Quotes from Ross Douthat

There are many families that want to raise kids on one income, or one income and some part-time work, and instead find themselves pressured, financially and culturally, to keep up with the dual-earning Smith-Joneses next door.

In the end the recrudescence of racism on the right is conservatism's problem to solve, and it has to be solved independently of whatever liberals and leftists happen to be saying. But the task of solving it still gets a little harder with every nonsense charge or bad-faith accusation.

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

Politics is partially about what you fear more than what you love, so there are plenty of things about liberalism all by itself that make me tempted to support Trump.

Every year at this time I join a growing number of journalistic flagellants in enumerating things that I got wrong in the previous annum's worth of columns.

I think generally, Pope Benedict did a good job cleaning up the way the church handled abusive priests but didn't go far enough in how he handled bishops who enabled them.

Even conservative columnists tend to prefer humor that isn't fit to print.

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

I had just been sort of raised and formed in a general Christian context, and it seemed to my teenage self that I found the argument for Catholicism very compelling. To the extent that there was a personal driving force, it was more on the intellectual side of things than the mystical or deeply personal. When I converted, I thought it was true.

I get the sense people sort of imagine that in my personal religious life I must be an intense rigorist wearing a hair shirt under my clothes while scourging myself. And, really, I'm not a rigorist by temperament.

The prosperity gospel, in its various forms, has always been with us and always will. But that reality is no less problematic for being inescapable.

Our immigrants joined a settler culture, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant, that demanded assimilation to its norms.

It's always good to have fears for your eternal soul.

There are all kinds of great things that megachurches and successful fundraising appeals can allow you to do, especially in terms of overseas charity work, and so on. I'm just arguing that American Christians need to recognize the temptations that can expose you to as well.

I think that ultimately the Christian vision of sexuality - the New Testament vision - is not compatible with same-sex marriage. And I don't see a way to change that without entering into a kind of deception, basically.

There may be left-wing or liberal solutions to our deeper problems. But an elite that tries to manage them away with more enlightened media curation deserves to inherit nothing but the wind.

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

The neoconservatives of the 1970s, former liberals who became Nixon or Reagan backers, eventually accepted the 'neocon' description instead of calling themselves 'The Real New Deal Democrats' forever.

It is not white nationalism to believe that countries like the United States would be better off with more babies. That belief can be held for racist reasons by racists, but it can also be held, reasonably and righteously, by people who worry about the economic consequences of demographic decline.

I think it's totally possible and plausible that racial balkanization is a recurring aspect of the nature of human politics.

When a newspaper columnist wants to write about a novel, the rule is that you're supposed to have a 'hook,' an excuse, a timely reason to bring up the book in question.

If you're too confident in assuming that America's and God's purposes are one, you tiptoe toward idolatry.

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.

If you live under a system that claims to have high ideals but seems ineradicably opposed to your own people's flourishing, the desire for idealistic reform within the system has to coexist with an openness to more radical possibilities.