I have no earthly idea how to describe this conversation. It’s about religion and belief – at this moment in our politics, and in our lives more generally.My guest and I come from very different perspectives. Ross Douthat is a Catholic conservative, who wrote a book called “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.” I’m a … Californian. But I think everyone would enjoy this conversation — believers, skeptics and seekers alike.Some questions touched on: Is the Trump administration Christian or pagan? How do Christian Trump supporters reconcile the cruelties of this administration with their faith? Can religious experiences be explained by misfiring neurons? Should organized religions embrace psychedelics? Can mystery provide more comfort than certainty?And if you do enjoy this episode, be sure to check out Douthat’s new New York Times Opinion Audio show “Interesting Times,” available wherever you get your podcasts, and on YouTube.Mentioned:Interesting Times with Ross Douthat“Donald Trump, Man of Destiny” by Ross DouthatLiving with a Wild God by Barbara EhrenreichBook Recommendations:Modern Physics and Ancient Faith by Stephen BarrAfter by Bruce GreysonMind and Cosmos by Thomas NagelThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected] can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.htmlThis episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Elias Isquith. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Mixing by Isaac Jones, with Aman Sahota and Efim Shapiro. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Marina King, Jan Kobal, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: Who are the guests and what is this conversation about?
I always enjoy conversations that I have no earthly idea how to describe. And today's is very much in that vein. My guest is my colleague, Ross Douthat. He's the author of Believe Why Everyone Should Be Religious, a book I enjoyed very much, even though quite a bit of it I had some questions about.
And he's the host of the new and really excellent New York Times Opinion podcast, Interesting Times, where he has been interviewing people on the modern American right. This is a conversation about mysticism and the role it is playing in the Trump administration and this era in politics.
And belief and the role it plays in society, in our lives, Ross's argument for why I should be more religious and you should be too. And it also gets into some things I did not expect to be talking about today on the show. Just a note before we get into the conversation here. This was recorded on Monday, April 14th. That was the day of the Trump-Bukele meeting.
So that's not going to be discussed in here. And also before the death of Pope Francis. So we also were not able to talk about that here. The conversation, as you'll hear, I think stands on its own. But because those things might have fit into places I wanted to mention, why you won't hear them. Ross Douthat, welcome to the show. Ezra Klein, it is a pleasure to be here.
Chapter 2: How is Donald Trump viewed as a 'man of destiny'?
So last year, after the first assassination attempt on Donald Trump, you wrote about Trump as a man of destiny, that he was, quote, a figure touched by the gods of fortune in a way that transcends the normal rules of politics. How are you thinking about that now?
Well, there were other passages in that column that are worth emphasizing. But yeah, I stand by that reading of the Trump phenomenon. I think one of the ways in which my sense of politics generally has changed over the course of the Trump era is just I have more appreciation for weird forces that are outside, certainly outside the control of people who write about politics.
You can't have lived through the Trump era without As a conservative columnist or newspaper writer and not have the sense of how fundamentally unimportant columnists are, what happens in American politics. It is a consistent exercise in humility. It is. Well, but even beyond that, you and I both grew up in a period that was, I think, reasonably described as a kind of timeout period.
from grand historical dramas. It was not the end of history in the totalizing sense, but the kind of Francis Fukuyama view of the post-Cold War era as one that had a certain kind of predictability and order and stability. History felt under control. History felt under control, right? And the reality is that much of human history is just not under control in that way.
And there are forces that move through history, generally forces that move through history that are sort of hard to predict and assess. But I do think often they are connected to specific personalities. And there is some kind of marriage between particular personalities and particular moments.
And the idea of a man of destiny, a great man of history, is a useful way of thinking about that when it happens, as I think it has happened with Donald Trump, the rise of populism, the crackup of the liberal order, and so on. The reason I laughed at the outset is that it's important to stress that someone can be a man of destiny and be bad.
Someone can be a great man of history and be worth opposing. You can look back at Napoleon and say, man, he was sort of above and beyond in terms of historical forces and also root for Wellington at Waterloo. That's okay.
How does it sense that Trump is a man of destiny? Because I agree with you. And I think understanding... The interpretation of Trump is somehow mystic, is very important to understanding his relationship now with the right. But specifically, how do you think it has changed the way his staff and his allies treat him?
I think that it is very hard to go through the kind of drama that Trump himself personally went through in... We can go back further, but let's just say the world that ran from January 6th through his return to power. And if you're on his side through that story, not come away with the feeling that you were sort of moving with the wave of history. For people in Trump's circle, this sense of...
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Chapter 3: What is the role of mysticism and paganism in the Trump administration?
I've had this joke in my head often in the past couple of months as somebody whose mythic analogies tend to come from the Marvel or DC universe more than the Old or the New Testament. They're just like, convince me we're not being governed by the League of Shadows.
And I went back and I rewatched the piece where, you know, Ra's al Ghul sort of reveals the whole plan and he says, look, we've infiltrated every layer of Gotham's power structure. We tried to do this through financial engineering and destroy Gotham's economy. It didn't quite work. Now we're back for number two. And the fact that we are here is proof of your decadence.
The fact that we could do this, get this close, shows that you deserve what we are about to do to you. Yes. And I'm not saying we are actually being governed by the League of Shadows, but when you brought up the decadence, there is a dimension of that to me when you think about this in those almost like narrative terms, a sort of reflection of very dark sides of our own lives.
Well, and I've carried on a couple of different running arguments throughout the Trump era that are going to continue, I guess. And one is with people on the right who have a sort of League of Shadows view of the overall situation, right? It's like things are so bad. that you might as well unleash chaos. You saw a lot of this in response to the tariffs.
People mostly on social media, real politicians don't say this, but people on social media who are like, fine, we need a 10-year reset of the whole global economy because things are so bad and so on. And I've spent a lot of time disagreeing with those people. I would prefer not to take the black pill, but I've also spent time disagreeing with
The kind of liberals and sometimes, you know, never Trump Republican critics of Trump who I feel like don't quite grasp why he's successful and what you need to do in response. Because I don't think he could be this successful if it were enough to just elect Joe Biden to fix our problem.
Well, clearly that didn't. That didn't work. Right. It didn't work. We tried that and definitely trying to elect him twice to fix our problems was not the winning move. I was listening a couple months ago to Barry Weiss's podcast and she had Louise Perry, who's a sort of British conservative gender and sexuality writer.
And Perry made this argument that I've been thinking about where she said that the difference between Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate is that Peterson is a Christian and Tate is a pagan. Right. And I think this might be unfair to historic pagans, but the argument she was making depends on the pagans, but also depends on the Christians.
But the argument she was making is that Peterson is, at least in his ethics, somebody who thinks a lot about the weak, who cherishes women. Kate is more interested in power, in dominance, in sort of driving his enemies before him and sort of fathering a lot of children for a lot of people, potentially. Yeah.
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Chapter 4: How do Christian values intersect with Trump-era politics?
Neuralink is...
It's pushing transhumanism forward very fast, if it can. Well, but there's also different transhumanisms, like, which, you know, what... Anyway, all I'm... No, these are actually... These are things that I, myself, am profoundly uncertain about in this moment. Like, what is the greatest danger from a Christian perspective to the future of the human race? I'm not entirely sure.
So a big part of your book, as I read it, is about what happens when elite society becomes hostile in its view of the world to the human impulse to seek a picture of reality that runs deeper than materialism. What happens when the seekers have nowhere to go, when organized religion weakens, or not nowhere to go? What happens when they're not channeled into organized religion?
And what happens when elite society becomes too materialistic? And I understand for you, and you can tell me if this is wrong, that one of the forces I think that you believe is driving the era is a kind of frustrated seeking, right? a sort of desire to re-enchant the world that has run into an elite culture. Maybe it's Apex being the Obama administration and that sort of moment in American life.
It's the Ezra Klein show. That's the Apex Ezra. Let's be honest here. Although that... Well, we'll get into this. I always joke the difference between you and me is more that you're a Catholic and I'm a Californian than that I'm a materialist and you're not.
Well, one can use the word materialist in different ways. Sure.
When you use it in this context, what do you mean?
I mean the view that all of existence, life, the universe, and everything is finally reducible to matter in motion. That matter is primary and mind is secondary rather than the other way around. I don't mean materialism in terms of Madonna's material girl or something like that, although the two can be connected.
So one of the various arguments in my book is that disenchantment is fake, fundamentally. The idea that you can enter a secular age where once upon a time people had wild religious experiences, but now we inhabit the iron cage of modernity and all of those are off the table, that just doesn't describe reality.
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Chapter 5: What are the critiques of the Trump administration from a Christian perspective?
physics, or if you're going to take a much more straightforward view of the math, we're splitting into uncountable new realities at all times. The implications are getting weirder and weirder.
So many podcasts.
So many podcasts. I love all that stuff. But so there's an argument for belief, and then there's an argument for channeling that belief. And I understand the book to really be about the second argument. I actually think the first argument is pretty straightforward, but it's about channeling this belief into organized religion.
So given the strangeness of everything you just described, and then also given that the big organized religions disagree on many things, a point you make on the book. A few, yep. Why go there? Why is it not enough to just say, you should believe that this world is not something we understand how to explain, and you should be open to all these things that violate religion?
a materialist intuition about it? What's the argument for going into organized religion as the answer for such profound unruliness?
Well, a couple things. So first of all, I don't think that the case for not being a materialist is a case for sort of total unruliness. To the contrary, I think part of the case for not being a materialist is precisely the order of of the universe.
One of the problems that materialism has, that you sort of gestured at, is accounting for the specific ways in which the universe is ordered, the beauty and precision and symmetry involved, and also, as far as we can tell, the extreme unlikeliness that this particular order would be selected for unless Whoever selected it were interested in listening to lots of podcasts.
No, you know, creating planets, stars, and conscious beings. So you have the religious argument is an argument for overarching structure. And then the ways in which it is weird are not themselves entirely random. Like there are patterns in spiritual experience. There's no sort of predictability to it overall, right? But the kinds of experiences that people have have a certain kind of consistency.
You can track different kinds of spiritual experiences across different cultures. You can track them in near-death experiences. You can track them in terms of, like, studies of what appear to be miraculous healings and so on.
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Chapter 6: Why does Ross Douthat argue for belief and organized religion?
Why 100%?
I don't mean like every aspect of it is dangerous, but I mean it is certainly dangerous. There are dangers within it. There are serious dangers within it.
Tell me about your views on psychedelics.
So I have never taken psychedelics. I've never been at an ayahuasca retreat. This is entirely based on reading and conversations. My view is that some psychedelics almost certainly open you to contact with non-human spiritual entities and that they do so in a way that is different from other forms of spiritual experience in that, again, not in every case, but it can be sort of a shortcut.
but that shortcut means that you're entering these landscapes without the kind of preparation that not only the traditional religions, but the shamans who use ayahuasca in the Amazon, right, or wherever they use it, would say is necessary for these kind of encounters.
And there's, you know, a Twitter joke or a social media joke, right, about, you know, getting one-shotted by a six-dimensional Mesoamerican demon or something like that that
people make about these kind of drugs and that's a joke but I don't think it's entirely a joke and so yeah I think that that possibility is real and it does not at the same time mean that lots of people can't take these drugs and have mystical experiences that just sort of convince them that there's more to reality than just the material and That is a correct view.
So in that sense, the drugs teach you something real about the world. But it can be like anything in human life. And one of the points I try and stress is that religion is not like out there in some compartment where it's totally different from every other thing and you can't argue about it the way you argue about other things and so on.
No, like in other aspects of human life, dealing with the supernatural is like dealing with the natural. There are good things and bad things and dangers and opportunities, and you just want to be aware of that before you throw yourself into a realm of experience that you might not be prepared for. But I haven't done it, and you have, or have you? Say what? Have you? Yes.
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Chapter 7: What is the relationship between materialism, mysticism, and religion?
I think what one should take seriously is the fact that clearly our minds exist in a dynamic relationship to our bodies and to physical reality. And religious experience, again, to take the Barbara Ehrenreich example, there is the kind of religious experience that falls on people unbidden. In some way. And I have seen this happen.
And I think it's a little bit hard to tell a brain chemistry story where it's like, why do human beings suddenly have this God apprehension thing that just sort of turns on? Like, where did this apprehension device come from? All our other apprehension devices are evolved to meet some sort of actual reality.
Well, can I force you to steel man this? Because... If you've ever read an Oliver Sacks book or familiar, I mean, as you are, I know, with mental illnesses, there are many things that happen in our brains where you might say, why do we have something like that that can ever turn on?
But we do. Yes, but religious experience and spiritual experience are at the very least in a distinct category from mental illness in that people who have religious experiences are very often entirely sane and entirely aware of the strangeness of the experience they've had and so on. Again, which doesn't, I take your point about the Oliver Sacks stuff, like you could just say, okay, well,
people's brains can misfire in this way and it yields mental illness and they misfire in that way and they think they're encountering the numinous or something like that. I don't think that's an impossible view to hold. All I'm saying is that the religious world pictures already takes it for granted
that your body, the physicality of your body, has some kind of connection to your apprehension of the divine. And most of the time, you are not supposed to be apprehending the divine. And this goes to your, you know, to go back to your vision, right? The idea that, like, religion is a scaffolding. Okay, like, reality itself is kind of... The Silicon Valley guys would say it's a simulation, right?
Okay, well, it's a world that you're supposed to be in. You're supposed to be in this world. Whatever God is up to doesn't work if we're not in this world most of the time. And having a spiritual experience is getting our mind a little bit out of this material world. But it's not the way things are supposed to work all the time. We're here as material embodied creatures for a reason.
But yeah, I don't think there's anything...
internally contradictory about thinking that the clear link between the physical and the spiritual means that you could reduce the spiritual to the physical experience i always enjoy that there are these two completely opposite theories of what the brain is doing and i'm not saying one isn't much more accepted than the other but there's the understanding the more materialistic sense of it that everything in our experience
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Chapter 8: How do religious experiences challenge secular materialism?
Like what happens when all of a sudden what is official knowledge no longer conforms to the world as you experience it and the sort of crowbar of skepticism that places between not just you and that particular institution, but maybe you and all of them simultaneously, if this could be wrong, right?
If this could have failed me so profoundly, well, who's to say it's not all failing me so profoundly?
Yes. No, I mean, that is the feeling that you have, right? And so I had, still have to some degree, but I'm much better, a chronic illness that is not officially recognized by the Centers for Disease Control. And indeed, to say that you have the chronic form of Lyme disease is to identify yourself in some way with... just the world of everyone from RFK Jr.
to, you know, holistic wellness practitioners, and so on, a whole world that is held in severe disrepute by official knowledge, official medical knowledge. You say kind of pointing at me. Pointing... No, no, no. I mean, I think at the, you know, this conversation has been the most serious blow to official knowledge since... No, I don't know. Yeah, and so that obviously... Like, I really was sick.
I really did get better using a combination of really strong antibiotics and other stranger things that are not recommended by the CDC. But it really did work, and I am morally certain both that chronic Lyme disease absolutely exists and the CDC's recommendations are absolutely wrong. So then the challenge is you've seen that the pillar of official truth has a hole in it.
How many holes does that mean that there are? And something that I have very self-consciously tried to do in my own thinking about this, and this applies to arguments about religion and religious belief as well, is to not assume that because official knowledge is wrong about one thing, it's wrong about everything. That seems like a big mistake. And two, not to assume that
because official knowledge is wrong about one thing, one important thing that really affected my life, that all evidentiary standards should be thrown out or anything like that. But that's clearly a really hard psychological balance to strike. I think you just see this. I saw it myself.
I spent a lot of time in worlds of chronic illness and alternative medicine, and people just, for totally understandable reasons, became full spectrum skeptics about anything the government said, anything that the American Medical Association said. It was just, if they're wrong about my illness and my experience, they must be wrong about The pull of that is incredibly strong.
And in the case of religion, right? Like, I think one of the things, understandably, that nice, secular, agnostic people fear about going too far with, like, my arguments is that the next thing you know, we're going to be... throwing out all of modern science and progress and locking up Galileo and so on, all of these things. And I don't want to say that that's not a legitimate fear.
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