"The surprising rebirth of belief in God is underway, and we may yet live to see the rebirth of our culture in the process."
So says Justin Brierley in his new book: The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God: Why New Atheism Grew Old and Secular Thinkers Are Considering Christianity Again.
Brierley is the host of the Unbelievable? podcast, where he moderates a debate/conversation between two guests. The podcast has featured leading thinkers from many fields and a variety of religious convictions. Brierly has been talking to public intellectuals about God for over a decade. What has he learned?
Surprisingly: God is back in fashion.
Changing the Conversation
Christianity was condemned as a terrible relic of the stone age during the heyday of Richard Dawkins. I was in high school during that time, and to claim I was a Christian was like claiming I actually believed in Santa.
Serious people knew Jesus wasn’t born of a virgin or rose from the dead.
Today, the conversation is very different. Public thinkers like Jordan Peterson, Douglas Murray, and Jonathan Haidt, though they are not confessing Christians, are pushing people back to the goodness and wisdom of the Biblical story. Now, Brierley says "Thinking people are being given permission to take the idea of God seriously again." Jordan Peterson can sell out theatres for two-hour lectures on Genesis 1-3. More and more people, who are serious intellectuals are finding in the Christian story deep roots of wisdom and relevance. Horrified by what they see as the fruit of a society sawing itself off from its Christian heritage, they say, "Hold on, let’s go back and look at this text because there is a lot of good here."
The person Brierley spends the most time on in the book is Jordan Peterson, and for good reason. Peterson has a reach that most of the others Brierly interacts with, do not. He has become a father figure in many positive ways for lots of young men. Especially Christians. I've read both of Peterson's popular books and found a lot of help in them. He is honest, and thoughtful, and has a finger on the pulse of our hunger for story and purpose. But, as Brierley points out, Peterson is notoriously hard to pin down on whether he believes Jesus actually rose from the dead. Peterson believes the Biblical story is psychologically and metaphorically true. Historically true? He won't say.
One strength of the book is how Brierley pushes readers further than someone like Peterson. Even someone like Peterson, he says, "cannot save the West from its meaning and identity crisis."
Why so? Because all these thinkers are pointing people back toward a story that is only useful if it is true. Yes, it may be 'metaphorically powerful.' But the power of a metaphor is contained in the fact that it ultimately points towards something that exists in reality. We cannot live on metaphors alone. We cannot use poetry, psychology, and myth to hold God at arm's length forever. What if this two-thousand-year-old story is only able to reconnect with our deepest desires for meaning, purpose, and identity because it is the true story to which all other stories point?
As the Apostle Paul said, "If Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation is in vain, and so is your faith" (1 Cor 15:14).
The change in the conversation from Christianity as evil, to Christianity as metaphorically true and wise, is not a conversion to Biblical faith. But it is a sign that "this generation is becoming primed to hear this story afresh."
Be The Church
What can churches learn from the rebirth of belief in God? Just be the church and preach the gospel.
The form of Christianity people are being drawn to isn't the seeker-sensitive type. It is the churches whose worship has roots in the ancient Christian tradition. The weirdness and sense of transcendence in the more liturgical kinds of services are attractive.
Brierley quotes a young man named Harry Howard who told him why he chose St. Bartholomew the Great rather than" a guitars-and-drums church." Harry said, "You get that outside in popular culture already, and the church tends to do a second-rate version anyway. But when I go to a service that has roots in something really ancient, it's like a refuge from the popular culture which is now so devoid of any real meaning. I think that's why church is so popular."
The discontinuity between the church and the world appeals to Harry.
Speaking for myself, I spent almost ten years in youth ministry and our team planned at least one very liturgical youth night a year, normally Good Friday. One year we structured our gathering around a shared meal where we read all of John 18-20, sang together, had prayers of confession and adoration, and closed with a reflection on the Last Supper. This was with a group of 12–18-year-old students. Not once did any student push back, nor did any of our regular students skip that week. Most of them told me how much they appreciated and enjoyed that kind of night because it felt like they connected with the disciples in the upper room with Jesus.
We are part of a grand story and the more liturgical forms of worship are connecting people to that story. To their place in the story and the author, the God of the story.
The church doesn't need to reinvent itself to reach people today. The church needs to be the church. Embracing the "weirdness" and ancient roots. I don't believe we need to get rid of the drums and guitars, but need churches whose worship gatherings are soaked in public Bible reading, prayer (and prayers of different kinds like confession, lament, adoration, and thanksgiving), singing old hymns and new spiritual songs, and Biblical preaching that points people to Jesus. The world needs the church to be the church.
"Embrace mystery, expect the supernatural, and keep Christianity weird."
The Story
Why does Brierley believe the tide of Christianity is coming back? It comes down to dissatisfaction with the story that replaced the Christian gospel. "The foundational problem is that we no longer possess the common story that Christianity once gave people to identify themselves as part of. Instead, we have all become free-floating entities in an indifferent universe, forced to make up our own story as we go along."
Humans are worshiping beings and creatures of story. It's through story that we make sense of our world and through worship that we discover meaning and purpose. The story of Jesus was the defining story of Western civilization for a long time. It gave us the values of equality, compassion, enlightenment, and others. The hollowness of other stories, the ones replacing the Jesus story, is now being felt. Brierley writes, "I believe that the reason we are beginning to see a rebirth of belief in God is because the story of Jesus still makes the best sense of our own stories." Other stories have been tried, and found wanting.
Brierley ends on a hopeful note and a call to action. "Two thousand years ago a wandering rabbi stood on a beach and called a bunch of fishermen to put down their nets, follow him, and fish for people instead. Together they changed the world. Like them, I believe we are standing on the shores of human history, waiting for a tide that is about to rush back in. Perhaps now is the time to answer his call again."
The surprising rebirth of belief in God is not a call to hunker down and wait for the tide to come back. It’s a call to take hope-filled confident action and live as Christians today.