Recently, Russell Moore wrote an opinion post for Christianity Today. In it, he discussed apologetics as a failed strategy for evangelism—and debates as pointless. Instead, he wants Christians to focus on their experiences and feelings. And in the end, he reveals that experiences and feelings are really all they have.
It’s breathtaking to see an evangelical leader of his status admit that Christians really don’t have anything objective or tangible to offer to support their many, many claims. But really, he’s just admitting something heathens have known for about ten years now, ever since the grand age of evangelical-atheist debates.
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SITUATION REPORT: Russell Moore wants to hear about experiences and feelings, not arguments—in the Theology category
For the May/June issue of Christianity Today, Russell Moore (the magazine’s editor at large) wrote an intriguing opinion post. He titled it: “Why I Don’t Debate Atheists.” Its summary line: “We need apologetics, but what we need more is genuine confidence in the Word we carry.”
In it, he makes a few points:
Apologists don’t tend to have converted because of apologetics. Instead, they tend to have converted from emotional reasons, or because they were raised in religious homes. In reality, this trend—which tracks with what I’ve seen as well—speaks to the utter uselessness of apologetics as a field.
Moore offers only strawman caricatures for Christians’ targets. In fact, he seems afraid of naming the actual reasons why people don’t believe Christian claims, or even accurately describing the pushback.
Not all Christians need to be able to win a “cage fight” against atheists. Of course, they should totally still learn apologetics, but really what matters is their feelings and experiences. They should push hard on acting passionate about their beliefs.
In the end, what matters is thinking heathens are afraid of the same things that Christians are, and their concerns—once ferreted out—are easily dealt with. He wants his readers to think their evangelism targets only talk a big game—while hiding secret feelings of yearning and fear that evangelists can exploit.
Amazingly, this post is categorized in the “Theology” category on the site. There’s nothing theological about it.
Now, let’s dive into his points—starting with a brief overview of apologetics itself.
Apologetics: What it is, what it does
In Christianity, apologetics is a field concerned with finding philosophical arguments that might support the existence of Yahweh as a real, omnimax god. Christians conceptualize apologetics like a courtroom drama. Apologists are like lawyers arguing for that existence. Officially, the goal of apologetics is to convert heathens to Christianity and to dispel doubts in current Christians.
In right-wing Christian flavors, followers are expected to learn the major apologetics arguments and to counter objections to their claims. Evangelicals consider this process part of equipping evangelists.
Some apologists are professionals. They get paid to write books and give seminars about their arguments. Most, however, are amateurs of varying skill.
When the so-called “New Atheism” age dawned in the 2000s, some of those apologetics professionals made tours of the debate circuit, arguing with New Atheist leaders and scientists about the existence of their god. I wrote about it a while ago. They fizzled out around 2014-2015 after some extremely high-profile losses for the apologists involved. Since Moore specifically praises William Lane Craig as a debater, here’s Craig getting his ass repeatedly handed to him by physicist Sean Carroll. It’s a splendid showing by Carroll, and one of the last big debates period for apologists. It’s also a great overview of how apologetics works:
However, Moore doesn’t like modern religious debates much. I agree with the sentiment, though I disagree with his reasoning. In my opinion, debates are not how objective facts get uncovered. If anyone ever finds evidence to support the existence of any gods, it won’t be an apologist—and it won’t happen during a debate.
Rather, debates reward those who can think very quickly on their feet. Their audiences value pithy quotes and emotional appeal over genuine correctness. No, debates really work best when the two sides are generally equally matched in terms of facts and support from reality, as we often see in local politics as opponents grapple with how to spend the public’s tax money.
In an atheist-Christian debate, though, the two sides are not matched at all. One is based in reality; the other is not. No amount of wordplay will ever, can ever, add up to a tether to reality. Arguments aren’t evidence.
But that’s not why Moore doesn’t like debates. He just doesn’t like seeing apologists arguing without fervor and passion. As he writes of the ones he likes, “these apologists could not be replaced by artificially intelligent debate bots.” He’s not wrong. Many times, I’ve compared apologists to old-school Roombas hitting a wall repeatedly, unable to change course or alter their routines. Apologetics largely only works, to the extent that it can, if the target follows the script along with the apologist.
Despite that signal failure, as Christianity declines more and more in the United States, apologetics has boomed. There are now countless books, videos, and social media posts pushing apologetics arguments at customers and followers. As well, countless Christian leaders in those right-wing flavors insist that apologetics is an essential skill.
Russell Moore understands that apologetics is useless as an evangelism tool, but he can’t outright say that
In telling us that apologists themselves didn’t convert through apologetics, though, Moore insists that he is far more impressed by their testimonies than he would have been if they’d been “convinced by the cosmological argument for the existence of God.”
If you’re wondering, the cosmological argument goes like this: The universe exists; it cannot have created itself; therefore, it was created by something else(; therefore, Yahweh created it). It’s not in the least persuasive. Anyone who learns to spot logical fallacies, cognitive biases, and manipulation attempts will see right through even venerable apologetics routines like this one.
That brings us to a serious dealbreaker, one that Russell Moore can only hint at: Even if apologetics routines were valid, even if their structure were airtight, the very best they can ever do is make Christianity seem very slightly more credible as a belief system.
Perhaps that’s why any Christian engaging too critically with apologetics stands at risk of incurring serious doubts about their faith. I’ve heard a number of “ex-timonies” that begin with noticing apologetics dealbreakers.
However, Moore can’t just come out and say that apologetics probably causes more harm than good to most rank-and-file pew-warmers. So instead, he laces his post with support for apologetics:
Christians sometimes think the way to share the gospel is to have a ready answer for every possible objection to belief—from archaeology to quantum theory.
The church needs people who can do all that
We need debaters, yes, and we need experts.
He does a lot of yes—BUT style argumentation here: Yes, he writes, Christianity needs apologists—BUT it also needs people who can speak passionately about their experiences and feelings. It’s like he’s trying to soothe ruffled feathers to avoid provoking the wrath of the many Christians who think apologetics is their highest calling. I can’t blame him there, either. I’ve seen what happens to Christians who are too blunt about their opinions regarding apologetics. Myron Penner was one of those, back in the 2010s. Evangelicals attacked him nonstop for it for a while.
A pivot to experiences and feelings over arguments
The main thrust of Russell Moore’s post is that Christians can evangelize just fine without resorting to apologetics arguments. Instead of fancy verbal footwork, they should instead focus on their experiences and feelings. Moore thinks they should “cultivate” Christian ideals like holiness, gentleness, and respectfulness alongside “the hope that is within them.”
To demonstrate how powerful his approach can be, he reaches for the New Testament’s accounts of early evangelists like Paul. This is a common trope within Christianity, this thinking that the first Christian evangelists did everything better. So is Moore’s advice to push hard on their own experiences and feelings about being Christian.
It’s a strange pivot from someone who thinks the Bible is literally true and inerrant. Moore writes:
Evidence may lead people to a moment when, in seeing Jesus, they have faith. But faith is not the endpoint of an accumulation of evidence. Faith is the evidence. People must experience it from the inside to really know it.
Faith isn’t evidence. It’s just a feeling. If I have faith that the grocery store closes at 9pm, that’s not evidence supporting the claim. It’s what happens after I’ve encountered what I believe to be evidence for the claim. Of course, I may have based my faith on faulty evidence. Maybe I’ve only heard someone say that’s the closing time. Or maybe I’m misremembering something, or mixing this store up with another. Faith can be very easily wrong. In similar fashion, billions of non-Christians around the world are just as certain of their beliefs as Moore is of his, and all these groups can’t all be correct in those beliefs. (But they can all be wrong!)
The other problem is that if people can’t have certainty without going gung-ho into his religion, then Russell Moore’s implicitly admitting that he has zero objective evidence for his claims.
I may not be a jogger, but I have evidence-backed faith that it has enormous health benefits. And even without physically going to Wyoming, I’m pretty sure Wyoming exists. Maybe. Probably.
Strawman pushback against Christian claims
All that said, Russell Moore is just as guilty of wanting bedrock certainty in his beliefs as any apologetics-wielding brigade of keyboard warriors online.
Russell Moore wants his readers to stop thinking of their god as “an algebra equation.” Oh, he only wishes that Yahweh’s existence could be that simple and stark and real! But it isn’t. No math describes anything he believes about the supernatural. The problem is, especially for right-wing Christians like himself, they want a real live god who does real live things in the real live universe, but nothing about that universe lends support to that notion.
And apologetics is the dead opposite of algebra equations anyway. It’s what Christians reach for because they don’t have algebra equations. Or carbon-14 dating, archaeological finds, or extant writings from that critical 0-35 CE timeframe. Or evolutionary biology support. Really, or a single verified miracle, or even a decent study marking the high efficacy of intercessory prayer! If Christians had a single bit of any of that, they would drop apologetics in the dust where it belongs.
Perhaps because Moore knows he doesn’t have any of that, he builds strawmen to demolish with pushback:
When someone says, “We can’t trust the Gospels because they were written hundreds of years after Jesus lived,” we should show them why that’s not true.
Firstly, nobody thinks they were written “hundreds of years after Jesus lived.” Experts date the first fragments of Mark to about the 60s to 70s CE. Likewise, they think John likely comes from the beginning of the 2nd century, maybe even into the 140s, but probably closer to 100-110 CE. So, maybe a century after Jesus’ supposed lifetime, tops. If you wouldn’t trust a Millennial to write a “contemporary” account of the Victorian age, then there’s even less reason to trust the Gospels.
But secondly, that’s not even why people don’t trust the Gospels. We don’t trust the Gospels because nothing supernatural that appears in them, right down to the existence of Jesus, his family, his followers, and anything he said or did, appears anywhere else in the extrabiblical writings of that time. (And I did the math on this one: See our ‘1st-Century Fridays’ tag.) Even Pontius Pilate, a real Roman official, acts wildly out of character in the Gospels.
The other strawman argument concerns those people who (correctly) insist everything is based in reality:
When someone says everything is material, we ought to show them how they don’t really act as though love and courage and music and beauty are just chemical secretions.
He’s never had any evidence saying otherwise. Antidepressants and party drugs work because emotions are chemical reactions. Music affects us because it toys with our brain wiring; it can even foster altered states in us. (See also: This Christianity Today article about it!) Even animals demonstrate enormous courage, so it’s definitely not divine in nature or uniquely human. And that’s before we get into the rushes of neurochemicals and interplay of brain structures that produce it! Beauty is largely universal—think in terms of face symmetry, or the “golden spiral” in art that produces such pleasing images. Here’s one from a Reddit community devoted to JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure:
None of that makes emotions, music, courage, beauty or art any less compelling or amazing. They don’t need to be caused by invisible wizards. And I sure did notice that Moore doesn’t even try to make his own conditioned and neurochemical response to his religion sound more objectively real. He’s just trying to knock down our entire mechanism for figuring out what’s real and what isn’t: that game of “Last Ideology Standing” that right-wing Christians adore so much. And he must do this, because he can’t make a case for using his mechanism until we lose trust in our own.
It’s such a display of intellectual cowardice. But he’s about to top that display with an even worse one.
A very evangelical riff on the advice to think of your audience naked
So far, Russell Moore hasn’t written a single word that’s made his claims sound even slightly more credible. To hear him talking, one could be forgiven for thinking that evangelism only works if the target is softened up by a Christian upbringing, or is emotionally vulnerable. That doesn’t exactly scream “objectively real.”
And then, we notice Moore’s deep contempt for those rejecting his claims:
When these forums seem to burn with life-changing fervor, it is not when the Christians applaud loudly and the skeptics slink away, having been “owned.”[. . .]
[W]e face an opportunity when people all around us are exhausted by living like machines. Many of them will keep their guard up and argue confidently, but deep down they wonder, What if there is more than this? What if, behind all this, there really is someone who knows and loves me? [. . .]
The Word we carry is resilient and can handle whatever the next decade throws at it. That’s not because our opponents are stupid but because the gospel is true.
Oh, really? Is it? And are these debates such grand victories, as he claims?
No and no.
He doesn’t even mention the times that Christians got BTFO by atheists in debates. Particularly once heathens began figuring out how Christians manipulate formal debate rules to win, those Christians began losing. (Here’s another really good one. It’s between Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry and two literal-who Catholics and it’s from 2009. Oh, and a fun one from 2014 between Ken Ham and Bill Nye about Creationism; it got nicknamed “Ham on Nye.”)
Further, it’s insulting that Moore wants to assume that “deep down they wonder.” This is a common belief within Christianity. Apologists particularly push the idea that when someone rejects a recruitment pitch, it’s never for the reasons given. It’s always something else, and if evangelists can just figure out what’s really wrong, they can fix it and win that person (back) to faith.
In the infamous 2014 evangelical movie God’s Not Dead, this belief becomes a plot point: The evil atheist professor, Radisson, has official, stated reasons for rejecting Christianity, but really he’s just angry that Jesus didn’t magically heal his dying mother when he was a kid! And when the hero of the movie, a student of his, picks and picks and picks at Radisson to find it, finally Radisson explodes at him with the reveal.
There’s no way whatsoever that an evangelical thinking this way can engage honestly and meaningfully with non-believers. It’s the ultimate bad-faith position to hold.
In the end, neither approach will move any needles in Christendom
But I guess it’s easier to assume one’s opponents are dishonest liars hiding yearnings for belief than it is to understand that people rejecting Christianity have very good reasons to do so. To Christians like Russell Moore, serenely satisfied that his feelings are facts and his faith is evidence, it’s impossible for anyone to reject his religion for anything but stupid reasons.
Indeed, no good hard-sales salesperson can accept a “no.” They’ve always got to treat it as a “not right now, but maybe later.” And there isn’t much that’s more hard-sales than Christian evangelism, which demands that targets change their entire worldview and ideology to match those of the evangelist… OR ELSE. In 2015, John Shore called that mindset “I love you; now change.”
There’s nothing respectful, gentle, or even holy about such demands, to quote Russell Moore’s own three stated ideals. There never has been. In particular, love is completely incompatible with the power play inherent in evangelism’s demands.
Russell Moore’s post may upset some hardliners in evangelicalism, if they ever see it. But it will give Christians like himself more serene satisfaction that their feelings are facts and their faith is evidence. In this era of great decline, that will need to be enough to keep some butts in pews for just a bit longer.
In the end, it’s really a moot point that Russell Moore refuses to debate atheists. Really, he should be much more concerned that more and more people find his product irrelevant to their lives—whether it’s sold via debates, keyboard fights, or soft-shoe apologetics routines.
NEXT UP: How personal evangelism works. See you soon! <3
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