God's Story Isn't Finished

A Conversation with Justin Brierley

Justin Brierley is a freelance writer, speaker, and broadcaster focused on dialogue between Christians and non-Christians around faith, science, theology, and culture. In this conversation with In Good Faith host Steven Kapp Perry, Justin describes how to approach religion with both your mind and your heart, how hearing so many arguments for atheism has shaped in his faith in Christ, and why he thinks so many people, especially those in the rising generation, are open to returning to organized religion.

How did you media journey begin?

I began hosting conversations between Christians and non-Christians nearly 20 years ago, believe it or not. When the Unbelievable? show began, it was a radio show, and later it became a podcast and video show. As a Christian, I wanted to get out of my bubble a little bit. I wanted to hear from other perspectives. I wanted to model good conversations. We live a very secular post-Christian kind of culture in the UK. I think it’s really helpful, actually, for Christians to be challenged a little bit and to be shown what a good conversation with a non-Christian friend or neighbor might look like.

That was really the purpose behind conversations. At first, they were challenging. Not everyone enjoys hearing their beliefs and deeply held views questioned by atheists, agnostics, and people of other faiths. Actually, I think it was actually a really healthy thing to do because I found that Christianity could stand up on its own two feet intellectually.

Do you like the word apologetics? Or is that not what you consider what you do?

I tend to avoid the term if it's the first time I'm interacting with someone. They might think I’m saying sorry for something. It’s a useful technical term, which simply means the intellectual defense of faith. I would more often use a phrase like defending the faith, explaining the faith, giving evidence, or Christian persuasion. These phrases perhaps mean a little bit more to most people than this rather strange word apologetics.

As I've thought through my faith, I think apologetics are quite important for a number of people as they put the pieces together. They need that kind of intellectual, rational approach. But it doesn't negate the need for personal experience, of course.

I think, in the end, faith is about both the head and the heart coming together. Many people need that rational approach to help put pieces together. It's never just the head or just the heart in the end.

In your experience, are there people who maybe have had the heart part and felt something, but have been talking themselves out of it because they didn't have anything intellectually to latch on to?

Yeah, I think that's quite right. To some extent, that's what my journey was initially. I very much had an experience of God that brought me to faith in my sort of mid-teens. I think my intellectual side had to catch up because I wasn't specifically in a church that dealt that much with the intellectual case for faith.

By the time I got to university, there were plenty of skeptics and atheists ready to challenge my new faith. I was so glad when I started to read thinkers like C. S. Lewis and discover what I later learned was called Christian apologetics. That really helped to make intellectual sense of some of those things that I'd felt at a gut level, a very experiential level, deep down.

I think that's probably the way it operates for a lot of Christians. I don't think that all that many necessarily come to faith through very kind of rationalistic ways; it's very often an experiential thing. You do, however, need to have those reasons in place because you are going to be asked to make a defense of your faith to others in the end. That's where I think apologetics can be very helpful.

Are you comfortable telling me about that experience when you were younger? What made you feel like you had experienced God in some way?

I suppose my story is perhaps not dissimilar to many people. I was raised in a Christian family, so church going was part of my background. I don't think I'd ever really grasped or latched onto that faith for myself. It was sort of inherited really from my parents up to those mid-teenage years.

Then I went away to a youth camp for a long weekend. I was very grateful for the presence of those peers of mine and some great youth leaders. There was one particular evening when everything came together, and I was challenged to take this seriously. I can only describe it as the lights coming on. I had an intense experience of the Holy Spirit, and I really suddenly became aware of God's extraordinary love for me, and His grace, and His goodness. Suddenly, what had seemed like something I did because of my family became very personal to me.

I was one of those people who had a road to Damascus moment. I can give you the time and the place where the lights came on. That's obviously not the experience of everyone; my wife is someone for whom it was a slow dawning awareness of her faith.

C. S. Lewis has this analogy of the person who is on a train from Paris to Berlin, and the person who travels by daylight perhaps knows the exact moment they crossed the line between France and Germany. The person who takes the sleeper train begins in Paris and wakes up in Berlin, but the point is you've arrived at the same destination, even if you can't give an exact moment.

Tell me about this title, The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God, and why you wanted to talk about it.

I had been hosting conversations between Christians and atheists for some time, really beginning in the mid 2000s. That was a time when the new atheism was really the big thing. These high-profile atheist figures denounced God publicly through bestselling books, like Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion.

I remember the atheist bus campaign in London; red buses bore the slogan, “There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” These were circulating the Capitol, and it was just very trendy to be an atheist and to dismiss religion.

That was the driving force in our culture around the whole God question. That was very much the environment in which my Unbelievable? show was born. I hosted lots of those debates and dialogues between these strong new atheist figures and Christian thinkers. That was quite exciting and dramatic. In many ways, I'm very grateful to figures like Richard Dawkins because they actually put the God question back on the public table. They made people who were fairly apathetic toward God here in the UK start to ask questions again, which I was grateful for—even if it was a very dismissive, arrogant approach to God.

I've always wanted to hear the best of both atheism and Christianity and hear the objections, but I find that, in the end, Christianity has the most compelling story. It just speaks to me both at an intellectual, historical, philosophical level, but it’s also emotional and experiential. For me, it is the most compelling story of reality.

As you've seen this change in society, this resurgence or rebirth of belief in God, what effect does that, has that, or could it have on our society?

I can imagine a lot of people scratching their heads and saying, what rebirth? Because if you just look at the statistics, especially here in the UK or in other parts of the West, the church has been in decline for a long time. I don't in any way deny that. I think the U. S. is only a decade or so behind that curve. You're seeing now, especially among Gen Z, less and less religiosity. So, you may say, why are you talking about a resurgence or a rebirth of belief in God?

At one level, what I'm describing is really about a change in the way people are talking about God. I think we're experiencing a real moment of a meaning crisis in Western culture; this is what a lot of psychologists are saying. As we've lost the Christian story in the West—which once gave people essentially a sense of their meaning, their purpose, their identity—it's created a void. New atheists thought they could come along and fill that void with science and reason, but they couldn’t. Science and reason are good for some things, but they won't give you a meaningful life.

Especially among that younger generation, I’m seeing the first signs of this surprising rebirth. Just recently, in Finland of all places, between 2016 and 2019, the number of young men attending church, praying, and believing in God more than doubled. That's the last demographic you would think that would happen to. I've seen pockets of that happening all over the place. New research on Gen Z is showing that they're the most open of any generation yet to God. I just wonder if we're going to start to see something shifting quite soon. I don't know for sure.

We're made to live in a story. If we don't have the best story, or the original story, we'll find a different story to live for. The problem is, of course, that this is accelerated by technology, social media, smartphone addiction, etc. All of that is rushing together to create a real problem in our culture in terms of the culture wars and the rise in mental health problems, especially among young people. But it's also creating the conditions for people to start taking faith seriously again and maybe look back to the God story.

The mental health crisis we're experiencing is partly a crisis of loneliness. The church is still one of the few places where people get together on a regular basis in person. I think people are looking for a place like church because, at its best, church is a place where you find grace, forgiveness, and acceptance. We know we're all sinners, and we're all there because of the mercy of God. That's very different to the culture that many people find themselves in, which can actually be very judgmental.

God isn't finished with the church. My hope and prayer is that we will see a revival of sorts as people come back to both God and to the vehicle he gave us to do his will on the earth.

Justin Brierley is a freelance writer, speaker, and broadcaster focused on dialogue between Christians and non-Christians around faith, science, theology, and culture. Until April 2023, Justin hosted the Unbelievable? radio show and podcast as well as the Ask NT Wright Anything podcast. Justin was also editor of “Premier Christianity” magazine from 2014-2018, for which he continues to contribute articles.

On the In Good Faith podcast, host Steven Kapp Perry aims to build bridges of understanding between religions. In talking with believers of different faiths, he highlights personal experience and commonalities across tradition.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and length. Listen to the full episode here or below.