Just over ten years ago, big-name apologetics hustlers realized that Christianity was fully and truly in decline. These apologists embarked on a new narrative: That their product, apologetics, would turn the ship around and get Christianity back into cultural dominance. Today, let’s check out their grand visions and predictions—and see how accurate they were. Then, let’s see why they still hope apologetics will be their winning ticket to decline reversal.
Spoiler alert: They weren’t super-accurate.
(This post first went live on Patreon on 7/21/2026. It’s available there now. Please support my work—see the end of this writeup for options, and thank you for whatever you decide to do! Also, I’m doing worlds better. The new medications are starting to do their thing and I’m regaining a level of energy that I haven’t had in years. I’m hoping by next week I’ll be back with voicecasts. Thank you for your concern. It’s made a difference.)
SITUATION REPORT: The inevitable apologetics ‘renaissance’ that never happened
As I work through my backlog of old posts with OPERATION LEGACY LIBRARY, I often find interesting snippets along the way that jog my memory of times long past. This topic arose from one of them.
Ten+ years ago, the biggest names in apologetics were predicting a huge renaissance to come for their product. In 2012, Lee Strobel declared that “we’re on the cusp of a golden era of apologetics.” The next year, Daniel Wallace called for “A New Kind of Apologetics: Christian Renaissance.”
Also in 2013 and not long after he lost his cushy Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) gig, Richard Land wrote: “I fervently believe apologetics is the way we will spell Christian evangelism, missions, and discipleship in the 21st century.” In 2014, Land was a keynote speaker at a huge apologetics conference held at his new workplace, Southern Evangelical Seminary—and Michael Behe, clearly recovered from his spanking at the 2005 Dover trial, gave two speeches there about “Darwinism.”
By then, we can read between the lines from this 2014 workshop outline that apologetics had become a full industry within evangelicalism. It mentions conferences, degree programs, social media groups, apologetics-heavy movies, and more as signs of the industry’s new popularity.
In 2016, Randy Newman—who likes a “gospel of joy” style of evangelism—felt that apologetics was entering a new phase of gentleness and humility that would make it far more effective than the prideful, victory-centered styles of the past. (Narrator: It was not changing and it did not, in fact, become more effective.)
Toward the end of 2016, some apologists at Biola were lamenting that yes, “young people are indeed leaving the Church.” (When “Church” gets capitalized like that, it means the grander body of Christians worldwide.) But they felt very certain that apologetics would fix that problem, writing: “faithfully answering questions and providing strong evidence for the truth of the Christian faith can have dramatic positive effects on the spiritual lives of others.”
Unfortunately for them, apologetics does neither. And there never was any kind of huge evangelism rush due to apologetics.
But they were right about the industry itself going into a boom cycle.
The rise of apologetics
Around 2012, some evangelicals were already aware that their religion was losing cultural dominance. Some realized it even earlier. Cottage industries began popping up along the religion super-highway to serve the rising demographic of panicky pastors with dwindling congregations.
One of those cottage industries was apologetics. It wasn’t a new industry, just one experiencing a major resurgence.
Apologetics has always been part of Christianity, ever since the beginning. By at least the end of the 1st century and very beginning of the 2nd, early Christian leaders were already defending their doctrinal beliefs with words, words, words. And yet I don’t hear much about people being persuaded that way. I hear mostly about them being persuaded by miracles or threats of Hell.
When Paul was imprisoned in Acts 16, it certainly wasn’t his fancy footwork with words that persuaded the jailer to convert. It was the miracle that freed him and destroyed the jail. His apologetics likewise failed to persuade anybody in Thessalonica in Acts 17. In Athens later in that chapter, it was resurrection and eternal life that interested his audience, not his apologetics. It’s always been miracles and Heaven/Hell, not arguments full of words, words, words.
Ah, but back then, Christianity wasn’t dominant yet. It held next to no temporal power—and very little cultural power. So Christians actually had to sell their groups, and their targets were under no obligation to buy anything.
Apologetics on cruise control
Even when Christianity did gain temporal and cultural power, apologetics remained a popular way to hone theologians’ minds and hammer out extensive doctrines from a sourcebook never meant to work like that. Ostensibly aimed at the only people nearby who weren’t Christian, Jews and Muslims, medieval apologetics seemed more for the benefit of church people than heathens. As Catholicism broke during the Reformation, apologetics then aimed at persuading listeners of particular kinds of Christianity—but it still seemed aimed more at those believing whatever the apologist believed.
In other words, apologetics aimed at actual persuasion seems to have been limited to times when Christians actually felt a great need to sell their beliefs to others. But they had to do that in their first couple centuries—and the most recent one.
Now that Christianity no longer holds the kind of temporal power it once did, apologetics has become even more important to believers. It ostensibly seeks to persuade those who have rejected Christianity, but once again it seems more geared toward bolstering the beliefs of Christians themselves.
What is old truly is new again.
Apologetics as a sign of late-stage Christianity
I’ve never in my life seen so much apologetics blahblah as I have within the past 15 years. When I was Christian myself (mid-80s to mid-90s), I barely touched anything in the industry. I think I read some C.S. Lewis in college. That’s it. Otherwise, I stood completely outside of apologetics.
Of course, one could easily say that I didn’t tangle with apologetics because I was Pentecostal, and Oneness people didn’t buy or read anything from filthy heretical Trinitarians, and almost all apologetics back then was Trinitarian. But I don’t remember my evangelical peers at the time talking about apologetics, either. Instead, we studied the Bible. If we wanted to get really fancy, we pulled out our Thompson Chain-Reference Bible.
And we didn’t need to do anything else. Our entire world was Christian. Nothing challenged our views overmuch. I didn’t really engage meaningfully with non-Christians until I was in college! That doesn’t mean I didn’t learn the popular apologetics routines of the era, however. I just didn’t purchase materials that taught them, that’s all. Instead, I absorbed them through cultural osmosis, sermons, and the like.
That’s really changed in recent years. You could (and many do) fill home libraries with nothing but apologetics books. Thousands of YouTube videos and online courses teach the arguments to millions of Christians. Through apologetics, Christians hope they can persuade heathens to buy more product at last.
And despite all that brouhaha and all that thunder, despite all those apologists shilling all those materials and all those Christians buying them and memorizing them, the religion keeps losing cultural power and members in America.
I look at this boom in apologetics despite its many failures, and I see it as a sign of late-stage Christianity in the same way that some folks look at extreme wealth differences and the gig economy as signs of late-stage capitalism. It’s a sign that the religion is heading toward irrelevance—and that there’s no way whatsoever Christians can turn their boat from the reefs.
What actually happened with apologetics
As a veteran of the Great Evangelical-Atheist Keyboard Wars of 2005-2015ish, I can tell you exactly what happened to all those grand apologetics predictions in the 2010s:
Nothing whatsoever—except Christians looking worse and worse.
Whenever an apologist developed some new sleight-of-hand wordplay, the skept-o-sphere found out because that person’s fans would swarm our spaces to parrot them at us. We’d patiently (or not so patiently!) debunk the arguments and pick them apart, at which point the evangelists would take a sudden vow of silence and leave.
This happened repeatedly over the end of the 2010s. Repeatedly. Even Christians noticed it while it was happening. I cannot stress to you enough how often this happened on every single skept-o-sphere space: the blogs we frequented, the social media we used, everywhere. Offline, too, many of us got apologetics books shoved at us by well-meaning friends or relatives. (If we responded to the arguments presented, they called us “hard-hearted” and “close-minded.” )
Despite all that effort, I’ve never encountered anyone in the skept-o-sphere who was swayed by apologetics. I’m sure it’s happened. It’s a big world, after all. But I haven’t found anyone.
That said, I’ve encountered lots of people who began deconverting over the realization that apologetics arguments are not evidence, will never be evidence, and can never be evidence no matter how many of them someone pulls together in one spot.
Not that it matters to evangelicals
In recent years, I’ve seen evangelicals trying to retool apologetics for the new post-pandemic world. In June 2020, someone at The Gospel Coalition decided that apologetics keeps failing to persuade because apologists just don’t listen enough to their targets. (Um excuse me yes um “just listen to people” has been advice since at least the 1980s.) Oh, he’s not planning to change his doctrinal stances even a little, of course, after all that listening. Evangelicals have been trying this strategy for decades.
As the great bard once sang, “Don’t think cuz I understand/That I care.” We’ve caught on to the deceptive nature of Christian listening. That act won’t enhance apologetics one bit.
Last year in August, Douglas Groothuis wrote of the great importance of apologetics in reversing Christianity’s decline:
I don’t expect revival to come mainly through apologetics, but a good apologetic makes way for evangelism simply because Christianity becomes more credible to those who hear the gospel.
And right after, in September 2025 Publishers Weekly had this to say about apologetics:
Publishers in recent years have seen apologetics back in fashion in a new way that reflects a shift away from battling culture, embracing it instead as a tool for evangelism.
They don’t need to worry. Evangelicals are already heading that way.
Wrong lesson, wrong time, wrong methods—what could possibly go wrong here?
In 2023, an SBC group, Southern Equip, assured readers that they could master apologetics to evangelize Gen Z. After telling us that apologists now face hurdles they haven’t faced in 1600 years (true, as I pointed out earlier here), they go on to suggest a two-pronged approach. They want their followers to try hardline apologetics + fake friendship:
Apologetics aimed at Gen Z will be most effective when accompanied by a genuine invitation into a personal relationship and the opportunity to witness Christian community. Secularism ultimately cannot live up to its promises. Christians have an opportunity to engage in an “apologetic of normalcy” as secularism continues to drive society in a direction at odds with creation order and Scripture. The imperfect but rightly ordered lives of Christians will present an attractive alternative to the secular norm and undergird the work of the apologist.
And I almost hope they try it. They’re already so bad at communication and friendship that they seem like space aliens who’ve only heard about the concepts from Cannibal Corpse albums. I think people today are a lot better than we were decades ago at spotting someone being nice to them to make a sale.
Apologetics didn’t bring in converts in my day. It does so even less now. Even now, evangelicals completely misunderstand why. Even when half-understanding how apologetics fails to change minds, evangelicals like the guy at Therefore God Exists (and yes, that is a real site) think that The Big Problem Here is how socially costly it is to become a TRUE CHRISTIAN™ like himself—rather than apologetics, as evangelicals wield it, being simplistic, puerile, and trivially easy to debunk by even a child.
If evangelicals are counting on apologetics to be the next great evangelism tool, the results will be nothing but hilarious for the rest of us.
NEXT UP: We’ll check out the very last Alpha Course video! See you soon! <3
Endnote
Part of the problem apologists face is that you can’t talk someone into adopting an irrational, illogical, reality-divorced worldview with fancy arguments. But they don’t have what it’d take to score converts for real—at least, not anymore. We’ll be talking more about that problem later, but I wanted to point it out now.
See also: Stages of grief at the end of apologetics.
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