I Read The Best Case for Religion of Our Time

Kelsey Osgood’s latest book, Godstruck, shows why people fall in love with religion

Hello friends, and welcome back after a long Pesach break! This week we have been graced with an excellent guest post by 18Forty’s very own Sruli Fruchter. Sruli is the director of operations of 18Forty and host of its podcast, 18 Questions, 40 Israeli Thinkers. A rabbinical student at RIETS, Sruli is also a columnist at the Forward. When not reading, writing, or tweeting about Rav Kook, Sruli enjoys adding books and articles to his ever-growing reading list.

Sruli reviews a book he read over Pesach and argues for the way that religion’s appeal lies in personal experience and emotional connection, rather than logical arguments. It is a moving and eloquent piece that highlights the power of the individual’s journey to faith. Enjoy!

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Religion is falling out of style. That’s not my assessment but what the numbers clearly show: 29% of U.S. adults are religiously unaffiliated, rising to 43–44% among 18–34-year-olds. And the trend is accelerating.

Why people leave or reject religion—whether Judaism or otherwise—is anyone’s guess. Some cite the allure of secular life or the clash between Western values and traditional beliefs; others point to religious trauma. As it relates to renewing religious interest, that is a worthwhile conversation to have: Knowing what repels people can revive religious interest. But that is not what Kelsey Osgood chooses to explore. In her latest book, Godstruck: Seven Women’s Unexpected Journeys to Religious Conversion, Osgood wants to know why people choose religion.

The women Osgood follows span various religions—Quakerism, Evangelicalism, Mormonism, Islam, the Amish church, Catholicism, and Judaism. (Osgood herself, an Orthodox Jewish convert, is the seventh subject.) Each chapter centers around a new woman’s story, tracing their fledgling religious interests through their long-winded road to conversion.

Some, like Angela—an Asian-American as devoted to atheism as she was to ethical living—found themselves drawn to religion almost against their will. “I think at some point,” Angela says, “it just felt like I couldn’t imagine not making this part of my life.” Others, like the “spiritually precocious” Orianne, grew up with an innate sense of the Divine, which led her to become a sister of the Daughters of St. Paul.

What binds these women together is their happenstance encounter, engagement, and marriage to faith. Love stories, after all, are always nourishing.

I developed a hypothesis about Godstruck after I finished its first chapter: This is not just a book about religion but a religious book. Osgood both excavates the rich lives of these women with a journalist’s objectivity and speckles her sobered thoughts throughout as an open-hearted friend—all gently nudging the reader to see how God and religion offer what our modern world is ravenous for. And Osgood does so excellently. She invites readers to join these women’s complex religious affairs—their hesitations and doubts, impulsivities and excitement. The messiness of their journeys appeals because of how realistic they seem. (I am thinking of Islamic convert Hana, who moved to Saudi Arabia, struggled in dating, and experimented with Islamic coverings, from the full-bodied niqab to the hair-cloaking hijab.) Reading about people reinventing their identities evoked an envy of admiration in me. It left me feeling profoundly inspired. That is the gift Osgood presents us.

In a word, Godstruck is making the best case for religion in our times.

The conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat’ latest book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, is self-explanatory by its title alone. While I did not read the book (and feel embarrassed to even mention it), George Packer of The Atlantic did, and one paragraph of his review struck me:

Douthat guides the reader through the science toward God with a gentle but insistent intellectualism that leaves this nonbeliever wanting less reason and more inspiration. I can’t follow him into his Middle Earth kingdom of angels, demons, and elves just because a book he’s read shows that a universe in which life is possible has a one in 10-to-the-120th-power chance of being random. We don’t fall in love because someone has made a plausible case for being great together. Some mysteries neither reason nor religion can explain.

I will resist commenting specifically about Douthat’s book (because, again, I did not read it), but Packer’s critique resonates with me. Though I grew up Modern Orthodox, my spirit was really churned in my gap year in Israel at Yeshivat Orayta. My own religious growth (read: “flipping out”) did not develop because I heard a “plausible case” presented for it. I instead think back to moments when I caught glimmers of God—Friday night prayer under Jerusalem’s violet sky, desert nights illuminated by distant sparkles, silent walks in a forest drenched in serenity.

Human life resists the strictures of rationalism; so few things in life abide by what ought to be or what makes sense. Why fall in love, or lose yourself in sunsets, or blow out birthday candles surrounded by friends, or open yourself up to the magical quality of religious life? Rationalism suggests that our beliefs and choices follow from a set of axioms that develop by principles into what we call religion, but logic is not what moves hearts.

I am not religious because it makes sense. I am religious because I love God and I believe in religion’s worth and validity. Pulling out a whiteboard to persuade me with Pascal’s wager or Aristotelian proofs only stuns me into repulsion. Living with God, as William James writes in The Varieties of Religious Experience, means living with “a higher kind of inner excitement” that calls one into all of life’s richness. Experiencing that is enough to convince me of it. And I think that is precisely what the people of today are searching for: a faith that convinces them by how they experience it.

The iconoclastic thinker Rabbi Shimon Gershon Rosenberg, known as “Rav Shagar,” wrote about the ineffable quality of his faith in Faith Shattered and Restored:

And truly, my faith is mystical; it is a wordless, letterless faith. It is my lot to believe without telling others … that I believe, much as the kabbalists cleaved to the Almighty with ovanta deliba, “the understanding of the heart.” This psychological technique or practice precedes language and grants it its vitality. In its second phase, belief manifests as a life of faith. It is compelled to function in a world of duality, and if I overlook its origins in the Real (for instance, by trying to demonstrate its objective truth), I destroy it.

Sometimes we are so bent on grasping everything with our human minds, which philosopher after philosopher has acknowledged is inherently limited, that we taint the beauties of life that evade our senses: emotions, stories, dreams, selfhood.

What Osgood offers through her luminous writing and vulnerable storytelling is an intimate view of the spiritual stirrings that lead people to faith. To read Godstruck and follow these women’s stories with Osgood as your guide is to enter into a doorway that leads you to the Divine. Osgood’s own story is peppered throughout the book, culminating in the final chapter in which she recounts her relationship with the “Divine Feminine.” Her journey is profoundly admirable.

If there were ever a question as to how we can save religion from its death rattle in the modern day, Osgood offers an answer. She shows us that the case for religion is best made with feeling, not logic; by demonstration, not persuasion; with experience, not intellect. The best case is no case at all.

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What did you read over Shabbos?

A shared selection of Shabbos reads