Ross Douthat

Ross Gregory Douthat (/ˈdaʊθət/ DOW-thət;^[1][2] born November 28, 1979)^[3] is an American author and New York Times columnist. He was a senior editor of The Atlantic. He has written on religion, politics, and society.

Ross Douthat
Douthat in 2025
Born	Ross Gregory Douthat (1979-11-28) November 28, 1979 (age 45) San Francisco, California, U.S.
Occupation	Columnist author blogger
Education	Harvard University (BA)
Subjects	Politics religion social commentary higher education
Spouse	Abigail Tucker ​ (m. 2007)​

Early life and education

Ross Gregory Douthat was born November 28, 1979,^[2] in San Francisco, California, and grew up in New Haven, Connecticut.^[4] As an adolescent, Douthat converted to Pentecostalism and then, with the rest of his family,^[5] to Catholicism.^[6] Douthat has described his conversion to Catholicism as being influenced by the writing of C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, and J. R. R. Tolkien.^[7][8]

His mother is a writer.^[9] His great-grandfather was the poet and Governor Charles Wilbert Snow of Connecticut.^[10] His father, Charles Douthat, is a partner in a New Haven law firm^[11][12] and a poet.^[13]

Douthat attended Hamden Hall, a private high school in Hamden, Connecticut. Douthat graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree from Harvard University in 2002, where he was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa. While there he contributed to The Harvard Crimson and edited The Harvard Salient.^[14]

Career

Douthat is a regular columnist for The New York Times.^[15] 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.^[16][17] Since 2007, he has been the film critic for National Review.^[8]

Before joining The New York Times, he was a senior editor at The Atlantic.^[18] He 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."^[19] Douthat's The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success (2020) received positive reviews in The New York Times^[20] and National Review.^[21] Douthat frequently appeared on the video debate site Bloggingheads.tv until 2012.

In 2025, Douthat began hosting the Times Opinion podcast Interesting Times, which explores the New Right and broader evolutions in American politics.^[22]

In 2025, Douthat published Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.^[23]

Beliefs

Douthat writes: "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."^[24]

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".^[25]

Personal life

In 2007, Douthat married Abigail Tucker, a reporter for The Baltimore Sun.^[11] Douthat is a Catholic Christian.^[6][7][8] He and his family live in New Haven, Connecticut.^[26]

Douthat has written that he suffers from chronic Lyme disease.^[27][28]

Published works

• 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.

Notes