the 1960s and 70s and pretend that something really big didn't change then. It did change. There really was a significant institutional decline. — Ross Douthat

The decline of institutional Christianity over the last 40 or 50 years has empowered a side of American religion that has always been there. The sort of do-it-yourself, "create your own Jesus" kind of faith. But, the forms that faith takes do have a real reason they are so appealing. — Ross Douthat

Just as the superstar pastor model can have its problems once the superstar pastor gets old or has a scandal or something, the house church model... there's a reason that the house churches of the New Testament era grew up into a more institutional faith down the road. — Ross Douthat

I think it is fair, in a way, to describe certain forms of Marxism, for instance, as the secular equivalent of a religion. But, I think the same is true, to a certain extent, of secular liberalism as well. — Ross Douthat

Institutional Christianity has had clear secular benefits to American life for hundreds of years. It's played both a prophetic role in terms of generating moral critiques of American excesses, and so on, and also a communal role, in terms of building community as the country moved westward to the role my own Catholic Church played in assimilating generations of immigrants. — Ross Douthat

No one doubts that pure libertarianism is simple, but that's just why it remains on the ideological fringe - because it boils down the most difficult questions in human affairs to a simple equation, a What Would the Market Do bumper sticker. — Ross Douthat

I think it is very clear that, though great difference remained, evangelicals moved closer to Catholics, mainline Protestants and evangelical Protestants moved closer together, and this convergence coincided with greater institutional strength for all the Christian churches than, for the most part, you see today. — Ross Douthat

I think that secular liberals need to recognize that they are still, often, hanging their worldview on what are metaphysical ideas. — Ross Douthat

Independent of the critique I'm making, I'm just trying to paint a more comprehensive portrait of American religion than you get from a right versus left, religious conservatives versus secular liberal, believer versus atheist, binary. Too often, we just look at religion in America through that kind of either/or lens. I think it's much more complicated than that. — Ross Douthat

My mother converted when I was 16. She was the driving force behind religion in our family. So, I'm sure I was heavily influenced by that. But, I also was, and still am, convinced by the Catholic churches historical claims to represent the continuity with the early Church that other forms of Western Christianity lack. — Ross Douthat

The thinking person's case for Romney, murmured by many of his backers, amounts to this: Vote for Mitt, you know he doesn't believe a word he says. — Ross Douthat

Even secular people can't really escape from the need to rest their ideas on some belief, some sort of commitment that is not scientific commitment. — Ross Douthat

The idea of universal human rights may not seem as weird to some people as the idea of a personal God, but it is still a metaphysical idea that liberalism, at least as we know it, couldn't really survive without. — Ross Douthat

During a frustrating argument with a Roman Catholic cardinal, Napoleon Bonaparte supposedly burst out: “Your eminence, are you not aware that I have the power to destroy the Catholic Church?” The cardinal, the anecdote goes, responded ruefully: “Your majesty, we, the Catholic clergy, have done our best to destroy the church for the last 1,800 years. We have not succeeded, and neither will you.” — Ross Douthat

Every Christian in every time and place is going to be tempted by certain forms of heresy. I'm sure I'm tempted by my own. — Ross Douthat

If you're willing to recognize the religious element in one secular ideology, you need to be able to recognize it in your own. — Ross Douthat

In the end, you do need institutions to transmit the faith for the long haul. That's why I make the case that, in certain ways, American Protestants could stand to recover the denominationalism that they've left behind over the last 50 years. They are real values in having a confessional tradition that can sustain your faith over the long term. — Ross Douthat

One of the things I try to do is take seriously some of the forms of American religion that people consider to be shallow and try and figure out why they have such a strong appeal and tease out the theology they actually represent. — Ross Douthat

In many ways, American evangelicalism is somewhat stronger today than it was in, say 1955 - certainly more mainstream and influential in the culture as a whole. But, the increased strength of evangelicalism hasn't increased fast enough to compensate for the total collapse of mainline Protestantism and the pretty steady weakening of my own Roman Catholic Church. — Ross Douthat

Life Lessons by Ross Douthat

1. Ross Douthat's work emphasizes the importance of understanding the complexities of politics and culture in order to make informed decisions.
2. He also encourages readers to think critically and to be open to different perspectives.
3. Finally, Douthat emphasizes the need to engage in meaningful dialogue with those of opposing views in order to foster understanding and progress.