The Return of Belief with Justin Brierly
Show Notes:
Ryan and Brian invite Justin Brierly, a seasoned journalist and the host of the popular podcast 'Unbelievable,' to discuss the evolving narrative of faith in contemporary society. The conversation begins with Brierly reflecting on his journey, which began in 2005, as he sought to create a platform for meaningful discussions between Christians and atheists. Through his extensive experience, Brierly has not only engaged with prominent thinkers but also witnessed a significant cultural shift regarding faith. He shares insights into how the New Atheist movement, which once dominated intellectual discourse, is waning, making way for a renewed interest in spiritual matters. This shift is not merely anecdotal; Brierly cites growing numbers of individuals who are reconsidering their stance on faith, spurred by existential questions that plague modern life.
Central to Brierly's message is his book, 'The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God,' where he argues that there is a noticeable resurgence in belief among younger generations. He discusses his conversations with influential figures like Douglas Murray, who acknowledges the significant cultural contributions of Christianity, and Tom Holland, who articulates a profound respect for the Christian narrative. Brierly suggests that these dialogues indicate a broader societal trend wherein the values instilled by Christianity are being recognized, even by those who do not identify as believers. He contends that this recognition paves the way for a more nuanced understanding of faith, encouraging listeners to consider the implications of such transformations in their own lives.
As the podcast progresses, Brierly offers practical advice for churches seeking to engage with this new wave of meaning-seekers. He emphasizes the importance of maintaining the unique aspects of Christianity that set it apart from other ideologies, advocating for an approach that embraces the supernatural elements of faith. By doing so, churches can attract those who yearn for authenticity and depth in their spiritual journeys. Brierly also highlights the power of storytelling in conveying the richness of the Christian experience, suggesting that narratives of faith can resonate deeply with individuals searching for purpose. The conversation culminates with Brierly's insights on fostering respectful and ongoing dialogues with those who may disagree, underscoring the need for empathy and kindness in an increasingly polarized world.
Takeaways:
- The podcast emphasizes the importance of having respectful, ongoing conversations with those who hold different beliefs.
- Justin Brierly discusses how he transitioned from a radio show to a successful podcast format.
- The changing cultural landscape has led to a resurgence of interest in Christian faith and spirituality.
- Brierly suggests that the church should embrace its unique and unusual aspects to attract seekers.
- The episode highlights the significance of storytelling in conveying the Christian message effectively.
- Brierly argues that modern apologists should focus on existential questions rather than just traditional debates.
Transcript
Welcome back to Ryan and Brian's Bible Bistro.
Ryan:I'm Ryan.
Brian:And I'm Brian.
Ryan:And this is the Bible Bistro, a podcast all about the Bible theology and all things related to the Christian faith.
Ryan:That's right, Brian.
Brian:Hey, you know, Ryan, we've had lots of really good interviews on our podcast in the past.
Brian:I think about, like, John Castellan's interview was fantastic.
Brian:I think about Ryan, Brian Burge, and Chad Ragsdale.
Brian:We've had lots of really good interviews.
Brian:We're really excited about the interview that we have for you today.
Ryan:Absolutely.
Brian:A lot of fun.
Ryan:Yeah.
Ryan:We've got Justin Brierly joining us today.
Ryan:And so you might have heard his name in the past.
Ryan:We've referenced.
Ryan:He's got a podcast and a book out called the Surprising Rebirth.
Ryan:What was the Surprising Rebirth?
Brian:A Belief in God.
Ryan:A belief in God.
Brian:Birth of Belief in God.
Brian:And it's how New Atheism Grew Old.
Brian:And something else is the subtitle Subtitle.
Ryan:Subtitle Subtitle but okay, while we don't know this very specific subtitle, we've listened to his podcast quite a bit and it's been really fantastic.
Brian:Yeah, we really highly recommend it.
Brian:I think this will be a good way, if you're not familiar with it, to get introduced to some of the ideas in it.
Brian:It's really, really enjoyable.
Ryan:So we talked with Justin quite a bit about the book and kind of his main idea of the podcast.
Ryan:The book and the POD mirror each other, but how he came up with this idea and then what are some of the intricacies of this idea and where all this might be going?
Brian:Yeah, Justin's a longtime POD or broadcaster, really, a broadcast journalist from the uk.
Brian:He's had other podcasts that he's done in the past.
Brian:He's for a long time been dealing with this issue of Christians, conversations with atheists and agnostics.
Brian:That's kind of a specialty.
Brian:If you've seen the NT Wright, ask NT Wright anything he was involved with that.
Brian:There's been all kinds of other really interesting things that he's done and just a wealth of interviews that he's done over the years with all kinds of really fascinating people.
Brian:It was a really great interview.
Brian:So I was gonna say, Ryan, if you like this interview, do us a couple of favors.
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Brian:On your podcast, what do you call that app?
Ryan:App.
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Ryan:Yeah, absolutely.
Brian:Ryan will tell you about it.
Ryan:Yeah.
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Ryan:So I think with all that, I think we've said everything that we need to say for right now.
Ryan:But let's jump right into this interview with Justin Barley.
Ryan:We think you're really going to enjoy this.
Brian:Here it is.
Brian:Well, we're pleased to have Justin Brierly with us, who is a journalist from the UK and has worked a lot in this area of thinking about faith.
Brian:And Justin, I want you to start with this question.
Brian:It seems like if there's any sinner to your journalistic work, it's been trying to bring atheists and agnostics, I mean, you state this specifically into dialogue with Christians.
Brian:How did that become such a driving passion for your work?
Brian:And why do you think it's an important thing that we do?
Justin Brierly: ians and atheists way back in: Justin Brierly:And it was when I began a radio show called Unbelievable in the UK on a Christian radio station.
Justin Brierly:And I just had this idea for just hosting better conversations between Christians and non Christians, because at the time I'd been working at the station a few years and we were very good at sort of talking to Christians about Christian things.
Justin Brierly:And there's definitely a place for that.
Justin Brierly:But most of the Christians I knew lived around non Christians.
Justin Brierly:You know, the UK is a very secular, quite post Christian place.
Justin Brierly:And so I thought, you know, there'd be a value in actually modeling good conversations.
Justin Brierly:And that was really where it began.
Justin Brierly:And I guess my own interest was that I, you know, had those kinds of questions myself.
Justin Brierly:I went through a period of fairly significant doubt in my sort of university years.
Justin Brierly:But I'd managed to find answers to some of those questions through apologetics, through thinkers like CS Lewis and so on.
Justin Brierly:And I guess I wanted to, yeah, test Christianity in sort of in real life, you know, seeing if it could stand up to scrutiny and having those kinds of conversations with people.
Justin Brierly:So it was very much an experiment and I never knew that it would lead to, you know, 17 and a half years of hosting this show, and it would obviously go well beyond the shores of the UK as a podcast, a video show eventually and everything else.
Justin Brierly:But that was kind of where it began and that was the passion that drove it.
Justin Brierly:I wanted to try to kind of road test the ideas of Christianity outside of the bubble, if you like, and to kind of put, put it into kind of real life conversations, hopefully in that way.
Brian:That sounds great.
Brian:One of the things we been amazed by, and it's because of this work that you've done, is you have all of these interviews from the past to draw from.
Brian:And so it's really interesting when you put together those documentary style episodes, you're able to kind of bring those older conversations in.
Brian:So you have this book, the Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God.
Brian:And the central thesis is that we're seeing, at least maybe in your mind, the first signs of a return to faith.
Brian:What made you initially begin to think about that?
Brian:Was there any kind of person you talked to or anything in the midst of that that made you think, oh, this, there seems to be something going on here?
Justin Brierly:I think that the catalyst for the book to some extent was a conversation I had with a UK thinker called Douglas Murray.
Justin Brierly:And Douglas Murray is associate editor of the Spectator magazine.
Justin Brierly:We're sort of contemporaries.
Justin Brierly:We were both at Oxford together.
Justin Brierly:He went on to much bigger and grander things than me.
Justin Brierly:But he's an interesting person because he's quite a keen cultural thinker and commentator, quite a conservative sort of cultural critic.
Justin Brierly:But he, whatever faith he had, he kind of lost by his early 20s.
Justin Brierly:And he was very much sort of caught up, you know, I think through his 20s with the new Atheist movement.
Justin Brierly:But I think he sort of came to reject that, or at least he came to see that it didn't have the answers that people were looking for, because by the time I interviewed him about this, about four years ago now, he, he, he was starting to talk of himself as a Christian atheist.
Justin Brierly:That was the, the label he used of himself to the, to the extent that he, he didn't believe in Christianity, but he did, did nevertheless recognize that all the values and virtues he did believe in kind of came from the Christian story.
Justin Brierly:And he had kind of come to realize that actually the, the New Atheist project, which sought to sort of tear down God and the value of religion was sort of misplaced.
Justin Brierly:And actually he'd come to be convinced that actually he thinks we, we're much worse off without Christianity even as he struggles to believe it.
Justin Brierly:He thinks the west is, is worse off without it.
Justin Brierly:So I had this conversation, I had him in a conversation at the time with NT Wright, who's quite a well known New Testament theologian and scholar.
Justin Brierly:And they were kind of debating sort of where we go in the absence of the Christian story, meaning morality, that sort of thing.
Justin Brierly:And it was Douglas Murray who sort of used, sort of referenced the well worn line from Matthew Arnold's poem Dover beach about the melancholy long withdrawing roar of the sea of faith.
Justin Brierly:And that, that has sort of has stood as in, as an image for the last 150 years really of that sort of outgoing tide of faith and secularism and science and everything else sweeping into its place.
Justin Brierly:But he said to me, the thing about the sea of faith, Justin is it could come back in again.
Justin Brierly:And he was saying this in the context of himself, as I say, talking about himself as a Christian atheist, but also seeing a number of his peers starting to take the Christian faith seriously again in terms of its, the value it brings to culture.
Justin Brierly:But also interestingly some of them, he was telling me, jumping in and becoming Christians unexpectedly, quite surprising converts that he was coming across among his peer group.
Justin Brierly:And I was seeing similar things.
Justin Brierly:And this, this came at a period where as I said, I'd been hosting these quite full on debates between Christians and atheists, especially those new Atheist type characters, you know, typified by, by Dawkins and Hitchens and Harris and Dennett.
Justin Brierly:But I also noticed a real change by that point.
Justin Brierly:So I'm trying to remember when I was.
Justin Brierly: k this would have been around: Justin Brierly:And definitely by that period I had definitely noticed a change in the tone of the conversation.
Justin Brierly:So it predated that.
Justin Brierly:But, but he kind of, he kind of catalyzed in my thought there's, there is a movement here.
Justin Brierly:I've been seeing a change in the conversations I've been hosting and that was so of the point at which I thought I think I need to write a book about this that specifically looks at the way that this conversational God seems to be changing at the moment.
Brian:Interesting.
Brian:Yeah.
Brian:And we've been told for years in our seminaries and in our discussions, oh, look, you mentioned the idea of a secular nation.
Brian:I lived in Scotland for a period of time and we've always looked at Europe.
Brian:Look, that's what's happening.
Brian:And that's where we're heading in the future.
Brian:It's kind of the idea.
Brian:So I find this fascinating.
Brian:If there is this kind of return, what does that say for us as well?
Brian:I think it's an interesting idea.
Brian:You've hosted lots of conversations with people in this podcast, then that's how we first became aware of you, through your podcast.
Brian:That's the same name as your book, Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God.
Brian:I wonder if there's any of those.
Brian:Of course, you've been interviewing people a long time.
Brian:Are there any of those interviews that just stick with you and that you keep coming back to or ones that stand out in your mind?
Justin Brierly:Well, you've definitely had a bit of a highlight reel by listening to the Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God.
Justin Brierly:Because in many ways, as you quite rightly surmise, that documentary series, which has only been going for the past year or so, very much does draw on a lot of those conversations and in a way tries to sketch out the way those conversations did change over time as the characters changed and the new atheism sort of began to wane and so on.
Justin Brierly:I mean, one of the ones that I feature quite prominently in the series, sort of about midway through the series, series is.
Justin Brierly:Well, it's the story really of Tom Holland, the historian, and the way in which he has become quite an interesting cultural figure himself as a secular historian, reminding his audience about the way in which Christianity has completely shaped their world.
Justin Brierly:But the debate that probably most typifies this and which I used, you know, at the outset of one of those episodes, was his debate with atheist philosopher A.C.
Justin Brierly:grayling.
Justin Brierly:And again, this was somewhat unusual for my format because normally the format was a Christian and a non Christian Christian to debate each other, but in this case, neither claimed to be a Christian.
Ryan:Right.
Justin Brierly:But they were debating an issue that they definitely kind of took very different positions on, which was whether we owe our morality to Christendom, to Christianity, basically, because this is very much has been Tom Holland's thesis in his bestselling book Dominion, that actually all of our values around human rights, equality, dignity, compassion, progress, they all stem from the Christian worldview that was inaugurated really by Jesus and the claims of his death and resurrection by his followers.
Justin Brierly:A.C.
Justin Brierly:grayling very much comes from that new atheist school of thinking, and he very much writes and speaks to sort of try and put religion in its place.
Justin Brierly:He thinks it's.
Justin Brierly:It's a, you know, a bit of a mind virus, actually.
Justin Brierly:And when it comes to morality and that sort of thing, he thinks, well, it goes far beyond Christianity that may have had some.
Justin Brierly:Some role to play, but it's, you know, you can go back to the Greeks and whoever, you know, to get the beginnings of all this.
Justin Brierly:So they had the most wonderful debate on this.
Justin Brierly:A really spark back and forth, and it was just great fun just to be in the middle of this.
Justin Brierly:Two brilliant minds, you know, going back and forth on this.
Justin Brierly:And to see Tom Holland sort of actually in an environment you don't often see him in, which is kind of really being pressed, actually, and just responding magnificently as well.
Justin Brierly:And it was just a really guilty pleasure at some points to see him take Grayling to the woodshed historically once or twice on his sort of account of.
Justin Brierly:Of Christian history and that sort of thing.
Justin Brierly:But it was.
Justin Brierly:It was just.
Justin Brierly:Yeah, it's just one of those standout debates where I was.
Justin Brierly:It was an absolute privilege to.
Justin Brierly:To host and moderate that kind of an interaction.
Justin Brierly:And.
Justin Brierly:Yeah, definitely, definitely one of the ones that stands out.
Brian:Okay, are there.
Brian:Are there others that have that kind of.
Brian:That.
Brian:That one really is kind of above and beyond.
Justin Brierly:Yeah, lots, lots, you know, lots and lots of them that I've really enjoyed hosting over the years.
Justin Brierly:I mean, another one that features quite prominently towards the beginning of is probably the one that is the most popular one I ever hosted, which was Jordan Peterson.
Justin Brierly:And again, interestingly, an example of one where neither side is actually necessarily a Christian, but Jordan Peterson and Susan Blackmore.
Justin Brierly:So Jordan Peterson, for those who don't know, is this sort of Canadian psychology professor.
Justin Brierly: He really came to fame in: Justin Brierly:He sort of started to become a very popular household name, or at least in certain circles, just sort of filling auditoriums with.
Justin Brierly:On lectures about meaning and purpose and very much drawing on the Bible as an inspiration for that and drawing huge audiences and, you know, going on to draw huge audiences on podcast and YouTube and so on.
Justin Brierly:But I happened to encounter his work just before he kind of really went stratospheric, as it were.
Justin Brierly:And so I'd invited him on while he was planning to do a sort of small book tour of the uk and I was in touch with his publisher, publicist, and people had been recommending this.
Justin Brierly:This guy, this new guy on the block making some waves Jordan Peterson.
Justin Brierly:So I was like, okay, let's see, see what this guy has to say.
Justin Brierly:We managed to kind of pencil some time in while he was in the UK with his publicist because he had this book coming out called 12 Rules for Life.
Justin Brierly:And as the date approached the publicist got in touch with me saying this guy's way more popular than I was anticipating and can we just sort of, she was trying to sort of shave off a bit of my time because he was getting lots of other invitations and they'd booked a sort of lecture at a thousand seater auditorium which had sold out in hours.
Justin Brierly:And then they booked it again and it sold out again.
Justin Brierly:And suddenly this publicist realized, oh, this guy is actually something of a cult.
Justin Brierly:He's got something of a cult following.
Justin Brierly:And then, and interestingly I ended up bringing him on with the atheist psychologist Susan Blackmore from the UK and they had a fantastic discussion, debate around whether we can make sense of life without God.
Justin Brierly:Again, Jordan Peterson not exactly in the chair as a Christian, but sort of playing the part of a Christian so, so strongly did he defend the idea that we can't make sense of human value or dignity without some reference to, to being made in the image of God.
Justin Brierly:So they had a, had a fantastic conversation.
Justin Brierly:Again, you know, if you read Peterson's book, lots of biblical references, lots of sort of stuff that you know, you might find coming out of any Christian apologist mouth.
Justin Brierly:And so, so they had a really good conversation.
Justin Brierly:The interesting thing about that was that I don't know if this make sort of something you guys recall, but in, in my world, Peterson really went stratospheric after he did an interview with a, someone in the UK called Kathy Newman, a Channel 4 news anchor.
Brian:You got shared quite a bit.
Justin Brierly:Yeah, it kind of went viral.
Justin Brierly:It was this kind of debate on the gender pay gap and just kind of Peterson's fairly cool dismantling of her arguments kind of just, it just kind of sent it kind of viral, you know.
Justin Brierly:Well, funnily enough that interview happened just a couple of days after I recorded my interview, my discussion with him.
Justin Brierly:But I was sitting on this material because we weren't planning to release it for a few months.
Justin Brierly:So just after I recorded it, suddenly everyone started talking about Jordan Peterson and he was everywhere and everyone was, you know, sharing this clip of him.
Justin Brierly:And, and so I, but I couldn't, you know, we had this schedule so I couldn't put our interview out but I knew that I was suddenly sitting on this really hot property and you know, I'd kind of managed to bag him just before.
Justin Brierly:It would have been probably far harder to get hold of him.
Justin Brierly:And so when it did finally release it.
Justin Brierly:Yeah, it kind of, okay, it kind of just launched our YouTube channel, really, because so many people were interested in that.
Justin Brierly:But it was a very substantive conversation as well, and it was a good one, you know, and that.
Justin Brierly:That kind of.
Justin Brierly:And the reason that one comes to mind is because he's a really good example of the way this conversation has changed.
Justin Brierly:It really has changed from the heyday of the new atheism.
Brian:Ryan.
Brian:It reminds me of a conversation we've been having that Justin has mentioned both Tom Holland and Jordan Peterson.
Brian:Do you want to ask that question we were talking about earlier?
Ryan:Yeah, it's the idea of how these two men who are not theists, you know, that it's kind of that God's using them maybe in some way, you know, that there seems to be people coming to faith through some of their work.
Ryan:Like, how do you interpret that?
Ryan:How do you interpret what's going on with these two guys that are not.
Ryan:That haven't taken that full leap yet into faith of God?
Ryan:Like, how do you interpret that?
Ryan:How do you understand?
Ryan:What do you think about that?
Justin Brierly:Well, I do think that God uses all kinds of means and methods to bring people to himself, and very often it is through people who aren't necessarily signed up themselves.
Justin Brierly:And I've been sort of likening them and others to sort of prophets from outside the church who are acting as a gateway to Christianity, even as they're not completely sure of it themselves.
Justin Brierly:In a funny way, I mean, Tom Holland, to give him his due, sort of is constantly teetering on the edge and he's, you know, I had a very, you know, a very candid conversation with him, a public conversation a few months ago in London in front of an audience where he talked about how, you know, some personal experiences have kind of brought him to the edge of belief.
Justin Brierly:So I'd say with Tom, and I don't think I'm speaking out of turn here, he would say, look, there are some days when I really struggle to believe it, and there are other days when actually, yeah, I feel like I really do believe it.
Justin Brierly:And to some extent, you know, that kind of reflects the way sometimes many Christians feel, you know, faith comes and goes.
Justin Brierly:Doubts a Salus.
Justin Brierly:But I.
Justin Brierly:And I suspect, to be honest, Tom, you know, has.
Justin Brierly:Has found, actually I, I'm.
Justin Brierly:He goes to church.
Justin Brierly:He is, you know, a communicant Anglican in that sense.
Justin Brierly:He's you know, probably found his, where he feels comfortable at this point.
Justin Brierly:But I think he probably himself would say, actually when it comes to pointing people towards Christianity, I'm probably more use kind of where I am than sort of seen as a, an insider, if you like.
Justin Brierly:And, and it's interesting, isn't it, because I think people somehow, funnily enough, are more willing to listen to people if they don't feel they're already inside that.
Justin Brierly:And so, yeah, I, I would say, you know, in God's, you know, divine economy, that there is something there about the fact that he, he will often use people who are not insiders to, to help people who do want to move inside.
Ryan:Yeah, yeah.
Brian:It's a great story you share about, about his prayer and, and the subsequent events that happened there.
Brian:I won't spoil it.
Brian:I thought about Jordan Peterson's wife as well and your conversation with her and her talking very, very clearly about that.
Ryan:Yeah, you mentioned the conversation has changed from the new atheism time.
Ryan:The conversation has changed.
Ryan:You're an apologist, you know, the conversation has probably changed.
Ryan:One of the things that's kind of struck me and Brian kind of alluded to this is like it seems to be the role of, yes, there's reason, but there seems to be these experiences that are driving some of these stories like they're having.
Ryan:Tom Holland has had some of these experiences.
Ryan:One of your interviews was talking about, I got to the back of the wardrobe and I just felt their fur coats back there, like there was looking for this experience.
Ryan:So how do you see this role of reason and experience kind of taking, at least for me, in my perspective, taking on the experience of the divine having more conversation or being a conversation partner now that it wasn't in the new atheist timeline?
Justin Brierly:I think that's right.
Justin Brierly:I think to some extent the new atheism came at a time when we'd be moving in a very, you know, for a long time, a materialist direction, sort of scientistic direction in culture.
Justin Brierly:And they, they kind of just cemented that and kind of tried to drive this narrative that, you know, the spiritual does not exist essentially, and that everything can ultimately be explained by chemistry and physics.
Justin Brierly:And that is the disenchanted age we live in.
Justin Brierly:That is the background sort of hum, really of most people's lives is they've been told this kind of materialist story of reality.
Justin Brierly:I do sense that's changing though, to the degree that I think it's impossible to completely disenchant people because it's Very hard to deny our kind of immediate sort of sense that, that we are spiritual beings.
Justin Brierly:And, and it comes out in all kinds of other ways.
Justin Brierly:So you've, even the New Atheists, I think, have been surprised to find that even as much as they seemed to be quite successful in pushing this, this narrative, nonetheless, when you look around our culture, people suddenly get religious about all kinds of other things, whether it be a political cause or a sort of ideologies around sex and gender, whatever.
Justin Brierly:So there's the sort of spirituality sort of pops up in all kinds of other manifestations.
Justin Brierly:And, and it turns out, and it's a bit like playing whack a mole.
Justin Brierly:You think you've defeated Christianity, but it, it comes up over here in a different form, these kind of quasi religious forms.
Justin Brierly:And so they've, they've had, I think, a really difficult time, actually, and realizing that we're all kind of more intrinsically religious than they realized.
Justin Brierly:And, and to that extent, I think, I think the New atheists themselves have sort of slightly given up on the project of trying to, to talk people out of religion.
Justin Brierly:They've kind of almost accepted whether we're going to have it.
Justin Brierly:Like it or not, people are kind of intrinsically religious.
Justin Brierly:It's just, it's just pick your poison.
Justin Brierly:Do we prefer this type of religion over that tribe?
Justin Brierly:And a lot of New Atheists that I'm bumping into interestingly now are kind of saying, I wish we hadn't spent so much time trying to, you know, disprove Christianity because actually the, the kind of quasi religious stuff going on in our own academic backyard now is far more insidious and dangerous to us than what the fundamentalists down the road believe.
Justin Brierly:And, and, and I think actually in an ironic way, they find more common cause very often now with many Christians than, than they used to because they might have similar concerns over, I don't know, transgender or whatever it might be.
Justin Brierly:And so, and so I think this is also, though, opened up because, as I say, this conversation has changed.
Justin Brierly:That materialist sort of thing doesn't dominate conversation so much in the popular culture.
Justin Brierly:It's kind of giving room for people to take the transcendental and the spiritual more seriously again.
Justin Brierly:And you are able to have conversations about religious experience, for instance, that you might have been laughed out of the room about at one time.
Justin Brierly:It's why I think Tom Holland can stand up on the stage, you know, and talk about this strange answer to prayer that he experienced and not get sort of laughed at by his peers in the way that he might have done 10 or 15 years ago because it feels like, I don't know, we've been given permission to sort of start to take those things seriously again and start to, to understand that actually this is just actually the normal experience of most people.
Justin Brierly:Weird things happen, you know, things that is, are very difficult to quantify purely in terms of science and reason.
Justin Brierly:And, and yeah, I, I'm, I'm kind of, I welcome that.
Justin Brierly:The problem is it can go off in all kinds of strange directions.
Justin Brierly:Obviously there's all sorts of.
Justin Brierly:Yeah, yeah, I was commissioned.
Brian:Charles Taylor, you know his, you know, that's basically his, his thesis.
Brian:We got to this, this point of, of secularity.
Brian:But then.
Brian:And we have this explosion he calls the nova, right, the nova effect of all of these different types of belief, different kinds of spiritualities, multiple spiritualities.
Brian:So it's interesting that there is this return to this, as you keep calling it, the story of Christianity, which I want to talk about later.
Brian:Ryan, did you have another follow up?
Brian:I didn't want to.
Ryan:Yeah, no, you're good.
Ryan:So towards the end of the first season, you dedicated an episode to helping the church prepare for this potential return to faith.
Ryan:What are some things that you would want the North American congregations to know about?
Ryan:This returning tide is what you kind of call it, this tide that's coming back in.
Ryan:What are some things?
Ryan:How should we prepare ourselves and maybe things we should be afraid of doing as well.
Ryan:What should we stay away from?
Justin Brierly:Yeah, no great questions.
Justin Brierly:Well, maybe there's specifically three things that I talk about in the final episode and in the final chapter of my book.
Justin Brierly:Book the Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God, which kind of come out of these conversations I've been having with some of these interesting intellectuals who are interested again in Christianity and taking it seriously.
Justin Brierly:We could just take each in turn.
Justin Brierly:But the first is this idea of keeping Christianity weird.
Justin Brierly:And that's a kind of interesting point that's been brought up by a number of people, including Tom Holland, including Douglas Murray, who have said, look, if you want to attract the kind of meaning seekers back, Justin, don't sort of dumb down Christianity.
Justin Brierly:We want.
Justin Brierly:The people who are actually embracing Christianity are kind of embracing the full fat, full blooded version of it, actually.
Justin Brierly:And they're looking for something different to their everyday life and story.
Justin Brierly:And so one manifestation of this is, for instance, that when he does go to church, Tom Holland goes to London's oldest church, St Bartholomew the Great.
Justin Brierly:Over 900 years old and more or less still looks like it.
Justin Brierly:Did you know 900 years ago.
Justin Brierly:It's, it's.
Justin Brierly:And I think that's because it ties it, him back to the kind of historical roots of Christianity, but it's also the, the very traditional Anglo Catholic worship and ritual that takes place there.
Justin Brierly:It sort of lifts him into a different world.
Justin Brierly:It is mysterious, it is otherworldly, it is a bit hard.
Justin Brierly:You know, it's something that transcends a purely intellectual approach.
Justin Brierly:And he is looking for that.
Justin Brierly:He's looking for kind of mystery and weirdness because one of the things he's often railed against is what he sees as a sort of politically correct, you know, good advice version of Christianity that often seems to prevail in Britain, which he just finds pointless because it's sort of.
Justin Brierly:Well, we can get good humanistic advice, you know, from all kinds of quarters now.
Justin Brierly:And given the church, you know, the other point he makes is given that Christianity has been so successful that many of the things the church used to do in terms of health care, education, poverty relief and so on are now done by the state because the state got so Christianized that it basically took on those things that the church used to be the prime provider for.
Justin Brierly:He said the church has to kind of, if it wants to look distinctive, it needs to kind of put its energy into its strangest claims.
Justin Brierly:It's the, the claims that continue to look weird in our contemporary culture, and that is its claims about the miraculous and this idea that, you know, you know, a virgin birth and a resurrection and angels and heaven and hell and everything else.
Justin Brierly:And, and he says, don't, don't duck that.
Justin Brierly:Don't be embarrassed about it, because actually, that's the thing that will actually draw people who are looking for that, that sense.
Justin Brierly:And, and again, I've heard similar kind of sentiments again from Douglas Murray, who's concerned about what he sees as the church sort of going in very sort of politically correct, direct direction to try and sort of embrace the culture.
Justin Brierly:But he says all it ends up doing is.
Justin Brierly:Makes the church just seem like yet another sort of shallow facet of, of, of a kind of, you know, the culture that already exists.
Justin Brierly:So I think that's.
Brian:That we don't do it as well as the culture.
Justin Brierly:Well, yeah, exactly.
Justin Brierly:That, that's, that's the other problem sometimes.
Justin Brierly:So, so that, that was one interesting sort of.
Justin Brierly:Yeah, takeaway.
Justin Brierly:Keep Christianity weird.
Justin Brierly:Now that's going to look different for different churches.
Justin Brierly:I don't think every church needs to adopt smells and bells and incense to, to do that.
Justin Brierly:But there is something about not Kind of being comfortable in our own skin when it comes to the, the supernatural claims of Christianity.
Justin Brierly:Expecting to some extent the supernatural, sort of not trying to hide the weirdness, you know, of Christianity.
Justin Brierly:It's, it's countercultural claims when it comes to, you know, sexual ethics to sort of the way we interact and the way we do things.
Justin Brierly:It's a sort of.
Justin Brierly:Yeah, it's, it's, it's that, that's one particular area where, where I think there's an interesting challenge to many churches who maybe have tried to blend in to the culture in order to be more appealing, but that may actually be the opposite of what actually happens when you do that.
Brian:Yeah, Andrew Root we've interviewed.
Brian:I don't know if you're familiar with his name or not, but he's written quite a bit about what it's like to have faith in a secular society and he has some interesting things.
Brian:And I'm just thinking about this.
Brian:You said not necessarily those bells and smells or the charismatic, for example, but his is really about helping one another see the way that God is at work in our lives.
Brian:And through a term that you use quite a bit, story, he says it's just a matter of talking about how we see God at work in our lives and sharing those kind of stories and not being afraid to see the way that he's working.
Brian:I'm going to skip ahead to a question I was going to ask later, but the last episode of your first season, you talk about story in particular, this last, especially the very last bit, you kind of summarize the entire thing.
Brian:Why do you think story is such, why do you think that's a category that's important for us to use?
Brian:And how do you think it's an important part of what we're doing is talking about Christianity.
Justin Brierly:Yeah.
Justin Brierly:Well, it's another one of those areas that I encourage the church to consider taking up as it tries to meet this wave of meaning seekers is that I think we are essentially story driven creatures.
Justin Brierly:As I was saying earlier, the, the new atheists, I think, assumed that once we got rid of religion, you know, we'd just enter into this utopian future based on science and reason.
Justin Brierly:What they didn't anticipate was that because we're story driven creatures, we will just substitute other stories for the Christian story and they may have their own kind of quasi supernatural aspects to them, as I was saying.
Justin Brierly:And I think that's, that's something to do with the fact.
Justin Brierly:Yeah.
Justin Brierly:That we're meant to live in a story we're meant to understand ourselves as having some kind of a beginning, middle, end, a sort of genesis to kind of revelation kind of way in which we understand our lives.
Justin Brierly:And, you know, even the.
Justin Brierly:The secular psychologists will tell you that people who don't think of themselves in that way really suffer.
Justin Brierly:You know, it's.
Justin Brierly:It's.
Justin Brierly:It's living in a kind of.
Justin Brierly:Living as though life is essentially chaotic and isn't bounded by any kind of sense of a narrative, I think is very unhealthy, actually, for people.
Justin Brierly:So.
Justin Brierly:So just at that level, you know, we tend to imagine ourselves in a kind of storytelling way.
Justin Brierly:But of course, I believe that the reason that's there deep in our sort of soul and our psyche, is because we are made in the image of God and we're meant to see ourselves as part of this bigger story.
Justin Brierly:The problem is, you know, going back to Charles Taylor, who you referenced earlier, because we have become this culture of expressive individualism where we all have our own story and we each have our own sort of ends and our own sort of personal journey, if you like.
Justin Brierly:You know, these are the kind of buzzwords, aren't they?
Justin Brierly:The problem is that that tends to move you in the direction of what we now say other culture wars.
Justin Brierly:Because if everyone's stories are essentially their own and they can invent themselves from scratch, then you end up, obviously, with lots of competing stories of reality and competing stories of what's good for people and what's not.
Justin Brierly:And as we've lost that sort of Christian story, which essentially kind of gave a unifying story to generations of people across, you know, quite diverse cultures, we've, we've.
Justin Brierly:And we've replaced them with these lots of individualistic stories.
Justin Brierly:It's.
Justin Brierly:It's generating this confusion and polarization and conflict that we now experience in our culture.
Justin Brierly:And that's partly why I think we're running out of steam on these stories.
Justin Brierly:Because they're not satisfying us.
Justin Brierly:They're not the stories that we're meant to live our life by.
Justin Brierly:They end up just draining us.
Justin Brierly:They become, you know, essentially idols, you know, to use another metaphor that we put in the place of God, but which can't do God's job.
Justin Brierly:And that's why I think we're starting to see an openness again to the Christian story.
Justin Brierly:Because people like Tom Holland and Jordan Peterson and others are sort of reminding secular folk, well, there was this story that once made sense of our lives.
Justin Brierly:And it turns out it was pretty good, actually.
Justin Brierly:It turns out that whatever you may think about whether it's true or not.
Justin Brierly:It did actually have all these extraordinary fruits that we quite.
Justin Brierly:We still appreciate in Western culture.
Justin Brierly:And as people see those fruits start to wither, as we start to see kind of, you know, the cultures and conflict and everything else, I think people are starting to realize maybe it's because of the stories we're telling ourselves that they're not doing the job anymore.
Justin Brierly:And.
Justin Brierly:And as it were, if when you lose the roots, you know, the original story, the fruits themselves will eventually die.
Justin Brierly:And so I just wonder whether we're coming to one of those points where more and more people are starting to realize it's.
Justin Brierly:More and more of these intellectuals are pointing it out in various different ways, and it's starting to make people realize we do need a story to live by, and the stories we're telling ourselves are not doing the job.
Justin Brierly:Maybe we need to reinvestigate the original story that so much of our culture was originally based on.
Ryan:Interesting.
Brian:Yeah.
Ryan:Let me ask you a question.
Ryan:As you've.
Ryan:I don't know if this is a trend or not.
Ryan:It's just one thing that I've kind of observed.
Ryan:It seems like when someone is looking for that metanarrative, that narrative that ties their life together, it seems like Christianity seems to be the last stop on their journey.
Ryan:Like, it seems like, oh, I have this meta narrative.
Ryan:I know there's maybe one out there, but I'm gonna try every other narrative that might exist before they come back.
Ryan:I mean, is that a trend that you feel like you're hearing in conversations, like, Christian?
Ryan:And maybe if it is, why do you think that might be?
Justin Brierly:Yeah, I definitely find that is the experience of many people of an older generation, slightly older generation, because.
Justin Brierly:And I think it's because they've sort of been inoculated against Christianity because they think they know it, because they maybe had some semblance of Christian education at school.
Justin Brierly:You know.
Justin Brierly:So the person I'm thinking of is Paul Kingsnorth, who I featured on the podcast and in the book as well, who is definitely one of these surprising converts because he, you know, he says very explicitly he was not expecting to become a Christian.
Justin Brierly:That was kind of the last story that he thought he would ever find, would make sense of his life and so on, because he essentially thought he knew what Christianity was, because he, you know, was raised in a sort of nominally Christian environment.
Justin Brierly:At school, he kind of had the traditional British upbringing, which does involve, you know, school hymns and sort of Bible stories and maybe the vicar coming in, you know, once a week to talk to the kids.
Justin Brierly:And, and he'd rejected it because it seemed irrelevant to his life.
Justin Brierly:It.
Justin Brierly:He wasn't interested.
Justin Brierly:And he kind of, you know, was essentially a teenage atheist, you know, but he then went on this rather extraordinary journey through.
Justin Brierly:Through kind of realizing actually he loved nature.
Justin Brierly:He was really connected with nature.
Justin Brierly:He spent a lot of time in the.
Justin Brierly:In the woods and in the mountains with his father.
Justin Brierly:And he ended up actually kind of turning to Buddhism for many years because he found he needed to find something that he needed some source of transcendence.
Justin Brierly:And so he kind of looked within to kind of try and find that, but even that didn't satisfy.
Justin Brierly:He told me that he eventually decided he needed to worship something.
Justin Brierly:So he thought, well, I love nature.
Justin Brierly:I could try worshiping nature.
Justin Brierly:And so he literally became a Wiccan, you know, for some time.
Justin Brierly:And, and that was, you know, an interesting period because he, he had a sort of period of his time where he found that it.
Justin Brierly:It was interesting.
Justin Brierly:But in the end, he describes it as sort of a pastiche of esoteric worldviews and Christian heresies.
Justin Brierly:And the thing that.
Justin Brierly:Fine.
Justin Brierly:That he finally came to, and I say the last thing he was expecting was the Christian story.
Justin Brierly:And that was sort of really through all kinds of interesting encounters with people who he had been following, who it turned out were Christians through his wife just randomly blurting out over dinner one evening, I think you're going to become a Christian.
Justin Brierly:And yeah, and she wasn't a Christian herself, but he said, you know, he just said, don't be ridiculous, you know, but she was right.
Justin Brierly:And, and also interestingly, in his case, having dreams about Jesus.
Justin Brierly:And, and he says, you know, he sort of a bit like Lewis, you know, the most reluctant convert, he got kind of dragged kicking and screaming out of his Buddhist and Wiccan sort of past.
Justin Brierly:And.
Justin Brierly:But it was.
Justin Brierly:And he says, I, you know, he, he said at the time he converted, which was only a few years ago, he said, if you'd ask, if you shown me myself now, a few years ago, I would have laughed.
Justin Brierly:Laughed at you.
Justin Brierly:But there's something about, you know, these, these folk who, I think because there's a sort of cultural Christianity that already exists there, they think they know it.
Justin Brierly:And so they.
Justin Brierly:It is the last thing they think would actually be the answer.
Justin Brierly:But when they come back to it, when they actually encounter it sort of again sort of as adults and actually getting to grips with the real story, they suddenly see, oh, what.
Justin Brierly:What I rejected as a youth wasn't Actually the Christian story, it was this sort of.
Justin Brierly:Yeah, so that's happening for those folk now.
Justin Brierly:I think it's a bit different actually for folk who don't even have that Christian experience, that, that sort of cultural memory of Christianity and that's, that's more where Gen Z, for instance, find themselves.
Justin Brierly:They don't even have, you know, they didn't grow up going to church occasionally.
Justin Brierly:They didn't have, you know, the Sunday school hymns or whatever.
Justin Brierly:So they're kind of coming from a completely unchurched background.
Justin Brierly:And I, Interestingly, I think there's less resistance in a, in a funny way to Christianity for some of that, that cohort.
Justin Brierly:There's still kind of significant barriers potentially around, you know, prevailing attitudes around sex and everything else.
Justin Brierly:But there's a kind of, I've often found that there are actually fewer barriers.
Justin Brierly:They're kind of willing to give it a listen because they don't have preconceived notions that need to be jettisoned, that need to be, you know, and, and there's less kind of religious baggage in a funny way with, with many of those who just haven't experienced Christianity.
Justin Brierly:So it's, it does depend a little bit on, on the generation in question.
Justin Brierly:Yes.
Ryan:So as an apologist, how do we.
Ryan:Because the conversation has changed.
Ryan:There's always going to be that kind of apologist of the past, you know, where we need like the facts and all that stuff.
Ryan:But kind of as we encounter this new.
Ryan:You've had these conversations, you've had a lot of conversations with people in different spectrums.
Ryan:How do, as a Christian, you know, the church needs to keep itself weird.
Ryan:But how, as an individual, how do we have these conversations to, in that kind of context to have an effective conversation as an apologist when the conversation has changed that way, I think it.
Justin Brierly:Is to some extent about recognizing that the questions have changed a bit.
Justin Brierly:So you're not likely to be encountering the sort of immediately the same objections that you were during the New Atheist era.
Justin Brierly:In that era it was all about these sort of high octane debates between Christian thinkers and atheist objectors who were talking about, you know, give me philosophical, scientific evidence for God, here's my case against the Bible and why it's evil.
Justin Brierly:Here's, you know, so these, these were the sorts of ways in which the conversations were being had.
Justin Brierly:I think, I think that's less the case today.
Justin Brierly:And we, you tend to be starting more from a point with most people where they're, they're asking questions sort of More existential questions around how do I get some sense of purpose or meaning in life?
Justin Brierly:Why do I feel so depressed?
Justin Brierly:What's the.
Justin Brierly:Is there, you know, is there a better way?
Justin Brierly:You know, that the channels, the YouTube channels and the podcasts and so on that, that are really popular these days are these kind of self help, you know, ones where it's all about improving your life through meditation or through sort of engaging maybe with some kind of stoic philosophy.
Justin Brierly:Or there's, there's lots of these sort of wellness kind of gurus and even some of the, you know, former new atheists like Sam Harris, they now essentially turned into one of these sort of, you know, meditation and wellness gurus because that's where people are.
Justin Brierly:They're not kind of really starting from a point of wanting to debate God, but I think we still want to bring them to the point where they obviously make them aware of their need for God.
Justin Brierly:But you're going to be probably starting from these much more sort of existential questions about people's meaning and purpose and what gets them out of bed in the morning.
Justin Brierly:And that will, I think, mean also changing from a more.
Justin Brierly:Rather than starting with apologetics, you know, starting with his My philosophical evidence for God, here's my four reasons for the resurrection.
Justin Brierly:I think you have to start in a more imaginative mode.
Justin Brierly:You have to start by engaging people with kind of the way they want the world to be and the way they're encountering the world.
Justin Brierly:And again, you know, you kind of referenced the sort of the final episode of the last season where I really sketch out the way C.S.
Justin Brierly:lewis did this, you know, I think in a wonderful way he was a brilliant apologist.
Justin Brierly:Obviously he wrote those books like the Problem of Pain and Mere Christianity, giving a logical defense for Christianity.
Justin Brierly:But he captured the most people, I think, for Christianity through the Narnia stories and that imaginative approach of creating a fantasy world with a true but not tame, wonderful lion who we all aspired to meet and just imbued that world with so much meaning that it led to lots of people wishing that it were true.
Justin Brierly:And in the process, Lewis was able to hold that out as an example and say, well, what if this is true in your world?
Justin Brierly:And I think there's something about that approach that appealing to people's imagination about the way they would want the world to be.
Justin Brierly:And then to say, well, what if the world really is this way?
Justin Brierly:What if there is a story that is true, that there's a true version of this story?
Justin Brierly:Jesus really did, you know, come Once, among all the other myths and stories that have been told, this was the true one.
Justin Brierly:And that's going to look different for each person that we meet.
Justin Brierly:But there's somehow starting there before moving to that, more kind of showing them that it's true with the nuts and bolts of what Christianity is.
Justin Brierly:Start there with the imagination.
Brian:I think this is kind of going a little bit against what you've just said, in a way.
Brian:But I wanted to ask you.
Brian:Your earlier books.
Brian:Unbelievable.
Brian:And the subtitle is why, after what, 10 years of talking to atheists, why I'm still a Christian.
Brian:I recently had a friend ask me, actually, she said, well, I want you to do a podcast episode on why you are a Christian.
Brian:What is it about it?
Brian:And I gave her some of the reasons right away.
Brian:And it may be something we do down the road.
Brian:But I thought, having you on, I wanted to ask you this question.
Brian:If that question were posed to you, why.
Brian:Why do you believe?
Brian:How would you at least briefly respond to that, to that question yourself?
Justin Brierly:Well, you know, that's very much what that book was written for.
Justin Brierly:And I do do that work of kind of more traditional apologetics there.
Justin Brierly:But I think.
Justin Brierly:I think.
Justin Brierly:I hope that I do it in a way that does engage also with the more kind of imaginative elements of people.
Justin Brierly:Because the way I would answer this is looking at what it means to be human to some extent.
Justin Brierly:And I would.
Justin Brierly:There's three particular ways in which I find that it makes a lot of sense to believe in God.
Justin Brierly:Because in the end, it's my view that we.
Justin Brierly:We kind of.
Justin Brierly:We all believe in something.
Justin Brierly:Lots of my friends, you know, that I've had are atheists or functionally atheist.
Justin Brierly:And that means that they essentially, you know, have a worldview which is ultimately, everything can be described in the end by the laws of physics and chemistry, really.
Justin Brierly:And I have a view as a Christian that actually there's a mind behind the universe and behind existence and that we're meant to be here.
Justin Brierly:That there's a sort of a purpose, if you like, to life.
Justin Brierly:And the question is, whose worldview fits better?
Justin Brierly:Okay, if we were just to kind of look at those two, and that's what I essentially do in that book, is primarily contrast atheism and Christianity and.
Justin Brierly:And then.
Justin Brierly:And there are three key areas where I'd say when it comes to these three areas, God is a better explanation of reality.
Justin Brierly:So human existence.
Justin Brierly:I think that the fact we're here, there are all kinds of ways in which that points back to a designer A bit someone, someone behind the scenes, if you like, that it's far less likely that we're here by purely a product of chance, time and chemistry.
Justin Brierly:When you look at some of the interesting phenomena that have been discovered about what it took for us to be here, you know, Big Bang, cosmology, the fine tuning of the universe, the extraordinary complexity of life developing in the first place, the fact we can do science at all, you know, and the fact that the universe is written in the language of mathematics, it all seems to fit better with the biblical account that we were made, you know, that there is a God behind it than with a purely naturalistic explanation.
Justin Brierly:So human existence.
Justin Brierly:But then if you don't look out, rather than looking outside ourselves, looking inside ourselves to human value, where does that come from?
Justin Brierly:And again, I think Christianity gives a better account of how we make sense of this idea most of us have about the idea that, you know, we should believe in the inherent dignity and value of human beings, that there are some better and worse ways to treat human beings.
Justin Brierly:I've never met a satisfactory naturalistic account of that impulse to give human beings value and dignity.
Justin Brierly:But it's right there on page one of the Bible.
Justin Brierly:If we're made in the image of God, then it makes perfect sense of that, that kind of, that impulse and then human purpose.
Justin Brierly:So having talked about existence, value, human purpose again, the fact that there is this search for meaning and purpose across all times, places and cultures, again on an atheistic account of real, that is just a blind alley that we've been tricked by the happenstance of evolution to going down.
Justin Brierly:There is no answer, there is no ultimate purpose.
Justin Brierly:The universe will one day all meaningful thoughts and existence will evaporate in the heat death of the universe in a couple of trillion years time.
Justin Brierly:There's no story essentially.
Justin Brierly:So this does come back to the story thing on an atheistic view, whereas.
Justin Brierly:But if we can't shake that nagging sense that actually there is more to life, that there is some kind of meaning, that we're supposed, that we're here for, that there are ways of living life that are meant to be, then that fits again with the idea that of a God who has created us for a purpose and to live within a certain story of reality.
Justin Brierly:And by and large, you know that that has worked out well for people who have, who have adopted that.
Justin Brierly:So in these three ways I make the case that it makes more sense to believe in God on balance.
Justin Brierly:And that's a kind of, that is a kind of classic apologeticsy kind of way of doing things.
Justin Brierly:But I hope along the way to appeal to the fact that we're more than just brains on legs, that actually there's something deep down inside us that wants this to be true, that wants, doesn't want the world to be the way Richard Dawkins describes it, of just blind, pitiless indifference.
Justin Brierly:That there's something that most people have experiences in their lives that seem to scream out against that idea.
Brian:It's interesting to me.
Brian:You start with the individual, whereas the other stories tend to start with the universe, the big, the cosmic.
Brian:And you're saying, let's start with meaning and purpose and value.
Brian:That's really interesting.
Ryan:I got a question.
Ryan:I know we're short on time.
Ryan:We're getting up to.
Ryan:I got one question for you.
Ryan:You've had conversations over the years, and particularly some of those, you've maintained these ongoing conversations and there seems to be some genuine care between you and respect from those you've interviewed.
Ryan:So what is your encouragement like on some tips to maintain similar ongoing conversations with the same tone with people that you fundamentally disagree with?
Ryan:You know, I mean, like that.
Ryan:What tips would you have for those that we have disagreements with, you know, inside the church and outside the church, you know, in all these different facets of life, to have these fruitful, ongoing, respectful conversations?
Justin Brierly:Well, the first thing I'd say is probably get off social media if that's where you spend most of your time, because it's, it's terrible not just for what is on there, but the way it actually shape us in all kinds of ways.
Justin Brierly:And that's true actually of a lot of our media generally.
Justin Brierly:It's predicated on polarizing, combative exchanges and it tends to amplify the loudest voices at each end of the spectrum.
Justin Brierly:And sadly, that's just the way it works from an advertising perspective.
Justin Brierly:That's where they make their most money and that's what they tend to reinforce.
Justin Brierly:But it can really, unfortunately, I think, make it really difficult to have good conversations in our culture because we're so trained by this kind of very polarized way in which the conversations tend to happen online and in the media space.
Justin Brierly:So I think it's really important just to try to get around the table with people, to have face to face conversations, to kind of human rehumanize.
Justin Brierly:People see that they're more than just an idea that you disagree with to be demolished.
Justin Brierly:That they're someone made in the image of God, someone that God loves just as much as he loves you.
Justin Brierly:And that alone hopefully can make a difference just doing that.
Justin Brierly:And I was trying to do that, as I say, with the unbelievable show for all those years, we tried to do the face to face thing as much as possible because it does make a big difference.
Justin Brierly:It's much harder to be rude to someone that you're literally sitting down in front of than it is to do it online.
Justin Brierly:If you do it online, it's really easy to be rude to people.
Justin Brierly:And I've been guilty of that myself.
Justin Brierly:So I think that's really important.
Justin Brierly:I think, though, especially in the kind of polarized times we live in where, yeah, we do tend to demonize, we encourage to demonize others.
Justin Brierly:It.
Justin Brierly:It involves a conscious decision not to play by those rules and to embody the grace that we are commanded to have as Christians.
Justin Brierly:When 1 Peter 3:15 says, Always be ready to give an answer to anyone who asks you about the reason for the hope that you have.
Justin Brierly:It has that really important bit at the end, but do this with gentleness and respect.
Justin Brierly:And you know, that's, that's the most important bit, arguably of that whole verse is the gentleness and respect.
Justin Brierly:Because the reasons for the hope you have won't land if I think they're not delivered with gentleness and respect, even if you get it thrown back in your face.
Justin Brierly:I think the Christian, you know, the Christian imperative is not to, you know, answer evil with evil.
Justin Brierly:And so I think we just have to be really see this as a spiritual discipline, you know, that actually we're meant to hold to a different standard.
Justin Brierly:We're meant to have conversations that are different.
Justin Brierly:And my encouragement for anyone who's kind of in that situation is just to try to be faithful in being there for people when you do have those conversations, even if they don't seem to be going anywhere.
Justin Brierly:If you feel that you're hitting your head against a brick wall with someone, just show up, up as often as you can.
Justin Brierly:Be willing to continue the conversation.
Justin Brierly:Don't close it down.
Justin Brierly:And you never know when something might happen.
Justin Brierly:That person might have an experience, something might happen to suddenly make them actually try to engage in the conversation a different way.
Justin Brierly:And that's been my experience.
Justin Brierly:Sometimes it's been years and years of feeling like, oh, this person's never going to change their mind.
Justin Brierly:And then some.
Justin Brierly:Suddenly there is something that they.
Justin Brierly:And if you're there, if you're still in the conversation, then that could make all the difference for that person.
Brian:I'd say thank you, Justin.
Brian:That's very helpful.
Brian:And thank you so much for Your time.
Brian:We've been very.
Brian:Your podcast been very helpful to us.
Brian:Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God.
Brian:We've recommended it on our podcast.
Brian:We've recommended it individually to many people.
Brian:We were very pleased.
Brian:The second season is going to be coming out.
Brian:We're looking forward to that.
Brian:Want to give you a chance.
Brian:Is there anything else that you have in the works that you want to talk about?
Justin Brierly:Oh, well, we're also working on releasing some videos, some longer videos from the podcast series.
Justin Brierly:So what you hear on the podcast series is more kind of these documentary, lots of talking heads with my narration weaving it together.
Justin Brierly:But if you want to kind of start to check out some of the more long form interviews that made up a lot of those shows, we're going to be releasing a number of those on our YouTube channel in coming months.
Justin Brierly:So do feel free to subscribe.
Justin Brierly:Subscribe to the YouTube channel.
Justin Brierly:Justin Briley is what you're looking for.
Justin Brierly:But yeah, all I can encourage people is go and get subscribed and recommend it.
Justin Brierly:I love hearing that you guys have been recommending it because that's the best news that I could have.
Justin Brierly:It's just that's.
Justin Brierly:And I've been stunned actually how quickly the podcast has been taken up by a lot of people and I think it is on the basis of primarily just word of mouth.
Justin Brierly:So thank you for that.
Justin Brierly:And if people again want, want a different kind of way of diving into it, there is the book and we even send out signed copies of the book from my website.
Justin Brierly:So if people want more, just go to the website justinbriley.com you can find the book there, signed copies, the podcast series itself, links to the YouTube channel and of course the newsletter and everything else.
Brian:So yeah, I'll come in.
Brian:It's very much worthy of support.
Brian:So I would encourage any of our listeners who want to do that to do that and go and check those things out.
Brian:Well, thank you again, Justin.
Brian:It's been a pleasure to speak to you and just look forward to what you'll bring in the future to the conversation.
Brian:Very important conversation, I think.
Justin Brierly:Oh well, bless you guys and thank you for what you're doing with your own podcast.
Justin Brierly:And yeah, really, really encouraged that you wanted to reach out because you're doing, enjoying the podcast.
Justin Brierly:That makes my day and yeah, really great to talk to you today as well.
Brian:Thank you.
Brian:God bless you.
Ryan:Thank you.
Ryan:Yeah, take care.
Ryan:Bye.
Ryan:So as we're wrapping up here, I just want to say thank you for joining us with this.
Ryan:I know it was a fun conversation you enjoyed it, Brian, as well?
Brian:I did.
Brian:It was really good.
Brian:Yeah.
Brian:Make sure to share it again with others that you think would find this useful.
Ryan:Yeah.
Ryan:And we will see you all next Tuesday as we continue in Zachariah.
Ryan:Yeah.
Ryan:All right.
Ryan:Thanks so much, Brian.
Ryan:Thanks so much, Justin.
Ryan:We'll see you all next Tuesday.
Justin Brierly:Bye.
Ryan:Bye.
Justin Brierly:All right.
