Not long ago, I ran across a Cru handout of Tim Keller’s “Deconstructing Defeater Beliefs: Leading the Secular to Christ.” In it, he details what he calls these defeater beliefs, which he thinks are beliefs that make Christian claims seem less plausible. But his response to them is anything but plausibility-building. Today, let me show you what he thinks these beliefs are, and then let’s explore his replies to them.
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SITUATION REPORT: Tim Keller tackles ‘defeater beliefs’
While researching something else entirely, I got a reminder of one of Tim Keller’s most famous contributions to evangelism: defeater beliefs. You can see them at this link. These are beliefs that a culture holds that make Christian claims impossible. In the PDF at that link, he tries to “deconstruct” them, meaning he tries to show that these defeater beliefs are, themselves, statements of faith in his god. In other words, skeptics must believe in Jesus to believe in these defeater beliefs.
Tim Keller (1950-2023) was a Calvinist evangelical. He pastored Redeemer Presbyterian Church in NYC, wrote bestselling apologetics and devotional books, and co-founded The Gospel Coalition (TGC), a hardline apologetics and evangelism site. (They do a podcast called Gospelbound that is spectacularly bad.) In life, he targeted “skeptics” and “secular” people. Most evangelists do, but he made the targeting explicit with blog posts like “Skeptics welcome.” TGC embraced his reputation in reviewing one of his books, which is subtitled “An Invitation to the Skeptical.”
And yet he’s one of the single most dishonest, duplicitous, sneeringly-contemptuous apologists I’ve ever encountered. As you’ll see today, his apologetics rely on his targets being very easily manipulated—and on them not having any idea why they really reject his god. His apologetics verge on the edge of childishness. His suggestions mostly offer zingers as replies. But these gotchas that seem very unlikely to persuade any people billing themselves as skeptical.
(Unless noted, all quoted material comes from sources. This includes all emphases within quotes.)
A brief overview of what Tim Keller is talking about
Tim Keller describes defeater beliefs like this:
Every culture hostile to Christianity holds to a set of ‘common-sense’ consensus beliefs that automatically make Christianity seem implausible to people. These are what philosophers call “defeater beliefs”. A defeater belief is Belief-A that, if true, means Belief-B can’t be true.
For a moment, we will leave aside that American culture is incredibly friendly to Christianity, especially his flavor. Evangelicals have an extremely outsized influence on American politics, and it’s very difficult to prevent them from sneaking indoctrination into heathens’ children.
We’ll also ignore for now that the contradictions to his claims are not simply “consensus beliefs.” They’re facts. Here are the beliefs he will “deconstruct” in this handout:
- The other religions (see also: The Outsider Test for Faith; the more religions exist on Earth, the less plausible any one religion’s claims start to look)
- Evil and suffering (ie, the Problems of Evil/Suffering/Hell; these are simply incompatible with an omnimax god)
- The ethical straitjacket (meaning churches try to “dictate everything that a Christian must believe, feel, and do,” which Calvinist evangelical churches openly try to do)
- The record of Christians (hypocrisy: It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!)
- The angry God (which Calvinists 100% believe in, as Rachel Held Evans lamented often)
- The unreliable Bible (completely true, but Calvinists tend to be literalists/inerrantists)
Notably, all of these “defeater beliefs” function as perfectly acceptable reasons to reject Christian claims. But they’re not beliefs, of course. They’re all completely objectively true and valid. And Keller clearly knows better than to even try to rebut them. He can’t. Nobody in Christianity can. Nobody in Christianity ever has or ever will. Instead, he’ll try to “deconstruct” them. That means he’ll just try to make his targets doubt the evidence of reality to peck away at their resistance to his evangelism.
Deconstructing the defeater beliefs, or something
Let’s briefly sum up the “deconstructions” Tim Keller offers:
The other religions. “Inclusivism is really covert exclusivism. [. . .] What you just said could only be true if: First, there is no God at all, or second, God is an impersonal force that doesn’t care what your doctrinal beliefs about him are.” He also asserts that skeptics think “Every religion is equally valid.” He then asserts that this defeater belief amounts to “a very white, Western view” and implies it’s really colonialistic to reject his claims.
Evil and suffering. “If God himself has suffered our suffering isn’t senseless. [. . .] On the cross, Jesus suffered with us.” (WTAF?) He doesn’t otherwise even try to resolve these capital-P Problems. Instead, he implies that anyone who rejects his claims on this basis must secretly believe in his god after all, because here we are mad at that god!
The ethical straitjacket. He emphasizes this reply: “Individual creation of truth removes the right to moral outrage,” then asserts that everyone has a sense of morality, so Christians having one and judging people is fine. And also, “No one is really free anyway. [. . .] Christianity gives you a lord and master who forgives and dies for you.” So not only is it okay for churches to impose an “ethical straitjacket” on members, but non-Christians have one already that isn’t nearly as nice.
The record of Christians. “The solution to injustices is not less but deeper Christianity.” Yes, yes, “there have been terrible abuses.” But look at Martin Luther King, Jr.! He didn’t demand racists leave Christianity. He tried to Jesus them into being less racist! (And oh boy did that work wonderfully, right?) “Christianity provides perhaps greater tools than the other religions do for its own critique.” In other words, he barely touches on any real resolution to this rejection.
The angry God. He emphasizes this reply too: “On the cross God does not demand our blood but offers his own.” Then he launches into an apologetic around the meaning of the Crucifixion. Again, he barely engages at all with the actual critique, which he defines this way: “The God of Christianity seems a left-over from primitive religions where peevish gods demanded blood in order to assuage their wrath.” That is literally how evangelicals explain Jesus’ suffering and death (they call it substitutionary atonement), but Keller doesn’t seem to want to go there. Again, he doesn’t touch the actual accusation.
The unreliable Bible. This one is the longest “deconstruction.” And he emphasizes his point here as well: “The gospels’ form precludes their being legends.” (No, it sure doesn’t. There were many other gospels, and many are obviously legendary!) He tries to lean hard on the vast gap between the events and the earliest scraps of writing about them as PROOF YES PROOF that they must be “historically reliable accounts.” Yes, just like if I wrote in 2002 about the life of Harry S Truman, who died in 1972, then that would totally be an eyewitness account. But Keller asserts that “to simply reject any Scripture is to assume your culture (and worse yet, your time in history) is superior to all others. It is narrow-minded in the extreme.”
Zingers as the best answer ever to defeater beliefs
Most of Tim Keller’s suggestions in his handout amount to zingers—quick, pithy comebacks that sound clever and effective. Evangelicals have loved zingers for a long, long time. They value courtroom-style evangelism, so a well-placed zinger that completely reverses a court case appeals to them on a level that outsiders can’t even begin to understand. That’s why they love the debate scene in God’s Not Dead (2014). Here it is (hopefully time-stamped to about 4:15):
It’s also why they absolutely loved the grand age of debates they had with atheists back in the late 2000s into the mid-2010s. Opportunistic evangelicals like William Lane Craig, who could minmax the rules of debate, had a field day—right up until atheists figured out those same minmax techniques and began stomping on them. These days, far fewer evangelicals try to start fights like that!
But even though they’ve figured out that debates have become a very bad idea, evangelicals still treasure the witty zinger.
Tim Keller likes his ‘tu quoque’ attempts, too
Tu quoque literally means “you, too.” It’s a logical fallacy that uses the speaker’s own example as a reason to reject their claims. The classic example is a doctor telling a patient to stop smoking, but the doctor is literally smoking a cigarette right then. The patient replies that obviously smoking can’t be that bad, because the doctor smokes too!
Modern people call this fallacy “whataboutism.” Republicans often try to neutralize Democrat policies with “but what about abortion?” and the like, implying in this case that support for abortion access is somehow inconsistent with those policies.
Way back in the day, Steve Shives described it as “the roadrunner tactic” of evangelism: The evangelist seeks to show the target that their objection is inconsistent with their stated disbelief. You can see it here at about 24 minutes in (and I’m laughing right now because he’s talking here about Tim Keller):
In today’s case, Tim Keller uses this technique constantly. In “the other religions,” he insists that disbelief is really belief. For the next section about the Problems of Evil/Suffering, he asserts that anyone who says those Problems are logically impossible for the Christian god must actually totally believe in that god’s omnimax nature to begin with. In the third, that “ethical straitjacket” one, anyone who judges the actions of others must be doing it because Yahweh exists.
None of this makes any sense to outsiders, but it thrills evangelicals. Keller’s TGC reviewer calls his book “superb, timely, insightful, and much-needed.” Evangelicals don’t ever tend to notice that his work assumes targets are blithering idiots who don’t know their own minds, how he refuses to accept targets’ own statements about themselves, and how he never even once offers any compelling reasons to believe—only words, words, words. This handout doesn’t change the Keller pattern, either.
The sheer dishonesty of these answers blows my mind, but it really shouldn’t
This handout doesn’t just contain “deconstructions” of defeater beliefs. It also teaches readers how to present them. A lot of emotional manipulation goes into evangelism! And Keller seems to understand that most people aren’t converted through apologetics anyway, but on far more “pragmatic rather than abstract” reasons. These include wanting to belong to a church community they like, or making social connections or joining based on shared social concerns.
What he doesn’t like is “expressive individualism,” which he defines as:
“It is true if it works for me.” This obviously is based on the view that truth and right-or-wrong is something I discover within my own self and consciousness.
He doesn’t like that because evangelicals generally bristle at the idea that they’re evangelical precisely because it works for them. Like the rest of his tribe, he wants to believe that he’s Christian because it’s the objective truth about reality. Alas, nothing about reality would lead anyone to his flavor—at least without a lot of prompting beforehand!
This idea lets him slam people who leave his tribe as fakey-fake fake Christians, which he does here. But he forgets that even Christians who stay do so for that same reason. That includes him!
Thus, evangelism and apologetics need to present targets with reasons to take his claims seriously. Keller writes, “Christianity must be perceived to be true, even though less rationalistic cultures will not demand watertight proofs like the older high-modern western society did.”
He really wishes that Americans still accepted Christian claims at face value like he thinks they used to. Nope, instead he had to develop complicated schemes for evangelism like his “sandwich approach,” which works like you think it does. It offers a “brief gospel summary” that presents Jesus as the answer to whatever personal questions the target might have about their life, then tries to “dismantle plausibility structure” in the target, then offers a “longer explanation of the person and work of Christ.”
Keller ends the second step with two very important “final notes.” First, he stresses that “it is critical to state these defeaters in the strongest possible way,” meaning the evangelist should steelman them and not strawman them, but I hope I’ve made clear he does nothing of the sort. They’re all strawman arguments. Defeater beliefs are not truly beliefs in the first place.
Second, he stresses that nobody should try to “‘answer’ or ‘refute’ them but to deconstruct them. [. . .] It is important to show that all doubts and objections to Christianity are really alternate beliefs and faith-acts about the world.”
If anyone wonders why I don’t like Tim Keller, hopefully I’ve adequately answered that question.
What real answers would look like—and why Christians can’t offer those
Like all evangelists, Tim Keller just can’t believe that anyone would ever reject his claims for good reasons. He even writes: “Alvin Plantinga wisely asserts that people avoid Christianity not because they have really examined its teachings and found them wanting, but because their culture gives huge plausibility.” So he takes Plantinga’s word over that of the growing number of people who reject his claims.
Evangelists can’t accept any reason for rejecting their claims because they need to think that their religion is perfect for every human being on earth. Therefore, all rejections are invalid. The evangelist attempts to make that invalidity clear. They can’t try to offer their own compelling reasons to believe. There aren’t any. That ship sailed very soon after Christianity was invented. It carries on its voyage reasons like these:
- Christianity changes people for real (when it doesn’t)
- Faith makes Jesus believers better people than non-Christians can be (which is laughably untrue)
- Miracles totally happen (when they don’t)
- Yahweh cares about the well-being and survival of his followers (yeah, they wish)
- Prayer produces objective results (when it is really just magical thinking)
- Some part of our consciousness continues to meaningfully exist after death (haha no)
- There’s a nice afterlife and a bad one (nope)
- Christianity accurately describes the supernatural (nope)
- Out of every religion humans have ever conceived, Christianity is the one accurate one (and I can see why Tim Keller tries so hard to invalidate that dealbreaker)
- The Bible is a history and science book (dear god NO it isn’t)
- The Bible presents humans with perfect advice about how to live and conduct relationships on every level (NOPE)
I could go on, but hopefully I’ve made my point. It’d be easier for evangelists to convince me that Paris is in Siberia than to give me any confidence at all in their claims. My post-deconversion belief in the goodness and trustworthiness of Macintosh users had a better basis in fact than my past Christian beliefs ever did.
The worst parts, the trump cards, that show the absolute disaster of it all
Maybe that’s why Tim Keller focuses instead on being the Last Ideology Standing. He tries to knock down targets’ objections rather than offering good reasons to believe. It’d be like me asserting that my family’s pharmacy closes at 6pm, my husband telling me I’m just wrong, and me changing my mind on that basis or arguing about it. Settling a question about reality can be as simple as looking up a pharmacy online! And in this particular case, when my husband politely pushed back on my claim, that’s what I did. (I was right, too.)
And you’d think that recruiters for a real religion based on a real god could do the same. But they can’t. When they try, they get laughed offstage. Reality-embracing people tear apart Christians’ reality-based claims. A number of science-based blogs and sites in the 2010s did exactly that—the TalkOrigins Archive being one of the best examples of the breed. However, Christians can’t do anything like it.
Instead, they sure need a lot of manipulation to sell their religion!
And why on earth does anyone care what Tim Keller thinks of their reasons for rejecting Christianity, anyway?
Does he imagine that if King Tim tells someone their reasons are purely cultural and invalid, that they’ll drop to their knees to sob their way through the Sinner’s Prayer? Are we to toss and turn at night because a Jesus salesman thinks less of us for rejecting their claims?
Really, Tim Keller just misses the Good Ole Days
I strongly suspect that Tim Keller misses what he describes as “the older high-modern western society” for more than one reason. That society gave deference to his beliefs. It was still very controlled by people who held beliefs similar to his. Knowledge of other religions—and perhaps more importantly of specific and widespread Christian hypocrisy—wasn’t common. Its people didn’t know that much about science, so they gave miracle claims more credit than they ever deserved. They openly embraced magical thinking.
More than that, evangelists then didn’t need to worry about “sandwich” evangelism. Membership in churches was still mandatory in most areas in America. Evangelism was simply a matter of poaching Christians from other churches with persuasive patter about beliefs the targets largely already held.
But he was born in 1950. During his most formative years as an adolescent and young man, those days were already in the rear-view mirror. He doesn’t remember how religious control of secular government could and did go haywire and hurt people, as it did in the Red Scare days. And for a man who holds Martin Luther King, Jr. out as an example proving that Christianity can police itself, he sure forgets that racist Christians did and still do use their religion to justify their racism!
Maybe that’s the worst dealbreaker about Tim Keller’s entire teaching about defeater beliefs. People in other religions can and do say the same things he does about his own. But worse, other Christians can and do disagree with doctrines he holds.
But not to Tim Keller. Like a lot of Christians, I suspect he believes in Mayberry Christianity. In this belief, society was once polite, high-trust, unharmed by religion, and largely agreeing about doctrinal stances. It’s clear that he really has no idea how to engage with people who have excellent reasons for rejecting his religion or his personally-held doctrines. Instead, he’s relying on the same tricks evangelists have used for many decades.
But his sales figures are perfectly safe, regardless. Evangelicals love those tricks, and they’ll always buy books telling them they totally work.
NEXT UP: Tim Keller isn’t talking to unbelievers in this handout anyway. We’ll talk about why next time! <3
Endnote
I just realized I actually described Tim Keller as a Mayberry Christian over a decade ago in 2013. I’m laughing so hard right now. That Steve Shives video wasn’t my only surprise today!
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