The Conversation You’re Avoiding: Justin Brierley

Hey, this is Shelby Abbott. I just wanted to take a second to thank you if you gave to our matching program that happened in December. You know, checks are still coming in and we don't have all the numbers yet, but if you gave, I sincerely want to say how grateful I am for your generosity to help make Family Life Today possible. Thank you so much for giving and supporting this ministry. And even if you didn't give, and you've just shared episodes with someone, or even if you just listened, thank you for being a part of Family Life Today. All right, let's jump into today's episode. I think we are living in a post-Christian culture. I think that's just been the reality actually for a while now, that actually we live in a culture where we still sort of have some familiarity with the Christian story, but increasingly younger generations are growing up unchurched without any real purchase on that story. Welcome to Family Life Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most.

I'm Shelby Abbott, and your hosts are Dave and Ann Wilson. You can find us at familylifetoday.com. This is Family Life Today. So I recently saw a 2018 Pinetops Foundation study that said over one million young people will leave the faith per year for the next 30 years. That is staggering and depressing and scary.

Pew Research maintained that for every person who becomes a Christian, four more leave the faith. That's sort of the world we're sort of living in. Isn't that depressing to you? Yeah, and the question is, is that really true and what is happening and why? And we have the guy who's going to give us the answer. It's not you and it's not me.

No, it's not. We've got Justin Brierley with us from the UK in Orlando. Just took a four-hour bus ride from Miami because his flight got diverted. But Justin, welcome to Family Life Today. Oh, thank you so much for having me, guys.

It's lovely to be here, even if the journey was a little bit of a late-night one. So you're trying to fly into Orlando and couldn't even get here. That's right. The weather, that was the problem. You had a storm brew up and the pilot, he circled a few times, hoping it were clear. But in the end, yeah, had to go to Miami and enjoy the four-hour bus ride back to Orlando. I mean, that's a long way to go.

We have never had to do that. And so you're on fumes right now. Well, look, I'm glad to be here. What a wonderful campus you have here as well.

It's beautiful, isn't it? And I'm glad you brought your son, Noah. My 18-year-old son, Noah, with me. We're kind of here in the US for a week or so, actually, doing a few different speaking engagements and things.

But it's really fun when you've got a traveling buddy like your 18-year-old son. And he's one of four? He is, yes.

So we have a girl, Grace, 15, Jeremy, 12, and Toby, who's eight years old as well. And by the way, we asked Noah, you know, what you're really an expert in. And he said, for sure, we should ask you about football, about soccer. He was lying.

He was lying, if that's what he said. I know precisely zero about soccer. Can you name five NFL football teams?

NFL football? Because we come over and play in London. I probably end up giving you some baseball and basketball teams because they all sound the same to me, to my British ears. That's true for a lot of people in the United States, too. And that's fine.

You know, it's actually refreshing to have somebody in the studio. They all think all I talk about is football, Justin. And that's true.

It's totally true. I actually saw my very first game of American football just a few weeks ago, and it was great fun. It was a high school game, and I didn't understand what was going on. But it was fun. There was lots of excitement and cheerleaders, and we just had a great evening.

You know, just to let you know something, football's not fun. It's life. It's everything here, Justin. It's an idol. It's an idol in America.

You know what? It's funny you say that, but I noticed this just driving around, and I realized you guys are absolutely sports mad. Compared to the UK, sports mad. Like, we don't have the same level of sport going on in secondary education, college. I mean, you guys, like thousands of people turn out for games just between, you know, schools and colleges.

It's crazy. It doesn't exist like that in the UK. Does anything exist, like golf or soccer? Well, people get really excited about, you know, soccer. So the big, you know, premier leagues and everything. Of course, people are passionate about that, but it's not quite like all through, you know, high school and everything.

It's not quite as big a deal as it is here. Well, I guarantee our producer Jim Mitchell right now is like, why are they talking with one of the premier apologist theologians in the world about American football? Right, Jim?

That's exactly what he's thinking. I'm always going to tell you a story about being in London with the Detroit Lions, but we'll leave that for another day. Tell our listeners what you do, because what I just said is really accurate. You are one of the premier in the world to discuss what we're talking about. When I said you're an expert, you really are. This is your world.

That's very kind. I've been trying to create conversations, essentially, between the Christian and non-Christian world for the last 20 years or so. All my broadcasting career, really. It started with a show I developed in the UK called Unbelievable, which was a podcast radio show where I would bring Christians and non-Christians together for dialogue and debate. And that really just grew, especially once we started podcasting and a video channel. So in the end, lots of people were listening all over the world, including agnostics, atheists, people of other faiths. And it was just this wonderful place for a meeting ground between different perspectives. I hosted so many conversations on belief, faith, does God exist?

It was really kind of getting going as well at the time when this phenomenon called the new atheism was riding high in the public consciousness. So it was great to be able to be on the cutting edge of some of those conversations. And over time, I was able to broaden that out to other sort of theological conversations and things.

So it's been an amazing ride. And along the way, I sort of have developed my own case for faith. So I not only host conversations now between skeptics and Christians, but I'm often the one putting the case for faith as well in talks or in debates. I published a book several years ago called Unbelievable, why after 10 years of talking with atheists, I'm still a Christian. And that was my case for faith really after hosting all these conversations.

And then the new book is sort of where we're at now really in our culture and where I think the God conversation has gone in the last few years. I mean, one of the beautiful things about what you've done is, as I listened to those conversations, they really were conversations. They weren't canceling one another or fighting with one another. It was honoring each other. It was honoring.

Yeah. I mean, there were conversations. I totally disagree with what you think, but I can have a conversation with you, which is something that's hard to do around a dinner table in our own homes.

Right? Well, that was what I was trying to do was to model good conversations, not necessarily to say here's the winner and here's the loser, but actually just to show that we can actually have civil discourse. Because I think sadly, especially in a social media age, we've lost the art of good conversation. And to that extent, I think Christians need to relearn it because the only way we can really move forward, understand each other and actually hopefully come to something that looks a bit more like a flourishing culture is if we actually can sit down around the table.

And talk to each other. So, I think it's really important actually for Christians to do that, not to run away from conversations, not to just bunker down and, you know, go into your silos and throw verbal hand grenades at people you disagree with. Where did your love for apologetics, like your faith, where did that begin? It really began in teenage years. I would say, yeah, my faith came alive around the age of 15. I grew up in a church-going Christian family in the UK, but I would say it was really on a youth retreat actually. There was a specific night I could pinpoint where God just came alive in a new way and faith was there.

And it wasn't that, you know, everything was plain sailing from then. Obviously, my faith developed over the years. There were lots of objections that I bumped into, especially by the time I went to university. So, I started to engage, I would say, in what you call apologetics, which simply means sort of intellectual defense of the Christian faith. Probably from around sort of my late teens onwards and I was interested in reading people like C.S.

Lewis and others. But really, I kind of, yeah, developed over time this passion for hopefully putting that in the public realm. Putting it out there and that was really where the radio show idea came from. What if we took these ideas, you know, these arguments for God and how to engage people who have objections and just gave them, you know, a real-life sort of formula around a table and that's where the Unbelievable Show began. Well, let's talk about your latest book, The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God. Why New Atheism Grew Old and Secular Thinkers Are Considering Christianity Again.

So, the stat I opened the program with, you know, sort of is that what's happening? Are people walking away in droves or is there something else that we're not hearing? Well, on the surface, I'd say that is what's happening. That's what the statistics are telling us. Every time we get a new survey, either in the UK or the US, the picture seems to look the same. Increasingly, more and more, especially of a younger generation, are describing themselves as non-religious.

They don't have any particular religious affiliation and so on. And we've seen sort of a huge decline in church-going in mainline denominations, both in the UK and the USA. And I think even in some of the more evangelical strongholds here in the US, you're starting to see, you know, the stability there starting to waver as well. So, I think we are living in a post-Christian culture. I think that's just been the reality actually for a while now, that actually we live in a culture where we still sort of have some familiarity with the Christian story, but increasingly younger generations are growing up unchurched without any real purchase on that story. Justin, let me ask you just real quick. Parents in the US, that freaks us out.

Sure. You know, our kids aren't following the way, you know, we've been pursuing Jesus. Is that true for parents in the UK? Does that worry them, for the believers that are loving Jesus?

Of course. I think it's bound to worry any faithful Christian parent who wants to see their child, their family grow up in the faith. And I think it's increasingly difficult because there are so many, you know, pressures on our young people. It's far more difficult, I think, for that faith to sort of stick and stay sometimes.

Now, this all sounds rather depressing, doesn't it, at this point? But the point is, I would say that sometimes the statistics are one thing, but I often see that there are things going on in the background that aren't always reflected in some of the statistics. So even in the UK, actually, although there's been a long period of church decline, when I look at actually some of what's happening on the ground in certain churches and networks and streams, I see lots of signs of hope. I think there are actually interesting signs of certain parts of the church which are actually flourishing. There's been, you know, a lot of immigration in the UK and a lot of the African Caribbean churches are actually overflowing with people and young people and so on. There are parts of the Church of England which, although lots of people have criticisms of it, there are some really wonderful church networks within it, such as the Holy Trinity Brompton Network run by Nicky Gumble and others, where they're seeing, you know, wonderful work of planting into dead and dying churches and seeing suddenly new life develop and large congregations developing.

So the picture isn't always what it appears to be just from looking at statistics. And sometimes I feel like what we're looking at in the West is a kind of the inevitable dying off of some of the old structures, some of the kind of nominalism that developed in Christianity over a generation or two. And sometimes that has to happen for God to bring a new life. It's like pruning back a plant in order for the green shoots to be able to come through. I just refuse to believe that God's finished with the church, either in the UK or the USA. And the new book is really actually identifying what I think is a really interesting trend, which suggests that actually the atmosphere is changing.

Now, you may not see that yet reflected in the statistics, but I think something is happening further upstream that we may see have a big impact later on. What is that? What's happening? So I've been running this unbelievable show, you know, for a decade and a half or more. The point of the show was to bring Christians and non-Christians together. And a lot of those debates were these very bombastic debates in the early years between these new atheist characters. The new atheism was this very militantly anti-God movement. And it was fronted by four so-called horsemen of new atheism.

Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, well-known biologist in the UK. And they had all written bestselling books against God, against religion. They even had an advertising campaign in the UK. There were London buses bearing the slogan, there's probably no God, now stop worrying and enjoy your life. And here in the US, you had the Reason Rally.

I don't know if you remember that back in 2012. You know, tens of thousands of atheists and agnostics pitching up at Washington DC to protest for science and reason. But the point is, this was part of a kind of big cultural movement at the time where I think a lot of Christians felt like, yeah, that Christianity was really under attack in some sense. That there was this really dogmatic, strong, you know, and it was very derisive as well of faith. Those were the kinds of individuals I was engaging with for several years on the show.

But I did notice that things started to change on the show. And a lot of those conversations started to be replaced by people who were still not Christians, they were still secular thinkers. But they increasingly wanted to distance themselves from that new atheist movement.

They would more frequently say, well, I'm not a Richard Dawkins kind of atheist, Justin, when they came on. And I think it's because they came to realize that that movement itself started to look quasi-religious almost. It had its high priests, these four horsemen, it had its sacred texts, it had its sort of orthodoxy, you know, scientific materialism. And if you strayed from that, you were a heretic. So the point I make in the book is that religion never really goes away. It just gets channeled into different things. You know, we become religious about something.

It's just a question of what. And some people got very religious for a while about atheism. That was really what new atheism was. And I noticed that a lot of the, you know, secular thinkers were starting to distance themselves from that movement and starting to take Christianity seriously again. I think the reason for this was that ultimately the new atheism, it didn't give people ultimate answers to what life's about. They sort of tore God down, but they didn't replace God with any positive ethic.

And that's the problem. People need something to live their lives by. They need a story to live their lives by. And what I was finding was that more and more secular thinkers I was bringing on my show were saying, well, maybe we do need something like Christianity. Because they were noticing a meaning crisis developing in Western culture.

And they're saying, well, how do we address this? And maybe religion, maybe Christianity does have something to offer after all. And so I tell the story of a number of these new secular thinkers in the book, but who are actually opening the door to Christianity again for a lot of thinking people.

I was thinking that as I was reading your book. And I was thinking, if there is no God, to me that feels so hopeless. Like, what do they base their joy and their future on if there's nothing? And I wonder about that, like, as people go into this world of, I don't believe I'm an atheist, I'm an agnostic, where do they find their hope? And do you think that's what you're saying is what was drawing some people back?

I think absolutely it is. Because in the end, atheism is a sort of negative statement. It's about what you don't believe in.

And people need something positive to live for. Now, I think the new atheism tried to build something and they tried to build it with just science and reason. They said, look, science, that can be our guiding philosophy, you know, we're just going to search for truth. But the problem is science is great for some things.

It's great for sort of exploring the world and the universe. But it doesn't buy you meaning or value or identity. And what I think a lot of the new atheists have realized, and some of them are actually saying this about their own movement in hindsight. They're saying, we actually cleared the way by getting rid of the Christian story for people. We didn't leave it open for people just to become rationalist, atheist scientist types. Actually, all kinds of other ideologies have swept in in its place because people are still inherently religious. They're still going to be looking for something to make meaning. And science wasn't enough.

Reason wasn't enough. And so a lot of them are saying the reason why we're seeing a lot of, for instance, on the progressive left woke ideologies suddenly becoming kind of sacrosanct and having this sort of real identity for people is because they've replaced God with a gender or sexual identity that that's become their new God, if you like. And a lot of them are realizing actually, whatever they thought of Christianity, that some of these new ideologies are far more concerning to them, ironically, than Christianity ever was.

Because these are in their backyard. These are in academia. These are quasi-religious kind of movements that they're suddenly realizing, oh, gosh, we didn't realize what we were actually opening the door to. And so it's been very interesting to see that even people like Richard Dawkins and some of these other new atheists are suddenly, they're not talking about religion anymore.

They've all basically taken sides in the culture wars. And it was really those culture wars that ultimately smashed through new atheism. And I think it's just part of that religious nature that people have.

They will always turn to something to try and give themselves meaning and purpose and identity. So in a sense, there's a deconstruction going on. And often, at least here in America, in the Christian world, deconstruction sounds like a bad word.

But often it's not a bad word. I mean, you can deconstruct and lose your faith, and that's tragic. Or you can deconstruct what you thought you believed or grew up with and go, oh, there are things I believe that aren't even true. And I find out I'm stronger in my faith because I've gotten rid of some of the things I thought were true that are not true. This is what is true from the Word of God. Is that what you're seeing on both sides?

I think I am. I think we talk a lot, don't we, yes, about deconstruction in Christian circles. And I think that's something we need to take seriously and address. But I also see people deconstructing their atheism. You know, I actually see people who have come to realize that the answers that they were being given by the new atheists simply weren't enough.

That didn't make sense of their lives either. And that's why we had the rise of some of these interesting secular thinkers like Jordan Peterson, who's quite a well-known Canadian psychologist who has drawn huge crowds to talk about, you know, especially young men looking for meaning and purpose in their life. And what does he give them?

He doesn't give them a purely scientific account of reality. He sends them back to the Bible. He says, if you're looking for meaning and purpose, this is where to find it. It's in these ancient scriptures.

It's in this ancient wisdom. And I just find that fascinating because, again, this is not a Christian per se who's doing this. And yet I've seen so many people walk through the door to Christian faith because he's made it an intellectual option again. He's taking faith seriously. He's saying, we are inherently religious, and so if you're going to choose a story, well, the Christian story is a pretty good one, actually.

It's done a lot of good for Western culture. Most of our values are actually founded on the Christian story. And so when I see someone like Jordan Peterson, who admittedly is a somewhat controversial sort of political pundit as well, but when he actually delivers these lectures or speaks to people on his YouTube platform, he is essentially acting almost like a Christian evangelist half the time. He genuinely sees the Christian story as the best way of understanding what life is ultimately about. He does it kind of from a psychological perspective.

But as I say, it's given people enough rationale for Christianity for them to start taking it seriously. And I've seen so many people, as I say, who have gone the whole way and decided, actually, I can make sense of this. Can you think of a conversation you had with one of those people that, you know, they were on one side, but now you see them contemplating and wondering?

I've got a friend called Dean in Australia. And I had this psychologist, Jordan Peterson, on my Unbelievable show several years ago. And he then put that conversation out on his own podcast. And Dean was a follower of Jordan Peterson's. And he then discovered my show and started listening to some of these conversations on faith.

And we struck up a friendship. And he has told me his story, really, that he sort of just became an atheist, really, as a young man. He sort of had a vaguely, in Australia, Anglican upbringing, but it didn't stick. And he just assumed that these new atheist speakers, you know, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, they just had the truth, you know, that life ultimately was about science and matter in motion and everything could be explained by biological forces. But I think he's an artistic soul, Dean, and it never fully explained his experience.

He's a poet, he's a writer, and he's a nurse in an intensive care unit as well. So he was living on the front line of life and death for a lot of people. And I think he gradually came to realize that that way of looking at life, that reductive way of looking at life, just didn't fit all of the experiences.

And that's why he went looking for something else. And he found it in Jordan Peterson, first of all, and found that the way he was framing life as being about much more, that there is a kind of an ultimate meaning, an ultimate purpose that we can strive for. It just made sense to him. And then he had Jordan Peterson start talking about the Bible, and then he heard him on my show. And then he started to discover, you know what, this Christianity thing that I just assumed was irrelevant to my life. He started to realize, gosh, there's an awful lot of sense in this. And he started going back to church. Now, at this point, I think Dean would say he's a kind of interested agnostic. He hasn't quite made his mind up.

He's still got questions. But he finds the Christian story far more intriguing than he ever realized he could find it. And again, it's because he's gone on this journey of being dissatisfied with the atheist materialist story of reality and starting to realize just how rich and deep the Christian story is.

But it's these prophets from outside the church who actually introduced him to it again. How did your journey to faith come? Well, my journey to faith was, I suppose, a kind of fairly standard one in some ways, because I did, I guess, have an experience, you could say, you know, going back to that 15 year old me when I found faith sort of on a church camp, really.

It was like the world just came alive. But what I soon discovered was that I couldn't just nurture my faith or keep my faith on the basis of one experience, you know. And I had to learn the hard way, as we all do, that actually faith is about a long game.

You have to sort of be there and you have to learn what it is to be a disciple of Christ and everything else. And I did that. But I would say that the intellectual journey was a really important one for me. And it is just for some people. And I discovered that actually part of how God has made me is to sort of wire me in a slightly more skeptical way, in a slightly more...

This is my husband, Dave. Yeah, absolutely. And that's just fine, because that's the way some people are. And I found that reading theology and books of apologetics somehow just brought it alive for me.

I loved being in, you know, a wonderful worship service. You know, it's not that I was against more experiential ways of being a Christian. But I just know that for a lot of people, they have to have that more kind of left-brained intellectual approach in their life as well.

And for me, that's fine, because we're all different and we all have to have that. So it was actually coming to realize that not only did Christianity make sense on a heart level, but there was this amazing depth of intellectual resources, the historical evidence for Jesus and the resurrection, the philosophical arguments for God, the way in which this whole worldview has shaped our world today. I just found that fascinating and a constant adventure. So for me, it's been that whole journey of coming to realize just how significant Christianity is. Now, somebody like you who studied and has a foundation, not just experientially, but intellectually, do you or have you struggled with doubt? I started a show where I put myself in the firing line every week of potentially having a crisis effect because I was inviting these very cogent atheist skeptics on to ask their difficult questions.

And there were some where I definitely had one or two sleepless nights. I remember when I first read a book by Bart Ehrman, who's a well-known sort of critic of the New Testament, an agnostic himself. And I read this book questioning the historical reliability of the gospels, essentially, and it gave me a real pause for thought. But of course, when I brought on Peter Jay Williams, who's a Cambridge scholar of the Old and New Testament opposite him, I quickly realized, well, there's always two sides to every story.

And I realized that Bart Ehrman, you know, he's a very good debater and writer, but he inevitably presents his material in such a way as to make the worst case possible. And you realize that there's other ways of looking at these issues where the glass is far more half empty, half full rather than half empty. And so for me, that's been a wonderful journey because I've realized, as much as I've often had questions and objections, you know, that have been puzzling or difficult for Christianity, I've always in the end met a satisfactory answer, actually, something that actually does make sense. And over and over, for me at least, it's been proved that Christianity can stand on its own two feet intellectually. Now, that's not to say that some of my ideas haven't had to be tested and changed and nuanced along the way because we all change and grow and develop in our faith. But in the end, I found that my faith has become much stronger because I can see the intellectual depth that's there. My belief in the Bible is perhaps more nuanced than it was when I first began, but I've got even greater respect for how extraordinary this set of documents is, you know, in terms of both the historicity and the way they continue to speak to generations of people. So for me, it's been a very positive thing having my faith challenged because it's helped me to grow as a Christian. If a man or woman or a boy or girl is listening right now and they are really struggling with doubt, maybe they've grown up in the faith, they have a real faith, but they're just, you know, where you've been, I've been, skepticism, doubts are just flooding their mind.

What would you say to them? I'm Shelby Abbott, and you've been listening to Dave and Anne Wilson with Justin Brierley on Family Life Today. And that's a really great and important question that Dave just asked. And we're going to hear Justin's answer here in just a minute.

I'm really excited to hear it. But first, Justin's written a book called The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God. This book really outlines the dramatic fall of new atheism and the birth of a new conversation on whether God makes sense of things like science, history, culture, and the search for meaning. So you can go online to familylifetoday.com to get your copy.

Just click on today's resources, or you could give us a call at 800-358-6329. Again, that number is 800 F as in family, L as in life, and then the word today. All right, Dave asked a really important question about struggling with doubt. What would he say? How would Justin respond?

Well, let's hear his answer. The first thing I'd say is don't bury the doubt because then it tends to fester and get worse and it'll come up in some form or another. Acknowledge it's there, okay, and just understand that doubt is part of faith, okay? Faith is not being certain about everything, okay? Faith is actually about trusting in a God we do know despite the fact of the things we don't know about. And I would say the first thing to do is to go and look for good Christian speakers, apologists, books, where they can start to address some of those issues. Don't expect all of your questions to be answered, but do expect to find that actually there is a good historical core. There's what C.S.

Lewis called mere Christianity. There's something that makes sense of life, I've found, at the center of this. And sometimes you have to hold on to that, the things that you can sort of have this confidence in, while holding somewhat loosely the other questions we may have that we would so dearly like to be answered. Often I think we don't really fully understand the big picture of Christianity until we've started to put a lot of other pieces together. So for me deconstruction, as it's sometimes called, sounds like a very negative thing, but actually you can reconstruct actually.

Lots of people, there's an important process of pulling things apart, looking at them. But actually the point of that is so that we can put them together again. And for me, you can do that. I know many people who have done that. And for anybody who's listening and is thinking, you know, can I do that? I would say keep praying, firstly, don't stop doing that. But keep looking, keep searching. I do believe what Jesus said in the Gospels about anyone who asks receives, anyone who knocks the door will be open to them.

It's true. Your faith might look a bit different by the end of it. But actually, I think it'll be a stronger, wiser, deeper faith because of it. So don't just deconstruct, work out how you can reconstruct.

Why is it important to prepare young people to face questions and objections to their faith rather than shielding them from the secular world? Well, tomorrow, Justin Brierley will be here with David Ann Wilson to talk about that and so much more. We hope you'll join us. On behalf of David Ann Wilson, I'm Shelby Abbott. We'll see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a donor-supported production of Family Life, a crew ministry helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.