In Alpha Course #13, the hosts kindly teach their viewers how to resist the wily wiles of the wiliest coyote of them all, Satan. Here, we learn that it’s not so much about resisting evil as it is about Jesusing the Jesus-Jesus just as hard as we can. And from there, we learn why that solution wanders this good dark earth looking for its problem—while real change proves elusive even after the most strenuous Jesusing.
(This post first went live on Patreon on 5/5/2026. Please support my work—see the end of this writeup for options, and thank you for whatever you decide to do!)
SITUATION REPORT: A quick summary of Alpha Course #13
Alpha Course titles this episode, “How Can I Resist Evil?”
Almost immediately, the series creators position Satan as the origin of evil. In fact, Toby tells us at 2 minutes in that an atheist lawyer converted to Christianity because he’d seen pure evil, so he figured there had to be a power of good as well. Toby asserts that lots of people believe in the Devil, but not in good beings like Jesus.
[Citation needed], because he’s got it completely turned around. Surveys consistently reveal more widespread belief in angels than demons. Here are two such recent surveys: 2023 Gallup; 2023 AP-NORC. We ain’t off to a good start, here!
The hosts all make these sorts of unsupported assertions about why evil exists in our world, all without laying it all even once at the doorstep of the one being they think created everything. For good measure, Gemma tells us that we need to be super-careful, because demons can hurt people dabbling in the occult! And we get a couple of testimonies from men who say they were very evil before conversion, and—most remarkably of all—a complete self-own from Nicky Gumbel, who leads and directs Alpha Course.
This self-own isn’t even the usual hinted-only kind we see out of evangelical leaders (like Gary Smalley). No, this one demonstrates that his roadmap for resisting evil doesn’t work at all, not even for his own course’s own leader. Instead, something else entirely stops him from committing an evil deed. We’ll get to that remarkable force soon.
Interestingly, the video never actually tells us how to resist evil, other than Nicky’s self-own story—which I can assure you he didn’t intend to be a real answer to the video’s title question.
How the Alpha Course roadmap functions, such as it were, to help Christians resist evil
At about 20 minutes in, Toby and Gemma show up to tell us a bit about how to fight back against Satan’s trickery. It’s the usual “whole armor of God” setup from Ephesians 6:13-17, which characterizes various aspects of Christian virtues and worship as literal armor and weaponry:
Therefore take up the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you will be able to stand your ground, and having done everything, to stand. Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness arrayed, and with your feet fitted with the readiness of the gospel of peace. In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. And take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.
So their roadmap navigating from Point Conversion to Point Resisting Evil Successfully involves:
- Knowing and believing “the truth”
- Being “righteous” and ready to evangelize
- Having strong faith (in particular noted as putting out Satan’s flaming arrows)
- Having “salvation” and wielding the Bible
Not one bit of that works, unfortunately.
All of this is simply a substitute for what actually works to make people into decent human beings. That is exactly why the more zealous the Christians, the more hypocritical they are: They’re overdosing on the substitutes and never actually mastering the skills that can help someone reform bad habits and tendencies.
Why the Alpha Course roadmap fails completely
When I think about the failure of Christianity’s roadmap to resist evil, I always think about my second pastor’s mother, a lifelong and extremely fervent Pentecostal—and she’s also still the most negative and virulently racist human being I have ever met in my entire life. I also think about my Evil Ex, who was such an incredible hypocrite that he explicitly begged his evangelism targets to look at his words, not his behavior, in assessing his claims. And of course, I think about my own self. While I was Christian, I suffered from PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) and had a serious problem with anger and frustration management.
None of us changed. Not even after Jesusing as hard as we could!
There’s a reason for it, of course.
So many factors go into our behavior. From genetics and neurochemistry to social conditioning and our upbringing, from our physical environment’s hazards to socioeconomic status, our behavior is the product of a number of factors that we can control only to wildly varying degrees. It’s how a very nice man named Phineas Gage became a whole different person after a metal rod shot clean into his head!
Changing behavior comes down to altering what we can control and trying to account for what we can’t. We have to break and then recreate mental pathways, change reward systems, and do it consistently enough that the new normal is our default. That is so difficult to do, and it takes years—even when we want desperately to change. Even so, sometimes there just isn’t a way to change something, as in the case of sexual orientation, nor any street-legal way to satisfy those deep physical needs.
All Alpha Course wants us to do is layer Jesusing on top of all those factors. The hosts of it act like it’s going to totally fix everything. It won’t fix anything. Worse, it’ll also just make the existing off-limits behaviors even worse.
Really resisting evil takes real-world moral reflexes, which Alpha Course’s leader lacks
And we can see this failure of the Alpha Course roadmap dramatically in one anecdote. It comes from Nicky Gumbel himself. At 18 minutes in, he tells the story of bicycling in London one day. Suddenly, a taxi driver honks his horn and shouts at him. Nicky gets super-mad at that. He chases the taxi on his bicycle. Soon enough, he gets close to the taxi. He begins yelling at the guy in traffic and while the car was in motion to get the taxi driver’s registration number. It all sounds incredibly dangerous.
But! Eventually, Nicky finally catches up with the stopped taxi. But the taxi driver recognizes him and tells him off for disobeying bicycle laws. Worse, the driver tells Nicky this while waving an Alpha Course manual at him! And even worse still, the driver has a passenger in the taxi who has been watching all this!
First and most importantly, Nicky is completely in the wrong here. He specifically tells us he likes to ride well away from the curb. He was on an incredibly busy shopping street (Oxford Street), and the way he’s describing his position makes it sound like he’s obstructing cars in a high-traffic environment. The UK government sites don’t suggest this at all. Also, he’s supposed to let cars overtake him without a fuss. So he put that driver and the passenger of the taxi into danger by chasing them so recklessly. He also endangered countless other people at the scene.
Nicky subtly attributes his desire to, as he puts it, “GET HIM” to Satan. He doesn’t flat-out accuse Satan of making him act like this. He just wants us to understand it sure wasn’t his god’s spirit influencing him. But it’s not Satan’s work. No demons tempted him. He’s just a vindictive person who cheerfully puts others in danger when he gets provoked. All the Jesusing he’s done hasn’t changed him from being easily provoked and vindictive. It didn’t stop him from endangering people in his anger.
And this complete self-own is something Nicky Gumbel now proudly tells people from a stage at Alpha Course meetings. He has no idea what he’s revealing here.
Evangelical hypocrisy as a feature, not a flaw, of their broken roadmap
This is how Alpha Course has changed its very own leader. So what are we to make of the other testimonies we’ve seen in this series? Are the convicted ex-felons really changed? Or did they just learn to smirk and pass off those desires as Satanic while pretending Jesus changed them?
The way Christians think of conversion change is like how Creationists think that lions’ teeth and digestive tracts changed completely after the Fall of Man: Jesus completely changes all those factors we talked about a minute ago to reflect Christian virtues and help his followers live according to his wishes.
But it doesn’t happen that way. Over and over again, we see that Christians aren’t magically changed at all. They just learn to layer Jesusing on top of their existing framework. And then, they learn how to escape accountability for what they still keep doing wrong.
It’s not them. It’s their flesh, or it’s demons, but it doesn’t belong. If they only Jesus harder, those desires will fall away. Any day now. You’ll see. Until then, you must listen to their words and not their behavior.
Thirty-five years ago, that line didn’t work for Biff either. And it works even less today, which is good. When even Christian leaders tell us how poorly their own systems fail them, we should be listening.
NEXT UP: Speaking of PROOF YES PROOF, we’ll check out an apologetics convention that recently wrapped up—and see what they’re offering. See you soon! <3
Please support my work!
Thanks for reading, and thanks for being part of our community! Here are some ways you can support my work:
0 Comments