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Ross Douthat

American author and columnist (born 1979)

Field	Value
name	Ross Douthat
image	Ross Douthat on Conversations with Tyler.png
birth_name	Ross Gregory Douthat
birth_date
birth_place	San Francisco, California, U.S.
occupation
education	Harvard University (BA)
subjects
spouse
caption	Douthat in 2025
alt	Ross Douthat, wearing a blue sweater and checkered button-down shirt, speaks into a microphone
module
children	5

Ross Gregory Douthat ( ; born November 28, 1979) is an American author and New York Times columnist. He was a senior editor of The Atlantic and is the film critic for National Review. He has written on religion, politics, and society.

Early life and education

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

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

Douthat attended Hamden Hall, a private high school in Hamden, Connecticut, graduating in 1998 as class salutatorian. 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. He was also a 2002 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow.

Career

Douthat was a senior editor at The Atlantic until 2009.

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. Since 2007, he has been the film critic for National Review.

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

Personal life

In 2007, Douthat married Abigail Tucker, a reporter for The Baltimore Sun. Douthat is Catholic.

Douthat has written that he suffers from chronic Lyme disease.

Views

Douthat is a conservative.

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."

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".

Work

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."
Douthat's The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success (2020) received positive reviews in The New York Times and National Review.
In 2025, Douthat published Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.

Douthat frequently appeared on the video debate site Bloggingheads.tv until 2012.

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.

Published works

Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream. With Salam, Reihan. New York: Doubleday. 2008. .
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.)
The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery. Convergent Books. October 26, 2021.

References

(July 14, 2008). "Rush Versus Me".
(October 11, 2016). "My birthday, as it happens".
(2009). "[[Current Biography Yearbook]]". H. W. Wilson Company.
Ross Douthat. "Anne Rice's Christ".
(1996). "John Carmichael (1740–1806) and his wife Esther Canfield (1748–1816) of Sand".
"Poems".
Hoffman, Chris. (March 18, 2020). "Q&A with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat". Connecticut Magazine.
Lamb, Brian. (May 6, 2009). "Q&A with Ross Douthat". ([[C-SPAN.
Sheelah Kolhatkar. (March 6, 2005). "A Pisher's Privilege". [[The New York Observer]].
George Packer. (May 26, 2008). "The Fall of Conservatism".
(January 2010). "Ross Douthat's Fantasy World". [[Mother Jones (magazine).
Chotiner, Isaac. (September 18, 2023). ["The believer : how the Times columnist Ross Douthat translates faith in the secular world"](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/09/18/ross-douthats-theories-of-persuasion <!--). [[The New Yorker]].
(2017-07-17). "Ross G. Douthat, Class of 1998".
"Phi Beta Kappa Members Named, Continuing 212-Year-Old Tradition of Recognition {{!}} News {{!}} The Harvard Crimson".
Shah, Huma N.. (March 13, 2009). "Crimson Alum Replaces Kristol". The Harvard Crimson.
"Publius Fellowship Alumni".
Ross Douthat. (April 17, 2009). "A Goodbye". The Atlantic.
Calderone, Michael. (March 31, 2009). "Douthat enters new Times zone". politico.com.
(March 11, 2009). "Times Hires New Conservative Columnist". [[The New York Times]].
(July 20, 2008). "Conservative Thinkers Think Again". [[The New York Times]].
Spangler, Todd. (2025-04-07). "New York Times to Bow Podcast About Trump Administration's 'Ideas and Personalities,' the 'New World Order' and More Hosted by Opinion Columnist Ross Douthat".
(September 30, 2007). "Abigail Tucker, Ross Douthat". [[The New York Times]].
(January 3, 2019). "Opinion | Your Questions, Answered". [[The New York Times]].
"About Ross Douthat". The New York Times Company.
(October 26, 2021). "The Deep Places by Ross Douthat". Crown Publishing.
Hoffman, Chris. (March 18, 2020). "Q&A with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat".
George Packer. (May 26, 2008). "The Fall of Conservatism".
Douthat, Ross. (July 6, 2017). "Should Tyler Cowen Believe in God?". [[The New York Times]].
(November 30, 2021). "Opinion | the Case Against Abortion". [[The New York Times]].
David Brooks. (June 27, 2008). "The Sam's Club Agenda". [[The New York Times]].
(25 February 2020). "Ross Douthat Has a Vision of America. It's Grim.".
(5 March 2020). "Our Comfortable Decadence".
Wilson, Kit. (February 25, 2025). "Mind the Gap". [[First Things]].
Douthat, Ross. "A Crisis of Conservative Catholicism".

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