Because “Christian apologetics” is not a monolith, it’s important to make some distinctions when answering this question. Are we talking about Ray Comfort, Sye Ten Bruggencate, and Ken Ham? Or are we talking about William Lane Craig, John Lennox, or Ravi Zacharias? Are we talking about young earth and global flood apologetics, or arguments for the resurrection and the reliability of the gospels? Are we talking about general arguments for theism? Are we talking in broad outline about any attempt to “reason one’s way to God” within what some might pejoratively call a “modernist frame?”

In the past year, I have been writing extensively about the Jordan Peterson phenomenon and what the Church can take away from it. As I and friends of mine have observed, Peterson’s rise has been sparking a surprising and heartening renewal of interest in spiritual things generally and Christianity specifically. Pastors all around the world have reported that people, young men in particular, are literally wandering into their churches for the first time at a shockingly accelerated rate. By any standard, this is good news for Christians. But it’s sparked a certain amount of reflection, some of which I summed up in my last post on the topic, “5 Lessons Jordan Peterson Has Taught the Church.” Today, I want to look at one specific sub-question that Peterson’s rise has induced in some of my discussion circles: Has Christian apologetics failed?

To imitate Peterson’s signature style of question-answering, it depends on what you mean by “apologetics.” And it depends on what you mean by “failed.”

Because “Christian apologetics” is not a monolith, it’s important to make some distinctions when answering this question. Are we talking about Ray Comfort, Sye Ten Bruggencate, and Ken Ham? Or are we talking about William Lane Craig, John Lennox, or Ravi Zacharias? Are we talking about young earth and global flood apologetics, or arguments for the resurrection and the reliability of the gospels? Are we talking about general arguments for theism? Are we talking in broad outline about any attempt to “reason one’s way to God” within what some might pejoratively call a “modernist frame?” It’s not my intent to do a deep dive into all the various and sundry “apologetics cottage industries” here. My point is simply that context matters, and the answer to our main question will vary depending on which context we choose.

Before we decide if apologetics of any stripe has failed, we need to establish what it means to “succeed.” In light of the Jordan Peterson phenomenon, people seem to be defining “success” as “inducing an openness to Christianity among atheists.” This is a familiar metric, especially for evangelicals. It gives us an understandable adrenaline rush to see people knocking on the Church’s door rather than vice versa. We want to look out and see our pews full of visitors. We want to hold campus events and “pull them in.” We want long lines of people waiting to ask questions.

It is very tempting to deem pulling in people from the out-group the gold standard by which a thing’s “success” is measured. For years, people have tended to view apologetics as primarily Christians trying to keep each other within the in-group—hence, by this metric, a failure. But setting aside for the moment whether this is actually an accurate description of the apologetics movement, I don’t buy this metric. Because I actually happen to think Christianity is true and rational, I regard maintaining stasis within the Church as a worthy goal in and of itself.

This metric is statistically sloppy as well. Counting the noses of former Sam Harris fanboys who have made a full conversion to evangelical Christianity won’t take into account the many people who would have left the church if it weren’t for apologetics. The reality on the ground is far more complicated than “Christians sitting around agreeing with each other.” Plenty of people inside the church, especially young people, have been on the bubble between faith and no faith as they work through concrete doubts. I have seen it multiple times even just in the small sample size of churches in my small hometown. The myth persists that all Christian kids are perfectly fine until college, whereupon the atheist professor from God’s Not Dead shatters their faith and they come home an atheist. But in my experience, signs of trouble tend to manifest much sooner. It’s just that they are often not properly attended to until it’s too late. More on this anon.

Turning now to the question of how many people apologetics has pulled in from the out-group, it would also be hasty to say apologetics has been a failure here. It’s true that, culturally speaking, we haven’t seen a dramatic Great Awakening of people flooding into churches because they watched William Lane Craig spank Christopher Hitchens on YouTube and saw the light. It’s true that apologetics has never catalyzed a clearly definable “hot spot” of renewed interest in church and Christianity on the scale of what we are currently observing with the Jordan Peterson phenomenon.

But just as it would be a grave statistical error to say that “pro-life Christians don’t care about babies after they’re born” just because the many pro-life Christians who do aren’t constantly tweeting about it, it would be a grave statistical error to say that “apologetics never converted anybody” just because contravening data isn’t making it into large social surveys. This is particularly true when we factor in the quiet, unsung work of “one-dollar apologists,” not just the big names everyone recognizes. I know for a fact that these conversations are constantly taking place on Skype, on email, in private message, and in private offices, and that they are bearing fruit. Often, they are bearing fruit with people who grew up in the church, left, and are only now getting the answers they never got before to their questions. Some of them are pastors’ kids.

This is not the stuff of which eye-catching op-eds and splashy pieces of investigative journalism are made. It is, to a great extent, an underground phenomenon. But it is no less real for being less visible. For that reason, it is imperative that people pause before making sweeping, unqualified statements like “Apologetics has failed,” or “Apologetics doesn’t work.”

Better: “Apologetics doesn’t work, according to my limited anecdotal experience, although of course I and/or my interlocutors could be wrong.”

Or, “Apologetics doesn’t work, because I personally am not sure how to answer certain objections, although it is entirely possible that my judgment is poor and my investigation has been sloppy.”

Or, “Apologetics doesn’t work, from within my particular frame for faith, although admittedly I do not prioritize evidential questions and thus haven’t thought about any of this very much.”

Or, “Apologetics doesn’t work, because something-something narrowly propositional Enlightenment rationalism, although admittedly I just got that from a book, whose author got it from another book, whose author got it from Alister McGrath, so maybe history of ideas by meme isn’t the best way to do history of ideas.”

Sorry, I let my snark get the best of me on that last one, but you get the idea. Such qualifying statements, open to correction and open to learning more, would help enormously in the furthering of fruitful in-house dialogue about these questions.

All of that being said, there are still people, some of whom walked away from the Church and are now fans of Jordan Peterson, who will say “William Lane Craig didn’t do it for me.” Craig is not necessarily my personal favorite Christian apologist (don’t @ me), nevertheless he is the name I tend to see most cited as the “poster boy” for Christian apologetics writ large, most likely because he has debated so many New Atheists. And he is a formidable debater, no question. But not everyone has walked away convinced. Why not?

First, let’s be honest: It’s ridiculously easy to generate a long list of objections to Christianity. The phrase “ridiculously easy” is carefully chosen. It takes ignorance ten seconds to ask a question that requires careful scholarship ten pages to answer carefully. Some will automatically take such thoroughness as a sign that the lady doth protest too much. Of course, a brief response will be waved away as embarrassingly insufficient. For some skeptics, this truly is a “heads I win, tails you lose” affair.

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