Why Everyone Should Be Religious | Ross G. Douthat | September 2026

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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Ross Douthat (0:23)

Thank you so much for that incredibly kind and only mildly daunting introduction.

Give me 10 seconds to calibrate myself with the clock in front of me, because I know that many of you have to disperse to academic pursuits at a very precise moment, 33 minutes from now. So I'm going to try and hit that mark exactly to make up for the fact that, as maybe a few of you know, I am actually about six months late to giving this address.

I was invited out here and accepted and was very excited to come. And then the largest snowstorm, I think in the last 25 years in the Northeast, arrived 48 to 72 hours before I was supposed to come. And, you know, there was sort of frantic emailing back and forth. I rescheduled my flight about four different times. Every flight was canceled. I didn't make it. BYU, my hosts were kind enough to extend the invitation again. I said, all right, late September 2026, nothing could possibly go wrong then.

That was not completely true. First, I took a new job, which I was not anticipating, which, you know, changed my schedule slightly. And then the most substantial Nor'easter in the recent history of the Northeast hit itself about, I think, 72 to 96 hours ago. And as I was in the Uber driving to JFK Airport through a torrential downpour, desperately checking the time of the flight to make sure that I was going to make it, I thought to myself, there's only two scenarios here. Either I have something incredibly powerful and important to say to all of you, and dark powers are trying to come between me and you and this address, or God is sending me a strong message, and I'm ignoring it, and you're all going to regret this entire experience. So you'll have to be the judge of that in approximately 30 minutes and 47 seconds from now.

But seriously, it's a tremendous pleasure and honor to be here. And the theme of my remarks is the theme of the book that I wrote about two years ago, when I was still a columnist for New York Times, trying to lay out a kind of basic foundation for why it makes sense to be a religious person, to be interested in religious things, to think that there probably is a god who probably has a plan for the universe and every individual human being within it. And as some of you may know, the typical reader of the New York Times may not concur 100% with that assessment of reality and the human condition. And so I spent a lot of time both in the writing of the book and in promotion and argument and going on podcasts and giving lectures, sort of addressing myself to an audience that I think is a growing audience in our culture right now, which consists of people who were not raised with any particular religious tradition, who find themselves somewhat adrift, I think, at a moment when secular culture has lost its confidence and bearings, and who are looking anew at religion, looking anew at religious ideas, but coming to it with a kind of presumption that a serious modern person can't quite take all of this seriously, or that the only way to become religious is to set your reasoning faculties to one side, and sort of take a pure leap that is not based on logic or rationality, and is in some way not compatible with a modern scientific mindset and things like that.

I suspect that the audience here at BYU comes to these questions from a somewhat different perspective, a more committed perspective, a perspective that generally takes it for granted that religion is important and interesting, and that God exists, and that figuring out God's plan for your life is an important thing to bear in mind when you're going to college, or when you're a middle-aged journalist contemplating a career change, or whatever position you may find yourselves in. But I do think that the kind of foundational arguments that I tried to lay out in the book and that I'll try and briefly lay out here are potentially as important for the average BYU student or undergraduate as they are for someone coming from a non-religious background or a skeptical background, for a couple of reasons. First, because you will not always remain in a community like Brigham Young University. You will not always remain in the kind of communities of faith in which most many of you have grown up. You will go out into a world in which religious commitments are not taken for granted, in which there is, I think, maybe less prejudice against the religious perspective than there was 15 or 20 years ago in certain educated and professional circles, but still a kind of sensibility that makes people who are religious feel defensive and apologetic in the wrong sense of the term, not the CS. Lewis sense of the term, about their faith, their faith commitments, their beliefs, and so on. And so I think having a kind of foundation, a strong intellectual foundation, a rigorous foundation that your faith rests on, can in those environments, in those more difficult and challenging environments, give you a special kind of confidence that you don't have to be defensive about, let's say, just believing in God or something like that, right? That in fact, you can treat that as a perfectly reasonable default perspective on reality that any serious or educated person should, if they don't hold it, they should at least take it seriously. And I mean this sincerely. I think that the world would be in better shape, America would be in better shape, religious and secular culture would be in better shape, if more believers approach their lives in secular contexts or less religious contexts with that kind of sunny confidence, that they're not just sort of dragging religion behind them as this kind of slightly embarrassing part of their life that they have, that they expect people to be skeptical about, but that is something that sort of naturally integrated into their everyday perspective, and something that, you know, in a sort of genial and friendly way, they're happy to share in the sense of like, well, you're not religious, why not? It's a very, very sensible and reasonable thing to be. So that's one useful perspective, I think, that the already religious can take from a kind of strong foundation.