The Faith of David Brooks

And the debate it inspired

For several years now, people like me — that is, devout Christians who read the New York Times and watch the PBS NewsHour — have been trying to follow the spiritual journey of David Brooks. While his Jewish upbringing and Episcopalian schooling left him an agnostic, if not an atheist, the NYT columnist and PBS pundit has been hinting for over a decade at having experienced something like a conversion to Christianity. Indeed, I went to a Brooks lecture on our campus several years ago primarily because I was curious to see how, if at all, he would talk about Christianity. He strongly affirmed the value of Christian colleges like Bethel and Wheaton (the alma mater of his second wife, Anne Snyder, editor of Comment), but didn’t exactly profess faith in Jesus Christ.

So I wasn’t surprised to find so many people in my networks talking excitedly about “The Shock of a Faith,” a kind of spiritual autobiography that Brooks published in the Times just before Christmas. In it, he likened his journey to faith as a train trip: “You’re sipping your coffee and all around you people are sitting nearby reading the paper and doing the ordinary things. But then you look out the window and you realize there’s a lot of territory behind you. Gradually over the course of the journey you have left the realm of atheism. At some point you have crossed a border into a new land.”

David Brooks at the Lyndon Johnson Presidential Library in 2022 - Public domain/Wikimedia

But what to call that “new land”?

Today, I feel more Jewish than ever, but as I once told some friends, I can’t unread Matthew. For me, the Beatitudes are the part of the Bible where the celestial grandeur most dazzlingly shines through. So these days I’m enchanted by both Judaism and Christianity. I assent to the whole shebang. My Jewish friends, who have been universally generous and forbearing, point out that when you believe in both the Old and New Testaments, you’ve crossed over to Team Christian, which is a fair point.

Throughout the essay, you get hints of that dual enchantment. Brooks alludes to Genesis, the Psalms, and the Apostle Paul. He quotes Christians like Paul Tillich and George Marsden¹ and Jews like David Wolpe and Abraham Joshua Heschel. He finds “holy delight” both in a rabbi’s laughter at Shabbat and in a priest gazing at the Host during Mass.

So it was interesting to observe two contrasting responses to Brooks’ column at the end of December. On the one hand, a theologically diverse variety of Christian friends recommended it on Facebook as a profound meditation on the nature of faith. For that matter, I not only included it in a Saturday links wrap but quoted Brooks’ “powerful rumination” in my Christmas Eve devotions.

On the other hand… well, here’s just part of what Mark Oppenheimer wrote at ARC:

Ultimately, Brooks’s religious identity should not matter to anyone but himself (and his Creator, he might add)…. The problem, however, is that he is not writing as a mere Christian; often, he is writing as a conflicted Jew. And in doing so, he keeps getting Judaism very wrong. The more Brooks writes, the more it becomes clear that he is not particularly interested in Judaism, except as some sort of nostalgia trip, familial obligation, or cover for his own discomfort at having left it behind. He should stop writing about Judaism, now.

A former NYT columnist himself who earned a PhD in religious studies at Yale, Oppenheimer insisted that members of “Team Christian” could not also be Jewish:

Notwithstanding liberal Christian theologians’ attempts to soften their faith’s supercessionist message, it’s undeniable that Christianity is meant to complete Judaism, to make it whole; to be Christian is to deny the sufficiency of Judaism as a religion, and to deny the sufficiency of Jews as one’s religious community. It’s also to deny that the Jewish commandments—keeping kosher, observing fast days, celebrating holidays like Sukkot and Passover—are in any way binding. If Christianity is true, then normative Judaism is ancient Near Eastern cosplay.

For the Jew, Christianity is a heresy, an elevation of a false messiah. Which is not to say that the Gospels are not great literature, or don’t have worthwhile teachings; but for the Jew, they are not divine. Brooks says they went, for him, “from beautiful to true,” which suggests that he believes in the resurrection of Jesus. If Jesus was resurrected, then we Jews are in error (maybe even stubborn, or hard-hearted, to use old antisemitic tropes). We keep praying for the coming of the messiah; if He came already, we’re just wrong. Point being: there is no accepting the whole shebang, because the two parts of the shebang contradict each other—for the Jew, anyway. It’s the Christian who believes in their consilience.

Earlier this week, ARC published a fascinating array of responses to Oppenheimer and Brooks. They’re all worth reading, but let me just mention two that brought into relief what’s become my main takeaway from “The Shock of Faith.”