Ross Douthat

Ross Gregory Douthat was born November 28, 1979,^[2] in San Francisco, California, to Patricia Snow, a writer,^[5] and Charles Douthat, a partner in a New Haven law firm^[6][7] and a poet.^[8] His great-grandfather was the poet and Governor Charles Wilbert Snow of Connecticut.^[9]

He grew up in New Haven, Connecticut.^[10] As an adolescent, Douthat converted to Pentecostalism and then, with the rest of his family,^[11] to Catholicism.^[12]

Douthat attended Hamden Hall, a private high school in Hamden, Connecticut, graduating in 1998 as class salutatorian.^[13] Douthat graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree from Harvard University in 2002,^{[citation needed]} where he was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa.^[14] While there, he contributed to The Harvard Crimson and edited The Harvard Salient.^[15] He was also a 2002 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow.^[16]

Douthat was a senior editor at The Atlantic until 2009.^[17]

In April 2009, he became the youngest regular op-ed writer in The New York Times after replacing Bill Kristol as a conservative voice on the Times editorial page.^[18][19][20] Since 2007, he has been the film critic for National Review.^[4]

In 2025, Douthat began hosting the Times Opinion podcast Interesting Times, which explores the New Right and broader evolutions in American politics.^[21]

In 2007, Douthat married Abigail Tucker, a reporter for The Baltimore Sun.^[6] Douthat is Catholic.^[12][22][4] He and his wife have five children and live in New Haven, Connecticut.^[23][24]

Douthat has written that he suffers from chronic Lyme disease.^[25][26]

Douthat is a conservative.^[27][22][20] Douthat has described his views and conversion to Catholicism as being influenced by the writing of C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, and J. R. R. Tolkien.^[22][4] In 2026, he debated Steven Pinker on the subject "Do We Need God?" during a discussion on CBS News.^[28][29]

In 2017 Douthat wrote: "What I’m looking for when I gamble on a world-picture is something that makes sense of the four major features of existence that give rise to religious questions – the striking fact of cosmic order, our distinctive consciousness, our strong moral sense and thirst for justice and the persistent varieties of supernatural experience. ... And, no surprise here, I think the combination of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament is the darkest swan in the sea of religious stories — the compendium of stories, histories, poems and prophecies and parables and (yes) eyewitness accounts that most suggests an actual unfolding divine revelation, and whose unlikely but overwhelming role as a history-shaping force endures even in what is supposed to be our oh-so-disenchanted world."^[30][jargon]

Douthat has written against abortion, arguing that the development process from zygote to human being is continuous, with no property "that makes the unborn different in kind from other forms of human life — adult, infant, geriatric".^[31]

Douthat has published books on the decline of religion in American society, the role of Harvard University in creating an American ruling class and other topics related to religion, politics and society.

• His book Grand New Party (2008), which he co-wrote with Reihan Salam, was described by New York Times commentator David Brooks as the "best single roadmap of where the Republican Party should and is likely to head."^[32]
• Douthat's The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success (2020) received positive reviews in The New York Times^[33] and National Review.^[34]
• In 2025, Douthat published Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.^[35]

Douthat frequently appeared on the video debate site Bloggingheads.tv until 2012.^{[citation needed]}

In 2015, Douthat delivered the twenty-eighth Erasmus Lecture, titled A Crisis of Conservative Catholicism, hosted by First Things magazine and the Institute on Religion and Public Life. In his lecture, Douthat examined the tensions within contemporary Catholicism following the Second Vatican Council, focusing on how conservative believers have navigated questions of authority, reform, and tradition under modern papacies. He argued that the Catholic Church was facing an internal struggle over its moral and theological identity, reflecting broader cultural divisions within Western Christianity.^[36]

• Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class. New York: Hyperion. 2005. ISBN 978-1-4013-0112-5.
• Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream. With Salam, Reihan. New York: Doubleday. 2008. ISBN 978-0-385-51943-4.
• Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics. New York: Free Press. 2012. ISBN 978-1-4391-7830-0.
• To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism. New York: Simon and Schuster. 2018. ISBN 978-1-5011-4694-7.
• The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success. Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster, 2020. (The paperback edition, issued in 2021, is titled: The Decadent Society: America Before and After the Pandemic.) ISBN 978-1476785240
• The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery. Convergent Books. October 26, 2021. ISBN 0-59-323736-6
• Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. Grand Rapids: Zondervan. 2025. ISBN 978-0-3103-6758-1.