Ross Douthat

Human beings seek community, and permanent openness is hard to sustain.

— Ross Douthat

The American intelligentsia has been pretty secular for a long time. There have always been figures like Oprah Winfrey, let's put it…

— Ross Douthat

On the evidence we have, the meritocratic ideal ends up being just as undemocratic as the old emphasis on inheritance and tradition,…

— 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

There were times at Harvard when I actually longed to hang out with a few more Trotskyists, rather than yet another set…

— Ross Douthat

Many things about American life, that even secular people consider good, have flowed from the presence of a robust, resilient institutional Christianity.

— Ross Douthat

“What he felt during his Spanish encounter with left-wing anti-Christianity was similar to his reactions to the anti-Christianity of the right. The…

— 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

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 do think you can see, throughout American history, this temptation, and it's both a liberal and a conservative temptation, to take…

— Ross Douthat

Where conservative Catholics have the power to resist what seem like false ideas or disastrous innovations they must do so.

— Ross Douthat

It is not white nationalism to believe that countries like the United States would be better off with more babies. That belief…

— Ross Douthat

Most people want the convenience of the Internet far more than they want the private spaces that older forms of communication protected.

— Ross Douthat

If you live under a system that claims to have high ideals but seems ineradicably opposed to your own people's flourishing, the…

— Ross Douthat

Our crisis of the house divided was a Christian civil war.

— 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

The fact that institutional churches have gone into decline doesn't mean that we're going to enter some purely secular age. Secular people…

— Ross Douthat

I think Trump had this general populist agenda but has not been particularly adept at using the levers of power in Washington.

— 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

The thinking person's case for Romney, murmured by many of his backers, amounts to this: Vote for Mitt, you know he doesn't…

— 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…

— Ross Douthat

Our great national drama was a westward expansion that conquered a native population rather than coexisting with it.

— Ross Douthat

Our culture has few taboos that can't be violated, and our establishment has largely given up on setting standards in the first…

— Ross Douthat

You start reading C.S. Lewis, then you’re reading G.K. Chesterton, then you’re a Catholic.

— Ross Douthat

I think that the politicians who were beaten by Donald Trump and then endorsed him, that's something that they will carry and…

— Ross Douthat