Some back ground: I have been trying to volunteer with a small creationist organization to lead tours for homeschool students through a local science museum. It has been over a year now because of COVID-19 and the leader of the organization is apparently bored and trying to think of things to do to "prepare" us for this. As if I needed anymore preparation. I was supposed to watch this unlisted youtube video on apologetics. I guess they don't want anyone seeing our training, even though this is no different than virtually every other "training" on apologetics I've ever seen in my life. Anyway, we were supposed to write a four page reflection on the video and it was due over a week ago. I hate writing papers, and I'm so frustrated with this whole process at this point that I really don't care if the whole tour guide thing works out or not, so I let one rip. I figured it belongs here. The C.S. Lewis quote I added at the end after I already submitted it, unfortunately.
I grew up in an evangelical church, family and basically everything, including a private Christian school from sixth grade on. I have grown rather tired of the evangelical world’s intense focus on, well, evangelism and apologetics. The true story I like to tell to explain why is about the chapel service we had every Friday in school. Every year I went there, once a year, our school would bring in the Gideons to do a service and, you guessed it, hand out free pocket New Testaments plus Psalms and Proverbs to everyone there. This was a Christian school and Bible class was a required class every single year, a class for which the required textbook was the Bible which we were required to bring to school every single day. Every student in attendance at these pointless giveaways already had a Bible, the entire Bible not just the New Testament. If they didn’t they’d be in violation of their class requirements. I remember I had a collection of these pocket Bibles, around twenty of them in several different colors and styles. I never read from a single one because I had my NIV study Bible or my Life Application Bible or my Chronological Daily Bible for reading. Obviously, we did not need an extra pocket Bible, and the Gideons were wasting their time with us. I listened to them and wondered just what exactly they thought they were accomplishing by doing this, and I felt sorry for them.
Another true story I always remember was this apologetics video I remember watching, probably in Bible class. I don’t remember much about what the guy argued, or even his name, but I remember him using a rope with a hangman’s noose as a prop. Every time he would make an argument he would smile at the camera, push the rope through his hand like he was doling it out to someone and say, “Sell them a little rope.” The illustration was supposed to be based off the saying, “Sell them the rope with which to hang themselves.” I learned many years later this was a quote from Vladimir Lenin about capitalism. But back then I didn’t know that, and I’m not now commenting on the appropriateness of that phrase. What I did know back then was I simply didn’t know any atheists. Everyone I knew were Christians. I grew up in a Christian family, went to a Christian church and a Christian school. I listened to Christian music and read Christian books. I even went to a Christian dentist who had Christian posters on the ceiling above the dentist’s chair. My dad had a literal phonebook of Christian businesses. I remember thinking that I knew a whole lot about how to sell an atheist a little rope, but I didn’t know any atheists at all. Not only that, my whole world was structured to the point that I almost couldn’t meet any atheists if I tried. If the primary goal of the Christian life is to evangelize atheists, that’s a strange way of going about it. Then I went to college.
I met a few atheists in college. One in particular that I tried to befriend loved to smoke pot and play video games. He told me everything he needed to learn he learned in public school, and I understood that he did not mean academics but rather how to survive socially in a community of people. Not once did I ever discuss “apologetics” with him. He wasn’t interested. He didn’t care that I was a Christian. We got along just fine, but the friendship fizzled out eventually because the entire time I couldn’t think of anything except that he was an atheist and I was supposed to be witnessing to him and it wasn’t working. I had a few professors who were openly hostile to Christianity, but almost all of them simply didn’t care. Nobody cared about ideas, even at college. Virtually everyone was there to get a degree for the sole purpose of earning more money in their careers, and the professors knew it. In my intro to biochem course filled with ambitious, and notorious, Type-A pre-med students the prof told them they could make $60k right out of school with a biochem degree. Not once did any biochem or biology professor argue or even present evolutionary theory to us. I have a few stories, but they were all initiated by myself, not by any of them. One time I wrote an article for the student paper that is still to this day online. There’s a story behind that that I won’t tell here, but the day it came out in the paper my PChem professor slapped the student paper down on his desk and after the lecture spent five minutes talking about some point mutation that changed the substrate for an enzyme’s active site. It was the only time I ever heard a professor try to sell his class on evolution, and it probably wasn’t even clear to most of the class that’s what he was trying to do. There was no opportunity to debate. They weren’t buying any rope. Why should they? They had all the power. All they had to do was ignore people like me and nothing would ever change. So that’s what they did and are still doing.
The evangelical world I grew up in told me the world will try to argue you into not being a Christian anymore. The real world simply doesn’t care. Yeah maybe there are some like that, but most only cared about doing enough work to get the grade so they could pursue their career goals. Getting involved in academic or intellectual discussions about the existence of God or the origin of life was a hindrance to that. Such interests were hobbies pursued by maybe a small number of people, but hardly anybody makes money doing that, so why bother? The vast majority had no interest and did not care, and there was no way to make them care. I ended up spending most of my time and making virtually all of my friends in a Christian student group on campus. Train a child up in the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it. Well I was trained up to live with Christians, so that’s what I did. I am still doing that. Once, in my honors genetics course the professor gave us a choice from among a number of books to read and discuss for honors credit. I voted for Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene because that was the only option that had anything to do with creation/evolution or God or anything like that at all. I was outvoted and I don’t even remember which book we actually ended up reading. Nobody cares. In fact they actively avoid it.
I have told a lot of stories and I promise there’s only one more. Growing up my family was very close to another family whose dad, or really grandfather, gave my dad his first job and were the reason why we moved to Nebraska from Ohio. We called him “uncle” even though he wasn’t. My first friend was his grandson who was living with him because his parents were divorced and unreliable, but I didn’t know that back then. Uncle Bare had grown up a missionary kid in Nepal, and his family had been evacuated during the communist revolution in the middle of World War II on Chiang Kai-Shek’s wife’s personal airplane. After growing up in the U.S. he got married and headed off to Thailand with his wife, an idealistic young missionary. But while he was there he realized he wasn’t an effective missionary because he had nothing to offer the people except the gospel, so he came back and put himself through medical school and became a doctor. Then he went back to Thailand and spent the next forty years as a medical missionary, including all the way through the Vietnam War. He has some amazing stories, all of which were made possible because he had something tangible to offer those people that they could appreciate entirely apart from the gospel itself, but it helped him earn their trust and develop relationships that did lead to missionary opportunities. I’ll never forget that lesson. How many apologists have ever learned it? What do we have to offer the world that is valuable to them and will make them pay attention?
Christianity rebuilt Western civilization from the ground up after the fall of the Roman Empire, and we did it by building educational institutions. Back then we were the only ones doing that. Western academics was built entirely by Christians. Today, it is not entirely atheist, but it is totally dominated by a secular ideal, and many Christians are party to it. Today, more than ever, we see the consequences of that. The Bible teaches us that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Reject God and you can’t even get started on the path of wisdom. The academic institutions that Christians built have rejected God, and are now obviously and clearly falling into disrepair and intellectual suicide. Do Christians have what it takes today to follow in our forebears footsteps and rebuild them ourselves? We won’t accomplish that by focusing so intensely on selling our random atheist acquaintance a little rope. The Big Picture that I believe in is building academic institutions. If it’s just Christians who are all already believers, such as for example, homeschoolers who want to take a creation science themed tour of a museum, that’s a strength not a weakness, but it means we won’t be doing much evangelizing or defending Christianity against hostile attacks. It means we need Christians who actually enjoy and care about science for it’s own sake. People like me. People like Johannes Kepler and the other fathers of the scientific revolution. They didn’t know many atheists either, and they weren’t great evangelists. Apologetics hadn’t even been invented yet, but atheist and Christian scientists alike still respect and value their contributions to science to this day four hundred years later. Where are the Keplers of today? I want to find them, to teach them, to excite them about science. And we just may find that when we care about something and build something valuable, the world will start paying attention to us again, just like they did then.
“It is my pleasure to taunt mortal men with the candid acknowledgment that I am stealing the golden vessels of the Egyptians to build a tabernacle to my God from them, far, far away from the boundaries of Egypt. If you forgive me, I shall rejoice; if you are enraged with me, I shall bear it. See, I cast the die, and I write the book. Whether it is to be read by the people of the present or of the future makes no difference: let it await its reader for a hundred years, if God Himself has stood ready for six thousand years for one to study Him.” ~Johannes Kepler
“Those who are wise will shine like the brightness of the heavens, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars for ever and ever.” Daniel 12:3
"When I speak of resisting the abuse of culture I do not mean that a Christian should take money for supplying one thing (culture) and use the opportunity thus gained to supply a quite different thing (homiletics and apologetics). That is stealing. The mere presence of Christians in the ranks of the culture sellers will inevitably provide an antidote." ~C.S. Lewis
