“Douthat adapts Pascal’s case to a more secular age by bracketing belief. For the sake of his argument, it doesn’t matter if there’s such a thing as heaven or hell. The benefits of religion are all right here on earth. Just go to church, meet people, celebrate the holidays, learn about morality, bury the dead, and give to the poor. It will make you and everyone else better off here and now.”

If you are a secular liberal who made your twice-yearly trip to church on Easter Sunday, you took an important step toward improving your life, your political philosophy, and your community, according to New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. The next step is to go back, not just at Christmas, but every Sunday from now on.

Douthat’s Easter Sunday column was, in his words, an “implausible proposal” aimed at helping post-Christian readers fill a gap in their lives while helping their former churches fill their pews. Mainline churches—the long-established, theologically liberal denominations that in the twentieth century were closely associated with white American political power—have been aging and dwindling as younger Christians either join nondenominational evangelical churches or disaffiliate from religion altogether. Half of American Presbyterians are age 59 or over; half of atheists and agnostics are under 34.

Douthat’s argument takes seriously the fact that religion is a social phenomenon, a way that humans negotiate public life and manage the “effervescence” of collective experience. He writes that church groups are better for dating than Tinder and that “Thriving congregations have spillover effects that even anti-Trump marches can’t match.” (Douthat doesn’t consider the effect his proposal would have on revenues at brunch restaurants.)

Even if it is true that American liberalism would flourish if it returned to the churches, the prospects for that happening are slim. The biggest reason people have left the mainline is not sociological. It’s theological. People simply don’t believe what the churches teach about God. No social or material inducement may make a difference. In that sense, secular liberals are more sincere about belief than are adherents to the prosperity gospel, which promises riches to the faithful.

The argument Douthat makes is similar to one made by another conservative Catholic, the French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal, more than 350 years ago. The argument known as Pascal’s Wager is the idea that it’s better to believe in God than not, because even if the odds in favor of God’s existence are pretty remote, the cost of belief is relatively low and the potential benefit is enormous. Likewise, the benefit of not believing is low compared to the potential cost, if indeed God does exist and consigns unbelievers to eternal hellfire. So if you’re unsure about God, act as if you believed, because “Even this will naturally make you believe, and deaden your acuteness.”

Douthat adapts Pascal’s case to a more secular age by bracketing belief. For the sake of his argument, it doesn’t matter if there’s such a thing as heaven or hell. The benefits of religion are all right here on earth. Just go to church, meet people, celebrate the holidays, learn about morality, bury the dead, and give to the poor. It will make you and everyone else better off here and now. It will even make you a better, more committed liberal.

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