Trevin Wax is one of the hardline evangelical Calvinist lads over at The Gospel Coalition (TGC). We’ve discussed his work more than a few times. He aims his message at evangelicals who might be fixin’ to deconstruct their faith. Since there appear to be a lot of deconstructing evangelicals out there, evangelical leaders are frantic to have this problem sorted. They are shining a spotlight on Trevin Wax in hopes that he can talk those deconstructing evangelicals down off their ledge.
But with evangelicals, the smoke never matches what’s actually on the plate. In this case, Trevin Wax insists that he’s totally nailed what he calls ‘the hard questions’ about Christianity. Let’s explore what he thinks those questions are—and see how well he handled them.
(I wrote the above before even starting to write today’s topic. That’s how confident I am that he will neither identify the real dealbreakers in his religion nor adequately handle whatever he thinks they are. Narrator: Spoiler alert! And he sure didn’t.)
(This post first went live on Patreon on 2/11/2025. Its audio ‘cast lives there too and is available now!)
SITREP: Trevin Wax nails the ‘hard questions’
On January 21st, Baptist Press ran two separate news puff pieces about Trevin Wax and his podcast Reconstructing Faith. Of interest, they were also both written by the same person, but not Trevin Wax himself. One takes a broad look at Trevin Wax’s overall career. (When I quote from it today, I’ll call it Puff One.) The other concerns his dedication to answering the ‘hard questions’ in the podcast. (Similarly, this will be Puff Two.)
Of note, neither post actually shares what the ‘hard questions’ actually are. So we don’t learn what the totes-for-realsies answers to them might be. But we do learn how he wants doubters to frame their doubts and address them.
Like all the other evangelical leaders we’ve ever encountered who claim to have 100% sorted the entire doubt issue, Trevin Wax sets up an easy hit on the Christian T-ball stand. He labels this ball “doubt” and “hard questions.” Then he knocks the ball out of the park and claims victory over them both.
It’s a clumsy and ineffective strawman, to be sure. But as long as his tribe believes he’s got all the answers for deconstruction, he’ll have a career in evangelicalism.
Everyone, re-meet Trevin Wax
Trevin Wax holds a somewhat medium-ranking position within the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). But he’s clearly bucking for more. He works for the SBC’s North American Mission Board (NAMB). In addition to having written books, many centering on his Calvinist faith, he runs a podcast called Reconstructing Faith. He’s written a lot of posts for The Gospel Coalition (TGC).
In the 2022 anthology book Before You Lose Your Faith, Trevin Wax contributed a chapter called “Doubting Your Way Back to Truth.” It was an extremely intellectually-dishonest attempt to reframe doubt and deconstruction in that one singular and fictional way that evangelical apologists could actually defeat.
In that review post linked above, I praised him for understanding that doubt often flows from one of two sources:
- Wondering if one’s faith is built on objectively true claims
- Asking if one’s faith is actually a net good for oneself and the world
I classify my own deconversion as flowing primarily from the first source. That said, I can see Christians starting from the second point. Over time, I gained a lot more reasons to stay deconverted, with those reasons flowing more from the second point.
Alas, that was about the only credit I could award him.
Christianese 401: ‘The hard questions’
When you see a Christian of any flavor discussing what they call the hard questions, be alert for attempts to reframe and strawman the religion’s dealbreakers. Evangelicals and other hardline Christians cannot accept that their religion does, indeed, have some spectacular dealbreakers. Nobody in their entire religion has ever really adequately handled any of them.
Instead of those, here are a few Christian strawmen of the hard questions:
- “Is there intellectually feasible evidence to support a faith in the Jesus of the Bible and his claims of deity, eternal life and absolute truth?” (from an intro to a “Why I Believe” blog series by Chip Ingram, 2011)
- “Is the Bible Inerrant?” (from a TGC review of Sam Storms’ book Tough Topics: Biblical Answers to 25 Challenging Questions, 2013)
- “Who was Cain’s wife?” (from a devotional about “difficult Bible verses” published on FaithWriters, 2013; his other “difficult verses” are equally hilariously poorly-chosen)
- “Who was Jesus and how can we know?” (7 Pressing Questions: Addressing Critical Challenges to Christian Faith, 2015)
- “Hasn’t science disproved Christianity?” (from a Focus on the Family review of Rebecca McLaughlin’s book Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World’s Largest Religion, 2019; we can see this list duplicated on a church website as well—they did a series of videos about them, even)
- “Doesn’t Christianity crush diversity?” (from a 2021 Medium review of McLaughlin’s book; and yes, this is really what he chose to discuss out of her list)
- “Why do bad things happen to good people?” (finally something more sensible from a blogger in 2025; however, she decides it’s because “sin has consequences,” which doesn’t answer that question at all)
This list is beyond stupid. It reminds me of how addicts try to reason with their addictions. Almost none of this stuff really matters. When this question is asked in social media spaces that are not strictly moderated in Christians’ favor, you get very different responses!
But these strawmen allow Christians to sniff down their noses at the wretched peasants who they insist are asking this bullshit. They allow Christians to give their stock one-sentence answers and get right back to insisting that everyone must adhere to their weird subjective version of objective morality.
The best part of ‘the hard questions’ is that nobody has to actually deal with them
For many centuries, Christians have struggled with two principle dealbreakers. These are such important dealbreakers that they are capitalized!
The Problem of Evil/Suffering: An omnipotent, omniscient god who is also omnibenevolent has somehow ended up with a universe marked by suffering and victimization. That shouldn’t be the case. Rationally speaking, he’s not aware of the suffering, can’t do anything about it, or doesn’t care about it. The more likely explanation, of course, is that he simply doesn’t exist in the form Christians believe he does.
The Problem of Hell: An omnipotent, omniscient god who is also omnibenevolent has somehow created a cosmology that hinges on brutally punishing humans infinitely and forever for offenses committed during a vanishingly short lifetime. He has not given humans any reason at all to suspect that Christianity accurately describes his demands and threats. No evidence even supports the existence of an afterlife! Worse, an infinite god seems awfully frail to be so offended by what are mostly thoughtcrimes. So Hell doesn’t make any sense at all from any standpoint. Either Hell doesn’t exist, or else the Christian god is drastically different from Christians’ conceptualization of him.
These are, indeed, “Problems!”
The more literally a Christian takes the Bible, the bigger the Problems. For example, a sizeable number of Christians don’t buy into Hell. As a result, the Problem of Hell isn’t a problem at all for them. Other Christians accept that the Bible does not accurately describe their god. So for them, the Problem of Evil/Suffering is easily dismissed.
You will only find the beliefs that spark the Problems, generally speaking, among the more hardline flavors of Christianity. It is downright crazymaking to try to reconcile belief in an omnimax god with suffering and Hell. And that dissonance might be intentional. As we’ll see in a moment here, the Problems distract Christians from what might be even bigger dealbreakers in Christianity.
Sunday-School answers for the hard questions
Around 2007, Kelly Clarkson released her song “Never Again.” It describes getting dumped by her very religious ex. Worse, that ex apparently quickly married another woman. In the song, he sends her a breakup letter—which she burns:
I never read your letter
‘Cause I knew what you’d say
Give me that Sunday school answer
Try and make it all ok
That phrase “Sunday school answer” got my attention. It’s such a perfect description of the all-too-easy non-answers that evangelicals memorize to dismiss genuine problems and issues within their religion. On Reddit, a Christian podcaster called them “cheap answers.” That works too. Here’s his example:
Why did God let x person die? Answer: because it was in God’s plan.
And oh, Christians do adore their Sunday school answers.
When the hard questions get thought stoppers as responses
Sunday school answers function as thought stoppers. Thought stopping functions as a form of antiprocess. It slams a mental shield down over very precious beliefs.
Let’s examine a few from the sources linked earlier:
- Why is there suffering in our world? Because “Sin has consequences.” (the blogger from that 2025 post)
Even if we accept her Sunday school answer, we’re left with a god who allows a great deal of suffering in his cosmos when he is supposedly capable of ending it at any time. - Why are Christians as a group such gross, toxic, control-hungry hypocrites? Because “Christians past and present have twisted Scripture to justify a catalogue of unconscionable sins, including racism, misogyny, homophobia, slaveholding, imperialist aggression and cultural insensitivity.” (from the Focus on the Family thing)
Okay, and now we get to ask why an omnimax god allows such twisting of his holy book. Again, this god is either unaware of the problem, can’t fix it, or doesn’t care about the damage caused by his poor performance as a deity—or he does not exist in the form that Christians imagine. - Doesn’t Christianity denigrate women? No, because “despite how our culture has misused this and scriptures like it, the Bible does not denigrate women.” (from the Medium review post)
We have two serious problems here. First and foremost, we once again have a holy book that can be very easily mangled to support any abuses. Second, we have a god who somehow failed to command the Bible’s writers to write that women are not property and merit equal human rights to men. These points can only be inferred.
Or Christians just ignore the questions they themselves have just asked. The pastor who asked about Cain’s wife drops the question there!
Escaping thought stoppers to find the truth
For many years, I accepted the thought-stopping Sunday school answer about prayer. If you’ve ever tangled with Christians, especially evangelicals, you probably know just what one I mean here: The yes/no/wait hand-waving. Here’s one hilarious take on the hand-waving from the father of Colton Burpo, who inspired the purely fictional 2010 book Heaven is for Real:
Sometimes God says no, sometimes He says yes, and I can handle both of those answers. But let me tell you what’s harder for me than no. It’s when God says, “Wait.” It’s the “not yet” answers that are hardest for me. The wait answers. The answers that seem like no answer at all for a long time.
Really? Wow! Sometimes those answers seem like “no answer at all!” You don’t say! Gee, I wonder why?
But that’s the party line right there about prayer. For my entire early life as a Christian, I accepted it.
I only questioned the party line after one of my church’s pastors died of cancer. Even then, the questions lingered for a while before I sat down to find answers to them in the Bible. That night, I fully expected the Bible to settle those questions.
Ironically enough, it did. It just didn’t resolve them in the way Trevin Wax considers the only valid one.
Trevin Wax’s compelling explanations for Christianity’s decline
We won’t find a lot of information about dealing with the hard questions in the two puff pieces on Baptist Press. Instead, we find martyrbation:
“The institutional credibility of the Church and of many leaders has taken such a hit in recent years,” Wax said, “and it can leave many Christians feeling dazed and disoriented as to the way forward.” [Puff One]
If anything good can come from an institution like the Church being attacked, Trevin Wax thinks it can lead “to a purer, better institution in the future.” [Puff Two]
Takeaway: The “hit” evangelicals’ credibility has taken comes from “being attacked.” Trevin Wax never identifies the attacker or the source of the “hit.” Alas for him, though, “the Church” has never changed for the better as a result of “being attacked.”
Trevin Wax’s compelling explanations for doubt—and doubters
We do, however, get a feel for the strawman doubt—and the strawman doubter, more to the point—Trevin Wax pushes in his work:
“There’s a difference between the questioner who delights in excoriating our Christian communities for their missteps as a way of discrediting them and disregarding their authority, and the questioner who acknowledges sin and evil by drawing us closer to the foundation of those communities by relying on a shared commitment to the authority of God’s Word as the standard by which we course-correct.”
And we must ask: Why does it matter what the emotions of “the questioner” are? Are we also to assume that if “questioners” appear to wish to “discredit” Christian leaders and “disregard their authority” that their concerns must be ignored? Is it only valid doubt if a “questioner” appears completely committed to Christianity no matter what those doubts might reveal? If the doubts of both valid and invalid doubters take the same form, then don’t doubters’ demeanors and attitudes stop mattering at all?
For that matter, if one pursues doubts with a fixed final act in mind, then that’s not pursuing doubts with honesty. It’s no different from a chemistry researcher who designs experiments for only one desired result.
Fixing the decline involves rehashing old non-answers to the hard questions
In Trevin Wax’s two puff pieces, we also find appeals to tradition:
The element of church history. . . serves “not as a map giving us turn-by-turn directions on what we should do and how we should live, but as a treasure box,” Wax said. “My love for church history has arisen from necessity, not just curiosity – that we must listen to the wisdom of our forefathers and mothers in the faith if we are to be faithful in our time.” [Puff One]
“It doesn’t mean accepting without question the assumptions we’ve inherited from the communities that formed us,” Wax said, noting: “In fact, this fortification process will often lead to harder questions. But we ask these questions with the goal of returning to the Scriptures and the great Christian tradition for answers. [Puff Two]
Trevin Wax hunts in the past for answers to today’s dealbreakers and Christian crises. Alas, he is guaranteed to fail. None of his named idols—who ironically include C.S. Lewis—have anything to offer about those dealbreakers and crises. These were still dealbreakers and crises back then, too. Nobody back then had solved them. Hell, some early Christians hadn’t even realized they were even problems yet! (F.e.: Slavery, women’s subjugation, etc.)
And nobody today will solve them, either. Nor can anyone. The rot goes to the bone here.
The hardest questions are not ones Christians can ever answer
Once we barrel past the Capital-P Problems in Christianity, though, we arrive at the two singular dealbreakers. They are potent indeed. They strike down almost every religion on Earth.
For my money, only these two questions matter when assessing a religion’s validity:
- Are the believers’ claims true?
(Accepting false claims always and inevitably opens the door to systemic abuse and other trouble. The more false claims you spot in a group and the more they expect you to play along with these claims, the worse it functions.) - Does this belief system tend to produce harmonious groups of people who are actually, consistently, and reliably following the religion’s rules?
(A large percentage of hypocrites, abusive leaders, and toxic groups is a very certain sign of—you guessed it!—systemic abuse and other trouble.)
In both cases, I’m not talking about stupid gotchas like Cain’s wife or the Bible’s dubious quality as a history book. I mean the claims that Christians prove false every single minute of the day:
- Do believers suffer from diseases, disasters, and crime less frequently than heathens do?
Christians claim to escape harm and wrongdoing all the time, and their urban legends are filled with such anecdotes. But the opposite seems to be true. - Does this religion’s behavioral rules and social systems actually make believers better people than heathens?
HAHA no, and when we point that out we get nothing but thought stoppers in return. - If the religion involves supernatural claims, has anyone in the entire religion ever demonstrated the existence of the supernatural in any way?
No, never, not even once. Not even a little. - Do believers’ groups and relationships run better than those of heathens?
Any secular business is more functional and harmonious than any church has ever been. So did the bramble fort I built with a bunch of friends when I was 12. - Do believers’ prayers actually do anything at all?
In a meta way, meditation might improve calmness and confidence. But prayer itself? Prayer for actual things to happen? No, prayer doesn’t function like Jesus magic. I kinda wish it did. I wish someone could cast “VERITAS EXPOSEO” at TGC’s offices! - Does the deity of this religion actually do anything in the real world?
No, he doesn’t. Christians have a lot of non-answers about this question, too, and they’re still left with a real live deity in the real live world who constantly breaks the laws of physics and meddles constantly in the real lives of his believers, and yet never leaves behind a single objective sign of his meddling. - Overall, do believers themselves behave like they believe their own claims?
HAHA nohellno. As a group, they never have.
If these answers described Hindus, I’d reject Hinduism. When I ran into a pagan fundamentalist years ago, I rejected his product because those two dealbreakers both fit what he wanted to do. Heck, if birds had a religion that fit that overall description, I’d reject it too. And I like birds!
Trevin Wax makes the hard questions into indicators of Christians’ moral character and faith
The worst Christians in the world never doubt their beliefs. Meanwhile, the very best ones doubt everything and try to thread the needle in the kindest, most ethical way they can.
Trevin Wax’s main offense in his work is trying to turn doubt into something Christians can defeat—questions into indicators of moral character—dissatisfaction with Sunday school answers into slams on the quality of one’s pre-doubt faith—anger at Christian dishonesty into valid reasons to reject criticism out of hand.
In other words, he’s handling doubt like a typical evangelical leader. He’s demanding that evangelicals frame doubt and deconstruction the way he wants.
Doubt is not a moral defect. Neither is resolving doubt in a way that King Trevin Wax doesn’t like. Nor is approaching doubt only with a demeanor that pleases King Trevin Wax.
After what Christians have done to others over its 1800-ish year history, he has not earned the right to judge criticisms for prettiness and poise. He never had the right to judge doubters or to make demands of them. If his god existed, he’d be too ashamed to do any of that—and too frightened of his god’s wrath even to think of doing it.
Always remember that Trevin Wax and his cronies are the salespeople here. All they’re doing is pitching a product—just like the people selling sausages at Costco every weekend. Their listeners, bystanders, and critics are all their marks. They benefit from our buy-in, and suffer when we refuse their pitches.
His religion has no more intrinsic value than any other hawker’s religion. Judge it as you would judge any other religion.
Ultimately, Christians poorly answer the hard questions for the benefit of the believing flocks and other cronies, not doubters
But then again, Trevin Wax is likely not talking to doubters in the flocks. He’s definitely not talking to heathens, and most definitely of all he’s not talking to ex-Christians/ex-vangelicals. When he pitches his products—his books, his podcast, his talks, or whatever else—he’s not selling this stuff to any of those groups.
He’s selling them to other evangelical leaders and to evangelicals who feel fairly certain of their faith.
Someone who’s already come to uncomfortable conclusions about Christianity can see at a glance that nothing Trevin Wax has to say actually settles any of Christianity’s dealbreakers. It can’t, because it’s really no different from the answers of tens of thousands of similar Christians since about the third century CE. With the setup of religion he buys into, he won’t be the Magic Christian who finally figures out how to deal with those dealbreakers.
But someone whose faith pool is filled—someone who hasn’t yet realized that those faucets represent invalid reasons for belief—oh, that person will be very happy with his work. That person will run across it somewhere, and their confirmation bias will fire into their minds like an angel blowing the seventh trumpet to announce the end of all mysteries. And they will nod to themselves in satisfaction as they consider the book or podcast or whatever: Yes, yes, indeed. This guy has well and truly answered these difficult questions at long last.
They are not yet asking the questions that Trevin Wax poorly answers, so his products will suffice.
Such Christians might not even actually listen to or read any of Trevin Wax’s work. In years past, they did the same with other apologists’ work. Instead, they’ll just be satisfied to know someone has dealt with those troubling questions—and maybe thrust his work at any doubters they encounter.
That’s all Trevin Wax can hope to achieve. And so I suppose he is to be commended for achieving it. Insofar as anybody low-ranking can trust in the evangelical crony network, dude’s got a job until he does something even the other cronies can’t accept.
NEXT UP: The Anglican Church still hasn’t learned its lessons. Their recent antics contradict Christians claims as well. Let’s check them out next time—and see their most recent attempt to silence a critic with serious concerns about how they operate. See you soon! <3
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You’re looking for him. I know because I was once looking for the same thing. And when he found me, he told me I wasn’t really looking for him. I was looking for an answer. It’s the question that drives us, Neo. It’s the question that brought you here. You know the question—just as I did.
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