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…

— Ross Douthat

I get the sense people sort of imagine that in my personal religious life I must be an intense rigorist wearing a…

— Ross Douthat

In Barack Obama's second term, with his legislative agenda dead in a Republican-controlled Congress, the president turned to executive unilateralism on an…

— Ross Douthat

“In an age of stagnant or declining birthrates, too, these communities’ willingness to heed the admonition to be fruitful and multiply has…

— Ross Douthat

The idea that America has some distinctive role to play in the unfolding of God's plan is compatible with orthodox Christianity. But…

— Ross Douthat

Every elite seeks its own perpetuation, of course, but that project is uniquely difficult in a society that's formally democratic and egalitarian…

— Ross Douthat

There are all kinds of great things that megachurches and successful fundraising appeals can allow you to do, especially in terms of…

— Ross Douthat

In fact, the religious right consists of an alliance of several groups that, without experiencing anything like the oppression visited on black…

— 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…

— Ross Douthat

Fox News is really two news networks. It's a center right news network that has good, solid, interesting coverage if you're watching…

— Ross Douthat

In many ways, American evangelicalism is somewhat stronger today than it was in, say 1955 - certainly more mainstream and influential in…

— 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,…

— Ross Douthat

I had just been sort of raised and formed in a general Christian context, and it seemed to my teenage self that…

— 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…

— Ross Douthat

In general, I think that not voting is a perfectly honorable and civic-minded course in an election with two options that you…

— Ross Douthat

There are many families that want to raise kids on one income, or one income and some part-time work, and instead find…

— Ross Douthat

It is not white nationalism to recognize limiting principles on liberal universalism, and a justifiable role for particularity - ethnic, cultural, religious…

— Ross Douthat

I try not to feel too embattled. I don't think that's a healthy approach for someone who writes for a newspaper like…

— Ross Douthat

The decline of institutional Christianity over the last 40 or 50 years has empowered a side of American religion that has always…

— Ross Douthat

I didn't really start writing about the church in earnest until the mid-2000s, so I wasn't present for or a participant in…

— Ross Douthat

It's a long way from Martin Luther's 'On the Freedom of a Christian' to 'Eat, Pray, Love,' and a vigorous Protestantism should…

— Ross Douthat

I think true atheism is a rare thing in human affairs: Even in the most secularized precincts of Europe, a lot of…

— Ross Douthat

That clerical celibacy doesn't guarantee asceticism is obvious, any more than attending Mass guarantees prayerfulness (trust me on that one). But it…

— Ross Douthat

I think it is fair, in a way, to describe certain forms of Marxism, for instance, as the secular equivalent of a…

— Ross Douthat

The fact that populism is flourishing internationally, far from the Electoral College and Fox News, suggests that Trump's specific faults might actually…

— Ross Douthat

To analyze Trump is to discover only bottomless appetite and need, and to carve at him is like carving at an online…

— Ross Douthat

One of the frustrating tics of our society's progressive vanguard is the assumption that every evil it discovers was entirely invisible in…

— Ross Douthat

To visit the West Coast, now and always, is to be overwhelmed by its beauty - the blue water and blue skies,…

— Ross Douthat

I think it was a good and necessary thing that the American upper class diversified, and that more African-Americans and Jews and…

— Ross Douthat

Every year at this time I join a growing number of journalistic flagellants in enumerating things that I got wrong in the…

— Ross Douthat

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…

— Ross Douthat

I think that liberalism and the centrist governing elite of this country need to learn lessons from the Trump phenomenon. It is…

— Ross Douthat

The rhetoric of anti-Catholicism, whether its sources are Protestant or secular, has always insisted that the church of Rome is the enemy…

— Ross Douthat

Every young writer, I imagine, has their first intellectual magazine, whose essays and articles are devoured all the more greedily for being…

— Ross Douthat

I think you can see a clear link between certain kinds of Christian nationalism and support for Trump. Then, I also think…

— Ross Douthat

I think religious individualism doesn't fulfill impulses toward community and solidarity and it doesn't necessarily work for people when things go really…

— Ross Douthat

“The physical vanity of the diet-and-exercise obsessive is recast as the pursuit of a kind of ritual purity, hedged about with taboos…

— Ross Douthat

We have plenty of examples from twentieth-century history where, out of fear of liberalism or Communism, religious conservatives made alliances with secular…

— Ross Douthat

There are voters out there that a moralistic and populist conservative right might win but a flagrantly hypocritical and ethnonationalist conservatism cannot.

— Ross Douthat

The neoconservatives of the 1970s, former liberals who became Nixon or Reagan backers, eventually accepted the 'neocon' description instead of calling themselves…

— Ross Douthat