Review: The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God

Can the Sea of Faith come in again? A new book makes the case.

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The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

— Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”

It’s been quoted to death, but then it’s a very quotable poem. The central metaphor has been invoked numerous times, providing the title for Don Cupitt’s 1980s BBC series on the history of Christianity in the modern world. Cupitt used to be an Anglican priest before he experienced his own Victorian crisis of faith, concluding, like Matthew Arnold, that the tide had gone out forever.

But a lot can happen in forty years. While it could be argued that many of the arguments for and against Christianity remain much the same as they ever were, cultural winds are always shifting. And some of them, increasingly, seem to be blowing in the Christians’ favor. Or, to use Arnold’s metaphor, the tide seems as if it could come back in.

This is British Christian broadcaster Justin Brierley’s argument in his new book The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God. Though not a priest or a scholar like Cupitt, Brierley assumes a similar friendly tour-guiding role. He’s well placed to do so, with years of experience under his belt as a skillful debate moderator and watchful ringside observer for numerous conversations among Christians, atheists, and everyone in between. His long-running radio show Unbelievable? enjoyed wide success with him in the host’s chair, sometimes bringing together big names for long virtual chats—which sometimes turned into spicy virtual sparring matches. But eventually, Brierley decided to step out of the host’s chair and develop some of his own long-gestating thoughts on Christian apologetics, the rise and fall of New Atheism, and what exactly is emerging to take its place. This book is an engaging presentation of those thoughts. Brierley has also been savvy enough to launch a companion longform podcast, for which he was gracious enough to interview me among many other interesting guests. In my judgment, this material shines best in podcast form, but the book is very much worth reading.

Brierley begins in the early 2000s with the arrival of the Four Atheist Horsemen—Harris, Dawkins, Hitchens, and Dennett—and works his way forward from there. He makes many cogent observations in his post-mortem of the movement, which eventually splintered into numerous squabbling factions along many of the same culture-war lines that have divided self-identified Christians. In the end, New Atheism was just another religion that grew big enough to schism.

Various people have done similar post-mortems, but Brierley can speak uniquely into it as a key player in the Christian response, which secular analyses tend to neglect. Some will argue the New Atheists’ popularity waned in part because their victory was so thorough, it was no longer worth talking about. Brierley disagrees. He believes their barbed polemics prodded Christians to take the task of defending their faith seriously, after a decades-long slide into weakly grounded emotionalism. (Neither seeker-sensitive Protestants nor post-Vatican II Catholics emerge unscathed here.) An entire apologetics network has subsequently grown up that might not have organized itself so effectively otherwise. Meanwhile, Dawkins famously didn’t show up to debate Christian philosopher William Lane Craig, an early clue that the New Atheists were perhaps more bark than bite. Brierley recalls that some mischievous soul set up an empty chair on the stage where Dawkins decided not to be—fittingly symbolic, he thought.

Craig became the New Atheists’ most recognizable Christian debate opponent. On a personal note, he also played a key role in inviting my parents to lend their own expertise to the conversation. They had long paid their dues as analytic philosophers when he commissioned their article on a probabilistic approach to Jesus’ resurrection for the Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology. This approach was actually not favored by another significant Christian figure in philosophy, Alvin Plantinga, and it was in sparring with him that they began to sharpen up their particular brand of Christian evidentialism—as my mother has summed it up, “making common sense rigorous.” Though they generally preferred not to take the debate stage themselves (which is why most of my readers wouldn’t recognize their names), my father sometimes served as a technical consultant behind Craig’s appearances. They have since made significant contributions in multiple areas of the Christian-atheist debate, specializing in the revival of various old arguments that deserve to be made new again. Most recently, my mother has made a number of serious contributions to New Testament scholarship (on which more in a bit).

If you dig far enough back in the Unbelievable? archives, you can hear my father’s voice on a couple of conversations with people like New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman and educator Peter Boghossian. Of the two, Boghossian gets more attention in this book, because his trajectory perfectly encapsulates the strange trends Justin traces after the implosion of New Atheism. Years after literally writing a book called A Manual for Creating Atheists, in which Boghossian suggested Christians might be mentally ill, he would later write to Brierley personally to let him know he was packing in the anti-Christian rhetoric. He had a new target now, and he suspected some Christian friends might actually come in handy. The Sokal-squared hoaxes soon followed, where he teamed up with James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose to write fake papers exposing the academic fraud of post-modernism. Boghossian predicted right: Conservative Christians (including my father) were among those who registered their disapproval when he was subsequently fired from Portland State University.

Brierley draws together many different threads as he analyzes these strange shifts and subsequent strange new alliances. It’s not that atheists like Boghossian stopped being anti-religious. They just decided that the biggest religious threat was no longer coming from traditional organized religion. It was coming from people who were religiously committed to injecting post-modernism into the culture’s bloodstream.

In an attempt to be balanced, Brierley gives a few nods to other kinds of substitute “religions” that could in some way be traced to the political right, not just the left. But these tend to fall flat and miss some of the nuances that an American reader might be better attuned to. (The same goes for his attempts to lump ordinary American distinctives like a fondness for the 2nd Amendment or the Pledge of Allegiance together with real examples of obsessive sacralizing.) Blind devotion to Trump was real and perplexing, but not everyone who voted for Trump was suffering from a “meaning crisis.” In fact, not everyone who voted passionately for Trump had that particular crisis. Indeed, many Trump voters were rooted in flourishing family and faith communities. I personally knew people who questioned the last election results while continuing to love their neighbors well and engage in numerous meaningful pursuits. And regarding COVID in particular, passing references to the most fanciful fringes of conspiracism (Bill Gates! microchips!) also gloss over the fact that many careful and reasonable people developed quite legitimate concerns about things like vaccine adverse events. (As ill luck would have it, this happened to include my mother, whose interview on Bret Weinstein’s Dark Horse channel you can watch here.)

But Brierley hits his stride when he digs into the real meat of the book, which is his analysis of the “New New Atheist” thinkers. Chief among them, the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, who emerged onto the public stage with his own singular articulation of what constituted a truthful and meaningful life. He was a compelling, sometimes confusing character who didn’t fit into any neat Christian or atheist boxes. Brierley was fortunate to book him for a conversation just before he hit the stratosphere, when he was still fresh and energetic. The book thoughtfully traces Peterson’s own subsequent rise, fall, and rebirth, fascinated not only with the man himself but with the waves created around him, particularly among meaning-starved younger people who were inspired to take a serious second look at Christianity and the Bible. Brierley is perceptive enough to cut through the political white noise that often distracted from what made Peterson actually interesting—at least to some people, though others still found him rambling and disjointed, sometimes sounding surprisingly like the “bloody post-modernists” he railed against so passionately. But whether you think his academic project is brilliant or a word salad, Brierley perceives that Peterson left his mark not chiefly by what he said, but by who he was—a credible, authoritative figure, pursuing the answers to life’s most pressing questions with a rare vulnerability, integrity, and humility. While Stephen Fry was busy composing the eloquent tongue-lashing he would give God if they ever met in heaven, Peterson confessed he was afraid of how God might judge him.

At the same time, Peterson has remained famously elusive about the evolution of his own personal belief, to the intense frustration of no-longer-New Atheists like Sam Harris. In their many dialogues, Harris repeatedly struggled to pin down the quirky psychologist. He didn’t sound like an evangelical Christian, but then why did he keep saying nice things about Christians? Why did he waste hours lecturing on the book of Genesis? And why wouldn’t he just agree with Sam that Jesus probably didn’t rise from the dead? Peterson would sometimes impatiently say he needed “three years” to think about this question. More than three years later, Brierley gently notes that he’s “still thinking about it.”

The same could be said of other Christian-friendly public intellectuals who have made their mark, like Tom Holland with his history of Christianity’s rise in Dominion, or Douglas Murray with his bleak “histories of the present” after Christianity’s decline. Or in America, thinkers like Bret Weinstein and Jonathan Haidt who would like to recast Christianity as a helpful evolutionary adaptation. These and other similar voices might not all be equally aware of each other, but Brierley observes the ways they have come to congregate in roughly the same empty space vacated by the New Atheists. We might call them the New New Atheists—not hostile to Christianity, but not prepared to embrace it either.

The atheist writer Freddie deBoer has often bluntly dismissed this kinder, gentler approach as more of an insult than the old New Atheist screeds ever were. To hell with all this “literally false, metaphorically true” nonsense, he says. If you’re going to critique Christianity, do it head-on, not in this patronizing, roundabout way where religion is fine for everyone else, just not the really smart people like us.

Brierley is much too polite and British to put it so bluntly, but he finds his own polite British ways to suggest that while the New New Atheists may have paused the debate, they can’t indefinitely shelve it. It may have been handled badly at times, may have grown shrill or stale in execution, but it was never irrelevant, and still isn’t. Brierley demonstrates this with a generous array of well-chosen adult conversion stories, from big names like the actor David Suchet to ordinary men and women you’ll never hear about. They might not have made an exhaustive study of the intellectual cases for Christianity or atheism (who even has the time?) and yet many of them found they needed to do some degree of wrestling with the sorts of questions over which Christians and atheists have perennially locked horns. Is God an abstraction, or a divine Person who listens to our prayers? Can we trust the documents claiming to tell us the grand story of His incarnation? Meanwhile, where did the universe come from? Do people matter more than animals? Do we even have free will? These are the sorts of questions that nag and gnaw and refuse to be endlessly put off for another day. All the converts Brierley profiles would chart their own distinct journeys through them, but all eventually needed to face a moment where they asked themselves the same pivotal question: “Do I really think this stuff isn’t true, or do I just not want it to be true?”

Tom Holland speaks candidly with Brierley in an exclusive interview about his own unfinished process, including his chilling memories of filming a documentary about ISIS in Northern Iraq. On that terrible journey, the horror and the wonder of the Christian story came palpably alive for him. The horror of freshly crucified bodies, the wonder of a forgotten painting of the angel Gabriel in the rubble of a church. Might angels be real? Might they really? For a moment, it seemed like they might. Holland never forgot it.

It should be said that a robustly evidentialist Christianity is generous enough to give Holland’s brief notions of angels their proper place. Sure, if we wanted to get academic about it and doodle some equations on the board, they might carry less weight than some other pieces of the whole puzzle. But it was the eminently rational C. S. Lewis who developed the argument from desire—specifically, desire for that which lies beyond ourselves. If we sense keenly that we were made for another world, a world containing more things than are dreamt of in our philosophy, then it’s not irrational to entertain the thought that this might be true.

Yet when it comes to keeping his own scholarly house in order, Holland prefers to keep the natural business of history and the supernatural business of religion separate from each other. When Brierley summarizes Holland’s thesis that “secular humanists who believe in the existence of human rights and treat them as sacrosanct are being just as theological in their assumptions about reality as the Christian who believes they are conferred by a divine Creator,” the word “theological” here is code for non-evidential, or less than rational. Elsewhere, Holland makes this even clearer with words like “fantastical” or “faith-based.” This presupposes a larger false dichotomy between faith and reason, one that Brierley gently but clearly wants to challenge.

This is done in what one might call the “gentle apologetics half” of the book, which is competent, though of course less original than the cultural analysis. The intriguing story of how classicist James Orr came to faith after reading the gospels in their original Greek naturally sets up a section where Justin talks about the Bible’s “historical pedigree.” I appreciate his succinct but data-rich summary of some positive lines of evidence, with a focus on New Testament work by scholars like Richard Bauckham, Peter Williams, and my mother, Lydia McGrew (specifically, her revival of the argument from undesigned coincidences).

However, Brierley’s source material isn’t as strong when he turns to address a couple of popular objections, like “Aren’t the gospels biased?” or “What about contradictions?” Of course, in one sense the gospels make no secret that they are “biased” towards convincing the reader that Jesus was “the Messiah, the Son of God.” It doesn’t follow that they are unreliable. However, in making this fair point, Brierley gestures along the way to Richard Burridge’s very thinly argued claim that the gospels fall into the genre of Greco-Roman biography. It would be more accurate to refer to this claim as a speculative hypothesis than an “established fact.” What’s more, given the sorts of fictionalizing liberties Burridge thought Greco-Roman biographers were free to take with their subject matter, it wouldn’t exactly raise one’s confidence in the gospel authors’ reliability anyway.

It may seem like I’m devoting too much space to academic nitpicking here, for which I ask the reader’s patience. But I want to linger a bit on this point for the simple reason that the gospels are the primary source material we have for Jesus’ life, and classifying them accurately is highly relevant to how we assess their reliability. It also bears on the question of how to approach apparent contradictions. Again, Brierley makes good points here, noting sensibly that organic human accounts of the same events often have discrepancies, and indeed would look suspicious if they had none. But he then once more refers to some highly speculative niche scholarship about the “literary genre” of the gospels, which allegedly “adhered to different conventions than modern biography.” This idea has been most popularly advanced by the evangelical historian Mike Licona, attempting to build on Burridge’s already shaky foundation. Licona’s thesis in brief is that the gospels were meant to be read like biopics: accounts “based on a true story,” which could also include parts that, well, aren’t true. It could even include whole incidents that are simply made up for dramatic effect.

Of course, this presupposes that such a “genre” even existed at the time, and that if it did, the gospel authors (and their readers) would have been aware of it, reading the gospels like we watch Hollywood movies—with a good handful of salt. Again, so far from helping to bolster the gospels’ reliability against objections, this theory would have quite the opposite effect, if it had any objective scholarly merit. Happily, it has none. (For those curious and energetic enough to look into this for themselves, my mother has a book-length treatment which blends a critical review of Licona’s thesis with some of her own research into positive evidences.)

Readers will be relieved to know that I have slightly less detailed thoughts on two chapters where Brierley turns from the historical to the scientific and considers the cases against naturalism and determinism. Quoting the famous Douglas Adams question “Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?” Brierley charmingly suggests that whether or not we believe in fairies, we may want to find and thank the gardener—not because we’re doing a “gardener of the gaps” argument, but because we have prior knowledge of garden-like creations and gardener-like beings.

Here again, Brierley’s knack for concise summary will be helpful to people disinclined to read entire books about the topics he touches on. (I find it interesting and refreshing that he places these chapters after the chapter on biblical reliability, where some apologists are inexplicably rigid about making arguments for bare theism first.) One chapter partly parallels Steve Meyer’s recent Return of the God Hypothesis, focusing on things like the Big Bang, the origin of life, the finetuning of universal constants (an argument I’m not persuaded of myself, but that’s a small aside), and the mysterious power of mathematics. These are the kinds of arguments that can be fruitfully explored towards a broadly theistic or deistic conclusion. For many, like the famous theistic convert Antony Flew, this alone is a giant leap. (Here, Brierley adds a unique personal touch, recalling a private conversation where Flew expressed his irritation that people thought he’d gone senile.)

However, as I’ve noted before, these sorts of cosmological arguments are still quietly tiptoeing around some of the most fiercely contested scientific territory in a post-Darwinian age, particularly as it touches on human origins. The truth is that legitimate questions can be raised even around the assumptions which are considered most sacrosanct in evolutionary literature. But Brierley’s choice not to touch this particular third rail is probably intentional, particularly in a British context. Still, in a chapter devoted to science, some nods to scientists working on the cutting edge of intelligent design research wouldn’t have come amiss. In an earlier chapter, Brierley says that the New Atheists caught the church “on the back foot,” but it’s worth remembering that when it came to the science and religion wars, it was the intelligent design researchers who arrived first and the New Atheists who generated backlash. It also couldn’t be claimed that these voices were uniformly “evangelical” or even uniformly Christian. In keeping with Brierley’s other references to maverick, Christian-friendly thinkers, he could have mentioned the American mathematician/historian/gadfly David Berlinski, or the Australian philosopher David Stove (who once wrote a book cheekily titled Darwinian Fairytales).

Brierley closes with a few of his strongest tales of adult conversion, including literary converts Paul Kingsnorth and Martin Shaw, and deliberately harkens back to the conversion of C. S. Lewis. For Brierley, Lewis is the quintessential convert, never emphasizing the cerebral at the expense of the imaginative, nor vice versa. He is the epitome of an integrated mind. But before that, he was a Christianity-curious intellectual, in some ways not unlike some of the public intellectuals we follow today. What won him over was J. R. R. Tolkien’s recasting of Scripture as Story, the myth that just happened to be true. We can’t all tell stories like Tolkien, but Brierley proposes that in our own small ways, we must try to be better storytellers.

Meanwhile, he clearly wonders who the next C. S. Lewis might be. At the same time, he recognizes the unique advantages enjoyed by religiously ambiguous figures who can command audiences across religious divides, some of which might become unavailable if they made a public profession of robust creedal Christianity. The Christian historian Rodney Stark made many of the same arguments as Tom Holland before Holland did, but non-Christian audiences didn’t notice until a non-Christian began to make them. Pastors are constantly telling young men to read the Bible, but it was only when Jordan Peterson said it that it suddenly sounded cool.

It would be uncharitable and cynical to assume that writers like Holland, Peterson, or anyone else in the “New New Atheist” sphere are hanging back because they don’t want to lose that privileged sweet spot of cultural influence. More charitable, and, it seems, more accurate, would be to assume that they simply still don’t think this stuff is actually true. They remain unpersuaded that “Christian evidentialism” isn’t a valiant fiction conjured up by valiant Christian apologists. After all, if it were more than a valiant fiction, why don’t more of their peers embrace it? Why does it involve challenging majority opinions in evolutionary science or biblical criticism? Aren’t those opinions in the majority for good reasons? When in doubt, isn’t it better to stick with the majority? Isn’t it safer?

Well, it might be safer. But whether it’s better is another question.