In the fourth Alpha Series video, Christians try very poorly to explain how religious faith works and how someone acquires faith in their religion. Unfortunately, they don’t understand what faith is themselves, nor how faith sparks to life in the first place. Today, we’ll review this video and explore what faith is—and isn’t.
(This post and its audio ‘cast first went live on Patreon on 7/29/2025. They’re both available now! Also, Neil Carter’s blog post I mentioned. Answering Alpha series tag.)
SITUATION REPORT: Alpha Course shows us how to totally have faith
The fourth video of the apologetics-based evangelism series, Alpha Course, claims to be able to teach people how to have faith in Christian claims. You can find it here:
The video does not actually provide any answers to how someone can find faith in Christian claims. Instead, its speakers offer a number of reasons for why they themselves have faith. None of these reasons aligns with reality. They’re all based on invalid arguments, their own feelings, false comparisons to real things (particularly their own marriages), grandiose promises, and the supposed “free gift” they claim Jesus has offered humans.
It’s remarkable to see an evangelism video aimed at non-believers that so poorly explains something as basic as how someone can have faith in Christian claims. Not one of these speakers understands anything about Christian faith. Instead, they trot out reasons that wouldn’t convince them to join some other religion. And they expect those reasons to be enough for viewers.
Let’s dive into those poor explanations. We’ll also grade their effectiveness!
How to have faith, according to Alpha Course
All timestamps are from the video (relink).
2:20: Two dudebros who look like they were made in a factory tell us that joining Christianity is totally not like joining an activity club in college. One falsely claims that Christian faith is not dictated by the beliefs of members’ parents. In reality, that’s the most reliable way to become a Christian as an adult. This is the one correct answer we’ll find in the video, but our two dudebros here are insisting that’s not proper faith.
Grade: F. Poor understanding of how faith arises.
7:20-11:30ish: Hilariously, both dudebros claim they have “good reasons to be confident in our faith” and that it is “based on facts, not just feelings.” One compares his religious faith to his marriage. He falsely claims his faux-relationship with Jesus is exactly like that, even though he’s never once seen or touched Jesus, heard his voice, or even gotten any clear evidence supporting the very existence of him. The other claims that the Bible itself represents a reason to have that “confidence.”
Grade: F. Video offers no real-world evidence of Jesus having relationships with humans. Further, the Bible is the claim. It cannot also be the support for the claim. To claim otherwise is to use circular reasoning.
9:30: The dudebros tell us, “You can be sure that if you invite Jesus into your life, he will come in.” That makes Jesus sound like a vampire, but Alpha Course still doesn’t give us any real-world signs of his possession or absence.
Grade: F. Lots of people pray for real reasons to believe and get absolutely nothing from their ceilings no matter how much they cry and beg.
11:45: Another false comparison to real marriage. Just as our dudebro has a marriage certificate, he insists he can also point to the supposed historicity of Jesus as PROOF YES PROOF that Christian claims are true.
Grade: F. Even if Christians could prove Jesus really existed in the form described in the Gospels, it wouldn’t prove that his claims were true. Other religions have much stronger claims to historicity—for example, Islam.
The rest of the video involves overcoming objections (12:15; for example, not being good enough to be a Christian), falsely framing their product as a “free gift” (13:00), sharing testimonies (15:00 and 18:10), and talking about the “great love” Jesus has for people (17:50). At no point does anyone in this entire video offer any real-world support for any of these ideas.
Our dudebros end on the Sinner’s Prayer (21:00). They clearly assume they’ve knocked it out of the park with this video. Having assured themselves of it, they move right along to closing the sale.
Faith is confidence and trust in a claim, not insisting a fantasy is reality
Amusingly enough, the video tackles the definition of faith. At 13:20, two new speakers tell us:
We exercise faith all the time in big ways and in small ways, whether it’s faith in the bus driver to not crash, faith in a friend to keep a secret, or even faith in the chair you’re sitting on to hold you up.
A great description of the word “faith” is trust.
That’s pretty close! One great way to describe faith is having a high confidence in the claims involved.
Unfortunately, nothing in the video inspires that kind of confidence in anyone who’s familiar with religions or critical thinking. The way Alpha Course describes faith in real things doesn’t map to their religious claims. Their religious claims just aren’t reality-based. Christianity doesn’t work the way their faith describes it.
That last bit about chairs is especially interesting.
Faith as a chair: Alpha Course’s most telling mistake in the video
This video’s speakers have obviously never had to navigate a world full of chairs that they couldn’t trust. Back in the 2010s at the height of Fat Acceptance, I read dozens of social media posts by plus-sized people who were scared to sit on chairs. Many had even experienced a chair collapsing out from under them, as one Facebook user attested!
Their rightful lack of trust in chairs comes much closer to my level of confidence in Christian claims. Maybe instead of conceptualizing my deconversion as a draining of my Faith Pool, I could say I had one too many faith-chairs collapse out from under me!
If we look at prayer alone, we find that reality doesn’t align at all with the Bible’s explicit promises about it. Even Christians themselves know better than to bet the farm on prayers. The only way to have faith in prayer is to ignore how reality constantly contradicts the belief. So they find ways to word their prayers so they’re unfalsifiable, or they ignore all the times they don’t get whatever it was they wanted.
This fluid shifting from faith meaning “confidence in something for good reasons” to “belief despite having no good reason at all for it” is called equivocation. It’s a dishonest attempt to frame religious claims as being identical to real-world claims—like trusting that chairs are reliable, though all too many people know they’re not always so.
I prefer real-world confidence
The two extremes of faith for me will always be Julia Child and Poppy Cannon.
These two women were contemporaries in the cooking world. Julia Child wanted to share her chef’s education with anyone who’d listen. Poppy Cannon was desperately trying to support herself through freelance writing about cooking.
I have 100% confidence in a Julia Child recipe. She only cared about teaching readers and viewers to make good food. So her recipes might look weird. The steps might seem strange. That’s fine. If I do what she says, I will come out of that walk of faith with delicious food.
In religious terms, she was a bit more like Thích Nhất Hạnh than Jesus. There’s a reason why the movie about Child’s life, Julie and Julia (2009), contains multiple scenes of women drying cubes of raw beef in preparation for making what is possibly Child’s best-known dish, Boeuf Bourguignon. There’s a ritualistic but real-world care to this first step, one that has always felt tenderly meditative to me when I do it:
I found I could similarly trust the writings of Thích Nhất Hạnh. He grounds his teachings in the everyday activities of life. They become a path to calm and hope. Those teachings helped me find my bearings in that first sharp, storm-tossed year of grief after my mother died. So I developed faith in his teachings because they worked—no gods required.
In the same way, you don’t need to have faith-for-no-good-reason in Julia Child’s recipes. They work. Every time, they work. You can trust them. If you follow her directions, you get the promised results. In the same way, I didn’t feel that Thích Nhất Hạnh promised anything he couldn’t deliver. I don’t think he’d have blamed someone for doing mindfulness wrong, either. Critics take issue with his secular take on Buddhism and supposed “intellectual dishonesty.” But I haven’t seen anyone say that his mindfulness practices are not rooted at all in reality.
The Alpha Course chef isn’t Julia Child; it’s Poppy Cannon
Conversely, I have 0% confidence in a Poppy Cannon convenience-food recipe. She wasn’t really writing those recipes to teach cooking. Rather, she wrote to evoke an image: the sprightly Manic Pixie 1950s Dream Girl. Her dynamic, fashionable, bubbly little vixens concocted gourmet feasts in minutes from creative combinations of canned food and boxed mixes.
Cannon believed in ultraprocessed convenience foods. That faith would sound completely familiar to the Christians of Alpha Course. As Laura Shapiro wrote in Something from the Oven (2004), her faith in these foods “ran across her career like a fault line in its very foundation” (p. 171).
One September 1940 recipe Cannon wrote for Mademoiselle sounds particularly grim (Shapiro, p. 184; local archive). In it, she suggested layering slices of Spam, canned macaroni and cheese, and canned asparagus, covering it all with cheese and bread crumbs, and baking the entire mess. When readers protested its sheer nightmarish awfulness, the magazine ran some of their letters—with an editor telling one man, “It must be that heavy masculine hand.” Another reply insisted that two staff members “tried the same recipe and report that it was divine.” (All emphases from original sources.)
When someone tells one of these chirpy, warbling Alpha Course Christians that they prayed and got nothing from Jesus at all, that’s the kind of response I expect from them. Their description of faith relies on circular reasoning, feelings over facts, and invalid comparisons. It never actually involves any real-world evidence.
Of course, it can’t. Its creators don’t have any.
If they did, they wouldn’t need all these false reasons. They’d just pony up the real ones.
The fundamental flaw of Christianity is that it doesn’t line up with reality, but its believers really wish it did
If I were to suggest a religion to someone, I’d stress its real-world effects. For example, mindfulness as a practice brings with it several benefits:
- Mindfulness meditation has small to moderate effects on anxiety, depression, and even pain management (JAMA 2014)
- Practicing lovingkindness (like active listening) has effects on mood, feelings of connection and social support, and one’s sense of well-being (Psychology 2016)
- Its ethical framework promotes ideas like social cooperation and community involvement, which have been linked to happiness across many cultures (Current Psychology 2023; Nature 2025)
- It doesn’t require the abandoning of one’s cultural roots or current religious affiliation; Thích Nhất Hạnh grounded his teachings in SEA Buddhism, but his Plum Village retreat in France welcomed people from every country and religion—and he recognized that couching his teachings in supernatural claims would only create obstacles for cultural outsiders and skeptics alike
If I were going to promise anything more than that, I’d want evidence of it. Christianity just doesn’t have that evidence. I have no confidence in their recipes, so to speak. I tried cooking with them for the first half of my entire life, and nothing came out the way Christians keep promising.
In response, all they can say is that I did something wrong. Yes, it must have been my heavy skeptical hand. Two staff members tried the same recipe and report that it was divine.
How very dare I suggest otherwise!
I don’t think Alpha Course-style evangelism would ever work to convert Christians to other religions
If someone’s very suggestible and desperate enough to feel something, anything at all, then they might feel sometimes like they have something like a relationship with Jesus. However, most people can’t work themselves up like that. All Christians have for those people are admonitions to Jesus harder.
Similarly, Christians might claim some random event is a miracle, as one Tennessee pastor claimed last week about CBS canceling Stephen Colbert’s TV show. They avoid closer questions about a god who can get a comedian fired but not end war or cure cancer. Or stop his own ministers from sexually abusing children.
Christians can claim all they like that the Bible totally assures them they’re in a real relationship, one that is every bit as real as their own marriages. But if I told them some people have exactly the same kind of relationship with some other god, it’d take more than mythology snippets and personal feelings to convince them of that! I can touch, see, hear, and talk with my husband—but anyone who says they do that with Jesus is either lying or deluded.
If Christians could map their evangelism strategies onto some other religion, maybe they’d notice more easily how weaksauce it all is. But they’ve been indoctrinated to believe that these tactics are completely sufficient to persuade others, purely because those tactics sound good to those who already believe! In a nutshell, that’s Alpha Course’s hubris. And ultimately, it’s why Christianity’s in decline.
I’d rather follow a recipe that works than one that requires me to ignore reality and eat garbage food while claiming it’s divine.
NEXT UP: A follow-up to this video—with Alpha Course’s creators offering a third way to find faith that the video never mentions. 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