THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:
A single columnist cannot possibly assess the flood of new religious books to rank the very best of 2025. But The Guy can attest that three new titles from really smart writers are really intriguing. Each is a good read for believers. But they’re particularly pertinent for someone without religious involvement who is open-minded, curious, and perhaps wondering amid the tinsel and eggnog whether there might be something to this whole God thing.
One of the three is very timely considering the new year’s 250th anniversary of United States independence: “In God’s Image: How Western Civilization Was Shaped by a Revolutionary Idea” (New York University Press) https://nyupress.org/9781479835713/in-gods-image/. Author Tomer Persico, who traces the powerful impact of related beliefs about humanity, is an Israeli historian who just concluded three years as a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
The second title, “Taking Religion Seriously” (Encounter Books) www.encounterbooks.com/books/taking-religion-seriously/#/, comes from conservative social analyst Charles Murray, well-known for works like “Losing Ground” (1984), “Coming Apart” (2012), and co-authorship of the much-disputed “The Bell Curve” (1994). This jaunty and readable memoir takes the boyhood Presbyterian to Harvard, where he learned that nowadays educated people don’t (yes) take religion seriously. But late in life this skeptic’s “haphazard pilgrimage” seriously re-examined what the evidence and reason tell us about God and Christianity, producing surprise affirmations and lingering puzzles.
Slightly Astonishing
The third book of special interest is “Believe” by veteran New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, who makes a slightly astonishing assertion in the subtitle: “Why Everyone Should Be Religious” (Zondervan) www.amazon.com/Believe-Why-Everyone-Should-Religious/dp/0310367581/. Like Murray, his ingenious argument builds from unimaginable facts about the material universe that science has only recently uncovered, which he then contends make faith in God and the supernatural quite plausible. Unlike Murray, Douthat is a lifelong Christian, first mainline Protestant, then more evangelical, and now firmly Catholic.
Tomer Persico draws a direct link between two uber-famous quotations, from 1776 and several thousand years ago. The Bible’s Genesis 1:26 (“Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness’”) brings the human question through the complexities of the centuries to America’s Declaration of Independence (“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”)
This substantial work of intellectual history encompasses “a vast amount of compelling evidence” in “provocative” fashion, according to The Wall Street Journal. The theme is as grand as it gets — how that biblical Genesis teaching shaped the stature of humanity in general, and then of each individual soul, culminating in Europe and North America as “hegenomic world powers, economically, scientifically, and culturally,” beginning in the 17th Century. This produced democracy, “protection of human rights, freedom of religion, and unprecedented material abundance” in the West, including the equality of women, and scientific research with its enormous gains in physical health. Even human slavery, a central and seemingly ineradicable system in all societies for thousands of years, could no longer be tolerated, as certain Christian thinkers first insisted 17 centuries ago.
A Crude Sketch
The story is too complex for any simple summation but here’s a crude sketch. For the Jewish people, humanity’s “image of God” was seen mostly in terms of identification with the God-given community. The world-shattering elevation of each individual, Persico says, was largely achieved through the bold biblical teachings of Jesus and the Apostle Paul, as the new Christian religion abolished national barriers. Medieval theologians explored the majesty of human reason. Eventually, the Protestant Reformation super-charged a thorough individualism in which only each person’s free conscience carries spiritual validity, not conformity to the rules of church or king.
This freedom, of course, allows rejection of the God who inspired it, which has become so pervasive in the 21st Century West that Persico worries it erodes our necessary quest for meaning and the “community, solidarity, and tradition” inevitably required to thrive. Lest we miss how unusual this moment is, Persico provides a useful reminder for modern readers that through most of history atheism was non-existent and each region’s religion suffused every aspect of life.
Charles Murray says awareness of “brute facts” from science “forced me to rethink everything,” in particular the realization that our universe is “created to permit life” against incredible odds, which suggests purpose and a Person. The mysteries of material existence led to the inescapable fact of humans’ inherent sense of moral right and wrong. He concluded, for instance, that altruistic good deeds performed without any benefit in return are “a fundamental component of human psychology” that evolutionary biology cannot explain.
An Unavoidable Jesus
Then there was the unavoidable matter of Jesus, a “magnetic figure, surely unique in all of human history.” Murray begins minus of any preconceptions and considers what we can know about the Nazarene. That leads to 55 pages of skepticism about scholars’ skepticism regarding New Testament history. At the end, this churchgoing Quaker remains quizzical about Jesus’ divinity, the afterlife, and those miracles. He figures that the Easter story of Jesus’s bodily resurrection is implausible, but equally so are the arguments against it. Throughout, Murray provides useful sidebars specifying the many writings that influenced his quest, in case others want to join.
Ross Douthat’s argument that we all should be religious was explained in this prior “Religion Q&A” column www.patheos.com/blogs/religionqanda/2025/02/why-believe-in-god-why-not/ but here’s a summary. Douthat concludes by depicting his own religious migration to Catholicism, but the book mostly promotes religious faith in general. He candidly discusses major reasons why people question faith and religious institutions, but counters with the following points.
For him, religion provides “an entirely reasonable perspective on the nature of reality and the destiny of humankind,” plus research proves it is desirable for peoples’ well-being. “Nonbelief requires ignoring what our reasoning faculties tell us,” while the “religious perspective grapples more fully with the evidence before us” and, compared with skepticism, “has the better case by far for being true.” So we have an “obligation” to seriously consider it.
That leads to the widespread intuition “that nothing so vast and complex and beautiful could exist by simple accident” as modern science produces “much better evidence for the proposition that the universe was made with human beings in mind.” If so, “it would be strange not to wonder about its purposes or where you fit into them, self-defeating not to care about how your own life aligns with the story in which you have been placed.” And then the existence of self-consciousness tells us our minds are not merely matter but “have a special relationship to the physical world and its originating Cause.” This in turn allows humanity’s understanding of nature and our own imitation of the creation’s “order and beauty,” seen in technological and artistic inventions, which in a way brings us full circle back to Persico’s scenario.
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