A new pope is coming. Is the US embracing faith?

Starting today – for however long it takes – hundreds of Catholic cardinals will sequester themselves in the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican to select the next pope.

The death of Pope Francis and the ensuing attention on the Catholic Church – with a real-life secretive conclave, not just a Hollywood movie version – comes amid a bit of good news for organised religion in the United States. 

For decades, the number of religious believers in the US, especially Christian believers, had been declining. But that decline has stopped recently, and there are signs that the US may be toying with a religious revival.  

There are similar signs of growth in other parts of the world. In England and Wales, the number of young adults who say they go to church once a month has increased 400% in the last six years. In France, the Catholic Church conducted 45% more baptisms this Easter than last year, a surge largely fuelled by young adults.

The person that I wanted to speak to about the state of faith and Catholicism at this particular moment is Ross Douthat. He's a columnist for the New York Times who's just written a new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. In the book, Ross makes the case for why people might benefit from following one of the major world religions – even if it's not his own. 

Ross is both an American and a Catholic – so our conversation touches on the conclave in Rome as well as the state of religion in the US.

I really enjoyed our conversation – I'd encourage you to watch (or read) more of it below.

Below is an excerpt from our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity. 

Katty Kay: I'm wondering if you could just start by giving us a sort of picture of faith today in America.

Ross Douthat: America has gone through a 20-year period of secularisation in which church attendance has declined, religious identification and belonging has declined more sharply. More Americans than ever before say they have no religious affiliation. 

But we've also entered in the last few years into a kind of pause in that trajectory. The rate of secular Americans has stopped going up. There's some modest evidence of religious revival, but really the best way to think about it is that America isn't having a religious revival. It's sort of considering whether to have one. That's the phrase I've been using. 

KK: [Laughter] It's dipping its toe into the faith pond.

RD: Yes! I think one way to think about it, too, is that institutional religion in the US has never been weaker – or at least not in modern American history. You have the first big generation in our history, that's been raised without even a sort of Christmas and Easter – or Sunday school kind of exposure to religious faith. 

But in an interesting way, that's making some of them more open to religion and religious questions than their parents or grandparents would have been, because they don't have this sort of memory of a kind of oppressive-seeming institutional framework. But that impulse can go in all kinds of directions.

So, you could easily imagine some sort of explicit revival where more people go to church, more people belong to Christian denominations. But it could also just be a kind of more purely individualistic thing, where you have lots more interest in spiritualism, the occult, UFOs, a very 1970s sort of landscape. I think both of those scenarios are there on the table, but we don't know fully what direction the culture is going.

KK: I never met Pope Francis, but his whole ethos was a church that was more inclusive, less hierarchical. As a Jesuit, he protected the poor and the masses. When you look at his role over the last few years and who he brought into or did not bring into the Catholic Church, how would you quantify his papacy?

RD: It's hard to quantify a papacy, but I think that's right, that the pope was sceptical or hostile to some of the forms of conservative and even traditionalist Catholicism that have often been unexpectedly successful in winning over college graduates and more elite Westerners. He saw Catholicism, ideally, as a faith more for the masses. But he saw that happening primarily, I think, through a kind of liberalisation and a certain kind of accommodation with modern culture.

But in a way, the story I would tell is that while Francis wanted the church to be more competitive with those non-denominational evangelical kinds of churches, the particular form of more liberal Catholicism that he partially embodied is actually less appealing, seemingly. It sort of loses people at both ends. It loses people both to non-denominational churches and to more conservative forms of faith. 

So, I think he was a tremendously charismatic and influential figure as an embodiment of the church on the global stage. But I think the particular model of Roman Catholicism that he embraced is actually likely to decline further in the future. 

KK: That brings us very neatly to the conclave, which is just starting and has kind of become the greatest political religious show on earth. Thank you to Robert Harris and his very successful movie with Ralph Fiennes.

RD: Well, he was building on material that the church had already supplied! [Laughter] Let's give Catholicism its due!

KK: So, the shtick about American politics is that it's a pendulum, or at least that's been the shtick to date. It swings one way and then it swings the other way. I don't know if this is even an interesting or an appropriate analogy, but you've hinted at some of that in your last answer, that you think that the Catholic Church may now be at some sort of a juncture. Where does it go? Does it carry on the tradition of Pope Francis or are we going to see a shift to something more conservative, more dogmatic?

RD: So, to the extent that you can handicap a papal election, and to be clear, I believe you can be excommunicated for betting on one –

KK: [Laughter] OK, it's a secret between you and me, then!

RD: [Laughter] No one will see this, right? 

I think if you were to speculate, you would say that a lot of leaders of the Catholic Church would like a modest course correction from where Francis went. They would think to themselves, 'OK, we don't want a hard swing towards any kind of traditionalism. But we think Francis sort of went too far in, in fact, some of his wars on traditionalists, his attempt to ban the traditional Latin mass, and also in his enthusiasm for sort of constantly opening up fraught subjects for debate.' So, I think rather than a pendulum swing, I think a lot of cardinals would be looking for some kind of figure who was seen as a moderate, who could sort of hold the church together, because one thing Francis did was sort of make the liberal factions in the church demand more and the conservative factions rebel. 

So, the gulf between the liberal Catholic Church in Germany and the more conservative churches in sub-Saharan Africa, that gap is pretty wide right now. So again, you wouldn't expect cardinals to say, we want the traditionalists, we want Benedict XVI, but more so you'd expect them to want someone who could sort of not rock the boat too much and hold things together. 

However, the other reality is that Pope Francis picked cardinals from all over the world in ways that didn't follow at all the normal pattern of picking cardinals. Instead of picking cardinals from the big cities, you know, the big archbishops and so on, he picked people who just sort of struck him in different ways. And it isn't always clear that they had any kind of theological or ideological consistency. So, you have all these cardinals coming in, many of whom have never met one another. He didn't hold a lot of meetings of cardinals.

And I think that means that saying, 'Oh, the cardinals want a moderate,' maybe works as a generalisation, but it doesn't actually tell you a lot about how these men are going to think and vote and operate once they're thrown together for the first time. So, that places a limit on all handicapping. What people might say they want in theory could end up yielding something very different when they actually come together and vote.

KK: OK, I absolutely don't want to be responsible for your excommunication, so we'll leave the handicapping at that –

RD: [Laughter] Well, you know, I didn't lay odds, so I'm in good shape.

KK: Ross, your new book is Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. Why did you write this book now? We live in a world, where there is an awful lot of chaos and lack of belief in institutions and people feel confused by technological, political, climate changes that are happening around us. Did you feel that was a backdrop against which your argument might fall on friendly ears?

RD: To some degree, yes. I think that there's a reason that writers like Dawkins and the other new atheists found a friendly audience 20 years ago. I think it had to do with the aftermath of September 11, a fear of religious fanaticism, opposition to George W. Bush and sort of evangelical politics. I think they picked a good opening, a good moment. And I think this is a moment 20 years on where people are less confident that a world without religion is going in a positive direction.

I do think there is a certain amount of evidence that actual religious practice does have an effect on the individual, right? Especially studies related to the Mormon Church and other places where you have sort of really strong communitarian religious cultures. It does seem to have a real effect even for people on the margins in terms of their behaviour, whether they get addicted to drugs, or these kinds of things. But what is definitely true is that you're never going to sustain a religious culture just on the promise that it's good for you to go to church.

And this is one of the points and arguments that I make in the book is that in the end, if you're going to get a religious revival, people have to be convinced that it's not just good for you, but that it's actually true and real, right? That in fact, you have to be persuaded that God is real and wants you to go to church, not just it's going to help increase your social capital and psychological well-being by 3.7%.

We're very comfortable, especially journalists in sort of secular spaces, talking about how religion is good for you, because it's something that the secular person can sort of concede and understand.

KK: And there's data. We like data points.

RD: You can measure it. And in America, you know, everything, we quote Alexis de Tocqueville at the drop of a hat. We're like, 'Tocqueville said religion was good for you. But in the end, that is too limited a case'. And I think it is important for religious arguers, myself obviously included, to sort of go a bit further and say, 'you know, there's almost certainly a God and [you're] probably going to meet him when you die and you should take that into account for your Sunday morning choices or Saturday choices,' as well.

The other thing I'd say though is that I do think that a lot of people who are agnostic or who are interested in religion but think it's sort of anti-science or unreasonable and so on have not fully kept up with some of the stranger directions that our understanding of the laws of the universe have gone, the sort of peculiar fine-tuning of the universe to allow for human life, the debates about the nature of consciousness. And I think some of those debates have gone in a direction that's quite friendly to religious ideas. And so, it's worth sort of explaining that and arguing that at this moment, saying that actually, you know, the militant atheist is, you know, is not quite the representative of scientific certainty that maybe people assume that he is.

KK: You advocate for organised religious faith, not the kind of, as you vaguely referenced, California-style mysticism, not to disparage California. Of course, our friends there might well be religious, too. 

RD: I was born in San Francisco, so you know, I can't speak ill.

KK: Is it a curious position for somebody who is a practicing Catholic to find themselves in, to be advocating for other religious faiths with which you may have some things in common, but a lot not in common.

RD: Yes, I mean, I think there's obviously a kind of delicacy to the argument where I'm simultaneously saying as a Catholic Christian, I think that my religion has the fullness of truth and in an ideal world, I would persuade you of that. But also recognising that, you know, the realities of pluralism, the complexities and difficulties of any human life, the fact that there are long-standing religious debates that no single author or arguer is going to settle.

All of that means that you need to be open to the idea that a movement towards religion is going to move some people into my own faith, and some people into other faiths, and it's OK to argue for that, right? To sort of say, look, I want you to come all the way with me, but if you come part way and end up in a somewhat different place, that's still better than sitting forever in atheism or agnosticism.

But I do sincerely think that in a pluralist society, everyone is not going to convert to the same religion, and it would be a good thing if more people moved into the terrain of serious religious practice.

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