Theology in the Raw - S2 Ep1096: Christianity, New Atheism, and the Rise of Public Intellectuals Exploring Christianity: Justin Brierley

Episode Date: July 24, 2023

Justin Brierley is a freelance writer, speaker and broadcaster known for creating dialogues between Christians and non-Christians. Justin is passionate about conversations around faith, science, theology and culture. Through creative use of podcast, radio, print, video and social media, he aims to showcase an intellectually compelling case for Christianity, while taking seriously the questions and objections of skeptics. Justin has worked in radio, podcast and video for over two decades. Until April 2023 he was Theology & Apologetics Editor for Premier Christian Radio, and 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. Justin's first book Unbelievable? Why, after ten years of talking with atheists, I'm still a Christian (SPCK) was published in 2017. Justin currently co-hosts the Re-Enchanting podcast for Seen & Unseen, and is a guest presenter for the Maybe God podcast. His next book The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God (Tyndale) will be published in Sep 2023. In this podcast conversation, Justin and I talk about the subtitle of his forthcoming book: "Why new atheism grew old and secular thinkers are considering Christianity again." Learn more about Justin from his website: https://justinbrierley.com Support Theology in the Raw through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/theologyintheraw

Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of Theology in the Raw. My guest today is the one and only Justin Brierley, the former host of the wildly popular Unbelievable podcast. He is currently a freelance writer, speaker, and broadcaster known for creating creative dialogues between Christians and non-Christians. He's written a couple books. His first book is titled Unbelievable, Why After 10 Years of Talking with Atheists, I'm Still a Christian, which is published in 2017. His forthcoming book, his second book is called The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God, which will come out early September. Would highly encourage you to check that out. And we had a wonderful conversation about his recent book. And really, we wrestled with the question

of why the new atheism movement is kind of dying out and why there's a surprising rise in secular thinkers considering Christianity. So please welcome back to the show, the one and only Justin Justin, thanks for being, I think this is your second time on Theology in a Raw, if I remember correctly. Yeah, but when was the first time? I can hardly even remember. Was it when you were over in the UK and recording some episodes way back? Well, I was on your show then. I've been on your show a couple times i i think you were maybe on during the covid era i think maybe you have i'm pretty sure you've been on but maybe not it's such a joy to have a a host on this show somebody who totally gets being on this side of the screen you know so uh you are a master at this. So we all look up to you.

Well, that's very kind, Preston, but I think you do an amazing job. I love listening to the podcast. I think you've got super interesting guests and such a great discussion going. So yeah, very pleased to, whether or not it's my first or second or whatever time, I'm very pleased to be here. Yeah, I think that, so I mainly have dialogues with other Christians. Oftentimes there's a lot of agreement. Sometimes there's disagreement. You often have, or are hosting dialogues and have dialogues with people who are outside the faith that that's, you know, and I don't have nearly as many as that, but I would say

your, your tone, your posture, your curiosity is very much. I mean, when I listen to you, I glean a lot from how you have these conversations. So I do think there's such a resonance in how we approach this. I want to jump in with your forthcoming book, The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God. The subtitle is Why New Atheism Grew Old and Secular Thinkers are considering Christianity again. That is a brilliant subtitle. I would love for you to answer that question if you don't mind, because I've thought about that. You just thought the new atheist movement, and maybe you need to explain what that even is for people who might not.

But I've been like, well, how come this didn't take off? What's going on? Yeah. Well, I'm a big fan of the long subtitle on a book. My last book had a long subtitle as well, but it does really, to some extent, encapsulate what the book is all about. We start with the new atheism, which for those who don't know, was a sort of very dogmatic form of atheism

that arose in the mid 2000s, led by people like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Bennett. They were publishing bestselling books basically saying there's no God and religion is bad for you. They were having atheist conferences. There were rallies. There was a real kind of burgeoning internet community around the whole thing. And there were a lot of headlines. And the stock and trade of the new atheism was not just sort of intellectual arguments against God and sort of science and reason and all that.

It was also a certain amount of ridicule as well. They were happy to kind of weigh in in that kind of way. There were lots of memes that kind of circulated and so on. So it was this very specific, quite anti-theistic version of atheism. A lot of people would suggest that it was 9-11 that was partly responsible for it, you know, the reaction to religious extremism and terrorism kind of set that in motion. So it wasn't just Christianity that they were opposing, it was Islam as well, of course. But I think there was also cultural issues like the question of intelligent design being taught in schools. That was kind of

on the agenda. And there was a lot of pushback from people like Dawkins and others against that and coming out swinging for Darwin and so on. And I think just the fact that, yeah, it was that time when the blogosphere was getting underway, early forms of social media. It gave lots of different atheists perhaps who felt somehow a little bit like religion was, there was too much religion around to be able to get together in those online spaces and really kind of create a movement in that way. I mean, here in the UK, probably, you know, the high point of it was what's become known as the Atheist Bus Campaign. And this was the closest thing to a marketing campaign that they had,

because for a while there were red London buses circulating the city with the words, there's probably no God, now stop worrying and enjoy your life. And that was sponsored by the Humanist Association. Richard Dawkins was behind it and so on. So it was the closest thing to have really organized atheist movement of its time. The equivalent high point, I would say, in the US was the Reason Rally. I don't know if you remember that back in 2012, when tens of thousands of atheists and skeptics gathered on the mall in Washington, D.C. to sort of campaign for science and reason and against the forces of superstition. So it really did feel like a movement that had a lot of energy behind it at the time.

So yeah, where is it now? The reality is, I think it really has fizzled out in many ways. None of those key architects of the movement are really talking about religion much any longer. I think it lost steam partly because I don't think it ultimately satisfied the actual questions people ultimately have. There's a reason why a new set of secular thinkers have come to kind of replace really that new atheist thing and are drawing essentially the same kind of crowd to themselves. And I think there's a point at which you can champion science and reason, but it's not going to buy you meaning and purpose and value. And I think there was just a kind of a limit to how much atheism could offer people. It's essentially, it's a negative claim anyway, and they had a real trouble building a kind of positive movement out of it because once

they'd agreed that God didn't exist and religion was bad for you, it turned out that the atheists leading the movement could hardly agree on anything else. In fact, the movement kind of splintered in all kinds of different directions. It started unraveling because a lot of people fell out with each other. There were lots of controversies. I could go into the detail, but basically it ended up with a lot of the key atheist names not being willing to share a stage with each other because of the infighting and the factions and so on. And to some extent, it was basically the beginning of the culture wars that spelled the end of new

atheism, because basically it split down the middle on issues around sort of, are we atheists who are also championing LGBT rights and feminism? And, you know, are we, you know, concerned about privilege and patriarchy? And you had that wing that kind of came to be termed atheism plus, because it was plus all these things. And then on the other side, you had those who were the kind of, you know, old school free thought folk who said, we don't need all this politically correct additional stuff to our atheism. We just want science and reason and the ability to just say what we think, um, without having to watch our P's and Q's. So, um, it, but that really did sort of split the atheist movement, uh, into, and, uh, in a, the kind of venom that those leaders had for each other

kind of outweighed anything that they had had for their Christian counterparts before. So there were a lot of factors that went into why it came and went. There was this internal thing, but there was also this overall cultural thing that it just felt like it ran out of steam in the end. You mentioned Richard Dawkins. I mean, that's probably the name most people would recognize if they recognize any of them. I mean, his books, this isn't just an academic who had some influence. I mean, he sold millions of books, right? I mean, widely popular in the heyday. So for it to fizzle out, that's kind of a big deal. Yeah. I mean, what's interesting is, speaking of the sort of ways in which the controversies overtook the new atheists, I mean, Richard Dawkins was at the center of a lot of those, because it seemed for a while, every time he posted anything on Twitter, it would create an avalanche of kind of response, because he wasn't, he didn't seem to be afraid of posting quite controversial things quite often. often, to the extent that, you know, more recently, and this is an area you've covered a lot,

obviously, Preston, but he was stripped of his Humanist of the Year award by the American Humanist Association because of his comments on transgender. And so that's just one example of the way in which the atheist movement kind of developed into all this infighting because of essentially these culture war issues that were on the horizon. To say I've dabbled in it would even be generous. Like I've not read, you know, but listen to interviews. And I've probably listened to more like Richard Dawkins being interviewed and Sam Harris's podcast and seeing him in other spaces. In my opinion, I would love to, I mean, let me know if I'm totally off the lunch.

I'm shocked at how unintelligent Richard Dawkins sounds. Like when his understanding of Christianity sounds like he went to some like podunk backwoods church in like the middle of Kansas somewhere, listened to some preacher. And that's the extent of his like knowledge of Christianity doesn't seem to be aware that there's like thoughtful Christians out there is incapable of steel manning any kind of Christian argument straw manning I mean like crazy and I say that as like when I listen to Sam Harris I'm like oh no okay here's a thoughtful guy this guy's very thoughtful I actually love I mean Sam Harris has he I really enjoy listening to him I mean obviously we have major disagreements. I believe in Jesus. He does.

But, but I mean, he's like, okay, here's a thoughtful guy. He's clearly brilliant. When I listened to Richard Dawkins, I remember listening to him, I think on the Joe Rogan podcast a while back. And I'm like, are you, are you serious? Like, this is your understanding of the body. Like you have no aware, no awareness of like, yeah, we've wrestled with like the Kenyanite genocide or something. And then we, we, we've wrestled with like the Kenyan genocide or something.

There's actual books written on it. Google it. I don't know. It just seems shockingly unintelligent. Have I seen the worst of Richard Dawkins or is that kind of characteristic of how he's answered? Yeah, I mean, I would broadly agree. Yeah, I mean, I would broadly agree. I think he almost sees things like the Bible and theology as almost barely worth putting much time into understanding because he sees them as so almost pointless in and of themselves. And so in his God delusion, he dealt with classic philosophical

arguments like the ontological argument in two pages and claimed to have sort of dismissed it out of hand. Well, let's be be honest that's probably not going to be the best sort of refutation you've ever worked read of of that argument so it's kind of yeah it's he's frustrating because inevitably of course it didn't stop millions of people buying the books and turning up at his lectures and everything else. And many thinking Christians and even thinking atheists, actually, were rather frustrated that Dawkins just wasn't really taking the argument seriously. I mean, one of the interesting things about all of it was that, again, going back to the heyday of it, when Christians were really wanting to kind of get Dawkins to engage with some of the

strongest arguments for Christianity and for God and to not just be this guy who just responds to the Colorado hell house and some fundamentalist preacher in the backwoods or whatever. The problem was he didn't seem willing to do that. So it was almost like he preferred the easy targets and the straw men. And he wasn't willing to come on and debate, for instance, William Lane Craig, who is a well-known Christian philosopher. And I was involved in a sort of campaign while Bill Craig was over in the UK back in 2011, trying to get Richard Dawkins to come and have a discussion with him in Oxford on his home turf. We even rather cheekily created our own bus campaign, which was called, there's probably no Dawkins now,

but find out by coming along to the Sheldonian theater. So, so it was sort of, yeah, the problem was he was happy to dish it out, but he wasn't so willing to take it. And I think that's, that again was part of the reason why people stopped being able to take it so seriously. It didn't feel like ultimately it had the kind of intellectual credibility that its proponents claimed that it had. Yeah, that's interesting. Okay, so let's, the second part of your question here, subtitle, why are secular thinkers considering Christianity again? And I shared with you offline, just kind of my interest in this part of the question. I remember when Jordan Peterson was really taking off, and I feel like there's two Jordan, I do want to talk to you about him because I know he's kind of a controversial figure. I appreciated him more early on, not nearly as much more recently.

We can get into that. Not that that matters at all. But I remember when he really gained popularity popularity here's a guy who has no really religious commitment you know is he curious is he a christian you know people kind of where's he at you know but he's he's giving like three hour long lectures very intellectual lectures on like the flood or the cain and abel story And thousands of people are showing up to hear an in-depth intellectual lecture on a story in the Bible and they're paying for it. Yeah.

Many of them aren't even Christians. And then I turn around and like Christian pastors have a hard time getting people to come who are committed Christians, who actually think this is a divinely inspired story to come to church. It's like, how do we get people to come to church? And I'm like, what's going on? Aside from Jordan and all this, it's a fascinating cultural moment that we're in. I'm like, what is going on here? And as as an academic i'm always pushing for i think people are smarter than we're making them out to be i don't think we need a dumb now i think people are want more me i think they want to be challenged i think but we need to like do it not like yeah dim it down water it down or try to get people you know like so that that's my kind of like i i

that's the argument i want to be true. Like, hey, see, people are actually wanting to engage the text on an in-depth level. But maybe that's just my assumption. Anyway, all that to say, yeah, going back to the original question, why are secular thinkers considering Christianity again? And can you make sense of this kind of Jordan Peterson moment that I think is tied to that question? Yeah. I mean, Jordan Peterson is probably the most prominent of the figures that I mentioned is tied to that question. Yeah. I mean, Jordan Peterson is probably the, the most prominent of, of the figures that I mentioned and, and you're, you're right. He's had different phases in his life. And, um, that, that, you know, I, I kind of, I love some of what he writes and speaks about other stuff I could

leave behind. Cause I think, you know, he's, he's kind of, to some extent he goes overboard when he's going in kind of cultural warrior mode on Twitter and that kind of thing. But no, I mean, I first ran into Jordan Peterson, I think, back in 2017 when he was a bit of a cult figure in Canada. And he was filling these auditoriums already with these young men, primarily doing these long lectures on Genesis. And you think, yeah, my goodness, what's he got that, you know, the preacher down the road obviously doesn't have. And then of course he, he kind of really came into public popularity in 2018. There was this kind of viral, it was while he was in the UK, actually he was interviewed on channel four news by a female presenter debating the gender pay gap. And he's kind of very cool

dismantling of her kind of went viral all over the world. And that really launched him into the stratosphere. But what was interesting was that, you know, as much as he was kind of talking on those kind of hot button culture issues, he was also had this very deep side to him where he was really engaging with the issue of God and the Bible. I mean, if you read his bestselling book, 12 Rules for life, it's stuffed full of references from the Bible and the wisdom that he dispenses in these lectures, you know, they're constant, you know, uh, constantly taken from ancient wisdom of the scriptures and so on. And, and why, why him? Why was that, you know, why, why was this so popular? A lot of the audience, I think were kind of the same audience that had been turning out for the new atheists. These were kind of thinking, intelligent people looking for answers. And I think what happened was, I just think because of that new atheist thing was running out of steam and it wasn't really satisfying a deeper sense of people's longings and intuitions for meaning, for purpose. And because I think we were moving more and more and have

ever since into a kind of very super post-Christian, you can have any story you want, kind of identity is completely up for grabs kind of world. I think the people who were turning up were a lot of, as I say, especially young men looking for, for, for identity. Um, it, it was a kind of a meaning crisis and an identity crisis. And Jordan Peterson, he kind of presented and still presents this kind of wise father figure, uh, who was kind of, you know, telling them to clean their room and stand up straight with their shoulders back and quite simple kind of homely wisdom, but kind of delivered also with this sort of deeper sense of meaning and how to make sense of your life and looking at yourself in the big picture of kind of

reality. And, and sort of, I think it just, it just spoke to a lot of people who felt like they were, they'd had kind of shallow answers, both from popular culture and from the new atheism. And they felt like there was something meaty here. There was something that, that kind of spoke to, to their, their inner sense of who they were and what life could be about. And, and it, I think it almost made a difference that he was a very human character. He still is a very human character, Jordan Peterson. Um, he wasn wasn't too he's not too studied in the way he brings himself across he he wears his heart on his sleeve he he you know on stage and in interviews he frequently wells up you know and he's closer to tears it's like he's he kind of wears his emotions on his

sleeve he and you get the sense that this stuff really matters to him it's not just an academic argument it's not just a sort of you just a chance to sell books or whatever. He's genuinely concerned for the state of people's souls, essentially. And so I think all of that, there was this aura and this attraction for a lot of people who were looking for someone who could give them a sense of meaning and purpose and identity. Now, I'm not saying he had all the answers by any stretch, but I do think he managed to somehow, at that moment, sort of be something that people felt a person they could follow, someone who had something to say that they felt might be worth listening to. This is an imperfect analogy, but kind of like a more secular, less religious,

less religious, like Mark Driscoll or something. People are like, how did he gain this folly? It's like, well, I think a lot of people had daddy issues. They needed to be told to man up, maybe in a way that wasn't, yeah, but he scratched the niche. I think there is actually, interestingly, a lot of overlap, whether you think that's a good or a bad thing. But I think, yeah, they're different in their different ways. But actually, yeah, to some extent, there are real similarities in terms of what was attracting, especially these young men who wanted to kind of have that sense of purpose and identity and sort of responsibility as well in life.

What was it like? So you interviewed Jordan, right? You had a one-on-one like conversation what was he like as a person i mean i i agree when i hear him in interviews he very human i know he has this kind of like crusty kind of strength to him that some people are really turned off but i've heard him in interviews get really like i'm like oh he cares deeply deeply for people you know and very very empathetic in ways that I think some people who don't like him wouldn't give him credit for. But what was it like talking to him? What kind of person was he? Yeah, I mean, I managed to catch him sort of just before he went sort of super stellar, really, in terms of his being well known on big stages. being well known on big stages. So it was just before he had that viral interview with Kathy Newman on Channel 4 that I recorded a big conversation episode with him opposite an

atheist psychologist, Susan Blackmore. And I was very aware that he didn't sort of claim a Christian faith for himself, but I'd set this up as a discussion on do we need God to make sense of life, basically. And he really acted the part of a Christian apologist. You know, you would have been hard to distinguish the things he was saying from what a lot of Christian apologists might say about why, you know, I mean, when he calls on Genesis, you know, as a foundation for human dignity and rights, you know, that were made in God's image, he says, you know, you just can't get that from a materialist ethic. You have to have something like the Christian story. It sounds, you know, as though he's essentially

just championing Christianity. And so it's fascinating because when you actually ask him, well, do you believe in God? He was kind of like, well, it depends what you mean by God. And I think I act as though I believe in God, but who can really know their inner motivations and psychology and that kind of thing. So he didn't want to be pinned down on that kind of stuff. But he was very happy to make an intellectual case for the moral force of Christianity and the value of Christianity. And that's what I've seen actually with a lot of these other secular thinkers. Some of them are closer and some of them are further away from actual personal faith. But by and large, they all agree that Christianity has overall been a good thing in the West

and that the new atheists really overplayed their card when it came to the evils of religion. I think by and large, they see that that was just not the case, that actually Christianity has given us far more than the new atheists ever really accounted for. Who are some other thinkers then? I know you talked to Tom Holland and several others. Who else are you thinking of in terms of secular thinkers who are considering Christianity? Yeah, Tom Holland is a good example, and I always have to make the caveat, not the Spider-Man superhero Tom Holland.

This is a Tom Holland who's a well-known author of historical literature here in the UK. He co-hosts a huge history podcast called The Rest is History that's listened to around the world. I think it is the number one history podcast in the world. And he's got a fascinating story because he really, whatever childhood faith he had in the Anglican church kind of had fizzled out by his teenage years. And he kind of grew up essentially as sort of secular agnostic, assuming that, you know, civilized culture was just what came from

the enlightenment and reason and science and that kind of thing. It was only when he started a career writing books investigating the world of the Greeks and the Romans that he suddenly began to encounter just how alien those cultures were to his way of thinking, the way they treated women and children, slavery, sex. He realized that in almost every way, the values and ideals that he held as a modern Westerner were not shared with the Greeks and the Romans, and indeed weren't shared with many other parts of the world in the contemporary world. And that he couldn't avoid the conclusion that those values came from the Christian revolution, as he calls it. And he wrote basically on the back of this sort of journey that he went on, this huge book called Dominion, which really spells out the vast

multiplicity of ways in which the Christian revolution shaped all of our ideas about freedom and democracy, science, human dignity, compassion. And it was, yeah, it was extraordinary to see the way that his journey developed. I've had the privilege of having him in a number of conversations, both very congenial ones with people like N.T. Wright, where they've both shared a passion for history and the early church and the influence of,

you know, Jesus and St. Paul, and also some real combative debates like one with A.C. Grayling a little while ago that, yeah, was a real fun kind of debate to see him in. Did you also talk to Douglas Murray? I think he's... That's right. Yeah. So what's he... Yeah. He's an interesting figure too. He is. He is. And for those who don't know him, he's a sort of English journalist, deputy editor of a magazine called The Spectator here. He kind of, as with a number of these figures, actually, he kind of leans right when it comes to his politics. But he's a very interesting character

because he's an atheist, he's gay. In a sense, he was very much a product to some extent. We're about the same age and he was very influenced, I think, by the new atheist. He was good friends with Christopher Hitchens, frequently went for lunch with him and lived in that milieu, if you like. But when he came on my show about two years ago to have a conversation with N.T. Wright, he really described to me the way in which he kind of really got past that new atheist phase actually himself. And he says he really came to see that the new atheism really didn't have an answer to the issue of ethics, to the issue of how we build a culture. He said that there is no, at present, he can't see any better foundation than the Christian foundation for human rights, dignity, equality, a very kind of similar kind of view to Tom Holland in that sense. And even where's the epithet of

being a Christian atheist, you know, he likes to put those two together. And what was interesting is I kind of owe the title and the image on the front of my book to Douglas Murray to some extent, because it was in that conversation that he talked about the fact that he was starting to see some of his friends converting to Christianity, particularly to more ancient forms, Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy. He said it wasn't a flood of them, but it was noticeable. It made him wonder whether maybe the tide is turning, maybe the church is able to speak into a more receptive crowd, as he put it. And he referenced that well-worn line from Matthew Arnold, the Victorian poet, where it talks about the melancholy long-withdrawing roar of the sea of

faith, this vision of faith going out in the Victorian era as science and reason and the enlightenment sort of swept superstition away. But he said, the thing about the sea of faith is that it could come back in again. That's the point of tides. And I just thought it was really interesting because I was noticing, as I say, this phenomenon of people like Douglas Murray kind of taking Christianity much more seriously again than the atheist counterparts had, and also seeing some interesting conversion stories just as he was seeing. And I just wondered, well, maybe this is the telltale signs that despite all the statistics about the growth of the nuns and the increasing secularization of the West, maybe we're just starting to get to the furthest ebb, if you like, of that tide of secular materialism. And we may yet see the sea of faith come back in again,

perhaps even in our generation. What would be the common denominator? I mean, so we talked about Peterson, Tom Holland, Murray, who had some kind of, some kind of awakened, like none of them would say, I'm an atheist, God doesn't exist. Or even there's some kind of theism that they're embracing on some level. Would that be accurate? How would you, how would you? I think they're probably all at different stages at a personal level. I think, um, I think probably if they wore a label, they, they would prefer something like agnostic over, over hard atheist.

A lot of these, these folk there, they're kind of really attracted to the Christian story. Um, I I'd say that's especially true of Tom Holland. Um, whenever I've spoken to him about his own sort of at a personal level, I I'd say that's especially true of Tom Holland. Um, whenever I've spoken to him about his own sort of at a personal level, I think he, he is very drawn to, to Christianity because, you know, the way he's put it to me is he finds the kind of secular material story of reality, just, just very boring, anemic palette. It doesn't excite him. Whereas he loves the story of Christianity. He just finds it exciting. And, you know, he loves the drama

and the idea of the kind of, this being a cosmic drama, you know. And I think at that level, it's, you know, it's when he's connected with the ancient form of it, you know. And when he does go to church, he does go to a very ancient church, probably the oldest church in London.

And he loves the, you know, that kind of liturgical approach and everything else. I think because he feels as a historian connected to a bigger story. And I think that's what he really appreciates about the Christian tradition. So I think there's a real sense that he wants to find, he would love it to be true, basically. I think that could even be true of Douglas Murray, though. I don't know. You never know what barriers are potentially standing in the way of some people.

I mean, Jordan Peterson's an interesting one. And people have spilled a lot of ink over where he's at. But I do remember one particular conversation he had really stuck with me. It was shortly after he was sort of coming out of a period of quite a long period of illness that he'd had. And he struck up a real friendship with a Eastern Orthodox icon carver called Jonathan Pajot. And they've had a number of conversations. And in this one, I remember them talking about faith and religion and Jordan Peterson, again, getting very emotional when talking about the person of Jesus and talking about how it seemed to him that the person of Christ reconciled the world of psychology and meaning and myth,

which he was so invested in, with the kind of real physical world of objective facts. uh it was he talked christ seemed to be this this moment of being able to bring these things together which is quite a sort of c.s lewis like kind of way of looking at at things so i i i'm hopeful that maybe you know he's he's certainly on a journey of some kind and and and who knows where where it could end i i agreed that more recently and not that this means i mean i'm more interested in the kind of broader, what does it say culturally? But he does seem to be drawn into a lot of culture stuff. And the last few times I've heard him talk, he just seems more just like an angry old man. He reminds me of something like more of a fundamentalist preacher as before.

He's always strong. And I would say my original critique is he's kind of sweeping. He would talk about, well, the postmoderns believe like, well, which one? But I can tolerate that. But I think more recently, and maybe it's because he's kind of – but part of it too though is I think when he was more of just a classical liberal, more of a free thinker, he was so blasted by – at least in America, blasted by the left. When that happens, oftentimes the by the left. Yeah.

And when that happens, oftentimes the right is wide open arms, you know, hey, we're up to a conversation. Yeah, yeah. So he ends up joining arms with the right. Yeah. I think that's right. And I think inevitably, you know, unfortunately, because we do live in a social media age that tends to reinforce, you know, positions that are far apart from each other.

Unfortunately, I think that that does happen. And I, you know, I guess Jordan Peterson, to some extent, you know, can get swept up in that as much as anyone. As I say, it's not, but it's, you know, I make it sound like the book's all about Jordan Peterson. He features, but he's one among a number of people who are kind of, I think, part of this movement. And it's not just in these sorts of culture and psychology. I think if you look at science, I think there's some really interesting intellectual, secular thinkers, but who are not arriving

at hard materialist atheist conclusions about the nature of the universe, who are coming to some very interesting conclusions about there being a sort of telos or, you know, for want of a better word, logos around the universe and the way it kind of, it seems to go in a direction that where life is almost inevitable in it and that kind of thing, or just the way that, yeah, in mind and materialism in the area of philosophy, there's been a real pushback against that sort of Daniel Dennett-style emergent view of consciousness, where it's really just an illusion. You are simply your brain and the chemical process is going on in it. There's

been a huge pushback now towards things like panpsychism, which is the view that consciousness is ultimately fundamental to reality. Again, these aren't necessarily Christians who are pushing this view, but it's certainly not a kind of atheist naturalist kind of perspective that seems to be, at least in my eyes, in the ascendancy now in a lot of academic circles. And there just seems to be more room for the concept of God than there used to be. And so I just find all of those different spheres where you're seeing this phenomenon happening as a really interesting telltale sign that that atheist materialist story of So I just find all of those different spheres where you're seeing this phenomenon happening as a really interesting telltale sign that that atheist materialist story of reality

that the new atheists banged on about so hard, it's just been found wanting in so many areas. And this new possibility that we can take God seriously again is just emerging in its place. help. Faithful Counseling offers online professional mental health therapy from a biblical perspective. And with Faithful Counseling, you can schedule weekly video or even phone sessions if you don't want to be seen on camera. One of the things I love most about Faithful Counseling is that they allow you to change counselors free of charge. Because, I mean, let's be honest. I mean, while we all could use good therapy, not every therapist is a good fit for us. So Faithful Counseling, they want to make sure you find a good fit. On top of that, Faithful Counseling is more affordable than traditional offline counseling. And even on top of that, financial aid is available.

So continue growing into the best version of yourself. Visit faithfulcounseling.com forward slash T-I-T-R and get the professional faith-based counseling that you deserve. They're even offering a special offer for our listeners. Right now, you can get 10% off your first month at faithfulcounseling.com forward slash T-I-T-R. Thanks again to Faithful Counseling for sponsoring this episode. Does the Bible support same-sex marriage? That's a question that many people are wrestling with today. And there's, you know, people who hold passionately to different answers to this question. Now, most dialogues about same-sex marriage, they end with divisiveness and confusion instead of clarity and a better understanding of the other person's position and even a better understanding of your own position.

This is why I wrote a book titled, Does the Bible Support Same-Sex Marriage? 21 Conversations from a Historically Christian Perspective, which comes out in August this summer. So what I do in this book is I first talk about how Christians should even go about having a profitable conversation about contentious issues. I really want us to cultivate a better posture in how we even go about defending our points of view or trying to refute others. I then lay out a biblical theological case for the historically Christian view of marriage. And then for the rest of the book, I take what I see as the top 21 arguments for same-sex marriage.

And I respond to each one in a way that's both thoughtful and thorough. Some of these arguments are, you know, since some people are born gay, then God must allow for same-sex marriage. Or, you know, the word homosexual was only recently added to the Bible. Or the traditional view of marriage is harmful to gay and lesbian people. And many other arguments that I wrestle with in this book, does the Bible support same-sex marriage? So if you're looking for a theologically precise and nuanced approach to these arguments, one that doesn't strawman the other view to make it look bad, then I would encourage you to please check out my book, Does the Bible Support Same-Sex Marriage? You can order it now on Amazon or wherever books are sold. of the common denominators of everything you're talking about is unlike maybe other awakenings, like the great awakening or other others that were more populist kind of driven. Like this one seems to be much more on the intellectual side. People that are having this kind of

spiritual awakening are doing so for deep intellectual reasons. They're thoughtful people. They're asking really hard questions and they're not satisfied with maybe how atheists have gone about some of these really tough questions. Would that be a common denominator? I appreciate that you said the few that we've talked about, they're on different planes and everything, we can't lump them all together, but they're all very thoughtful, intellectual type people. What do we make of that? What does that say? What does that say? Well, I think to some extent, yes, it is. These are sort of public intellectuals that are primarily behind this movement. And to that extent, they probably attract primarily people who are of a similar disposition.

So the question is, is this just sort of something going on at one level up here, but it's not really reaching the vast majority of people elsewhere? I don't know. I think actually you do see a lot of people turning out for these things. You've got a lot of people listening to their podcasts and watching their videos. That's what the internet's done for us. It's made it all so accessible. And I think there are people bringing it in at an easier to understand level. And I think, as I say, for a lot of these guys, even if they haven't walked through the door of faith

themselves, they've definitely been a gateway drug for a lot of people to take Christianity seriously. And I do know a number of people who have, you know, gone through and walked on to faith. I think at a kind of more kind of general level though, I think there's also just the fact that matched with this kind of, this change in the way people are talking about Christianity and God at that level, there's also just at the everyday level, I think people are just running out of steam with these lots of little stories that we're telling ourselves in our culture. Because one of the other big themes of the book is just that what the failure of the new atheism proved in a way was that you can't take religion out of people. of the new atheism proved in a way was that you can't take religion out of people. We've seen a long process of secularization, which the new atheism was kind of the cherry on top of in a way,

where we've seen the Christian story go out of fashion in the West and very much in the back window. But when people stop being religious about God, they just get religious about other things. And for me, that's evident in our culture today because people do get really invested in other quasi-religious things. So a lot of the ideologies of the progressive left, I think, have a very kind of religious nature to them. They have their sacred texts and their high priests and their orthodoxies and they have their witch hunts and their heretics and everything else. And these identities and so on that people often assume are regarded as sacrosanct in many ways. It is sort of internalized in a way that is quasi-religious. But it's not just on the progressive left. If you go on the right, there's certain forms of nationalism and conspiracy theories

and all sorts of things that, again, are these sorts of ways in which I think people are trying to fill that God-shaped hole with something to make sense of reality. It's because the atheist materialist story that we're really just a collection of randomly evolved atoms bouncing around in a purposeless, mindless universe, no one's going to really

be happy with that story. No one's kind of gets a sense of meaning or transcendence out of that. So there's all these other stories that people are reaching for in the absence of the Christian story. And the problem with them, of course, is that none of them agree with each other and you end up in the culture wars. And the question is, how much longer can people survive on that diet? And so I wonder whether we're kind of seeing sort of at the intellectual level, things getting sort of prepared, but also a kind of just at the pure cultural level, people kind of running out of

energy. You know, I don't know your thoughts on this Preston, but I think that a lot of the reason personally behind the rise we're seeing in anxiety, depression, suicide, especially among younger people is to do with the fact people are exhausted by having to basically invent their own story. And we are made to live in a story, but we've forgotten the story that we were made to live in. And until we find it again, we're not going to be happy. No matter how many other stories we tell ourselves. Everybody needs a meta-narrative, right? A thing that makes sense of everything. I think what you're saying, just from my anecdotal observation, that I would agree that a pure atheist meta-narrative is going to produce way more anxiety and make less sense of the world than other meta-narratives. Yeah,

the anxiety, depression, all that. I mean, I, yeah, that's a whole nother conversation. I, I, I think for sure, at least part of it is the burden put on the individual to make sense of, of their own world to cultivate and create sometimes an identity for themselves. And I also think just the, the, the plethora of all the available options can be super stressful. Like if you go to the grocery store and you're looking for a box of cereal and there's three kinds, that's not stressful. But when there's 300, just thinking about that stresses me out. And I don't want people to read between the lines.

Like I'm just talking about gender identities, although that might be part of it, but I mean, and not just even sexual identities, but like just lots of different, um, yeah, the, the algorithms on social media, though, the way everybody's vying for attention, the way ad companies are, I mean, every, everything's just been exacerbated and, and as, as much as we live our lives, especially online, that could be, yeah, I think, I think it's been shown pretty, pretty clearly. I mean, Gene Twenge has shown it and other – Jonathan Haidt. I mean, the more time you spend on a screen, on social media, living in an online world, I mean, that's just – I think it's been proven.

I don't think it's that disputed that that does not increase your happiness and lower your anxiety. And we know that. We've watched movies like that, Netflix is social dilemma. We, we know this, it's not a disputed point, but we can't stop, you know? So yeah, I, I would agree with all of that. And I think, I think, I mean, the, the, the technology and social media, I think that's all accelerated it, but I feel like it's accelerating something that was, was there already, which is, it has been kind of sown already by the post-Christian kind of postmodern culture that we're living in, which is, you know, which goes as far back as, you know, Disney films and everything,

you know, which were about, um, if you can, you know, if you can dream it, you can do it. It's this kind of, you can invent yourself, you can be yourself, you can, you know, you can dream it you can do it it's this kind of you can invent yourself you can be yourself you can you know and everything else and i think but i think technology and social media has just inflated and accelerated that in a way that makes it far more invasive on people's lives and and therefore makes it far more intolerable almost you know and and you know it's why people are cracking under the strain, I think, of that kind of thing. There's a great book actually by Alan Noble on this, which I don't know if you've come across, You Are Not Your Own and other stuff he's written. I found really helpful kind of from his perspective, kind of looking at the way that search for identity and just how stressful and burdensome it is for people, especially, you know, he teaches a lot of, you know,

students as an English professor and everything. And it was just fascinating to see his take on that as well. I thought you were going to talk about Carl Truman's book because he does that massive kind of look at the roots of a lot of this expressive individualism and other, other ideas. But yeah, I thought I went on the show, um, and, and we talked about that, I think last year sometime. So, um, yeah, I'm glad a lot of people are tapping into it. Do you find then that, that the, that a pure, not agnosticism, but atheism, that that as a,

as a metanarrative, as an identity, as a way of thinking, that that is really like the numbers of true atheists, do you find that shrinking and will continue to shrink? It's an interesting one because when I kind of put a preview cover of the book title, The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God on my Twitter, I had a lot of atheists kind of responding to it saying, what a ridiculous hypothesis. You know, just look at the statistics. We know that Christianity is on decline in the West. It's, you know, and how can you even put that on your book cover? And as

I've explained, it's actually about looking really at a phenomenon that I think we're just at the very beginning of potentially. I don't dispute the fact that the statistics tell us that churchgoing is in decline across the West, that more and more people are signing none when they write about their religious affiliation, especially true of millennials and Gen Z. But what is interesting is when you dig into those statistics a bit, there's not that many of those who are actually saying, and the type of nun I am is an atheist materialist. The statistics haven't really changed that much on that one. We had our latest big census. Every 10 years here in the UK,

we do a national census and the statistics came out for that last year. And the big thing for on the religious demographics was that for the first time, less than 50% of people ticked the Christian box. And I think it was about 25% of people said that they had no religion. But then when you drill down into it, you had the option of saying, well, what does that look like for you? And out of, I think it was about 22 million people who said they had no religion, only about 10,000 had said they were an atheist. I mean, that's a, that's a tiny number who, who have actually gone to the trouble of actually telling us what they're kind of. So I just think, and again, there are other statistics

that bear this out that people live in a kind of agnostic slash quite often spiritual, but not religious kind of way. That's the phrase I was going to say, spiritual, but not religious sounds like the most popular. Yeah, exactly. And so I think that typifies a lot more of the people. So I don't think Dawkins and new atheism made that many converts to scientific materialism. I think they were just part of what was already a big cultural wave of agnostic post-Christian kind of culture where religion was seen as old-fashioned and fusty and something that your granny does. To that extent, it's interesting to see the way that church membership has declined precipitously in the UK, but in the same way that actually other forms of membership have declined.

The number of people who affiliate with political parties or the number of pubs that are closing in local villages and things like that. There are other changes afoot in the demographics of the West that mean that people are rejecting institutional membership of things and that sort of thing. So I think it's hard to say atheism is on the rise. It feels more like people are just not buying into institutional religion so much. But that doesn't mean that, as I say, that more general religious feeling has necessarily completely gone away at the same time. I love that you said that because when I hear people say, church going is on an all-time low and people are... Part of me is kind of... Okay,

this might make some people upset, but part of me is kind of like, so what? I don't, I've been to a lot of churches where I'm like, yeah, this place is screwed up. You know, I wouldn't want to go here. I'm more interested in people having a reconciled relationship with the risen Lord of the universe. And sometimes some forms of an institutionalized church can get in the way of that. I've experienced that. That is not a knock on all churches or even most churches. I'm just saying like our goal should not be to cram people into a church service. To me, that could be a penultimate goal. Maybe that's a way for them to encounter Jesus.

But just to get them – there's loads of people that are simply going to church who are not in a reconciled relationship with the radical Lord of the universe who commands their existence. There's a big gap there. So yeah, to me, I'm not as interested in raising the numbers of simply church attendance. I am interested in... Well, I mentioned unearthing the question, why? Why is that? Some people just assume, see, that's a sign of no interest in Jesus. Not necessarily. I know a lot of people who are very interested in Jesus, but wouldn't step foot inside of a church building for many different wide range of reasons. It's too politicized. Maybe in America, they might vote Democrat and they're scared they're going to be yelled at by some Republican preacher.

They might be – just maybe they've experienced abuse by a spiritual authority. And so the idea of going under and placing yourself under the authority of some spiritual figure, maybe there's trauma there. There's so many reasons why – legitimate reasons why people might not want to simply spend three hours every Sunday inside of a church building. So, sorry, that was a tangent. This is like spiritual therapy talking to Justin here. I guess I'm interested in where are we headed as a Christian movement? Are we headed in a positive direction? And how can we not simply get more people back in church, but

how can we take advantage of this cultural moment we're in, which is very interesting? There's lots of dust being kicked up. And what can the church, not church buildings or church attendance, but the big C church, what can we do to capitalize on this unique spiritual moment that we're encountering? Yeah. I think it is a real test now for the church as to whether it, if this is a real movement, whether it's ready to receive it. Because the problem is so often the church is so busy, you know, navel gazing or having internal disputes

or whatever that it cannot often miss these opportunities when they're presented in the culture. And as you're fully aware, Preston, we've had a real reckoning in the evangelical church over the last several years. There's lots of scandals, celebrity pastor issues and everything else. And you kind of have to ask, would anyone who is looking for meaning and purpose and identity and thinks maybe the Christian story holds it out to them, would they want to find it in the church given our track record at the moment and in the past? I suppose I've always got hope in the end, this is where the faith comes in, that God's doing something and that the church is always being reformed and it's dying and being reborn in so many ways. I think it was

GK Chesterton who said something like, you know, Christianity has died a thousand deaths. It's constantly dying and being reborn because it has a God who knew his way out of the grave. And I think that's true in our generation as much as any previous generation, that if we are going to see Christianity flourish and be reborn in the West, it's not going to look exactly the same as it did before. It's not just going to be that we're fling open the doors and wait for people to come back into the pews. I think the church is going to have to ask itself, what's gone wrong? the church is going to have to ask itself, what's gone wrong? There's a reason why the Catholic church has had a huge scandal in terms of child abuse. There's reasons why lots of the institutional churches are dying on their feet because people don't want to come through the doors anymore. There's reasons why the evangelical church has had a slew of

scandals and falls from grace and if we don't get our own house in order the question will be then it may not be those churches that are ultimately god's vehicle for going forward um it might be something new you know what's interesting to me is that in a way a lot of the people these intellectuals who seem quite attracted to Christian faith, they're not usually attracted to the more sort of evangelical versions of faith. They tend to skew towards those more traditional ancient sort of forms that are in a sense less showy, but kind of are sort of more grounded in some kind of quite ancient wisdom and tradition and that kind of thing because that's what they miss. They want something that isn't just another version of what

they can already get in the popular culture. They want something that feels completely different. You know, I talk towards the end of the book about Tom Holland again, who says he wants Christians to keep Christianity weird. If you want me to become a Christian, basically, give me the old fashioned, the really ancient version. Don't try and rationalize away all the stuff about angels and things like that. He wants to have the mystery and the otherworldliness of Christianity in that way. And I just wonder whether, you know, there are lessons across all of that for us about the way we engage people who are sort of tired of the thin diet of secular materialism. And they don't just want the church to just feel like another version of that. They want something that feels different, that kind of taps into that sort of ancient line of people who have found this story compelling and

life-changing in that way. So yeah, so I don't know if that helps at all, because I'm probably not very good at predicting what the church will look like that perhaps is able to encompass this movement. All I do know is there's a movement there. And if the church is willing, it could be ready to sort of see something quite new happen in its lifetime. So I'm hearing you suggest, and I know you're not the son of a prophet, but I guess two major things. Number one, we have to do something about this really bad reputation that the church has with the church as an institution between scandals and celebrity pastors and narcissism in the church and all this stuff that I get a lot of people.

It's just that the bubbles kind of pop. People are just tired of it. How women have been treated, especially. The hard thing for me on that is, I mean, it's without question we need to address that and clean it up. Part of it too is, I don't know, I've been wrestling with this with some friends of mine and I don't know what to do with it, but it's also the reporting on it too. For every one mega church that makes the news on a scandal, there's a thousand unknown churches with godly, humble leaders who aren't abusing women or children or whatever, who aren't embezzling

money, who wake up every morning to pray for the people and are visiting people by the bedside, you know, but they don't make the news. So like, no matter what we do to our reputation, even if there's, say there's 20 churches that make the news on a scandal, that's minuscule. Let's just say we got down to there's, okay, at any given time, there's 20 churches doing really bad stuff. Those 20 will make the news. The hundreds of thousands of others will not.

And it's going to get the perception of the church is just filled with scandal. So part of me is on the nature of reporting that even if we do reverse, even if we do address the issues, which we absolutely must, I'm not sure, I'm a little more pessimistic about actually reversing the reputation. Unless we do something about the more global question of how do we even go on about getting our information of what's kind of going on? That's number one. Number two, I'm hearing you say that, yeah, I think we need less fluff and more depth. I mean, of course, that's my hobby horse I've been on for 25 years. I think people actually, it's funny, if you look at the bestselling books in the secular world, there are books by Tom Holland and Jordan Peterson.

And I just use those as examples because we've talked about them. But sometimes they're 500-page, very intellectual books. They're selling millions of copies. Now go to the Christian bestsellers, and it's like adult coloring books. It's Christian living stuff. They might serve a purpose, but it's so vastly different. And I'm like, are we we i think people in our congregation are actually asking harder and their questions and they're capable of deeper much more meaningful conversations and into

in-depth church environments now i'm speaking as an, I've spent years in the UK, you guys are way better at this than we are here. Well, not necessarily. I mean, it depends. I mean, on both those counts, I think you're right. I think it is hard sometimes in a culture where people love to hear the bad news and that tends to be what rises to the top. It's hard to reverse an image problem in the church when, you know, inevitably people always focus on the things that do go wrong. Having said all that, I do think it has been an issue, you know, in the evangelical church. I don't think it's just a coincidence that there seemed to be a spate of more stories than usual. I think that the chickens were coming home to roost to some extent with a certain kind of church culture and celebrity culture

that was increasingly becoming common, especially in megachurch kind of circles, a way, a kind of evangelical industrial complex that was setting things up in ways that were unhealthy. And I think the challenge for the church is, is it going to basically model itself on a kind of growth model, but which produces potentially narcissistic pastors and people who do things that are wrong in that way? Or are we less obsessed with growth and more just with being faithful to Jesus?

I agree, there are thousands of churches for every one megachurch scandal who are doing that. But I have nevertheless seen a trend with the growth of social media and everything else where people want to emulate, you know, certain types of models of church and and ministry that that ultimately have proven sadly on a number of occasions to to not be healthy ways of doing ministry in church because they they result in burned out people you know who are just doing it

for the wrong kind of motives and i yeah i i think we do have to take a long hard look at ourselves and ask whether we're getting it right in that respect um partly it's about disengaging from those types of culture and being willing to to have churches which are in a sense simpler which which don't require us to kind of adopt all the methods of the world to kind of make sure that we're seen and noticed and everything else and whether we can have the humility to just get on and do what we're being called to do faithfully um for jesus without without necessarily having headlines about it the one thing that i think does give me hope in a way is that in an increasingly technological culture where we are so often more lonely than we've ever been before because of screens and the fact that real community doesn't happen anymore. The church can be a counter

example of that. It still is a place where we're supposed to turn up on a regular basis and be together in person. And if the pandemic taught us anything, it's that you just can't beat that when it comes to community. And for me, that alone gives me hope that the church will continue to thrive in some form or another because people need community. And it's actually becoming harder and harder to find that in today's technological world. And I think as we see these sort of refugees from what I've described as the meaning crisis in our technologically saturated world in which you're sort of, everyone's having to compete to create their identity. And it's, you know,

resulting in, in this sort of search for a story that, that is people is out there, but people can't see. I just think that the church still has everything it needs. If it just went back to basics to, to do that, to, to be the place where people discover that story and work out how to live out in community together and my hope is that all of the other stuff that's been going on in the evangelical church and other church traditions that hopefully this is a you know the best way of i can hope of seeing it is that it's kind of like clearing away stuff that needed to be gotten rid of and that god's kind of doing something painful as it is that will clear the way for something new where we can kind of have a fresh start and that

rebirth thing. What was the second thing you were talking about? There is a, and maybe it's a post-internet, post-social media age, I didn't say it like this, but there's just so much information out there, so many ideas, people are thinking much more about things. Oh, and the way that the Christian bookshelves just don't really seem to reflect that kind of depth. Yeah, I know what you mean.

I mean, it's funny, isn't it? Because at one level, we've got more at our fingertips than we could ever have dreamed at one time. If you want to read extraordinarily good Christian theology or apologetics or anything else, it's easier than it ever was. in the general culture, far more shallow versions of Christianity very often. And that is a worry to me. I think you sort of see it on the social media side as well, don't you? We could do anything with the internet, but we end up just scrolling mindlessly through 20-second videos on TikTok.

So it's like, I don't know, it's something about the human condition, I think, that militates in that direction. I think Christians do need to take seriously, and on, that we still reference them today as giants, because they were people who did that. They were Christians who just put the Christian worldview into their work in a way that, unfortunately, today doesn't happen so frequently. And my hope is that perhaps this rebirth itself could signal something like a rebirth of that kind of intellectual tradition as well. I think we've seen parts of it coming back to life. I think the new atheism, in a funny way, actually sparked the church a little.

It gave the church a bit of a shock, and it forced at least certain parts of the church to put down their guitars and tambourines and pick up their theology books and philosophy books again, because they had something they had to respond to. So I've been gladdened by the rise of a lot of quite good Christian apologetics and so on in response to the new atheism. But I still think there's a long way to go. And the bit where there's a long way to go and the and this the bit where there's a long way to go i think is is in the popular culture creating real depth in uh in other areas of art and music and culture and film and everything um where but we can't rely on michelangelo and the sistine chapel forever we need to have our regeneration of that christian worldview in our day. And I feel like something has to change in the culture and maybe that's what we're seeing. If we see some of those big heavyweight intellectuals or whoever coming through and suddenly seeing that this Christian story makes sense of all

those stories, maybe it'll be some amazing rebirth, not just of belief in God, but of culture itself. Wouldn't that be amazing? That would be absolutely amazing and exciting. Well, Justin, thank you so much for the invigorating conversation. The book, again, is The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God, Why New Atheism Grew Old, and Secular Thinkers Are Considering Christianity Again. I would highly, highly encourage people to not just buy and read the book, but please do pre-order it. It's available on pre-order. Something readers don't understand is that it's actually more effective to pre-order a book than to order it after, like to pre-order sales. Somebody explained it to me once. It does something with algorithms.

Amazon buys more books. So if you're planning on reading it, pre-order it now, you'll get it when it comes out. Um, where can people find you, Justin? I know you're, you're doing a lot of kind of independent work these days and, uh, yeah, well, the, the, the, the best way to keep up with what I'm doing is, is maybe to sign up to my newsletter at my website, justinbriley.com. Um, so I've, I've got some new, uh, podcasts that I'm working on these days. Um, uh, there's one called the re-enchantingEnchanting Podcast, which is actually very similar to what we've been talking about, talking to both Christian and non-Christian thinkers and intellectuals about how we can re-enchant the secular culture with the Christian worldview. So that's exciting to be on that.

I'm obviously doing a lot around this book, and you can find out more about that there as well. I'm obviously doing a lot around this book, and you can find out more about that there as well. And I'm currently working on a podcast documentary series based on the book as well. So I'm hoping to launch that in September. It'll also be called The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God. So think if you enjoyed sort of the style of, say, the Rise and Fall of Mars Hill podcast, it's doing that, but for this kind of material. So yeah, but the easiest way to pre-order the book and find out more is just to go to my website. That's justinbriley.com. Okay. Awesome, Justin. Thank you so much for

being on the podcast. Really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you, Preston. this show is part of the converge podcast network