Can Apologetics Save the World?

The bad news and the good news

Out this week on YouTube, you can now enjoy a panel discussion I contributed to at the small Breakwater conference in London this summer. This conference couldn’t have been more different from ARC, but I really enjoyed myself and appreciated the chance to contribute. Breakwater is an ongoing international series of small conference experiments designed to foster open conversations among people from different religious backgrounds. It’s an entirely grassroots effort with no major institutional sponsorships, which in my opinion makes it more interesting.

A couple of extremely capable women made this particular event happen, and we were all very grateful for their kindness, efficiency, and foresight. Somehow, they secured multiple beautiful venues for multiple events over the course of a few days, arranged to have sessions recorded, arranged top-shelf catering, and all the other nuts and bolts that make a successful event like this. They should seriously give masterclasses.

One of the organizers moderated my panel, which was about whether Christian apologetics is helping or hurting the church (and the world, I suppose). A complicated topic that we only had an hour and change to explore, but her thoughtful questions opened up lots of space for reflection:

I was joined by Nathan Jacobs, an Orthodox philosopher, and two skeptical YouTube creators—Jared Smith, an evangelical Christian deconvert, and an excommunicated Mormon who goes by “Nemo” to protect his identity. Jared and Nemo shared their stories in another fascinating panel on conversions and deconversions. I appreciate how both of them are trying to use their channels in constructive ways. Nemo’s story is tragic, and he gave me a new appreciation for the corruption of the Mormon church and the courage it takes for ex-Mormons to start their lives over from scratch. He gently tries to help other Mormons follow his example here. Meanwhile, Jared is conducting an ongoing social experiment which he calls “atheist church audits,” in which he visits a new church every Sunday and comes back with an honest “review.” These are done in a spirit of good faith and sometimes hilariously funny. Jared to me is the “sad clown” of atheist YouTube. I think he’s wrong about many things, but no one else is doing what he does. On this trip, he decided to review Westminster Abbey.

Back to our panel: Readers new to my work might not be aware that apologetics is an area where I have a lot of accumulated knowledge and thoughts. I didn’t mince words in this discussion when I talked about what I call the “apologetics industrial complex,” as distinct from what I call the “apologetic project.” I have no confidence whatsoever in the former, for reasons I’ve written about before and started unpacking here. But I still have faith in the latter, and at some point I plugged a ministry I work with called Talk About Doubts, where people are invited to write in with their honest questions about Christianity and get one-on-one answers over Zoom. Sadly, our work sometimes involves “deprogramming” bad apologetics and replacing it with something better.

It would be an exaggeration to say “Christian apologetics has failed.” However, I do think it’s fair to say that the industrial complex has damaged its efficacy in many serious ways. There are of course the very obvious moral scandals of figures like Ravi Zacharias, or more obscure figures like the charismatic apologist Michael Brown (whom Jared studied with at a “pseudo-seminary” called FIRE). But there are other, more hidden failures of honesty and character that have had their own slow-motion corrupting effect, through a perfect storm of ignorance and arrogance.

Not everyone I could name is equally culpable, or culpable in all the same ways. But let us say the continued circulation of “slopologetics” has been a group effort. Academic standards are low and have been allowed to remain low with no rigorous accountability structure. Inadequate models like the much-touted “minimal facts” argument for the resurrection have been adopted as the standard template for decades of apologetics education, with no serious effort to fact-check the argument’s flimsy foundations. People with social capital have been aggressively shielded from confronting their blunders honestly. People with low moral character have been able to muddy the waters and insinuate themselves into positions of respectability and influence. And people attempting to do interesting, honest work can struggle to gain a hearing if that work involves acknowledging any of this out loud.

All of this has been playing out on a small canvas, niche debates even within the already small niche of conservative Christianity, and usually missing the thrill of debates over cultural hot topics. With limited time (and only middling execution, since I’m a much better writer than speaker), my goal in this panel for a mixed audience was twofold: to explain why I think the apologetic project is still valuable and relevant in our cultural moment, and to acknowledge that it hasn’t always served the culture effectively due to the failures of the industrial complex.

Who or what is apologetics for? Does apologetics “make people better”? Can apologetics save the world? Each of these questions could inspire an article series unto itself. Here I try to flesh out my answers perhaps a little better than I could flesh them out on the spot.

In hindsight, it might have been helpful if we had framed the conversation by going around and clearly defining what each of us meant by the term “apologetics.” I define it very simply as the public presentation of the evidence for Christianity. But Jared, my ex-Christian co-panelist, seems to define it as the practice of assuming Christianity is true, then desperately arguing in favor of it no matter what the evidence says. This sounds like Nemo’s experience of Mormon apologetics, in which he was taught that it’s better to have an answer, any answer at all, than to say you’re not sure.

Here I appreciated Nathan Jacobs’ contributions, because he could confirm from his own inside experience of academic politics that irreligious academics may be just as siloed as the religious, if not more so in some cases. At one point Jared innocently said he imagined academics being thrilled by some new discovery that proved they were wrong. Nathan said on the contrary, many an academic fiercely resists such discoveries precisely because his life’s work is bound up in being right. (One rare exception he encountered was the philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff, who praised Nathan for completely changing his mind about Kant.)

I am not an academic, but this chimes with what I know my parents have encountered in their careers. Within New Testament studies, where my mother has focused for about a decade now, the word “apologist” is a slur wielded against scholars who buck consensus in a conservative direction, even if they are carefully making their case on the merits. And not only that, but the scholar who wants to break into the field is instructed not to be too “apologist-adjacent.” It’s a kind of academic purification ritual, requiring at least several degrees of separation between you and the “unclean” scholar. This hostility has generated an unhealthy cycle within evangelical academia. An evangelical desperate to feel part of the academic Inner Ring is tempted to conform, while at the same time being tempted to cloak his ideas in double-speak so that he can retain an evangelical audience.

So, a big part of doing apologetics well is simply not worrying about whether you will be called an “apologist” in the insulting sense, or about whether a Cool Person might lump you in with (gulp) the fundamentalists. True open-mindedness means following evidence wherever it leads, and by wherever we do mean wherever. In my mom’s case, that’s led her sometimes in what people might call a more liberal direction—away from inerrancy, for example—but also in a direction ridiculed by liberals as she upholds a high view of the gospels’ reliability. As you can imagine, the chips have fallen all over the place, and she has simply let them fall.

In the discussion, I got a laugh by also criticizing what I call the “Always Be Closing” model of apologetics, in which doing apologetics is pressed into the mold of a sales pitch. Apologists are sometimes told they need to “make the case” as quickly and slickly as possible, and that if once they can get the target to agree with a proposition like “Jesus rose from the dead,” it’s a hop and a skip to getting them into the Christian fold. This has incentivized the development of “slopologetics” like minimal facts.

Of course, many people simply won’t be persuaded by apologetics of any kind, for all kinds of reasons—hostility to the tenets of Christianity, academic pride, “church hurt,” or perhaps just what my agnostic friend Ben Sixsmith calls “apatheism.” This isn’t the fault of any apologist in particular. It’s simply how things are. But I don’t conclude from this that apologetics is valueless, only that not everyone will see its value. At one point, Jared brought up Jonathan Haidt’s “rider and the elephant” to point out that people often don’t make decisions based on rational arguments. I obviously concede this, but I still maintained (and Nathan agreed with me, though we come at this from different perspectives) that trying to help people be rational is a good thing. Man is a social animal, but man is also the rational animal, even if he doesn’t always act like it.

Nathan talked about how for many young “nones” he’s engaged—like the subjects of his documentary Becoming Truly Human—it was an emotional reason or a traumatic life experience that led them to leave religion behind. When he asks what might draw them back in, they say they’re looking for an experience of the supernatural or the numinous. An experience drove them away, perhaps only an experience can bring them back.

Here, writers like Rod Dreher have entered the chat to talk about how Christianity might be “reenchanted.” I’ve engaged these ideas at length, with some misgivings. One misgiving is that I believe the integration of heart and mind isn’t a process that can be indefinitely deferred. If intellectual doubts arise, in the end there is no way but through. It won’t do to try to put them in a box and keep coasting on vibes. In Jared’s church background, there was a heavy emphasis on experiential closeness to God. When he couldn’t experience that closeness, he felt profound devastation. Meanwhile, as our ex-Mormon panelist reminded us, Mormons are famous for telling people to hang their faith on an experience, the “burning in the bosom.” I would submit that something is badly wrong with your epistemology if it’s indistinguishable from Mormon epistemology.

So to answer a question Jared asked me, “Does apologetics make people better?” I would say sometimes yes, in the sense that it can ground people in reality, and in the process it can make them whole where they have felt internally divided. Now, there are some saintly people who spend their whole lives in a serene state of grace where somehow they “just know,” without ever being able to formulate a proper apologetic argument. I would say such people are accessing commonsense intuitions that apologetics can formalize. It wouldn’t “make them better” in the sense of making them holier, though perhaps once it was explained to them they would think it’s kind of neat. But obviously, I think it’s always a good thing for people to understand why true things are true, and achieving a better understanding of the truth is especially important for people who don’t already have serene confidence about these things. (And even serenely confident people must interact with the not so serenely confident, and should have an idea of what to say.)

But alright, Jared also asked me, so then what do you say to people who listen to all of the arguments and simply do not believe—not necessarily because they’re hostile, or even because they’re uninterested in the problem, but because they just don’t find it persuasive? This past week I wrote a little appreciation of the late great English philosopher Sir Anthony Kenny, who abandoned the Catholic priesthood to become a distinguished agnostic scholar. Certainly no one could say that Sir Anthony was an unintelligent or dishonest man, nor was he a man merely craving a life of sinful excess—he remained happily married to the same woman until his death. He also couldn’t be accused of not taking the opposition seriously. He teased fellow skeptics like Richard Dawkins for their sloppy God Delusion-style work, far less sophisticated than his own. But despite all this, he could never find his way back to an honest affirmation of theism, which he found as unconvincing as atheism—though he said that he still prayed for “enlightenment” on the matter from Whoever might be listening.

I obviously couldn’t know the inner workings of Sir Anthony’s mind and heart, nor could I possibly presume to script his first meeting with Almighty God. I never had the honor of meeting Sir Anthony myself, but I suppose one question I would have wanted to ask (though I might not have had the gumption to ask it) is whether he felt at all in need of a Savior. He seemed so content in his agnosticism that it doesn’t seem a stretch to suppose the answer was no. In that case, I would ask why.

I have great sympathy for the man who does acutely feel that need, is mindful every day of the crushing weight of his sin, yet for whatever reason can’t believe that there’s a remedy for his torment. I want to put my arms around that man and tell him there is the best of all possible good news.

I have to admit, though, that when I hear skeptics present themselves as “non-resistant non-believers,” it doesn’t tend to be in this tormented spirit. I wouldn’t say this makes them by definition stupid or dishonest. But I always find something uncanny about it, as if I’d met someone who never experienced hunger or thirst. If I tell you where there’s bread, and you tell me that sounds like a very nice thing some people might like, but eating food just isn’t your thing, I confess I am somewhat at a loss.

Jared asked me why getting to heaven should be a matter of believing the right ideas as opposed to doing good things, or being a good person. What I tried to convey in response is that if you’re framing the process of getting into heaven as something like filling out the right answers in a multiple-choice test, you’re framing it wrong. Getting to heaven is not a cash prize for answering a bunch of Jeopardy questions in a row. It is the final consummation of a soul’s search for his true love. It is the uniting of the human heart with that which it most intensely desires. If heaven is not heaven to you, it is because there is something else you desire more intensely than Jesus, and you will not find it there. If, for example, you are a two-bit Christian apologist who desires above all else to be told that your life’s work is groundbreakingly important, and if you have woven a tangled web of lies around yourself in the course of refusing to hear anything else, you may be surprised to find that having all the right Jeopardy answers won’t do you any good in the hereafter. It was Jesus himself, after all, who said that the results of the Last Judgment would surprise many sheep and goats alike.

Can apologetics save the world? If the world is on fire, and I shout, “The exit’s over there!” can I save you? If you insist that the exit is in fact not over there, or perhaps you insist that you can’t even smell any smoke at all, can I pick you up and carry you?

Love will carry you. Love will save you. Love will save whoever will be saved.