Latest Ross Douthat Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• Even secular people can't really escape from the need to rest their ideas on some belief, some sort of commitment that is not scientific commitment.

  Ross Douthat

  Commitment, Ideas, People

  Source: www.christianpost.com

• The idea of universal human rights may not seem as weird to some people as the idea of a personal God, but it is still a metaphysical idea that liberalism, at least as we know it, couldn't really survive without.

  Ross Douthat

  Ideas, Rights, People

  Source: www.christianpost.com

• I think that secular liberals need to recognize that they are still, often, hanging their worldview on what are metaphysical ideas.

  Ross Douthat

  Thinking, Ideas, Needs

  Source: www.christianpost.com

• If you're willing to recognize the religious element in one secular ideology, you need to be able to recognize it in your own.

  Ross Douthat

  Religious, Able, Needs

  Source: www.christianpost.com

• What replaces Christianity isn't going to be Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and so on. It's going to be something else and something secular people may not like very much.

  Ross Douthat

  People, May, Christianity

  Source: www.christianpost.com

• I think it is fair, in a way, to describe certain forms of Marxism, for instance, as the secular equivalent of a religion. But, I think the same is true, to a certain extent, of secular liberalism as well.

  Ross Douthat

  Thinking, Way, Certain

  Source: www.christianpost.com

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

  Ross Douthat

  Mean, People, Age

  Source: www.christianpost.com

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

  Ross Douthat

  People, Christianity, Resilient

  Source: www.christianpost.com

• The idea of a post-religious society is a fantasy, ultimately. Human beings are, by nature, religious in various ways.

  Ross Douthat

  Religious, Ideas, Way

  Source: www.christianpost.com

• Independent of the critique I'm making, I'm just trying to paint a more comprehensive portrait of American religion than you get from a right versus left, religious conservatives versus secular liberal, believer versus atheist, binary. Too often, we just look at religion in America through that kind of either/or lens. I think it's much more complicated than that.

  Ross Douthat

  Religious, Atheist, Independent

  Source: www.christianpost.com

• Institutional Christianity has had clear secular benefits to American life for hundreds of years. It's played both a prophetic role in terms of generating moral critiques of American excesses, and so on, and also a communal role, in terms of building community as the country moved westward to the role my own Catholic Church played in assimilating generations of immigrants.

  Ross Douthat

  Country, Years, Community

  Source: www.christianpost.com

• I read a lot of G.K. Chesterton. It was a fairly conventional intellectual path to the Catholic church, I would say.

  Ross Douthat

  Catholic, Intellectual, Church

  Source: www.christianpost.com

• My mother converted when I was 16. She was the driving force behind religion in our family. So, I'm sure I was heavily influenced by that. But, I also was, and still am, convinced by the Catholic churches historical claims to represent the continuity with the early Church that other forms of Western Christianity lack.

  Ross Douthat

  Mother, Historical, Catholic

  Source: www.christianpost.com

• I do think you can see, throughout American history, this temptation, and it's both a liberal and a conservative temptation, to take a healthy patriotism a little too far. For liberals the temptation is to say the purpose of politics is to straightforwardly bring the kingdom of God to Earth. For conservatives, I talk about Glenn Beck, the temptation is more apocalyptic and messianic, it's the temptation to say we did have a covenant with God, a literal covenant beginning with the Founding, and we are, like Israel in the Old Testament, falling away from it.

  Ross Douthat

  Fall, Thinking, Israel

  Source: www.christianpost.com

• Americans are an "almost chosen people," which is meant to suggest that there are clear parallels, literal, theological and everything else, between the American story and the Old Testament story of Israel and then the broader story of the Christian church. It's OK to recognize the parallels. It's OK to invoke them. But, you have to keep that "almost" in front of the "chosen." You can't go all the way and say, "America is Israel, America is the Church." That's where I think patriotism shades into, what I call, the heresy of nationalism.

  Ross Douthat

  Christian, Thinking, Israel

  Source: www.christianpost.com

• It's not always clear where a healthy patriotism shades into a dangerous nationalism.

  Ross Douthat

  Healthy, Shade, Dangerous

  Source: www.christianpost.com

• It's just silly to look at the incredibly steep decline in the mainline and the clear institutional weakening of Catholicism in the 1960s and 70s and pretend that something really big didn't change then. It did change. There really was a significant institutional decline.

  Ross Douthat

  Silly, Looks, Significant

  Source: www.christianpost.com

• It's clearly the case that there's not some moment in American history when every evangelical is holding hands with every Catholic who is holding hands with every mainline Methodist, or what have you. Obviously, American Christianity was deeply divided in all kinds of ways at mid-century too. But there was a kind of convergence going on. Even though Reinhold Niebuhr, the great mainline Protestant theologian, didn't think highly of Billy Graham, he and Graham still, clearly, had more in common, both theologically and in their attitudes toward religion in public life.

  Ross Douthat

  Attitude, Thinking, Hands

  Source: www.christianpost.com

• I think it is very clear that, though great difference remained, evangelicals moved closer to Catholics, mainline Protestants and evangelical Protestants moved closer together, and this convergence coincided with greater institutional strength for all the Christian churches than, for the most part, you see today.

  Ross Douthat

  Christian, Thinking, Differences

  Source: www.christianpost.com

• In many ways, American evangelicalism is somewhat stronger today than it was in, say 1955 - certainly more mainstream and influential in the culture as a whole. But, the increased strength of evangelicalism hasn't increased fast enough to compensate for the total collapse of mainline Protestantism and the pretty steady weakening of my own Roman Catholic Church.

  Ross Douthat

  Catholic, Church, Stronger

  Source: www.christianpost.com

• Just as the superstar pastor model can have its problems once the superstar pastor gets old or has a scandal or something, the house church model... there's a reason that the house churches of the New Testament era grew up into a more institutional faith down the road.

  Ross Douthat

  House, Church, Scandal

  Source: www.christianpost.com

• In the end, you do need institutions to transmit the faith for the long haul. That's why I make the case that, in certain ways, American Protestants could stand to recover the denominationalism that they've left behind over the last 50 years. They are real values in having a confessional tradition that can sustain your faith over the long term.

  Ross Douthat

  Real, Years, Long

  Source: www.christianpost.com

• I do think that evangelicals in general need to think seriously about how you pass on your faith across generations and over the long haul.

  Ross Douthat

  Thinking, Long, Generations

  Source: www.christianpost.com

• I think what you see a lot of in American religion, even in areas of American Christianity that don't go all the way with Osteen to the idea that God wants you to have this big house and so on, the nature of American religion right now, the fact that it is so non-denominational and post-denominational, the most successful churches have to be run more like businesses than ever before. I think that just exposes Christians to a constant temptation to think about the ministry more as a business than they sometimes should.

  Ross Douthat

  Christian, Running, Successful

  Source: www.christianpost.com

• Every Christian in every time and place is going to be tempted by certain forms of heresy. I'm sure I'm tempted by my own.

  Ross Douthat

  Christian, Certain, Form

  Source: www.christianpost.com