Podcast Review: “The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God”
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Editor’s Note: This is a review of Justin Brierley’s remarkable new podcast series.
My congregation lives within an 80 x 60 x 50 kilometre triangle, an area larger than the Principality of Liechtenstein. So I drive a lot. I don’t enjoy a view of the Swiss Alps, but I do get to listen to podcasts.
Right now, what makes me actually look forward to driving is the chance to listen to more of Justin Brierley’s wonderful series: The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God: Why New Atheism Grew Old and Secular Thinkers Are Considering Christianity. The podcast complements his 2023 book of the same name, published by Tyndale House.
One word to describe Surprising Rebirth? Refreshing. Brierley is smart, informed, nuanced, and confident in the truth. He has a beautiful turn of phrase and oozes positivity. Listening to him I get the same kind of feeling as when I read C.S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy, or J.I. Packer’s Knowing God.
The thesis of the series is in the title.
In the mid-2000s the so-called “Four Horsemen” of the New Atheist movement—Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and their (somewhat) fearless leader Richard Dawkins—scooped up millions of sales with books like The End of Faith (2005), The God Delusion (2006), God is Not Great (2007), and other vaunted takedowns of mainstream religion.
As sarcastic as Voltaire, as certain as Senator McCarthy, as pompous as Sir Humphrey Appleby, and as populistic as Abba, they made a lot of God-suppressors feel more snug in their idolatry.
Dawkins even fronted a bus campaign: “There is Probably No God. Now Stop Worrying and Enjoy Your Life.” Despite the lame hedging of the word “Probably,” it went down well in the burbs of Oxford. Not sure what famine-wracked Somalians would have made of it. Or incarcerated Uighurs.
But the devil has been cursed to only ever kick own goals.
The Four Horsemen’s arguments earned C-minuses all round from real philosophers—theists and atheists alike. Their arguments had all been raised and answered countless times across the past two millennia. Moreover, they failed to offer even a postage stamp of terra firma on which to build a life of meaning and purpose, but instead revelled in a universe that has, “at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” Yet they failed, as Nietzsche and Camus did not fail, to follow through with their nihilist suppositions, persisting that basic human ethics—strangely reminiscent of the ethics of the Second Table—could still be derived from their god-free milieu.
People learned inductively that atheism was rather like an egg left too long in the sun—smooth on the outside, an agglomeration of stinky gas and nothingness within. Moreover, the Horsemen whipped up millions to begin talking again about the target of their attacks—God. Oscar Wilde said it: “There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”
Twenty years later it turns out that the New Atheists, rather like Pharaoh’s foremen but without their reasonableness, cause millions to lift up their heads to the possibility of something better—that there might in fact be real substance to the claims of Christian theism.
Justin Brierley tells the story in sixty-to-ninety-minute podcasts, thirty of which have appeared so far. I will engage with a few of the more remarkable of these and make some observations about the oeuvre as a whole.
In “The Rise and Fall of New Atheism” (Ep. 1), Brierley storms the beach with a bracing retelling of the rise of Dawkins et al. They flowed with Matthew Arnold’s “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the Sea of Faith. They had the wind in their sails. Yet how brittle it was. “Elevatorgate: How the Culture Wars Killed New Atheism” (Ep. 2) shows how the movement ripped itself apart over sexism, LGBT and trans rights, and other highly charged public debates. Yes, their impact lingered, but not in the way they hoped.
In “Thank God for Richard Dawkins” (Ep. 3), Brierley interviews a number of public intellectuals who turned to theism, and even to Christian faith, after the undergraduate naïveté of the Horsemen’s books opened their eyes to the better arguments of Christianity. An interview with prominent YouTube atheist Alex O’Connor (Ep. 4) is a case study of this.
“The Jordan Peterson Phenomenon” (Ep. 5) is one of the most exciting episodes, tracing the rise to popularity in 2018 of a gifted but unknown psychology professor at the University of Toronto. Peterson was the doctor’s hammer that tapped all kinds of reflexive tendons. First when he stood against state laws forcing people to use preferred pronouns as an attack on free speech, which Peterson argues is an attack on thought itself. Second for his 2018 Twelve Rules for Life, which has sold over ten million copies and urges people to take responsibility for their lives—young men in particular.
Then Peterson began to lecture on the Bible. Gifted pastor-preachers with half-empty churches were treated to the sight of thousands of predominantly young men paying up to a hundred dollars to pack out large lecture theatres to hear Peterson’s passionate, rambling, and often emotional reflections on Genesis. Reading the text through the prism of Jungian archetypes and symbols, he fails to understand it. Yet millions of people were now hearing from the weeping prophet of Canada all about God and the Bible and a God-given purpose and destiny for life.
In Episode 6, “The Meaning Crisis: Why we’re all religious deep down,” Brierley builds on the idea of the innate sense of meaning and purpose that Peterson was tapping into. He works backwards from the funeral for Elizabeth II, when “a latent spirituality surfaced.” Having been reared on a diet of “you can be whatever we want to be”—what Charles Taylor called “expressive individualism”—and having rejected theocentrism for anthropocentrism, young occidentals were unmoored. And terribly unhappy.
The great bonus of listening to Brierley is that you will discover, through his adroit choice of interlocutors, all manner of wonderful Christian communicators. In Episode 6 you will meet Graham Tomlin, a C of E bishop and author of the superbly titled Why Being Yourself is a Bad Idea (2020). Our anthropocentrism has meant that we are looking in the wrong place for meaning. Social media’s smashing of community has exacerbated this. Refusing to enter “the story of our society,” we have failed in our attempt to invent our own. Sociologist Max Weber described the “disenchantment” of the industrial West. But nature abhors a vacuum and we’ve learnt to worship other entities: ourselves primarily. This is not working well for anyone.
Interviews with Australian historian Sarah Irving-Stonebraker, who converted to Christianity from atheism, and social-psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who has catalogued the catastrophic increase in levels of anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide since 2010—when a new generation was being shaped by smartphones and social media—trace the modern mental health crisis to an existential crisis, which itself derives from an identity crisis which is, at its heart, a spiritual crisis. Brierley sums it all up: “If we are made to live in a story that is bigger than us, then I don’t think we can simply play-act a part in something we know is ultimately just a fiction.”
At the moment New Atheism imploded, new voices began to be heard.
“The New Thinkers: A new conversation on God” (Ep. 7) introduces four highly prominent and well-regarded public intellectuals who are all making positive noises about Christianity: Douglas Murray, Tom Holland, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Louise Perry. Of the four, the human rights campaigner Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the only one who has come to belief in Christian theism (Ep. 8). She is a friend of Richard Dawkins, who has publicly expressed his disappointment in Ali’s conversion; though even Dawkins has recently called himself “a cultural Christian.” We should ask: “From whence that culture, Prof. Dawkins?” Ex nihilo nihil fit.
In “Paul Kingsnorth & Martin Shaw: A poet and mythologist convert” (Ep. 9), Brierley introduces two recent converts. Shaw is an academic and mythologist who read the Gospels and “found Christ disturbing.” He takes the same kind of line as C.S. Lewis, who was also deeply conversant in pagan mythology, that the echoes of truth heard in the stories of the gods came to be fully realized in the history of Jesus. Shaw finds that the church does best when it is “outnumbered and outgunned,” and that after generations of hostility and marginalization it is beginning to find its feet again in a time of unexpected opportunity.
“History Maker: Why Tom Holland changed his mind about Christ” (Ep. 10) focuses on the extraordinarily popular classicist and historian Tom Holland, author of Rubicon (2003) and Dominion (2019). Holland has done for history what Jamie Oliver did for cooking. I find his books a little sensationalist, but he has done a remarkable service in showing that so many of the ethical principles that we hold dear, and especially that of caring for the weak and downtrodden, can only be traced to the Bible and Christian history. Holland contends that the West is saturated in the Christian worldview and ethics, even if we have distorted our inheritance in strange ways. Even our atheists are Christian atheists: it is the God of the Bible that they suppress. (Brierley follows up on Holland in Episode 17, “Live In London: Tom Holland & Justin Brierley in conversation.”)
“The Sexual Revolution: Why Louise Perry changed her mind” (Ep. 11) is one of the highlights of the series. Perry is a journalist, anti-pornography campaigner, and author of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution (2022). She is a fiercely articulate thinker who had bought into the mores of the sexual revolution until she began working at a rape crisis centre. She is today a non-believer “emotionally and intellectually drawn to Christianity,” who argues that the message that “God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong” brought about hitherto unheard of emancipation, dignity, and protection to women and children: “To point out the vulnerability of women, children, the poor, the enslaved, and the disabled is to argue in favour of their protection, not their persecution.”
Perry draws on the work of classicist Kyle Harper, who describes a “first sexual revolution” in the fourth to seventh centuries with the irruption of a Christian sexual ethic that steadily de-sanctioned the rights of powerful Roman men to sexually penetrate all and sunder in their households: whether male or female, slaves or children. The evil of rape, which hitherto was only prosecuted against the violation of high-status male-protected women, now included the violation of any person. The first sexual revolution tamed men and was good for maintaining strong families and care for women and children. For it is women who get pregnant and who bear the greatest burden of childcare. They cannot, like men, simply walk away from their progeny to build new lives, careers, and romances in other places.
Fascinatingly, both Harper and Perry analyse our society’s antipathy toward Christian sexual mores as antipathy toward Christianity tout court. Harper writes, “In our secular age, just as in the early years of Christianity, differences in sexual morality are really about the clash between different pictures of the universe and the place of the individual within it,”[1] and Perry, “When pro-life and pro-choice advocates fight about the nitty-gritty of abortion policy, what they are really fighting about is whether our society ought to remain Christian.”[2]
This begins to answer a nagging question: Why do so many secular organizations, who have no inherent interest in homosexual practice, fly the rainbow flag? Is it not because LGBT rights have become the cause célèbre of secularism? That the rainbow flag has become the battle standard of godlessness?
The fact that Jordan Peterson, Tom Holland, Louise Perry, and Douglas Murray do not claim to be Christian believers has arguably given them a greater hearing and influence in contemporary intellectual discourse than they might otherwise have had. I will be fascinated to see where they and our culture land in the coming decade or two.
“The Christian Revolution: Why the cross changed the world” (Ep. 12) goes over very familiar ground for Christians. We have long understood that crucifixion was intended to inflict maximum protracted agony and public humiliation and degradation upon the victim. It was designed to terrorize the subjects of the Roman Empire into meek submission. The pax Romana was established, paradoxically, in large measure upon such placards of intemperate violence. Brierley does a very good job of showing how the Gospel of the Crucified Saviour fundamentally inverted human values. Human success must not be measured by the triumphs of the highborn and powerful over the lowborn and weak, the intellectual over the simple, the beautiful over the plain, the popular over the despised. The Cross teaches us to value the humiliation and subjugation of self for the benefit of the other, to prize the amelioration of the weak rather than their exploitation.
That is why Christians, when they are repentant and trusting and in tune with their Master, have given their time, talents, education, privileges, and wealth to the service of the most vulnerable—widows and orphans, the unborn and abandoned, the sick and enslaved—rather than to self-service.
“Did The Resurrection Really Happen? A classicist discovers the living Christ” (Ep. 16) presents a fresh recapitulation of the arguments for why the resurrection of Jesus is an historical event that truly has been proven beyond reasonable doubt. It focuses on the remarkable conversion story of twenty-first century Oxford scholar James Orr. But Brierley’s interview with John Dickson is one of the highlights of this episode; there are in fact numerous synergies between Brierley’s Surprising Rebirth and Dickson’s own really excellent Undeceptions podcast. It is no surprise that these two public Christian intellectuals have found each other.
In episodes 18 to 20 Brierley moves away from the historical evidence for the truth of Christianity to engage with natural theology, to how the natural sciences support belief in the God of the Bible. The desperately lazy idea that science and faith are opposed, or are at best mutually exclusive, is quickly swept away. Biblical faith—notwithstanding Kierkegaard’s false re-casting of the idea—is never described as believing in the illogical, unproven, or otherwise unbelievable (which is credulity), but as entrusting ourselves to God on the grounds of Spirit-awakened convictions in statements of truth.
Scientia is knowledge. Christians and scientists face in the same direction, wanting to know the truth about things. It is entirely natural that the modern scientific enterprise of discovering truth by rigorous observation and experimentation, the results of which are critically tested and systematized into general principles, arose (most notably) in the seventeenth century among European Christians who hungered for the truth and who believed that a God-created universe was of such a complexity, design, and rational order that truth could be discovered.
“A Goldilocks Universe: The surprising science pointing to God” (Ep. 19) is a very enjoyable exploration of the concept of fine tuning. It is a myth to suppose that scientists are drawing ever closer to fundamental explanations of things, as though the world is like a complicated watch that may be pulled apart into simple components that can be simply explained—end of story. On the contrary, every newly discovered component proves to be in itself a bewilderingly complex entity that must itself be disassembled into its constituent components, and so on, “world without end.” Thus, whereas nineteenth-century biologists saw single cells as quite simple inchoate blobs, molecular biology shows us that every single cell is like a city, teaming with complex machines and processes. Each part of the machine is itself a Tardis of extraordinary order and complexity, within which are untold other Tardis-like components. Furthermore, the matter of the universe exists within scores of physical constructs and forces that must function within extraordinarily miniscule tolerances. Adjust even one of these constructs by an infinitesimal degree and the cosmos as we know it ceases to exist. It looks a little bit like the universe might have been designed.
“The Logos Behind Life: The dissident scientists discovering a mind beyond matter” (Ep. 20) shows that scientists are discovering more and more that living cells exist and replicate according to vast banks of inbuilt information. Information, of course, can derive only from a mind. And although scientists have been able to describe in part how life replicates, they have not even begun to explain how life itself got going in the first place (or indeed why anything exists.) Every new discovery only adds to the complexity and only makes it more difficult to find such explanations. The trajectory of science is toward a mind, a Great Intelligence, lying behind the universe and its elements.
Brierley’s podcast is a brilliant exposé of evidence. But there is never a suggestion that conversion is merely an intellectual affair. His accounts of “surprising conversions” invariably describe people coming to faith within the context of community. Human beings are not just brains on legs. Our thinking develops, for better or for worse, within a communal environment. Many new converts describe how they learned about Christianity within the context of seeing others live out what they were learning, and of experiencing the love of the Christian community. We preach and teach the truth within community: and the richer and more loving that community is the better.
The series reminds us of the importance of other subjective factors too. No amount of evidence will budge an idolater, whose heart is “dead in sin and transgression.” A supernatural intervention is necessary. It is true that the Spirit enlivens the hearts of the spiritually dead by the true and powerful Gospel, by “demolishing strongholds” of lies, by persuading people of the truth with as much reason as we can master, and by loving Christian fellowship. But we must never forget that it is the Spirit who enlivens. A well-equipped smithy with hammer and tongs and bellows is a good thing. But not a single horseshoe will be made without the Blacksmith himself.
Surprising Rebirth is beautifully produced. Each episode is a journey: an important question about the truth of Christianity is posed, then various expert witnesses are heard both for and against. Brierley holds to the “steel man” principle of hearing only the best forms of opposing arguments put by its brightest and best proponents. Then conclusions are drawn, gentle but strong, and always with the sense that “this matter deserves serious consideration.” The production quality echoes the quality of the content: everything is beautifully clear and the whole is adorned with original music inspired by the Baroque, Southern Blues, and, I jest not, the Spaghetti Western.
Justin Brierley has produced a remarkable work and recently finished his first season of thirty episodes. I have been freely and confidently sharing episodes with both Christian and non-Christian friends, knowing that the material is of the highest intellectual and aesthetic quality.
What should we make, finally, of Brierley’s idée fixe, that there seems to be a change in the air, that there is a new wave of serious interest in Christian belief among public intellectuals and opinion-shapers?
We must always take the long view. Movements come and go. The New Atheism has waned, and so will any surprising rebirth of interest. I have been encouraged and even energized by Brierley’s work. He has equipped us with fresh evidence of the Christian faith, with a vigorous recasting of old evidence, and a renewed confidence in the intellectual and logical rigor of Christianity. He has given us a fund of podcasts to share with others on their journey. But we must always remember that Jesus has conquered sin and the curse at its root—“It is finished!”—and that he made a promise: “I will build my church.” Truth is like the great granite monoliths standing sentinel in Greens Pool and other southern beaches of West Australia. Winds, waves, and tides may obscure these mighty monuments for a moment, but they are solid and immoveable and must reappear to sight before too long.
If waves of opposition and enthusiasm come and go, the truth of Christ’s death and resurrection remains untouched. Our greatest need, and our greatest gift to others, is every day to plant our feet upon that Rock, and there to stand.
This article is adapted from “The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God,” which was originally published at AP, the National Journal of the Presbyterian Church of Australia (PCA).
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Notes:
[1] Kyle Harper, “The First Sexual Revolution,” First Things, January 2018; https://www.firstthings.com/article/2018/01/the-first-sexual-revolution.
[2] Louise Perry, “We Are Repaganizing,” First Things, October 2023; https://www.firstthings.com/article/2023/10/we-are-repaganizing.
