Truth Unites - Christian Apologetics Is Changing

Episode Date: September 1, 2026

Gavin Ortlund explores five major trends reshaping Christian apologetics today and considers how Christians can respond faithfully and effectively in a rapidly changing cultural landscape.Truth Unites (https://truthunites.org) exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites, Visiting Professor of Historical Theology at Phoenix Seminary, and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville.SUPPORT:Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunitesFOLLOW:Website: https://truthunites.org/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/truth.unites/X: https://x.com/gavinortlundFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/

It's a fascinating time to be a Christian apologist, and it feels like some days the ground is shifting underneath our feet. For example, less than two years ago, I was doing a dialogue with Joe Schmidt on the ontological argument for God's existence. I remember thinking, what a cool experience this was at the time to do such a challenging topic with someone I really respect as a philosopher. And I'm always excited to lean into general Christian apologetics. That's why I got into YouTube in the first place. And then just recently, Joe announced his conversion from agnosticism to Roman Catholicism, and he's putting out, you know, 10-hour videos on Catholic miracles and things like this. And it's just a fascinating shift in the kinds of questions that are occupying the apologetics world. Here I am trying to get

into general apologetics. And then all of a sudden it's kind of a whiplash kind of feeling. There's other things that are happening right now as well. Some of them are more discouraging. You just see social media and AI affecting how we process information. And I think you see the result in how apologetics works. Just look at debates today. Oftentimes they feel more wired for entertainment than actually discerning truth. 20 years ago, it felt like debates were a little calmer and more robust. Let's just step back a bit and look at the landscape that is reshaping Christian apologetics right now, and I want to mention five trends and what they mean for us to try to defend the truth of Christianity well, those of us who are doing apologetics. I'll give them each in an image here. First, a post-secular jungle.

Now, what I'm thinking of here is Christianity's long decline, especially in the West and in places like the United States, seems to have slowed down and leveled off. In the United States, for example, since around 2020, adults remain Christians by profession in the U.S. by about 60 to 64 percent. The religiously unaffiliated are hovering right around 30 percent. That seems to have stabilized somewhat. Meanwhile, nearly three quarters of Americans describe themselves. as at least somewhat spiritual, 43% they've become more spiritual over their lives. It seems as though the confident secularization narrative has weakened.

And new atheism is no longer this ascendant, dominant challenger. However, the world is not necessarily becoming Christian, specifically. On my vacation, I've mentioned this in other videos, even though this book's a little dated. It's really fascinating. I read Tara Burton's Strange Writes. And what this book shows is that people are not necessarily abandoning religion in any large numbers right now, but they are redirecting religious impulses into new forms.

Wellness, fandom, political identity, social justice, sexuality, technology, self-creation. There's also a fair amount of sorcery and Satanism and things like this going on. So you say, what in the world does this mean for Christian apologetics? It seems as though the need of the hours to not just focus on secular alternatives and objections. I don't want to take away from that. That's still important. It's not like that's gone away. When I say post-secular, I don't mean that there isn't secularism anymore so much as it's no longer this ascendant, kind of dominant threat. We also need Christian apologetics that engages with Islam, new thought, Eastern and New Age spirituality, the growing world of

neo-pagan and occult practice, and just so many other things you never know on any given day what you're going to come across, right? One simple strategy, oh, I forgot to get it off my shelf. It's right over here. It's the purple book at the end. Those are all my books over my left shoulder. But I just wrote this book, Why Christianity Makes Sense. And one of the things I'm trying to do in there is give arguments about Jesus, not just arguments about God. Such a simple thing, but I think this can help us right now. It tends to put the conversation right on the nerve center of where we need to go in many conversations. By the way, whenever you're doing evangelism and you're just not sure where to, to go or what's going on, just make a beeline for Jesus and just talk about Jesus. In that book, for example, I have an argument on fulfilled prophecy, which is really fun to develop. All right, here's

a second image, fragmented echo chambers. I don't know if these resonate with anybody else. Tell me in the comments if you think these are off base or if you would change them. Here's what I'm thinking of. The internet and social media continue to shape so much of public discourse. And this just furthers the polarization and the tribalism. So many people live in their own in their own little silo. In 2015, you had more of a sense of a dominant cultural trajectory, from which Christian witness departed. So you think of yourself standing on the beach and the tide is coming in and the waves are coming further and further toward you. That's a little bit what it felt like. You're resisting this cultural pressure coming at you. Now, being a Christian,

apologist or just a Christian evangelist or having any sort of Christian witness feels a little bit more like you're at a crowded convention center passing one booth after another. And every single one is different. It's harder to identify a singular cultural narrative anymore. In many contexts, the objections that will face are more right-coded than left-coded. So less has Christianity done enough for the marginalized and more, is Christianity sufficiently masculine, just as an example. But of course, that's not universal. And that's kind of the point here is that in any given conversation, you really never know what you're going to get. And so Christian apologists are going to need to build up skills at resisting different kinds of pressures in answering different kinds of

objections. Here's a third image, vibes-based epistemology. What I'm thinking of here is, I think I heard that phrase from Trent Horn first describing Candice Owens and the tendency among her followers to believe conspiracies apart from evidence, which is one of the alarming things we see right now. But it applies to so much in our day, unfortunately. As distrust for institutions has increased, people increasingly form beliefs based not on evidence and arguments, but on vibes and identities and personalities. People ask questions like, what feels courageous? Who seems compromised? Where's the momentum? What group feels most alive in questions like this? And that's always been the case, but you sense that, especially right now. That dynamic combined with the echo chambers

leads to some pretty weird dynamics in the world right now. For example, did you know that flat earthism has enjoyed a bizarre resurgence in recent? years. It has. Pretty interesting. Here's the point that sort of unites all the different comments I'm going to make under this third image. We are in a world where we are glutted with information, but under-resourced for discernment. And the AI revolution threatens to compound this problem. A few weeks ago, I was listening to Colin Hanson to give a really good talk on this book. And one of the questions that so many are wrestling with when they study AI is, to what extent will literacy rates go down as a result of AI?

And it's a little bit alarming to see how many people are more likely to gamble than read a book in any given year. Question is, what does that mean for apologetics? First, we should challenge people to slow down, read books, and think critically. We cannot assume that people are already doing that. Second, we should try to model discourse that is charitable and wholesome, rather than optimized for gotcha clicks. It's never been more important to have a sense of the love of Christ and the stature of Christ. I just preached on Ephesians 4 yesterday, the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. We want our apologetics to feel like Jesus.

To that end, please watch this video by my brother Nate Sala, which helpfully challenges us in our social media behavior. Here's a fourth image, intra-Christian trench warfare. Disagreements between Christian traditions are increasingly becoming. becoming the battlefront of apologetics, at least in many contexts. Again, I don't want to take away from the secular threat that's still there, but that was, you know, traditionally, you think 20 years ago or so, so much of Christian apologetics was for a mere Christianity, a general Christianity. It's harder today to do that without getting drawn into questions of theology and church tradition. Glenn Scrivener had a good video talking about this recently. Check it out.

All these videos linked in the video description. For example, recently Dinesh DeSuzza was critiquing Calvinism on X, and unfortunately, in my view, he doesn't have a good understanding of Calvinism. And if I may say with charity and love, as a Calvinist, many people don't. Many people don't give a sympathetic understanding of it, even before they reject it. I don't really, doesn't bother me too much of people critique Calvinism. It is a little wearisome hearing some of the same common talking points that don't seem to really get at the nerve center in my judgment.

But leaving that aside. What was interesting, as I observed, is this, is why is he even talking about Calvinism at all? Here's someone who became a well-known public voice doing debates in the Christianity versus atheism space 20 years ago. I remember watching Dinesh justa versus Christopher Hitchens in St. Louis in like 2008 or 2009. I was sitting in the second row right beneath Christopher Hitchens looking up right at him. I remember that. And now Dinesh Jusza is spending a lot of public energy critiquing Calvinism. He wasn't talking about that 20 years ago.

And this seems to connect to the post-secular jungle dynamic here, where any kind of coalition of Christians versus secularism seems to be weakened, now that atheism feels less dominant and ascendant, Christians have more bandwidth and more incentive to argue about which Christianity is correct. Another fascinating example that brings up these questions is Joe Schmidt's conversion to Roman Catholicism. the more I think about this, it is just so interesting. It feels like a sign of the times in some respects. Here you have this really great philosopher, and he's not converting just because of philosophy only, but also because of miracles and other appeals. And he's not framing his conversion as to Christianity generally, but to Catholic Catholic apologetics. Now, my point in this video is not really to criticize Joe or his arguments, but just to observe what this reflects of the changing landscape. Maybe in the future I'll try to do more work on the whole miracles thing.

My basic position is Protestants can rejoice and should rejoice that Joe has embraced God and Christ, but we're also allowed to disagree with his conclusions about Roman Catholicism, and we just let those conversations rumble forward. But just not to get into that here, big picture observation is we need to engage these miracle claims more. I've never really focused on these that much. Part of that is just for me personally, and I'm open to changing my mind on this, but they don't really move me that much personally. I tend to think that we expect miracles in all kinds of different contexts. I've grown up with connections to the charismatic movement. I'm even aware that in non-Christian religions, there are some miracle claims that are very hard to write off. I was just reading an article

about a Hindu context as one interesting example. I'll link to that too. Now, I know the claim is that Catholic miracles are uniquely vindictory in various ways, but it seems to me that in many of these miracle claims, the evidence is much stronger for the miracles themselves than for the vindicatory aspects of the miracle. In other words, the evidence for something miraculous happened is often much stronger than something miraculous happened and therefore Roman Catholicism is true. Sometimes those two things get pushed together. but I'm not saying that for every case and I'm not trying to give a comprehensive position here.

I'm just saying that's one thing I've observed. The more important point is just to say this is a huge issue that deserves more treatment, more treatment that I've given it. And in general, it seems harder these days to defend Christianity in general without at least some work being done to explain the particular Christian tradition we inhabit. And my effort and my hope is that Christians, will explore their disagreements and engage on these questions and have vigorous argumentation and argue for their side, but also do recognize where we have common ground and have a spirit

of charity as we have the discussions. That leads to a fifth image that I hope is true. Oh man, I'm going to say it, even though I'm not 100% sure, a stirring spiritual hunger. It almost feels some days as though we're at a tipping point in that things are so crazy and strange in the world, people are genuinely looking for hope. The old questions that religion has traditionally answered are still on the table, like what makes life meaningful? Where do I truly belong? Where can I find transcendence and identity and fulfillment? Of course, the big one, what happens after I die? And so let me end here on a positive note, because actually the challenges we see today are also opportunities. A post-secular jungle? Well, it means people are spiritually open right now.

Fragmentation? Well, it means the old cultural scripts have weakened and people are more open today to listen to alternatives. Vibes-based epistemology? Well, it means that character and beauty and courage and embodied Christian life matter more than ever. Intra-Christian trench warfare, even though I I hope it won't be trench warfare. Nonetheless, intra-Christian disagreement? Well, people are caring more about theology and church history and the sacraments and the shape of the Christian life, and those are good things. So the new apologetics landscape is messier and stranger and more demanding, but there's also

many open doors for the gospel. So in so many respects, it's an exciting time to be alive. There's no other time I'd rather be alive, you know. This is a moment for all hands on deck. Every day matters. Pray for revival. evangelize your friends, invest in your local church, live well as a human being, resist despair, lean forward into life, and above all, tell people about the gospel. There is nothing more

enthralling than coming to learn that the God who created every single one of us loves us so much that he sent Jesus to die on a cross for us so that we could be forgiven and restored to him. And that is the message that people are aching for right now. That's why I wrote why Christianity makes sense, which is trying to do apologetics for the human heart in 2006. It's trying to say, Christianity doesn't just explain the world around you. It explains the deepest longings of your heart. That's the message I want to give my life to, and hopefully all of us can try to advance. All right, what trends did I miss? Let me know in the comments what you think about this and what we should add on. Thanks for watching, everybody. See you in the next video.