But only in I think only in Divinity School are they least approaching the text by saying, I'm not trying to destroy it. I need to love it, and I don't know how to love it.
Ask not what your country can do for you, Ask what you can do for your country.
Mister Gorbucha, tear down this wall.
It's the Ricansirat Podcast with Stephen Hayward, who myself, James Flllingx, and Rob Long is back because we're going to talk to Ross Doubtfuit about his new book, Why You Should Be Religious. So let's say reselves a podcast.
The threat to democracy, Indeed, the existential threat to democracy is the unelected bureaucracy of lifetime tenured civil servants who believe the answer to no one, who believe they can do whatever they want without consequence, who believe they can set their own agenda no matter what Americans vote for. Federal bureaucrats who are defying democracy by failing to implement his lawful orders, which are the will of the whole American people.
Welcome everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, number seven and twenty nine. I'm James Lylyx here in CRISP Bright Minneapolis, Stephen Hayward probably somewhere out there on the West coast, and Rob Long is back with us, not to say yeah Stephen, right, okay, but Rob James, how are you?
I'm doing well. How are yourself? How are you James? It's the most important question, how are you well?
That is a fraud question at the moment, with many facets glinting dully in the dark cave of night.
But you are the same basically from that's actually where where I, uh, where I left, and.
You are in You are in New York right now, and you are where the last time we met you.
Of course I am not in New York. You're not Princeton, New Jersey.
Oh right?
Is that where you were conducting your your Yeah, that's where I'm conducting my certain my studies.
I don't know how to quite a describe How would I describe it exactly? Your your studies, your theological studies, James, so that you can call that anything you want. An m D.
Mastered Divinity, which I have always secretly been, but now I really am gonna I'm going to have the license.
What is the step below master of Divinity? Because Master of Divinity really does sound like a commanding position from which you can do all sorts of things. You've been invested, You've been imbued that you are a master of divinity, mastery. What's below that, acolyte of divinity?
I don't think there is. I think you're either a master or you're just nothing.
Okay, so we're all just here, journeyman of light, Stephen, how are you today?
I'm just fine, James Good and Dandi.
Well, we have a world to discuss. We could take a couple of angles about it. We could talk foreign affairs, ivault. But I would almost like to reserve Ukraine for another day because it's big and thorny, and I want to
see how it all shakes out. And I'm reading all sorts of things, and I understand, of course, why the president would want some mineral rights, because Ukraine provides seventy percent of the neon gas to the world, and if we're going to make America great, that means a lot of neon signs over you know, main streets and Hambiger
shops and the rest of it. But the rest of it, I'm still trying to figure out what is going on beyond the obvious talk about Israel, if we want to put our heart in the gutter because it seems to be an extraordinarily unfathomably amoral situation on the part of Mamas, or we could find something that gladdens the heart of all, and that is the complete and total realignment of the deep state, the swamp, and the federal government. I don't
know if you guys saw this yesterday. In the flurry of executive orders that came out, there was one implementing the President's Department of Government Efficiency Workforce Optimization Initiative. Sounds good, DC ish, Are either you guys familiar with this latest EO about how they're going to completely completely transform the federal government.
No, I've completely missed this, although it fits into the larger piece. I think that what the Trump administration is determined to do is restore presidential control over the entire executive branch, meaning the ability of the president of fire essentially anyone. And this will evolve over earning at least one old Supreme Court case, the you know, famous Humphreys executor from the nineteen thirties, and won't get off into
the legal swamp there. But I think they have a grand strategy involved here, and I think they're likely to win many of these battles.
Yeah, the administration, you mean, yes, yeah, yes, I think so, Toru. And I actually I think it's I mean, you know, as you know, I'm a I have a feelings, but it is in fact a good idea for the executive branch to be allowed to execute and for the legislative branch to be allowed to appropriate and legislate. I mean that that's kind of how it's set up. And we've you know, the most interesting about DOGE has been not the waste in the fraud of debut. I mean the
waste of the fraud. Maybe I don't know. I've been hearing that story forevery now right. It's fine, if that floats your boat, fine, go ahead. But what's been amazing to me is just how much it's been, how much the federal government's doing, how huge that Leviathan has become.
And I mean I was just driving here, as you know, I was driving around and I was listening to NPRS is my want during the day, and it's a big SOB story on NBR about people complaining about the scientific research, scientific research, and you know, they're going to cut the scientificgure in Columbia and at Coloya University, I mean not the country. And I came home and I didn't quite get it yet, but I'm going to get it because I thought, Okay, Columbia, big university. What is the endowment
for Columbia University? And the endowment it's popping up right now is going to be as of June thirtieth, twenty twenty four, so as of you know, six months ago, basically fourteen billion dollars.
That's a rainy day fund though.
Yeah, and that's actually small, right, I mean, Harvard's bigger, at Yale's bigger. Universities are bigger. So there is there is this giant, vast pool of money that you used to be used by in universities to engage in research.
Uh and all the things that they think are very important, all the all the great scientific discoveries that we have that we're you know, people have been talking about, certainly on the NPR uh uh show I was listening to happened outside the realm of the federal government and federal
ar jests. So there is an argument to be made that you know, a little bit of you know, breaking some glass and shaking things up may not be a bad idea, and and and that, and that the and that the fact that the American people, although not the majority of them, but the huge plurality of them, seemed to be supporting This suggests that the problem has been lying in the universities and the research organizations and the medical and scientific establishment, which have been telling us all
sorts of things for years and years and years and years, like we're all going to die in climate change, or we're all going to die if you don't wear the mask, and schools that we call all that stuff. Right, Yeah, that's credibility they lost. They can't come crying now about it.
Well, so here's here's an odd bit of trivia that is unknown to just about everybody. Is that for decades, science funding from the federal government has actually risen faster under Republican administrations than democratic administrations. Lots of reasons why that turns out to be true, and there's lots of problems.
But two things right now jump out of me.
One is you mentioned the discrediting of the scientific establishment from COVID and whatnot. And I have a headline I found this morning from inside Higher Ed and I'll just give you the headline Voodoo doll study explores why scientists get harassed? So that was probably for it by a federal grant.
Okay, well, I'm in favor of that. We need more research on voodoo, you know, right well, or voodoo economics, right, I mean.
Of course that's the subject for a study. Who you do doll study? As much as I love to say it, I want to know where this was conducted. Was there somehow a USA idea.
Creation to the Vanderbilt University, which then gave two million dollars to Tides Foundation, which then gave on twenty thousand dollars to a Haiti group which I went out and asked a bunch of people about which kinds of knives and pins they particularly use. Who who did the voodoo study?
That voodoo study you do? So well, yeah, I'll have to pull.
It up again because I don't have it handy.
But it was some university where they actually had they actually had people in a room saying, you know, pok a voodoo doll to give in response to questions about scientists and science. I mean, it sounds perfectly preposterous, but beyond the sort of the frivolous things you can point to which you know we can.
We've done that forever, right.
Uh.
The other thing going on is the Trump administration saying we're going to cap overhead on federal funding for science at I think fifteen percent fift The great scandal here is most universities take forty percent. Some take as much as fifty percent. I've seen sixty Yeah, I know one university where it's fifty six percent. And and the point is is that this has become a slush fund to cross subsidize universities. The universities say, oh, we need that
to provide the labs and equipment and administer the grants. Well, the labs are mostly built and any new lab equipment would be part of the grant that goes to the researcher.
So I love this.
I think that this is an absolutely solitary development by the government to say, no, you can't you have universities, We're not going to cross subsidize your bloated administrations.
But before I toss it to Rob again, I have to note that one of the things that this administrator, this executive order says is that there is dose is going to go through Rooten branch and look at all of the regulations and they have to I mean the man hours required to look at that as extraordinary that have been promulgated by agencies outside of their specific congressional mandate. In other words, you guys don't get to make that
rule up. That's the job of the legislature. And the number of encumbrances that have been placed upon innovation and business and the rest of these things, because the guys are just throwing these rigs out everywhere that if they have no statutory basis, they've got to go. And I seem to remember that there was a reason Supreme Court
kurd fluffle about this. So this when people talk about the intractability of the deep state, I mean they're essentially referring to a civil service that regarded itself as being a permanent overclass that you know, does the work of
governance no matter who's in the White House. Well, this changes that, and if they move fast and swift enough, we may see the most consequential change actually to American governance since I don't know, since FDR started, like you know, draping this stuff and doing what he did back in the thirties, Rob, what's the.
Use well maybe. I mean the problem is that everybody thinks that the government spending stupid money on everybody else, but everybody thinks the government spending really good money on them.
I don't.
And so there's a lot of this, Like you know, you can go back and forth on all of this stuff, but you know where the money is is in entitlements and we're not going to touch those. And you know, Republicans have been flinty and mean about this for years and we get nowhere with it. But if you're under forty, your social security is going to be different from mine.
And if you're under thirty, it's going to be vastly different from if you're under forty, and your retirement age is going to be seventy or seventy five, it's not going to be sixty whatever. And that is just the truth. And nobody wants to tell anybody that, but just hoping it kind of seeps into the groundwater so that everybody under thirty, which I think is kind of true. Any smart person under thirty, if you ask them, they know
it's not going to be there. But nothing's going to change until that happens, until we accept that, and really sort of internalize that and stop lying to people about how if you're on a left, if you're a Democrat, how it's all going to be fined. All we have to do is raise the text on the ridge, or if you're a Republican this current present, lying to people saying no, we don't have to touch it. I'm never going to touch it, because that's just simply a lie.
And as long as we're not doing that, we're just going to be firing some scientists and listening to outrageous but basically financially economically trivial story on talk radio and on Twitter. But we're not actually going to be changing the future direction of this country in a way we deploy resources because we're still going to be spend a lot of money on entitlements. And then the second thing is, I mean, the other big giant pot when Stevie chime
in here is is defense. And we on the one hand, we have an America First policy right now, which is we agree with the disagree with it, is a policy that argues for a much much much smaller armed forces. If we're America First, we don't have to go overseas. We just have to protect our borders. So we should be shrinking. If we're going to be America first, we should shrink. If we're not going to be America first, we should stop saying because the worst thing in the
world to be is America first. But except for some foreign and tendments, that is, that's a recipe for disaster. So we have to as a country and as a policy, we have to sort of unify those two things.
Well at two quick points.
One, Rob, I take your point about the waste, fraud and abuse theme has been overdone over the years. You know, the Reagan people made a big deal of that, and they found there wasn't very much in nineteen eighty one, and that's why seriously cutting spending then involved changing eligibility formulas.
However, I do think that that is less true today.
I mean even the Biden administration GAO found what last year sometimes that potential fraud in Medicare and Medicaid was between two hundred and fifty and five hundred billion dollars, I mean real money now, So I think there is
more going on. And I have a theory on this that if we do a full scale forensic examination of the last fifteen years, I think we're going to find that the kind of things that just have dripped out now from doges about USAID and so forth, We're going to find that that kind of you know, frivolous spending and subsidies for liberal client groups and all kinds of crazy things. But that exploded under Obama and especially you know that that eight hundred billion dollar package, and it's
only grown bigger during uh, the Biden administration. I don't think the first Trump administration was looking hard at this, uh, and so I think that they're actually, if this works, that's a big if. I think we're going to find substantial savings that then might make possible the conversation about entitlements, because you're right that it won't get us close to where we need to be.
Uh. But okay, that's point one. Point two.
I have sorry about Medicare before we talk about defense. I mean, the Medicare is true, but the Medicare rises in Medicare costs and waste, broaden, use, all those things. I mean, I mean, they accelerated under a bomb obviously, but they always go up because price controls do not work, and Medicare is a price control program. So every time by the you know, it takes five years for this big Medicare review because obviously the health care business is
really be huge. So we have this five year review on procedures and what will pay for a procedure. Meanwhile, the procedures become redefined and one procedure is now three small procedures or six procedures. And then the costs always, always, always go up because Medicare is a is a single payer program, whether you like it or not. It's socialized medicine,
whether you like it or not. And we have a federal government, a behemoth trying to control prices and that it's only one system in the world that ever accurately and efficiently controls prices, and that is a market. And if you don't have a market, it doesn't matter. You can have you can give Elon Musk the keys to the kingdom, and dose could be given, you know, app carte blanche. It's never going to happen, and because people
don't want it to have. Look a lot of elderly people who work walking around with maga hats, driving around in their golf carts. The villages are going to get really, really a pissed when they discover that medicare is going to cover this or that procedure that they think they want.
Yeah, oh, I mean he did agreement with you about that, just quickly.
On defense, a lot to be said there, But one place where I think we need to think hard is whether we have in America first posture or not. Is I wonder if we can continue to afford having a gold plated military. By that, I mean, we seem to build the most expensive fighter planes, the most expensive ships.
And we've always thought and this goes back to the Cold War years when we countered the superior numbers of the Soviet Union in terms of troops with better technology, and you know, I, you know, I don't really have a firm grasp on that, but I know there's lots of intelligent criticisms of things like the F thirty five fighter plane. It's unbelievably expensive, and you know, I don't know, maybe drones are better, but I think there needs to
be a top to bottom review. And by the way heg sathas seemingly indicating that he's open to some of that inquiry.
You know, I was actually, I mean, I disagree with the policy, but I believe that the policy itself has ramifications, and I think that it is one thing to be America first, and that is a completely legitimate policy. You can't be America first unless that is your that's the primary h P, a foundational point. As you're gonna if you're going to rebuild or remodel the US military, we are not going to be protecting You're not going to be protecting Ukraine. We are not going to be in Taiwan.
We're not going to be doing any of that. That's that's not America first, America versus the opposite of that. All that's fine, but that means that we don't need a lot of things. What do we really need? We need to protect our shipping lanes. I guess we need to protect our borders and then we're done. And if you if the waiver on that, then you gotta then you're on a very slippery slope. The one thing about Reagan said is that we are there to protect the world,
So we're going to build, build, build. If we're not there to protect the world, we're just here to protect our borders in our country, then we don't need half the things that we buy. We just don't need them. And that you can't have it both ways. The worst thing for us to be is have an interventionist, even a quasi interventionist posture in the world, and also so have a military that can't handle that. That's just having a big mouth with no follow through, And unfortunately, I
believe that describes our current president. But it's a very dangerous position to be in. It's one thing to say, world, you're on your own. It's something to say, world, you're kind of on your own. And we're going to reduce our military, but we're also going to when we want to, we want to get involved in something, We're going to get involved in something. I mean, what do we care if Russia takes over Ukraine? What do we care if China takes over Taiwan. If we care, then we need
to prepare and spend. If we don't care, then we don't have to prepare or spend.
Well, it's remarkable it took six minutes to go from my original point, which was how this is going to impact the housing values in McLean, Virginia to a projection of power and Rob, You're absolutely right. My point put a boa and the whole thing is that not that I expect any of what is DOJA is doing or the executive orders in reshaping the bureaucracy is going to necessarily get us out of the spending problems that I mean, the deficit is what it is, and you're right, entitlements are.
What they are.
But it will, in the future, I think, result in a leaner government that has less control and less intervention and less invasive tentacles into the body politic and body, economic and social and whatnot. And that's a good thing, and it's going to be hard to rebuild if they want to do it well the next time they get
their hands on the levers of power. But maybe perhaps there is but one lever of power, and it is in the grasp of things way beyond our ken and we small little ants here struggling in the muck trying to comprehend our place in the universe, oftentimes turn to
things that can't be necessarily empirically quantified. And that is why we're going to talk to Ross Ross Dout, the columnists from The New York Times, host of Matter of Opinion podcast, author of many books, and most recently, as of just last week, believe why everyone should be religious. Russ Welcome back.
It's great to be back, and I'm here. I'm here to unlock the mysteries of the universe.
Good. Good, it took you so long. Rob is going to grapple because Rob is a grappler of these We're all grapplers of these things here, and so I know that I'm going to you don't have to defer to him, almost immediately. But let me ask you this why everyone should be religious. It matters what the religion is, doesn't it. I mean, if you're, you know, the devotee of some some Pithy and Death cult, that's not the same as being somebody who's a shaker in Iowa.
I mean it depends. You know, what does the Pithy and Death Cult really ask of you? You know, how does it? Does it help your marriage? It's good for American politics? Is there a Tokvillian defense of the Pithy and Death Cult? I mean, I think, you know, I think we have to be open minded. But yes, obviously it matters. It matters what religion you are. What I'm
trying to do in the book, though, is two things. First, I do think that there is a general religious personspective on the world that is shared by most, if not all, of the entities and institutions that we call religions. And it's not a complete perspective. It, you know, doesn't get to all the details about who God is and what God wants of you and so on. But the major world religions tend to agree that, you know, the world exists for a reason, humans exist in some kind of
relationship with a higher power. You should probably be preparing for whatever judgment or transformation awaits you after death, these kind of things. Right, So there is I think there is something called religion, even if it is a very general category. And then part of what I'm doing in the book is essentially taking people to the threshold of what I would consider the sort of more specific questions that you ask when you're deciding which religion to join.
But a bunch of the book is arguing for why it makes sense. You know, people talk about being spiritual but not religious. Right, that's a pretty broad, a pretty broad category in American life right now. And part of the book is a lecture to atheists on why they should be spiritual, and then having persuaded them to be spiritual, I proceed to the lecture on how the spiritual person should really join an institutional religion, ideally a big and old one. And then you know, at the very end
I talk about my own Christianity. But I do think that there is a valuable case to be made before you get to the specifics of religious doctrine, before you try and solve the problem of evil or litigate the incarnation of Jesus, just about you know, does it make sense to believe in God? Is the universe made for a reason? Are we an accident? What are we doing here? Those kind of things? And I think you can get some distance on those questions, further than a lot of people nowadays tend to think.
And you answer all those questions in your book a chapter for each.
I do believe a chapter that's right every question, every question answered. No, I mean, I don't answer every question, but I do think that it is you know, there's a slightly apocryphal, maybe not quote from the polymath scientist John von Neuman something to the effect of, there probably is a God. A lot of things make more sense if there is one, And that's a pretty good summary of the first few chapters of the book. There's a lot of things about the universe about our consciousness about
religious experience. That just make a lot more sense if you assume that there is some form of God or Divinity out there.
Hey, Ross, I'm sitting here in Prince, New Jersey, or I'm a student at the Prince of Theological Seminary getting an MDiv on my way to ordination. I hope in the Episcopal Church. So I totally disagree. Obviously, they write the joke, right.
The joke is that, you know, at Harvard Divinity School they are shocked if you believe in God and Prince, but Princeton is actually known for, you know, for its relative robustness.
So that's one of those weird things about divinity schools that you stand out if you kind of believe in God. Mostly the default setting is I'm not so sure. But I mean the upside is I get to spend all day thinking about these things. The downside is I have to spend all day reading the Elogians, which is incredibly difficult for me because it's incredibly hard writing and it's very boring except for the really great ones like Augustine.
But there's a French one named Julia Christeva, and she's a psychoanalyst and she's only a French person could be a psychoanalyst and a theologian. And she says that the atheists are people who believe that they do not believe. Do you buy that.
I think there's a lot of different types of atheist. I certainly think that there are there are atheists who are in a posture of functional rebellion. I think where atheism is chosen sort of the way you know, in The Brothers Caramelzov, the brother says, you know, even if even if God reconciles everything, I still have a moral objection right to his creation. And there's there's certainly versions
of that style of atheism. I think if you read, you know, someone like Christopher Hitchins at his peak, at the peak of his powers, he's really rebelling against God, not proving his non existence. He's really saying God is a dictator and I, you know, I reject his authoritarian rule. So that's one category of atheist that partially fits. I used to say that Chris hit wasn't wasn't an atheist.
He was a Testament Jew right right, he was.
He had a long list of complaints, not only the Old Testament Jews, right the long list of complaints. But then you know, then there are other types. There are people who you know, believe in something else right as a substitute for God. There's that style of atheism that
I think we're very familiar with. I do think, though, that there is a category of atheists who who sincerely sort of has you know, if there is a if you're reading theology right, you're hitting the people who argue for a census divinitas right, the idea that all human beings said have a sense of God's presence. I do think that there are people who have found a way to turn that off, whether it was always off, whether they've made certain choices and gone down certain paths that
have taken them pretty far. But you know, I wouldn't say to every atheist, oh, at some level, you really believe in God, and you know, and you're just sort of you've sort of constructed. I think there are people who go pretty far, I guess in their in their not in their non belief, in the non belief. I know Steve wants to jump in. I just wanted to read one more quotation to you, because I'm letting you push your seminary education to good. Yeah, from my reading
this week. So how many thoughts you just send them?
Just jot them down and all of Uh a slav Zizek sort of very interesting theologian, but he's a great it's a great, great pithyphrase. If once upon a time we publicly pretended to believe while privately we were skeptics or even engaged in obscene mocking of our public beliefs. Today we publicly tend to profess our skeptical, skeptical, hedonistic, relaxed attitude, while privately we remain haunted by beliefs and
severe prohibitions. Do you think there was a switch there at some point where we went from being sort of publicly observant now the public face that many of us have as well. I don't believe that. That's just I'm a rationalist. I don't believe this.
Yeah, there was a switch. It seemed to sort of it seemed to somewhat happen in stages, right you get, you know, one stage at the end of the Wars of religion, maybe a second stage with the Enlightenment and sort of the peak of Voltaire, another stage somewhere with the Victorians. When Matthew Arnold starts writing about the see of faith receding, and then maybe a final turn of the dial somewhere after the nineteen sixties. So it's not
an all at once process. But yes, that the language of haunting is appropriate, right, because I'm definitely a disbeliever in true disenchantment, true secularization, in the sense that I think that all of the events that people described as enchanted in the Middle Ages or you know, the Roman Empire and so on, a lot of that stuff just keeps on happening.
Right.
The modern world is filled with people, many people I know, who have religious experiences that would by no means be out of place in the enchanted cosmos of thirteenth century France or wherever else. What has changed is not disenchantment of experience, but disenchantment of official knowledge.
Right.
If you go on Wikipedia and read Wikipedia pages on miracles and alleged miracles, you don't get to write a Wikipedia entry unless you have a materialist default.
Right.
And you know, if you hang out I live in New Haven, you're in Princeton, right. You go hang out at the law school or the business school, you know, hang out with the people who are not professionally anti religious, but take themselves there seriously. Their view is the rational person's default is atheism. Whatever may happen to you in perfect personal experience, and that is you know, I think
that religion. I think there's a limit to how far any religious revival can go unless you, at some point deconstruct that sensibility. I think every pendulum swinging back towards religion in the modern age is limited by the inability to persuade let's say, the typical reader of the New York Times, that religion, you know, might be well and fully true as a description of reality, which is you know why I've written this book, right, you know I'm going to I'm going to solve.
That problem, right, and everyone should buy the book, of course, to say again believe while everyone should be religious, for us, I just want to get back to something you said about the last the last turn of the knob being somewhere in the sixties. It's so true. I spent a lot of time looking at old newspapers, and in the fifties ther early sixties, Easter would be a big event for a small town newspaper because they would get everybody
to buy an ad. The gas station, the dry cleaners, the shoe guy, and they would all use clip art, which there was an abundance of a happy family going to a church with a very tall steeple, and so the newspapers would be crammed with this imagery of specific religious activities and obligations and duties and Eastern itself. It's gone by about nineteen eighty or so, it's just gone. And everybody who grew up in that era, if you, even if your family did not go to church, ours did,
and then if you fell away from it. Even now, all these decades later, Easter and the few commercial trappings that we get still strike a tuning fork inside of you. Now you can say that's cultural, that's Memori's sociological, or that is that sense of divine awareness that you're talking about, but you're absolutely right on. It was a distinct decision to get rid of this old kind of weird stuff
because it was our parents. And I'm convinced that so much if this just is simply a base rejection of what our parents happened to believe in, until we abashedly crawl back to it and say, you know, maybe those folks did a point.
And you can see this.
You can see this at that point in data in the places where secularization went fastest. It happened faster in Western Europe than here, right, And so there was you knowata data from Ryan Burge, who's one of the best sort of data analysts of American religion and recently on you know, spiritual and religious belief in Great Britain, and it's very clear that the Baby Boomers are the most secular generation in Britain. Now that isn't fully true here.
I think the Millennials are the most secular generation in the US, But in Britain, secularization goes all the way with the Baby Boomers, and then subsequent generations culminating in gen Z get progressively a bit more interested in spirituality and there. What's interesting is that some of the turns of the dial had to do with you know, sort of scientific argument and debate. So Victorian atheism was shaped
by Darwin in a profound way. I think the sixties turn had, Yeah, it had a lot more to do with a cultural rebellion based primarily around changing sexual behavior against you know, against the old the old order. It wasn't about discovering a new philosophical argument against the existence of God. It was that, you know, traditional religion strictures no longer seem to make sense, and it was time to let it go.
As they say in Arundel.
Ross, it's Steve Hayward out in California, where as Walker person used to say, has its own peculiar sunshine version of Christianity.
Right, and and other faiths as well. Yeah, right, exactly.
Right, right.
So look, I have to gush about your book and give you dust Jack a blurb. It is rightly being compared favorably to C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity. That was my friend Frank review, which I yes, well, but I think, but I mean, what I'd add to it is, uh, it brought back a whole lot of things I haven't thought about for a long time. You know, about problems of cosmology, the limitations of Darwinism, the riddle of consciousness,
the whole domain of what we call natural theology. And the writing is I'll put it, this has meant his praise. The writing is so gentle. I would have, especially in criticisms of scientists, I would have written a lot of things that would make them mad. But your book on every page invites the skeptical reader to keep going. You have a nice respect and generosity towards them, which I
think is a remarkable writing achievement. I just really have two I could talk all day or hours for you about this, but I have two questions of curiosity and maybe just one. I do think there's a dog that doesn't bark in the book. And here I'm going back to when I was a young man finding my way in Christian faith, and one of the big things going on in the world was, for lack of a better term,
was existentialist Christianity. It was, you know, people like Rudolph Boltmann and Paul Tillick and Harvey Cox and process theology. Hopefully things rob is not having to suffer through. And we all remember if you ever finding do have it, And we all remember the famous Time magazine cover is God Dead from nineteen sixty six, and all this I thought was just an attempt to try and reform religion, and specifically Christian religion to modern scientism as opposed to science,
and I think an unsuccessful and defective attempt. And so I'm kind of interested if that ever came on your radar screen or am I right, that that has receded because of its sheer implausibility.
Yeah, I think a lot of that material has receded. I wrote about that. I wrote a book, you know, ten or fifteen years ago about sort of about the decline of American Christianity, and that particular moment featured as a cautionary tale on how Christianity can think that it's adapting, right, that it's sort of adapting successfully to a new world.
And then suddenly, you know, that style of spirituality is sort of like you know, high modernist architecture or even brutalist architecture, that was the architecture of the future, and now we're in the future and nobody likes it anymore, right, And it was an attempt to sort of in a way, to evade some fundamental questions.
Right.
So one of the things I do in the book that you know, goes a bit beyond some of the usual arguments for design and so on, is I make a real defense of supernatural experience as a you know, real part of human life that has to be reckoned with as an evidence for God.
Right.
And if you go back to Boltman and Tillek and a lot of those guys. You know, they had sort of an ineffable concept of like some encounter with the divine, but they really wanted to move away from questions like you know, I mean obviously the most basic one being okay, you're a Christian, you know, was the too empty? Did Jesus actually for you know, did Thomas actually put his.
Finger in a wound?
And so on?
And in a way, my book is is actually quite liberal in a certain sense. Like I am, I think you described it well. I am trying to be very gentle, and I'm not telling people to become Latin Mass Catholics tomorrow. I'm saying, you know, if you're if you're drawn to your local Unitarian church, if that's all you can do, you should do that.
Right.
So I am.
I'm not unsympathetic to a certain kind of mode of liberal faith, but I do think the mode that trying to just sort of efface like or obscure fundamental questions in order to preserve some kind of you know, modern friendly Christianity clearly just failed. It just failed, and we're living in the aftermath.
Yeah.
Yeah, So one more question that maybe is too broad, but you'll know how to sort it out. James mentioned a moment ago that you know, some of what we saw the last couple generations was youth will revolt against their parents' generation. And I think, of course that's always
a social factor to be pondered with. But I also wonder if, especially the decline of mainline Protestant churches is connected in a deeper way with the whole problem of the effects of the liberal tradition, which is the emphasis
on individual autonomy. And I mean, you've written about that previously, but I've often want and you do see by the way that some of the growth in churches right now, especially young man is for things like Eastern Orthodoxy, really traditional faiths, And so I don't know, I keep thinking that the traveils of the Protestant church is at some level connected with the problems of liberalism.
I think I think that it is, and I don't think it's a coincidence. Like right now, like I'm trying to write the book into a moment where I think generally the culture is more interested in religion right now than it was ten or fifteen years ago at you know,
in the heyday of Dawkins and so on. And I don't think it's a surprise that there's this sort of interest in religion at a moment when liberalism itself seems to have either sort of run, you know, run into a wall or been ensnared by its own contradictions, you know, whatever metaphor you want to use. Right, that sort of whatever lies beyond liberalism, it might be some kind of return to religion. With that said, it's really hard to
get away from the individualism of modern life, right. So, yes, the mainline churches did end up becoming too individualistic and sort of you know, individualizing themselves out of existence. But you know, the most successful forms of Christianity in the US today are non denominational forms of Evangelical Protestantism, which are conservative in some way, but really, you know, compared to like the sturdy Presbyterians of your quite seeker sensitive
and personalized. My own book, as you said, is very seeker sensitive in spite of my own traditional commitments. And even something like you know, the vogue for Eastern Orthodoxy or Latin mas Catholicism. Right, It's like, Okay, you have people embracing tradition, but are they embracing you know, a
fully existent, high hierarchical institution that they're submitting to. Not exactly right, They're like Latin mask Catholicism is kind of in rebellion against the pope right now, Right, Eastern Orthodoxy you're joining. Eastern Orthodoxy is great because you can join this really deep, rich tradition and no one can even agree on who's in charge of it.
Right.
So even even in it's like, oh, I'm a you know the right right, well, right, it's like, but I'm in the Ruthenian branch of the Moldovan Orthodox You're a heretic then, right, So, like, there is this I just think there is as much as we like to critique individualism, or at least I do, right, there is this way in which any religion that succeeds in this dispensation has to be adapted to some degree to pluralism and individual agency in a way that was never true in you know,
the antique or medieval past.
And also I just I know I got to wrap it up, but I wanted to talk a little bit about the mystery, right. I mean, we say the mystery of faith, but also there's a myst tree to the Latin mass, there's a mystery to the if you're not Eastern Orthodox. To Eastern Orthodox Church, I went. I sat in a lot of them when I was in Jerusalem a few years ago, and and there was way. I had one experience, which is sort of about the mystery, is that I was somewhere outside and there's this Korean
group turned out their Korean Pentecostals. They're kind of wandering around, and then that at some point they really got overcome with the spirit and they started to speak in tongues. And I turned to our guide and I said, does this happen a lot? He says, does what happen a lot? I said, does people? Do people come and start speaking in tongues? And he said, is that what that is? It just sounds Korean to me? He said, of course, you know, anybody else's language sounds like tongues, right, because
you don't understand it anyway. And I just feel and when I tell people that I am I'm doing what I'm doing, they're they're the what I was prepared for were people to say to me like, really, I mean, you ran TV shows, really, And instead what most people have said is, oh, man, of course, yeah, let me know, let me know what you find out, right, so the longing that we have, I think, uh is just no longer filled by a culture that has told us that all the longings we have can be satisfied by, you know,
a million of different things. There's still this empty longing that we have that brings us back to this mystery that isn't really going to give us an answer, but at least it's going to address the part of us that is desperately wondering what it is that we're missing and how we can behole again.
Is that I feel like that's that's such a powerful statement.
How can I possibly add at anything we don't?
That's me?
I think, I think that's I think that's right.
I think there is a way in which things do move in cycles, and you get you know, a culture, sort of religion can only decline so far before people start to have exactly the feelings you've described and turn back towards it. But in a way, the turning back towards it is easier because of the decline. Right, It's like, oh, you're not threatened by the big institutional religions anymore.
I mean some people are. You can watch the Handmaid's Tale.
Obviously those fears have not gone away, but a lot of people I think regarded like Roman Catholicism as a much more intimidating thing in even in like nineteen ninety seven than today. So there's there's a way you turn back. The last thing I'll say, though, is just about mystery. Yes, we're now we turn back to mystery, and the old religions especially are steeped in mystery, and you're never going to get definite, you know, definite, perfect answers out of
that mystery. But I do want to insist that like the point of turning back is to find some kind of answer.
Right.
It's like you know, in in in the Mist, like you're trying to decide how to live your life. Right, I'm trying to decide how to live my life, and in the mystery, maybe we don't get the perfect answer to you know, why is there suffering in the world? Or why did God make the cosmos this particular way? But I do think for religion to make good on its promises, it does need to provide people with a sense of again that individualism again, right, but in some sense of like what do I do next? Am I
on the right path? Should I get married to this woman. Should I join you know, should I join the you know? Should I become an episcopal priest? Right? Like, if God is real, it's okay to say I need a little help here, I need a little concrete guidance.
I just culturally, though, it might be wise for us to sit in, to sit in confusion in mystery for a while. We're so used to reaching for the solution and so used to googling the answer that these are sort of answers and questions that are sort of bigger than we have AI algorithms for. It's a good that's a nice feelings. It's actually a nice feeling to know that there are no ready answers here, that that your question is deep enough that the answers are going to
be satisfying if and when they come. Just for some reason, I feel culturally that's very important for me, And then ultimately too, I think it's harder, especially in a seminary, especially in culture in general, to understand that the message of Christianity is fundamentally different in many ways from the message of everything else, which is one of the reasons why this strange, weird sect has lasted, which is that you are important, right he will leave the flock to
get you, and that gives you a lot of grace. It also gives you a lot of responsibility, and it gives you a lot of I think autonomy in a lot of ways, and a lot of expectation. That it's not about fitting into the tribe. It's not about fitting into the darma, it's not about fitting into the sort of big sweep in history. It's about something really personal which may never you know, I'm sixty years old. I don't know the answer. So that's my that's my Friday
sermon for you. It's not very satisfying, but please give that's right. By the time you're in the pulpit, you'll have honed it to perfection.
Speaking of that pulpit, I'll leave you with an extremely petty question that I have here, a petty complaint. Perhaps somebody mentioned before, and I think it was Stephen, the word cosmology. And one of the things that just absolutely fascinates me is the depth and the breadth and the variety and the glory and the beauty of the universe. And when I behold these great, deep astronomical photos and generally I say, yeah, well, you know, of course God exists.
This stuff is proved positive to me, and I want this is the mystery to me, and I want to look at it more. I wanted the fascinating aspect that if you look at a very close a picture of the human retina, it is almost indistinguishable from a picture of a great galactic wall. Everything scales, and you sense
this design and you sense this purpose. And of course the rationally atheist will say, no, that's just simply how it arises because of certain laws applying, because of the Big Bang, et cetera, et cetera.
I get it.
But if your heart and your spirit and your mind are open to you know the contemplation of the Cosmo says, I know that sounds spiritual, not religious. But what I'm saying is getting into a small building build in nineteen twenty five that smells of old candles and a stained glass window seems a constraining thing. And when you add the liturgy and all the other wrote things, it seems like something that's an impediment to contemplating the great beyond above.
What do you say to people who have basically the Homer Simpson critique of going to church on Sunday because you have to wear itchy church pants and a tight shirt.
And you mean you mean my nine year old son that complaint.
Or your sixty six year old friends.
Yes, it's funny because you know, the last at a book signing, someone came up to me and in a friendly way, gave me a long lecture on exactly the terms you've you've given about how there can't possibly be a god because the universe is so big, right, he was like, you know, he was all mystery and wonder.
But in the service of.
That's that's like saying it can't there can't be a cook because Orison Wells is too fat. I don't get that one at all.
No, I don't.
I don't get that argument either, But I'm going to just to to steal from it to to try and answer your reasonable question, which is to say that, like there has to be there are different scales of things, right, And yes, of course it's appropriate to contemplate the majesty and mystery and wonder of Almighty God in a sunset, a rainbow, you know, the hubble hubble telescope photos, all of these things, right, And but what is asked of you in church is not you know, spending your whole
life sort of in a small building saying prayers.
Right.
I mean, if you're Catholic, you're expected to go to Mass once a week plus on on Holy days of obligation more you know, maybe more you should go more, right,
But that's the basic ask. And if God is present in the fullness of the cosmost part of the point of going to church is to say, okay, there's a correlation there, right, that these things, these things scale in just the way you talked about with the retina, right, And that's why it's nice to go to a church I think that has nice architecture, right, that has good music, that captures some form of that scaling, that seems itself to be participating in the heights and depth that you describe.
But I think what the low church Protestant who has skepticism about fancy Catholic architecture would say is that actually, you're so supposed to see that scaling in your neighbor next to you and to hear it in the word of God preached by you know, Father rob Long from the public.
Right.
But like that, you shouldn't even need the stained glass windows and the saints and so on you should be able to get that scaling from your neighbor next to you and the Bible read to you. And that's what church is for. And I think that's certainly enough. It should be enough to get you there. You know, once a week, I think once a week. This is what I literally what I say to my nine year old son.
I'm like God, in all his majesty created the entire universe for you to in habit, and all he asks you to do is wear on comfortable pants for fifty seven minutes this Sunday.
Can you do it?
Well?
Sometimes is? You know, come on, Dad, you're to have to say that. Homer Simpson goes nonetheless the only family on television that goes to church regularly.
Well, God speaks to him in that episode. And one of the great things about it, when God is actually revealed, we see that he has five fingers. Well, as we like to say around here, a mighty fortress is our rob And we will look forward to the next time we talk to you about the next book, or even this one, because it's the topic of our lives. Ross douth that's the new book is Believe Why everyone should be religious? And we thank you so much for showing.
Up, guys, I really appreciate It's great book. Thank you Ross. Take care.
You know I mentioned the church, you know, built in the twenties. The church that I grew up in elm Lutheran Fargo, North Dakota, is an old, classic nineteen twenties church with the off the shelf stained glass picture of Martin Luther looking varied about and Jesus in the garden and the arrest of it. But at some point in the nineteen fifties they decided, hey, if we want to really be with the times, we've got to modernize a
little bit. So they slapped the sort of Perry Mason era swank, cool blonde wood stuff all over the place in the pulpit and some of the railings. And so I grew up with a syncredic combination of these things which just made perfect sense to me. Streamlined pulpit, I mean, from which the pastor would thunder and I mean thunder at everybody. And it was wonderful. It was one.
So you're a Lutheran, Yeah, yeah, I knew everybody.
I was, but I was.
I was an ultra boy too. I was ideal that too, And so I put on these robes and the robe and I would have these wands, these wonderful ones with a wax tip at the end. You'd light it and then you'd play it out a little bit. You'd light all the candles, and then you'd sit there, and the soft fabric of these of these robes was just absolutely wonderful, and you just feel you, why don't we wear this all the time? I wish I had sheets like that.
But here's the thing, folks, with spring right around the corner, the bitter cold of winter hangs stubbornly.
Literally the greatest transition I've heard. I'm so overwhelmed with the fractal perfection of this transition that I it's almost mystical.
Mystical.
Well, I'm just I'm just saying. We have a we have a seminary student here, a man studying the divinity, studying the resurrection, and and just said that was the greatest transit transition. I think there are other bigger ones on history. Robin maybe become a configuration.
I just said transition. Anyway, put it that way.
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Ricochet podcast a few minutes before we got a role here. Gentlemen, I have to have to have my lunch and then I have ten thousand errands to do. Sounds like good proclaimer song. But so we have upcoming German parliamentary elections and according to Reddit, we got Nazis. The Nazis might win, the Nazis to the Nazis might come in second.
Well well yeah, I mean it's always been the fear right. I mean it's very strange that the country itself has been what it's been since nineteen forty six, right most of Europe. Frankly, let's be honest, when whenever the conservative wins in a European election, every one in the United States reminds everybody, well, when they say conservative, they still mean socialist. It is about time. I mean, there is this probably an idea. I don't know whether it's going
to turn out okay. It has never turned out okay up till now, so maybe you know, nineteenth time is the charm. But a certain amount of sort of from from that big center part of Central Europe national identity and national pride, which you're very very very very ginger things to think about when it comes to the German Republic. But it does seem to me that it is time for European nations to think of what it is, what it means to be a European, what it means to
be a nation, and those are two different things. I mean, that's the changes. Yeah, the vast changes culturally in that part of Europe from immigration really more than any thing else. They were never going to go easily. And what you what you don't want to do is is ignore it and then it leaps out inappropriately, or it leaps out
in the historical historical president. So I suspect that there'll be a lot of screaming and yelling at Henry in certain the obvious places about the outcome of the German election. But I suspect that we were in Germany the people who voted in that if they do in fact vote in that, you know they do vote for that, that party will won't won't sound like Nazis to us. They'll sound like dudes from Wisconsin.
Look, I mean, I I think we should not be trusting the same people who called Trump a Nazi to say that AfD is purely a Nazi party.
I think they do have a few bad.
Actors, and that friends of mine in Europe say, look, they do have some problems that could clean house more than they have so far. However, I have thought that the party was probably underpolling, and I was predicting here the last few weeks that AfD might well win the most votes, which will cause a political crisis in Germany that they richly deserve. For reasons you just stated, Rob, I do I'm now equivocating a bit because I think it's possible that Vance's speech a week ago, which I loved,
by the way, but I could see it backfiring. I could see a certain amount of undecided Germans who might be fed up with all the violence to keep getting from their immigrants. Their migrants would have voted for AfD, but now may vote against them because of their latent anti Americanism. So it's possible that speech may have backfired at least for this election.
But I think I'm with you, Rob.
I think the continual exclusion of you know this is a fifth of the country or more is going to say we are fed up with this, and for all the other parties to say no, we won't talk to you is just simply unacceptable.
I agree, And I'll also feel like the rule of thumb is in general, and it isn't just Jade Vance, it isn't just the current administration. American politicians should stay out of European policyolitics and shut up because there's always that European contrarianism which comes from being a client state, essentially that you know this, you you can't tell me nothing, and it's better that we just let them discover on
their own that it's a good thing to it. It's not necessarily a good thing for all of Germany to suddenly speak Turkish.
Yeah, well, they will not discover it on their own because they have an entire overclass that's designed to keeping that information and that revelation from being enshrined in the general in general wisdom. They won't. I mean, when you said before they need to start thinking of themselves as Europeans, and then you add a nationalist, I mean, that's the problem, that's the division. There is no we know, we all see where nationalism got us. So let's have this pan
European transnational identity. And it ain't going to work because people still like to have their folk ways and their culture and their language and the rest of it. And then within that national quality to hate the people on the other side of the country for different reasons, you know, and so forth, down to the sub atomic level. We are done. Ross's book was great. We want you to buy it. We want you ricochet dot com and discuss it. And if you're thinking, wait a minute, isn't that some
kind of just civil cyvile center right political thing. No, it's the place where people will have an animalst comment thread discussing theology in interesting ways. So yes, Ricochet is all things under the sun, and you really got to go there. You can read it for free, but the membership where the friendship's form and the interesting conversations happened
a couple of shekels a month, So go there. Rob has been great to have you back, Steven and WELLI we would like everybody, of course to buy Cozzy Earth sheets because that thanks them and you get great sheets and find some place to leave us A review couldn't hurt. What's stopping you?
I don't know.
All I know is this has been the Ricochet podcast. We got another coming up right next week. But until then we'll see everybody in the comments, said Ricochet four point.
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