WHY I DON’T DEBATE ATHEISTS.
We need apologetics, but what we need more is genuine confidence in the Word we carry.
As a former seminary dean, I’ve interviewed lots of people for jobs teaching Christian apologetics, to equip future pastors and missionaries to defend the faith against unbelief. Almost all of them were brilliant—skilled not only in philosophy and science but also in rhetoric and logic. Many of them were quick on their feet and could demolish any atheist who dared debate them. After a while, though, I noticed something all these interviews had in common. When I would ask, “How did you come to Christ?” not a single one, to my memory, ever pointed to an apologetic argument.
Often these apologists would talk about finding faith the same way I did: growing up in a good church or having parents who shared and demonstrated their faith. One candidate, a towering intellect who had been a graduate student at an Ivy League university, happened to stumble into a tiny congregation to hear a preacher with a fifth-grade-level education talking about what grace means. Another candidate blushed as he told me he became a Christian while watching disgraced televangelist Jimmy Swaggart quote John 3:16.
But these scholars had nothing about which to be embarrassed. I walked away from those stories even more amazed by grace than I would have been had they told me they were convinced by the cosmological argument for the existence of God. And sometimes I wished these apologists who became Christians through seemingly unsophisticated ways would say that more often, more loudly, more publicly. In fact, as the years have gone by, I’m even more convinced that the parts of their lives they mentioned quietly are far more important to defending the faith in the 21st century than the carefully crafted onstage takedown of a professional atheist.
We are well past the heyday of traveling road-show debates, which were at their height when the New Atheists at the end of the last century levied Bertrand Russell–like breadth of knowledge with Oscar Wilde–level wit and sarcasm against the Christians across from them. In other debates, apologists seemed to get bored with talking about, well, God as they moved more and more into political polemics or attention-economy YouTube theatrics.
Today’s apologetics debates are quite different from those of eras past; sometimes both sides seem to doubt that there’s a God and that he raised Jesus from the dead. Some of those most eager to defend the faith want to talk instead about civilization, discussing how socially “useful” Christianity is rather than whether it’s true. Some of them speak definitively about gender pronouns or Islamic jihadism or vaccine mandates, but when asked whether the Resurrection happened, they’ll say, Well, what do you mean by “happened”?
All that seems exhausted now. Yet something is stirring, and I think it could take us where we should have been all along.
In the case of apologetics debaters, the exceptions prove the rule: What makes the best apologists stand out is precisely the ways they are not a mirror image of their interlocutors. Think of the most compelling defenders of actual historic Christianity, even in “Christian versus unbeliever” open debate. William Lane Craig comes to mind, as do John Lennox and many others. Yes, their gifting is in rhetorical firepower and philosophical argumentation, but those traits seem embedded in something else. When these forums seem to burn with life-changing fervor, it is not when the Christians applaud loudly and the skeptics slink away, having been “owned.” It’s not just about their arguments—these apologists could not be replaced by artificially intelligent debate bots. Something else is there.
Most of us, when thinking about apologetics, turn to Acts 17, the account of the apostle Paul at the Areopagus, and rightly so. Paul squared off against the Athenian Stoics and Epicureans, skillfully demonstrating—from their own architecture and poetry and philosophers—that they didn’t have the certainty they pretended to possess. But what we often forget is that Paul, though ready to debate that way, didn’t start there.
What provoked the session at Mars Hill was not what made the gospel intelligible to Athens but what made it strange. He was, Luke records, “preaching Jesus and the resurrection” (Acts 17:18, ESV throughout). Paul went from the Resurrection to disputes over the “unknown God” to right back where he started:
The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead. (vv. 30–31)
At its best, our emphasis on apologetics has served God’s kingdom well when it is enfolded in a much bigger project of carrying, bearing witness to, and demonstrating the gospel that reconciles people to a God who loves them and forgives their sins. But the debate culture of our time can sometimes impede that end. Christians sometimes think the way to share the gospel is to have a ready answer for every possible objection to belief—from archaeology to quantum theory.
The church needs people who can do all that—and that’s why we ought to thank God for and support the training and participation of physicists and archaeologists and philosophers and, yes, YouTubers and TikTokers who know how to have a virtual cage fight.
But we also need to emphasize that not every individual needs to be equipped to do all that in order to share the gospel and bear witness to the life-changing reality of Jesus Christ. Some are intimidated because they feel inadequate to “always [be] prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you” (1 Pet. 3:15). But the apostle is not calling for omnicompetent debaters.
The “defense” here is in the context of people who are free from fear of what others can do to them, who seek holiness, who are gentle and respectful, who have good consciences. It’s not primarily about how Christians articulate the hope that is within them but about how they cultivate it.
Apologetics is not about building the household of God; it’s about clearing the brush around it. When someone says, “We can’t trust the Gospels because they were written hundreds of years after Jesus lived,” we should show them why that’s not true. When someone says everything is material, we ought to show them how they don’t really act as though love and courage and music and beauty are just chemical secretions. We might set up a ride to church for a friend who can’t get there or note where the wheelchair ramp is for a neighbor who’s had surgery, but the point is not the ride or the ramp—it’s what happens once that person gets there.
Apologetics is not the mastery of information for the sake of getting people to master Jesus as another, greater piece of information. God is not an algebra equation. Faith is “the evidence of things not seen”(Heb. 11:1, KJV). Evidence may lead people to a moment when, in seeing Jesus, they have faith. But faith is not the endpoint of an accumulation of evidence. Faith is the evidence. People must experience it from the inside to really know it.
The great Mississippian novelist Eudora Welty once explained why she didn’t “crusade” more in her writing. She said in an Atlantic essay, “A plot is a thousand times more unsettling than an argument.” She was right. We need the arguments, but none of them matter if we’ve lost the plot.
We need debaters, yes, and we need experts. But more than that, we face an opportunity when people all around us are exhausted by living like machines. Many of them will keep their guard up and argue confidently, but deep down they wonder, What if there is more than this? What if, behind all this, there really is someone who knows and loves me? Apologetics is a step toward showing people Jesus, but winning arguments alone is not the kingdom of God.
What we need now is genuine confidence. The Word we carry is resilient and can handle whatever the next decade throws at it. That’s not because our opponents are stupid but because the gospel is true.
Russell Moore is editor at large and a columnist at Christianity Today. CT.
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