Reasonable Faith Strikes Back

In which Joe Rogan reopens the case for Christ

It’s only been a couple weeks since Christian apologist Wesley Huff’s appearance on Joe Rogan, but YouTube has churned out enough reactions and counter-reactions to constitute a whole subgenre. This isn’t surprising. Huff’s appearance marked Rogan’s first encounter with an evangelical Christian scholar who deals in specifically Christian apologetics. If you understand how small this niche is, then you understand this was rather a big deal. (Philosopher of science Steve Meyer did count as an evangelical Christian and an apologist of a sort, but not a Christian apologist per se.)

The words “apologist” or “apologetics” tend to inspire knee-jerk negativity. My mother remembers an encounter at a philosophy conference where she was using the words in a matter-of-factly positive way, and the academic woman she was talking with seemed rather taken aback. Some might try to blame apologists for this, cherry-picking cringeworthy examples. But watching Huff on Rogan, it was clear that the cultural disconnect here is far more basic. When Rogan innocently asked if there were places you could still go to learn ancient Hebrew, he wasn’t being snarky. He literally didn’t know.

My long-time readers know that while I don’t consider myself a Christian apologist proper, in the sense that Christian apologetics isn’t the area around which I’ve built my brand as a writer, it’s certainly an area I’m very interested in. Both my parents have dedicated their professional lives to philosophy and biblical scholarship, and over the years this has given me a front-row seat to many of the academic conversations happening behind The Conversation about faith in the public square. This has been a mixed blessing, because now I know a lot, but I know too much. As I’ve written before, there’s no nice way to say that Christian apologetics has been packaged and marketed in some deeply flawed ways. Unimpressed as I’ve always been with the usual atheist suspects, no one could accuse me of giving a pass to all their Christian debate rivals just for representing me and my tribe. Lest I give a false impression here, I want to stress that I’ve met plenty of good people who are doing good work. The problem is that sometimes, some of the worst work has been held up as the best, while healthy in-house criticism gets suppressed amid egotism, politicking, and petty turf-warring.

Of course, none of this should shock anyone who knows anything about how human nature works, or how human institutions work, including Christian ones. And none of it has shaken my belief in the apologetic project. I still believe in helping churched and unchurched people alike to see that the Christian faith is reasonable. Not because I think that one can “prove God” in some simplistic sense, or that people will be magically converted if they just read all the right books. And not because I think my faith is free of anomalies and unanswered questions. My readers know that I think about some of those unanswered questions a fair bit, particularly around suffering, evil, and divine hiddenness. I’m wary of Christian content creators who’ve set up their podcasts or YouTube channels to be one-stop answer shops, because at the end of the day, I simply don’t believe you can make a quick stop and get an answer off the shelf for everything. I believe there’s an inescapable element of mystery built into the Christian faith. That’s what makes it faith. But that doesn’t make faith, in essence, arational.

As I’ve observed the ongoing “vibe shift” around religion in general and Christianity in particular, I worry that in all the buzz and excitement, this distinction has gone missing. I don’t want to kill the mood here: I think exciting stuff is happening, and not just on the level of “high-status public intellectuals going on podcasts and saying nice things about Christianity and The West.” All that is fun in its own way too, I just think it has a limited shelf-life. But when you hear testimonies from people like Paul Kingsnorth, or Ayaan Hirsi Ali, or for that matter from people who have no name recognition at all, it’s clear that something else is going on beyond podcasts and vibes. At the same time, I think there still remains a need to have a deeper conversation about how faith intersects with reason, because there seem to be a number of misconceptions in the air about what this means, or whether it’s possible.

There’s a certain potted narrative of How We Got Here that runs something like this: Once upon a time, there was naive “modernist” Christianity. Then along came modernist atheists with their Reddit-tier modernist atheist arguments. Some Christians were blindsided and lost their faith, others fought back with modernist apologetics, and the early 2000s were subsequently spent in an endless back-and-forth. Christopher Hitchens made his statements, William Lane Craig made his rebuttals, Sam Harris made more statements and William Lane Craig made more rebuttals—back and forth, back and forth. Maybe all of this debating helped some people, but at the end of the day (the narrative goes), it didn’t actually matter all that much, because people don’t really decide to be Christians based on reading a book or watching a debate. The Christian apologists meant well, but they didn’t understand how people work. They were trying too hard to beat the atheists at their own modernist game, when they should have been thinking outside the modernist box altogether. So, in the end, the New Atheists kind of won—or so they thought.

But then, enter quirky, uncategorizable thinkers like Jordan Peterson, or Eastern Orthodox voices like Jonathan Pageau. In a “left-brain” world, enter the weird, unpredictable “right-brain” guys. And along with them, enter various people who fall in various places along the faith spectrum, but mostly agree with each other that whatever the New Atheists thought they won, it doesn’t really matter. Maybe they won their little debates with Christian apologists or maybe they didn’t, but those conversations were boring anyway. It’s time to level up and have newer, cooler, sexier conversations. It’s time to leave long-faced modernity behind. Who’s afraid of post-modernism, anyway?

Well, I’m not afraid of post-modernism. I just don’t think it makes any sense. Which is why I think the boring old debates actually do still matter, for all that they were sometimes tedious and flawed and much more boring than they needed to be. I don’t think the New Atheists ever actually won the argument. They won a certain kind of PR war, even as they’ve lost another one. It’s a curious paradox: Nobody really likes them anymore, yet people seem to take it for granted that they were basically right, in a boring kind of way. There’s a funny moment in a new conversation between Tom Holland and Nick Cave where Holland talks about flirting with the idea of faith, then worrying “Am I betraying Richard Dawkins?” before deciding dash it all, he doesn’t care what Richard thinks. Tom is of course being light-hearted, but underneath the joke is the unquestioned assumption that there was something intellectually substantive to “betray” in the first place.

It seems to me that if this whole Dialogue is ever to level up and stop (mainly) idling in neutral, it’s going to require the collective questioning of that assumption, and many others. Which brings me back to Wesley Huff and Joe Rogan.

As befits our new media era, Wesley and Joe didn’t have a debate. They had a friendly, 3-hour-long conversation about whatever Joe wanted to talk about, in which Joe did his usual schtick where he plays a meathead on TV but is actually asking intelligent questions. Some of them fell within Huff’s particular scholarly wheelhouse, and some of them didn’t, but he did a graceful and good-faith job navigating the meandering safari ride that is a Joe Rogan podcast. For those wondering how he got there in the first place, the short version is that he had a debate with Billy Carson, a somewhat famous, petulant atheist who thinks he’s some kind of expert on ancient civilizations or something. I’d never heard of the fellow myself, but he seems to be a bit of a legend in his own mind, and crucially, he ran in Joe Rogan’s circles. So, when he threatened to sue Huff for the crime of releasing their embarrassing debate clips, the whole drama went viral, and the almighty algorithm took care of the rest.

Even other atheist apologists can’t bring themselves to defend Carson, but they remain deeply suspicious of Huff. Much of the Content now floating around the Rogan episode has fixated on the same few sentences where Huff said something inaccurate off the cuff (like describing the Great Isaiah Scroll as a “word for word” match for the Masoretic text). I’m loath to get deep into the weeds of reactions and counter-reactions here—perhaps in a follow-up post for paid readers who like that sort of thing—but as I browsed around, it was clear to me that this conversation has hit a nerve. This especially struck me in a reaction video by Alex O’Connor, a rising young atheist star who’s more or less picked up where Dawkins and friends left off, yet gained more of a hearing among Christians than some of his atheist predecessors. Alex isn’t hostile to the idea of people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali humbly rediscovering Christianity, so long as they don’t step on his turf. But it’s clear that apologists like Huff trigger him, especially when casually making certain claims about the gospels’ reliability or provenance which Alex would have us know are “highly disputed,” or go against “the consensus.” That’s not how this is supposed to work. Christian apologists are supposed to know their place.

I don’t know Huff myself, but we have a very good mutual—Jonathan McLatchie—to whom Huff gave a gratifying shout-out (gratifying because Jonathan is the sort of quiet, self-effacing guy who will never be a household name but is worth ten guys who are). Jonathan is someone I often talk honestly with about things that need to change in how Christians do apologetics. A persistent problem we’ve observed, especially among American evangelicals, is a confused mix of over-deference to consensus scholarship, over-interpretation of what scholars have actually said, and consequent over-optimism about how confidently evangelicals can claim to be “following the scholarship.” I unpack this more in the post I link up top, so I won’t repeat the details here, but this in a nutshell has been the problem with the evangelical apologetics model, for years. However, Wesley Huff isn’t following that model. And it’s just a happy accident that the algorithm happened to introduce Rogan to him instead of the various apologists who still are.

This doesn’t mean that Huff doesn’t care about actually rigorous scholarship. What it does mean is that he’s prepared to fight for turf that some scholars seem to think is theirs by right. When he discusses the resurrection, he doesn’t follow the received apologetics wisdom of sticking with the modest claim that the disciples “had experiences” of the risen Jesus, details not included. He stresses those details for emphasis—that they not only claimed to see Jesus but to touch Jesus, eat with him, speak with him, spend days on end with him. Here Alex O’Connor and Company will insistently chime in that most scholars don’t grant…and sure, he’s right. They don’t. Huff just thinks they’re wrong, and he’s happy to argue the point.

This came out most impressively when he discussed details about the gospels, unpacking various lines of evidence for their reliability as texts that can be sourced to eyewitnesses. There was much more where his sampler came from (readers can check out other posts in my series here, or check out this book by my mom nicely distilling her scholarship at a lay level), but it was enough to leave Rogan appropriately impressed. One of many persistent misconceptions about an evidentialist approach to Christianity is that it creates hoops too complex for laymen to jump through. In actuality, many of the best arguments are fairly simple to follow if presented well.

You could see this when Huff rolled a short video about the argument from onomastic congruence. That sounds esoteric, but it’s really a straightforward argument about how the presentation of the gospels’ character names compares to what we know independently about how names were distributed in their time and place. Uncommon names aren’t presented with a disambiguator like “son of…” or “brother of…,” but common names like Simon or James are. And statistically, we find about as many people named Simon, James, Mary, etc., as we would expect to find in a document close up to the setting it writes about. (For those who’d like to dive a bit deeper into this argument, including discussion of a popular critique, see a short lecture series from my mom here.) Similarly, Huff touched on evidence from geographical familiarity—the fact that the writers casually know whether one is going “up” or “down” to get from point A to point B, the fact that Zacchaeus specifically climbs a sycamore tree, and so on.

These discussions arose out of Joe’s questions about canonicity and how the four gospels compare to texts the early Church rejected. Huff ably demonstrated the many points of disanalogy, including these various markers of authenticity that are all over the canonical gospels and absent in gnostic gospels, or later forgeries like the Gospel of Barnabas. As an example of how ineptly these fake texts try to mimic the originals’ organic sense of place, Barnabas has an episode where Jesus and the disciples take a boat to Nazareth…which is landlocked. In a similar vein, the name statistics of gnostic texts align with what we would expect from their time and place, not Jesus’ time and place.

These arguments are subtle, to be sure, and no one of them possesses magic powers to make anyone come to Jesus. But taken together, they have considerable cumulative force, and you could see Rogan appreciating that cumulative force in real time. As my friend Rhys Laverty wrote recently, if we were to try to place Rogan in this whole Religious Vibe Shift, it’s emerging that Rogan is actually a “left-brained” guy. He likes this sort of nerdy, detailed stuff. He prides himself on being the sort of guy who can sniff out BS, who wants to look into things for himself without taking someone’s word for it. What Huff was able to offer him was a reassurance that Christians understand and share this instinct. There was some discussion of comparative religion, including Mormonism, which Joe playfully referred to as the nicest cult in the world. Mormons have their own brand of apologetics, but it doesn’t take too much reading around to see that it’s a pale facsimile of what Christians can offer.

Do I think apologetics is the only way to come to Jesus? No. Do I think everyone is going to be equally wowed by Wesley Huff on Joe Rogan? No, although I don’t think the measure of an argument’s quality is the number of clicks or wows it gets. But it’s more generally true that different people are tuned in to different frequencies, and this is not going to be the frequency for everybody. And yet, it’s a frequency that can’t be discounted if we’re going to have a serious conversation about reasonable faith in the public square. That conversation must eventually entail a reckoning with narratives that have been taken for granted for far too long.

The fun part is, that reckoning need not be the province of dusty academics. It’s open-access. It’s open to Joe Rogan, and it’s open to you, too. It always was.