EDITORIAL: Accompaniment reflects our conviction in the God-given dignity of all human persons, even those with whom we disagree.
This past Sunday marked the end of an era: Catholic journalist Ross Douthat wrote his final column as a staffer for The New York Times, as he departs for a new role with CBS’ 60 Minutes.
Douthat had been a regular for the Times since 2009, when at age 29 he was hired as the newspaper’s youngest regular opinion columnist. As Jesuit Father Bill McCormick has rightly noted, Douthat’s nearly two-decade-long tenure at “The Gray Lady” was spent demonstrating “that Catholicism remains an intellectually serious way of understanding the world.”
But even more than that, as a religious conservative writing and podcasting for a largely secular progressive audience, Douthat’s tenure at the Times modeled a journalistic version of a papally approved mode of evangelistic outreach: the art of accompaniment.
The approach had been emphasized by Pope Francis — making Douthat’s embodiment of it somewhat ironic, given his frequent criticisms of the Argentine Pope. Laid out in Evangelii Gaudium, the art of accompaniment emphasizes meeting others where they are at, treating their experiences seriously, and gently guiding them toward deeper truths.
While Douthat never explicitly framed his journalism in terms of accompaniment, he certainly had thoughts about it as a form of Catholic outreach.
“I think that Francis’ vision of accompaniment is basically correct,” he told America magazine in 2018. “… [T]he trick is to find a means of accompaniment that doesn’t compromise or sacrifice the truth.”
Douthat’s journalism at the Times has been shot through with this approach. Instead of settling for simplistic caricatures, he has always gone to great lengths to understand the views of the secular audience with whom he often disagreed. His style has been the antithesis of the cheap “dunking” on opponents that passes for argumentation in the era of social media. Instead, his capacity for “steelmanning” his opponents’ positions spoke not only to his confidence in his own views but also his respect for the dignity of those with whom he argued.
This approach also underscored Douthat’s purpose in writing for the Times: persuasion. Rather than speaking in a triumphalist tone to his own tribe, Douthat sought to speak winsomely to those who disagreed with him. His goal was never to destroy, nor to simply get along with liberal elites, but to substantively engage. He sought to meet his interlocutors on their own turf and appeal to their own “better angels” to persuade them that his point of view — which often aligned with the Church’s — was correct.
Douthat’s columns are full of instances of this. For example, he regularly appealed to liberals’ emphasis on social goods like community to make them reconsider going to church. He tapped into their concerns about irrational religious superstition to make a case for more institutionalized and orthodox forms of Christianity. And he used progressive readers’ discomfort with sex-selective abortions to force them to confront the fact that all abortions end a human life.
Similarly, his podcast Interesting Times often featured discussions with ideological opponents, such as the CEO of an embryo-screening company or a New Testament scholar who denies the Resurrection. While Douthat challenged the views of these and other guests, his willingness to first hear them out and sit at the same table made his arguments all the more compelling.
In his recent “exit interview” with the Times’ Ezra Klein, Douthat said that the opportunity to write for an audience that largely disagrees with him has been a “gift,” one that has forced him to refine his own thinking. The effort, he added, has not been in vain, as he has found that “the act of sustained, attempted good-faith interaction does, even in totally polarized environments, yield a kind of reasonably favorable response.”
Douthat’s tenure at the Times has given his coreligionists an example to follow. Most of us won’t be writing opinion columns for national publications anytime soon, but we will likely be engaging with people who don’t share our views on faith or controversial social issues: a secular humanist cousin; the pro-abortion person you end up in a conversation with at a cocktail party; or a young co-worker taken by the promises of transhumanism.
Douthat’s opinion writing has not only supplied his fellow Catholics with helpful points to make our views more persuasive in these kinds of interactions, but a style with which to engage in making them: one that is winsome, respectful and inflected with just a touch of self-deprecating humor.
To be clear, in some contexts, our focus must be on defeating bad ideas. But in most human interactions, accompaniment is the order of the day, a posture that reflects our conviction in the God-given dignity of all human persons, even those with whom we disagree. We applaud Ross Douthat for putting that principle into practice and wish him well as he takes on a new journalistic challenge.
