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The Role of Intelligent Design in UNFORGETTING GOD: An Interview with Barry Arrington about his new book

Barry Arrington is a friend, colleague, and top-flight attorney who is deeply interested in how worldviews impact our society. He and I collaborated for close to two decades on the intelligent design blog UncommonDescent.com, which I started in 2005, which Barry managed for more than a decade as a 501(c)(3), and which we finally archived in 2023. In its first decade, Uncommon Descent was the premier blog for advancing the intelligent design movement, though in more recent years other blogs surpassed it in that role, notably EvolutionNews.org.

On May 6, 2025, Barry published with Inkwell Press a fascinating new book titled Unforgetting God: Defeating Culture-Destroying Materialism Through Christian Renewal (available at Amazon here). Barry’s perspective as a Christian, intelligent design proponent, and seasoned litigator (he has brought cases before the US Supreme Court) has given him a useful perspective from which to understand how materialism affects and infects our culture. Intelligent design provides an important tool in his arsenal for defeating materialism. I therefore proposed to him that we do an interview relating his book to intelligent design. Barry graciously agreed and gave the following interview.

Tell us about Barry Arrington.

I grew up in Texas and graduated from the University of Texas Law School (Austin) in 1986. I was admitted to the bar in 1987 and since then I have practiced mainly in complex civil litigation, including constitutional law, and nonprofit law.

I have been an allied attorney with the Alliance for Defending Freedom since 1994. I served in the Colorado legislature in the 1990s.

Some of my cases have been in the news. In 1999, I began representing several of the families whose children were killed at Columbine. In 2020, I represented a Colorado church in a case that went to the United States Supreme Court. We won that case and succeeded in opening the churches, which Colorado had shut down during COVID. I discuss my experiences with those cases in the book.

I have been involved in the intelligent design movement for many years. I ran the intelligent design website Uncommon Descent (UncommonDescent.com) for well over a decade, which in its heyday was the largest intelligent design discussion site on the internet. In 2023, we decided to shut UD down and archive it at the Discovery Institute’s website.

Currently, I have a case pending in which I sued the State of Colorado over its law making it illegal for licensed professionals to counsel teens struggling with gender dysphoria in any way other than “trans affirming.” The Supreme Court has agreed to hear that case and oral argument will be in the fall.

What was your purpose in writing Unforgetting God?

In 2020, I wrote a post for Uncommon Descent with the intentionally provocative title “Critical Theory is Certainly Correct.” The first sentence of the article is: “Indeed, it is more than merely true; it is an inexorable logical certainty if the premises of the theorists are true.” In that article, I went on to write:

“Critical theory is applied metaphysical materialism. Materialism posits that the physical is all there is. Its central premise is this: In the beginning there were particles, and the particles were in motion, and in the entire universe there is and never has been and never will be anything other than particles in motion. This means that human beings are not special. You and your family and your friends are also merely particles in motion, reducible to the chemicals that make up your bodies. Humans are clever hairless apes with no more ultimate significance than rocks. Yes, they have come up with this thing called ‘morality.’ But morality is an illusion foisted on us by material evolutionary forces because it gives us a reproductive advantage. Morality in any objective transcendent sense of the word not only does not exist, it cannot exist. There are no moral or immoral rocks. And humans — in their essence — are in the same category as rocks. Both rocks and humans are mere amalgamations of burnt out star dust. If this is true, it has profound implications for just about everything. One of those implications is that there are no universal truths guiding our relations in society. There is only power and those who have it and those who do not.”

That article in UD contained the seeds that would ultimately grow into the book Unforgetting God. The book is about premises. If materialist premises are true, then certain conclusions logically follow. This radically secular philosophy has come to dominate the minds of Western cultural elites and is at the root of tribalism in our politics, lawlessness in our courts, chaos in our universities, and the crisis of meaning rampaging among young people.

In my thirty-eight years of practicing law, I have had a front row seat watching materialism literally destroy lives and hollow out our once vibrant cultural institutions. In Unforgetting God, I try to shine a light on the path out of the soul-numbing materialist wilderness in which we find ourselves. The book is about demonstrating that materialism is false, even absurd, and pointing the way to a loving God who is our best hope for personal salvation and cultural renewal.

The cover of your book is striking. Tell us about that.

The cover features Friedrich Nietzsche and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn holding opposite ends of a rope as they play tug of war for the soul of the West. Nietzsche famously said “God is dead.” In contrast, Solzhenitsyn was a committed theist who called for spiritual renewal.

The title of the book is an allusion to Solzhenitsyn’s speech when he accepted the Templeton Prize in 1983. He said that he had spent 50 years working on the history of the Russian Revolution. He had read hundreds of books and interviewed hundreds of witnesses to try to gain an understanding of that unspeakable human tragedy. Then he concluded:

“But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: ‘Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.’”

Even a casual perusal of the headlines on any given day reveals that in the West, we too are rapidly forgetting God. The purpose of the book is to call for a reversal of that trend before it is too late.

You mentioned Columbine. How does that tragic event figure into your book?

This too has its roots in a UD article I wrote many years ago called “Darwin at Columbine.” Eric Harris was the leader in the Columbine shooting. Dylan Klebold was merely a follower. In the course of representing my clients whose children were killed that day, I spent hundreds of hours investigating Harris’s writings as well as his video and audio recordings. Contrary to popular myth, Harris was not insane. Nor was he a victim of bullying out for revenge. Harris was an intelligent young man who had even studied philosophy. And as I write in the book:

“[Harris] took the philosophical ideas he learned very seriously indeed. He often alluded to those ideas in his journals and recordings. That’s how we know that Harris affirmatively believed those philosophical ideas justified his actions. Unfortunately for those he murdered and maimed, those ideas were a toxic miasma of Charles Darwin funneled through Friedrich Nietzsche. . . . If there is one quotation that sums up Harris’s views, it is probably this one: ‘F**k money, f**k justice, f**k morals, f**k civilized, f**k rules, f**k laws . . . DIE manmade words . . . people think they apply to everything when they don’t/can’t. There’s no such thing as True Good or True evil, it’s all relative to the observer. It’s just all nature, chemistry, and math.’ Harris was a deeply committed materialist who believed that ‘morality’ is just a word; there is no such thing as good or evil, and everything ultimately reduces to chemistry and math.”

Harris took materialist evolution very seriously. It was not a coincidence that the shirt he wore the day of the shooting had “natural selection” emblazoned across the front. He believed he had evolved into a Nietzschean Übermensch, and as such he had no duty to respect his fellow students’ right to life.

Obviously, the overwhelming majority of materialists are not mass killers. My point is that Harris was taught to reject the existence of objective good and evil. The only difference between Harris and other materialists is that he acted on his metaphysical beliefs and they usually do not.

How does Darwin make an appearance in your book?

In the opening chapter, I discuss how the late philosopher Daniel Dennett compared the materialism that came to dominate the minds of Western intellectuals following the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species to a “universal acid” that ate “through just about every traditional concept” in Western culture and left in its wake “a revolutionized world-view.” Materialist evolution was not a new concept in 1859. The Greeks and the Romans had discussed forms of the theory (such as Epicurus and Lucretius).

Darwin’s genius lay in overcoming the fatal flaw in the classical theory — its prior invocation of sheer randomness to account for the exquisite design of living things. Darwin proposed a seemingly plausible materialistic explanation — natural selection acting on random variations in deep time — to account for the apparent design of living things. And the rest is history. As Richard Dawkins remarked in The Blind Watchmaker, he could not imagine being an atheist prior to 1859, the year Darwin’s Origin of Species appeared in print. But for Dawkins, everything changed in 1859 — Darwin now made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.

It is no coincidence that belief in metaphysical materialism came to dominate the minds of Western elites in the decades after Origin of Species was published.

Describe the place of intelligent design in your book.

In the first third of the book, I draw on my experience as a lawyer and former legislator to discuss materialism’s corrosive impact on culture, politics, and law, especially constitutional law. I then make a plea for a reevaluation of the premises underlying the materialist worldview. I write:

“As late as the 1980s, when materialism’s iron grip on the minds of intellectuals was at its zenith, it would have probably been pointless for me to write a book like this. To be sure, many people continued to believe in God, but that belief was under assault from a militant and ascendant materialist elite that accused believers of clinging to superstitious myths. Times have changed, and we live in an exciting intellectual age for theists in general and Christians in particular. The materialist edifice has been crumbling for some time now. Nevertheless, while materialism is no longer intellectually ascendant, it remains culturally dominant, and the cultural course materialists have set us on is fraught with danger. Destruction and chaos lie at the end of our current path.”

I urge my readers to reevaluate the case for theism generally and for Christianity in particular. As Stephen Meyer discussed in his masterful Return of the God Hypothesis, which I cite extensively, ID can play a role in pointing to theism generally. Chapter six is in many ways the heart of the book. I sketch [out] many ID arguments and point to the work of ID theorists for more in-depth analysis. These ID arguments include how Big Bang cosmology, cosmic fine tuning, and the staggering specified complexity of living things point to a creator. Along the way, in addition to Meyer, I discuss Bill Dembski’s The Design Inference, Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box, Jim Tour’s work in the origin-of-life area, Douglas Axe’s work in protein folds, Granville Sewell’s insights into complexity theory and the work of other ID luminaries.

What convinced you that intelligent design is true?

In The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins wrote that “The complexity of living organisms is matched by the elegant efficiency of their apparent design.” Dawkins went on to argue in that book that this appearance of design is an illusion, but the point is that even an arch-atheist like Dawkins concedes that living things at least appear to be designed.

Is that appearance of design really an illusion as Dawkins argues? I have always been skeptical of that claim. So, to answer your question, I probably always had a deeply held intuition that intelligent design is true. The more important question in my mind is, “When did you come to realize there are solid empirical grounds confirming that intuition?”

For years I endured a constant onslaught of Darwinian/materialist indoctrination as I made my way through the education system. I had resisted that indoctrination but I constantly wondered whether I was just being stubborn. All the “smart” people believed in materialist evolution. Phil Johnson’s seminal book Darwin on Trial was, for me, epochal. Like many people, Darwin on Trial was my first introduction to the ID movement, and thirty-five years later, I still remember the excitement I felt reading that book.

Johnson demonstrated that the empirical support for the modern synthesis (neo-Darwinism) is really quite unimpressive. Then, in a stunning passage that literally changed my life, he provided an insight that finally made it all make sense. Why do “smart” people believe such a weak theory? Religion. I incorporated Johnson’s insight in the following passage in Unforgetting God:

“One of the consequences of a fervent religious commitment to materialism . . . is the belief that any evidence is a stunning confirmation of the materialist origins myth. Phillip Johnson pointed out that if materialism is true, ‘then some materialistic theory of evolution has to be true simply as a matter of logical deduction, regardless of the evidence. That theory will necessarily be at least roughly like neo-Darwinism, in that it will have to involve some combination of random changes and law-like processes.’”

Belief in Darwinian evolution is not a conclusion based on the evidence. It is a logical deduction from metaphysical materialism.

That was in the early 1990s. In the decade or so that followed, I continued my investigation into ID. At that time, Richard John Neuhaus was still in charge of First Things, and he provided an early forum for ID proponents. I remember Stephen Meyer’s “DNA and Other Designs,” in which he set forth an early version of the ideas that would appear in his book Signature in the Cell, having a particularly powerful impact. During this time, Dembski’s and Behe’s work also came to my attention. So, to answer the question, while I always believed design at an intuitive level, the ID pioneers confirmed my belief at an empirical level.

Opposition to intelligent design is a proving ground for atheism. How did your leadership for close to 20 years at Uncommon Descent in defending intelligent design against atheist critics help shape Unforgetting God?

Indeed. The late Cornell atheist professor William Provine (who often debated Phil Johnson) rightly stated that evolution is the greatest engine for atheism ever invented. This is true because Darwinian evolution has tremendous first-blush plausibility, and if one is inclined to go with the cultural flow, it provides a great jumping-off point.

Francis Bacon famously said that a superficial knowledge of science (which he called “natural philosophy”) would “incline the mind of man to atheism,” but a deeper understanding would bring him back to God. That is still true today. A superficial study of origins undermines theism, but the deeper study provided by ID theorists points the other way.

As I mentioned earlier, I have always believed in ID at an intuitive level, and ID theorists helped confirm that belief empirically. There is an obvious pitfall here. A natural human tendency is to believe what one wants to believe despite the evidence. There is a name for that tendency: confirmation bias.

After I had been running UD (Uncommon Descent) for several years, I addressed an earlier fear I had had that my belief in ID would one day be exposed as nothing but the result of intense confirmation bias. The name of that article was “No Bomb After 10 Years,” and it opens with this:

“I have to admit that when I first started debating the origins issue I did so with some trepidation. After all, there are a lot of highly educated, credentialed, intelligent professionals who say they believe the Darwinian narrative. To tell the truth, when I first started debating origins, I assumed not only that there was a very good chance that I was on the wrong side of the debate, but also that one or more of those highly educated, credentialed, intelligent professionals would come along and drop a science bomb on me that would destroy my naïve belief in ID.”

I go on to report that after 10 years of debating hundreds of materialists, no one had dropped a science bomb on me. My confidence in ID was as strong as ever, and I was beginning to suspect there is no bomb.

Leading UD all those years was valuable for several reasons. The first I have already mentioned. Exposing one’s ideas to criticism can be scary, but if those ideas come out intact through the crucible, one can hold them with much more confidence. Yes, confirmation bias will always remain a risk, but one way to mitigate that risk is to receive and deal with intense objections in good faith. That “good faith” part is important. You have to address the opposition’s real argument, not some straw man caricature. One thing I have found over the years is that when your opponent sets up and knocks over a straw man, it is a sure sign they are not so confident that they can beat your actual argument.

Second, debating origins all those years at UD not only strengthened my own position, but it also exposed me to materialist arguments that I might not otherwise have thought of. At UD, I learned that materialists tend to recycle the same arguments over and over. This prepared me to write one of the most important chapters in Unforgetting God entitled “Objection!” in which I address numerous materialist objections to theism.

How does your background as a lawyer impact your approach to atheism?

How many times have you heard someone say, “there is no evidence for God’s existence” or “you can’t prove that God exists.” After 38 years of litigation, I know a thing or two about evidence and proof, and in the book, I show how both of these claims are demonstrably false. You may not be persuaded by the overwhelming evidence for God’s existence. That does not mean that evidence does not exist. And while the existence of God cannot be proved to an apodictic certainty, the totality of the evidence proves his existence to a high degree of certainty. God permits doubt. He does not permit reasonable doubt.

In addition to my experience in evaluating evidence and proving facts, I hope I am following in the tradition of Phil Johnson in Darwin on Trial. Johnson said that he was a lawyer “with a specialty in analyzing the logic of arguments and identifying the assumptions that lie behind those arguments. This background is more appropriate than one might think, because what people believe about evolution and Darwinism depends very heavily on the kind of logic they employ and the kind of assumptions they make.” That is just as true today as it was in 1991 when Johnson published Darwin on Trial.

In a world without intelligent design, what happens to natural law? How does natural law undergird Unforgetting God?

There is a passage in chapter four of Unforgetting God entitled “Lawless Law,” in which I address the question of natural law:

“Prior to the Revolution, the colonists did not think of themselves primarily as ‘Americans.’ They thought of themselves as Englishmen living in America, and English common law was the law of the colonies. After the Revolution, English common law carried over as the law of the states of the new nation, and William Blackstone’s Commentaries were the preeminent authority on that law. It is difficult to exaggerate Blackstone’s influence on early American law. John Marshall, considered by many to be the greatest Chief Justice in our nation’s history, read the Commentaries four times by the time he turned twenty-seven. As one historian wrote, ‘In the first century of American independence, the Commentaries were not merely an approach to the study of law; for most lawyers they constituted all there was of the law.’ To this day, the Supreme Court cites Blackstone when it is seeking to understand the state of the law in the early republic.”

For Blackstone, all legal matters implicating a moral question must be resolved by reference to natural law principles that God infused into the fabric of the universe at creation. He wrote: “[When God] created man, and endued him with freewill to conduct himself in all parts of life, he laid down certain immutable laws of human nature, whereby that freewill is in some degree regulated and restrained, and gave him also the faculty of reason to discover the purport of those laws.” The Declaration of Independence speaks of the “Laws of . . . Nature’s God.” These are the immutable moral principles laid down by God of which Blackstone spoke.

A key idea in natural law theory is that men do not create natural law. Rather, like mathematical concepts that are discovered and not invented, the precepts of natural law have a freestanding existence and are discovered through human reason. This idea informed the founders’ view of law when they signed the Declaration of Independence. It is the view that dominated American law through the end of the nineteenth century.

In Unforgetting God, I describe how all of that changed largely through the work and ideas of one man, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Holmes was a committed Darwinist, a brutal materialist, and a moral nihilist. For good reason, he has been called “the American Nietzsche.” Holmes’s great project was to sever the link between law and morality, which he believed had no objective existence. For Holmes, all human relations, including the law, boiled down to a Darwinian struggle. One consequence of Holmes’s ideas was that American legal thinkers developed the jurisprudential theory of “legal positivism,” which remains the hegemonic theory of law to this day. Under legal positivism, law is not “discovered.” It is made by the people with the power, and the laws they make will have no necessary connection to morality.

The prevalence of legal positivism is only possible in a legal culture that is thoroughly saturated with materialist presuppositions. In Unforgetting God, I point out the brutal consequences of judges imposing their will on the American people under the guise of interpreting the Constitution. The “living constitution” project is essentially materialism played out in constitutional law. I call for a reexamination of the materialist underpinnings of the modern legal project, and crucial to that reexamination is answering the following key question: Does God exist?

As I discussed earlier in this interview, intelligent design plays a critical role in answering that question. Again, it all comes down to premises. If God does not exist, the legal positivist view of law is almost certainly correct. Natural law — law based in a fundamental morality — is possible only if objective morality exists, and objective morality exists only if God exists.

What do you say to people who think that God created by Darwinian evolution? Can such “theistic evolutionists” still profit from your book, and if so, how?

As I discussed above, belief in the materialist worldview exploded after Darwin. Daniel Dennett was surely correct that Darwin’s “universal acid” dissolved ancient theistic beliefs, and for many Western intellectual elites (such as Holmes) those theistic beliefs gave way to a thoroughgoing materialism. For over 160 years, many Christians have been trying to reconcile belief in God with belief in Darwinian evolution. Many of them have settled on what’s come to be called “theistic evolution.” Today, the BioLogos Foundation, established by Francis Collins, promotes this theory relentlessly.

The essence of theistic evolution is that God uses Darwinian evolution to create all living things, including humans. The only difference between atheist Richard Dawkins and the typical theistic evolutionist is that the theist evolutionist adds the following footnote: “We accept on faith that all of this was caused by God in an empirically undetectable way.” Well, if science is the study of empirical phenomena, what is the purpose of that footnote? Good question. Theistic evolutionists are committed to the view that “theistic evolution” is, at the level of empirically observable phenomena, identical to “materialist evolution.”

I believe that theistic evolution is misguided in at least two respects. First, as ID theorists have convincingly demonstrated, a creator’s work is empirically detectable. Second, they are kidding themselves if they believe that theistic evolution will halt the culture’s slide into atheistic materialism in any meaningful way. It is a very short journey from “God is not empirically detectible in the process” to “God is not necessary to explain the process,” and it is an even shorter journey from there to “God is not necessary, full stop.”

In Unforgetting God, I rely on ID theory to demonstrate that the design inference is by far the most reasonable explanation for the staggering specified complexity of living things. Thus, there is no reason to retreat into the theistic evolution cul-de-sac.

What impact would you like your book Unforgetting God to have immediately and in the coming years?

In a word, I am calling for the revival of skepticism. This might sound odd coming from a theist because we have been conditioned by our culture to believe that only atheists can be true skeptics. While that might have been true at one time, as I explain in the following passage from Unforgetting God, that is no longer the case.

“’Fideism’ is a grit-your-teeth-and-believe-despite-the-evidence sort of belief. I am not asking anyone to retreat into an unreflective fideism. Indeed, I am calling for just the opposite – a revival of skepticism. For centuries, ‘skepticism’ was associated with unbelievers such as the Enlightenment thinkers David Hume and Voltaire. This is because they were skeptical of the dominant cultural narrative, which in their time was Christianity. In our time, materialism is the dominant narrative, especially in the media and academia, which are the joint heralds of our culture’s received wisdom. My purpose in writing this book is to urge everyone to re-examine the evidence for the existence of God with a skeptical perspective toward the secular received wisdom that has long dominated the discourse in our nation. . . .

I am calling for a renewal of an attitude of genuine skepticism toward the cultural hegemon of materialism. Again, I am not asking anyone to retreat into fideism. That is both irrational and unsustainable in the long run. I am not asking anyone to endure and believe despite all the evidence to the contrary. I am asking for the opposite. The point of this book is to encourage people to examine the evidence again, especially in light of the scholarship summarized in chapter six that demonstrates that accepting the existence of God and the truth of Jesus Christ’s message of love, peace, and redemption are the overwhelmingly more rational positions to hold.”

As the highlighted part of the passage states, my purpose in writing Unforgetting God is to call on people to examine the claims of materialism with a genuinely skeptical attitude. I understand this will be difficult for many. It takes true courage to stand up against the overwhelmingly dominant materialist narrative of our culture. While I do not agree with Hume’s and Voltaire’s conclusions, I cannot help but admire their courage in standing up to the dominant narrative of their culture. We must find the courage to do the same thing, because the stakes are very high. Indeed, they are nothing short of existential for Western Civilization.

Recommended Resources:

I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist (Paperback), and (Sermon) by Norman Geisler and Frank Turek 

Stealing From God by Dr. Frank Turek (Book, 10-Part DVD Set, STUDENT Study Guide, TEACHER Study Guide)

Answering Stephen Hawking & Other Atheists MP3 and DVD by Dr. Frank Turek 

Person of Interest: Why Jesus Still Matters in a World that Rejects the Bible by J. Warner Wallace (Paperback), (Investigator’s Guide).

 

Bill Dembski holds doctorates in math and philosophy as well as an advance theological degree. He’s published in the peer-reviewed math, engineering, biology, philosophy, and theology literature. His focus is on freedom, technology, and education. Formerly almost exclusively an ID (intelligent design) guy, with most of his writing focused on that topic, he found that even though ID had the better argument, it faced roadblocks designed to stop its success. So his focus shifted to the wider social and political forces that block free human inquiry. Bill still writes a lot on intelligent design but his focus these days is broader.

Originally posted at: https://bit.ly/3FyCxE9

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Is Christianity Making a Comeback? with Cliffe & Stuart Knechtle

Are we witnessing a renewed interest in God, Christianity, and Jesus in today’s culture? For this midweek podcast, Frank welcomes back our favorite father-son duo, Cliffe and Stuart Knechtle from the popular Youtube channel, ‘Give Me an Answer‘, to share their unique insights into the recent rise of Christianity in the West, particularly on college campuses. They’ll also discuss how the rapid growth of their ministry has led to incredible opportunities to share the Gospel on major secular and Christian platforms.

Tune in as Frank, Stuart, and Cliffe answer key questions like:

  • What major cultural shifts has Cliffe observed over the past 40 years, and why has he softened his approach?
  • Why are young people today so anxious, and what is their biggest fear?
  • What are some of the most common misconceptions and objections to Christianity that Cliffe and Stuart encounter, and how do they respond?
  • Why should we care about sin?
  • How should Christians address the topic of homosexuality and other cultural issues with grace and truth?
  • How did the Knechtles end up on popular shows with Logan Paul, Alex O’Connor, and George Janko?
  • How important is it to have an eternal perspective on life, and why is God’s judgment actually good news?

Cliffe and Stuart’s commitment to open-air preaching has led to incredible ministry growth—but not without its challenges! Find out what’s happening on the frontlines, where they’ll be traveling next, how you can be praying for them, and simple ways you can support their mission!

Is there a guest or topic you’d love to hear discussed on a future podcast? We’d love to hear your feedback and suggestions! You can take our 5-minute podcast survey HERE.

Connect with Cliffe and Stuart in-person or online using the links below!

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@givemeananswer
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stuart_knechtle
Website: https://givemeananswer.org/
Grace Community Church: https://www.gracecommunity.info/

 

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When Culture Hates You with Natasha Crain

Has the recent political shift softened the growing animosity toward Christians, or is hostility here to stay? The election may be over, but Christians can’t afford to let our guards down just yet. While America might be moving toward cultural sanity, the battle for truth, justice, morality, and reason is far from over!

This week, our good friend, Unshaken Conference speaker, and author, Natasha Crain, joins Frank to discuss her timely new book, ‘When Culture Hates You: Persevering for the Common Good as Christians in a Hostile Public Square‘. Together, they’ll explore how Christians can respond to persecution, speak truth boldly, and navigate cultural backlash and opposition with grace, courage, and humility, tackling questions like:

  • Why do Christians need to speak truth in culture and link it to the Bible?
  • What’s the ‘new vibe shift’ that’s taken place since the inauguration?
  • Was the leftist female bishop justified in her public scrutiny of President Trump?
  • What are the four main tenets of secularism?
  • Are all Christians guilty of being Christian Nationalists?
  • What’s the difference between social justice and biblical justice?
  • How can Christians help true victims fight for biblical justice?
  • How do you respond if someone calls you a hateful bigot?

Do you feel hated as a Christian? Get used to it, but don’t give up! In this podcast episode, Frank and Natasha will offer encouragement for believers who experience persecution on any level, as well as provide practical tips on how to be salt and light in the midst of so much chaos. Be sure to order a copy of Natasha’s book, ‘When Culture Hates You‘, and don’t miss the upcoming midweek podcast episode where Frank and Natasha will continue their conversation by discussing a topic that’s TOO EXTREME for radio!

If you enjoyed this podcast episode PLEASE HELP US SPREAD THE TRUTH OF CHRISTIANITY BY SUPPORTING OUR MINISTRY HERE. 100% of your donation goes to ministry, 0% to buildings!

Resources mentioned during the episode:

NATASHA’S WEBSITE: NatashaCrain.com

ORDER NATASHA’S BOOK: When Culture Hates You

BLOG POST: What the Inauguration (and Vibe Shift) Means for Christians

BOOK: Faithfully Different by Natasha Crain

UNSHAKEN CONFERENCE 2025: UnshakenConference.com

 

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The New Cultural Christianity

A few months ago I wrote an article on the West’s move towards a post-Christian culture (Post-Christianity: What’s That?). Since the article’s publication at least two prominent atheists decried the fall of Christianity in the West. One claims to have converted to Christianity (Ayaan Hirsi Ali) and the other maintains atheism but embraces “cultural Christianity” (Richard Dawkins).[1] They, along with fellow atheists Bret Weinstein and Tom Holland recognize that the fall of the West will be accomplished with the dismantling of the Church. The New Atheists of twenty years ago assumed that logic, reason, and science would provide the basis for a moral society as it abandoned God and moved into the post-Christian era.

Much to their chagrin, however, this has not been the case. Dawkins began to recognize the threat radical Islam is to the West years ago. He knew that the vacuum of religiosity could clear the way for something much worse. Nature abhors a vacuum and Dawkins rightfully understood that while his desire to see religion dissipate seemed noble, the results could be catastrophic. I always found it interesting that he pursued the eradication of faith anyway.

But this is not a new realization. Many atheists are simply starting to recognize what Frederick Nietzsche proclaimed over a century ago. Nietzsche, an atheist himself, understood full well the terrible implications of a godless West even if, initially, those like Sam Harris, who once said “I’m still the kind of person who writes articles with rather sweeping titles like ‘Science must destroy religion’” and others might sneer at the idea. But Nietzsche’s words are worth a second, third, and maybe hundredth look as we barrel down the road of post-Christianity because his words seem more prophetic now than when they were first penned.

From Nietszche’s Madman to the Übermensch

Nietzsche recounts the story of the madman that declares the terrible consequences of God’s death:

“Where is God?” he cried, ‘I’ll tell you! We have killed him – you and I! We are all his murderers. But how did we do this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained the earth from its son? Where is it moving now… God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him. How can we console ourselves, the murderers of all murderers! The holiest and the mightiest thing the world has ever possessed has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood from us?… Finally he threw his lantern on the ground so that it broke into pieces and went out. ‘I come too early, he then said; ‘my time is not yet… The deed is still more remote to them than the remotest stars – and yet they have done it themselves!”[2]

Nietzsche surmised that those in the enlightenment had not understood the consequences of God’s philosophical and scientific “death.” He understood that the absence of God would plunge society into nihilism and futility. While God may not exist, perhaps, his perceived existence was necessary to hold society together.

Nietzsche then proposes a possible solution to the problem. A pursuit of the god within ourselves. He named this pursuit of the ultimate human the Übermensch. The Übermensch (which literally means the “over-man”) has been an oft-misunderstood concept. At times it has been seen as the ideal moral human or even as a superior form of the human “race” as the Nazis seemed to use it, but this would be a misunderstanding of Nietzsche’s goal in developing the concept.

In his mind, if we had successfully killed God, we could either drift to nihilism or pursue an “ultimate man” or “beyond man” as the archetype of what it means to be truly human.

Nietzsche understood something about human nature that many new atheists simply did not. That, at our core, human beings are religious creatures. We desire to pursue something greater than ourselves; we desire to order society by a set of ideals, we desire order and not anarchy to hold our culture together. We will all, in the end, worship something or someone.

This is the missing link between a Christian and a post-Christian culture. Human beings cannot order themselves purely along scientific or materialistic lines. Societies and cultures for millennia have proven this pursuit futile. Even supposed secular states tend to develop a religious culture around their leaders. The Czar, the Dictator, and the Communist leader demand religious-like loyalty. They develop their own sets of dogmas, doctrines, and worship standards whether they would admit it or not and they do so to maintain and establish a common culture. Sure, they claim there is no god above them but that does not stop them from declaring themselves a god unto themselves.

In the end the idea of the ultimate man, the Übermensch, has been adopted a variety of ways throughout history from racial lines to philosophical humanism. Society would look to construct a new ideal through which to order itself, one unshackled from the restraints of archaic Christian morality.

The word culture is derived from the Latin word cultus which means both to till and to worship. And while etymology does not equate to definition it is fascinating to think that we could move into a post-Christian cultus or an atheistic cultus. It would seem to be a contradiction in terms and thus would lead one to wonder if a godless culture is even possible.

Perhaps one is technically possible but I contend that the human tendency towards a common culture based on certain metaphysical beliefs about reality renders the proposition dubious at best.

Every culture eventually orders itself around its highest ideal and whatever the highest ideal is, for all intents and purposes, is God. For any culture to survive it must have guiding principles through which it orders itself and often, these principles will take on a religious undertone. There is inherently a religious structure to how human beings organize themselves.  This is not an argument for God’s existence, rather, it is an observation concerning human history.

All cultures eventually sustain a religious type of structure, or, as Nietzsche observed, they are on the precipice of anarchy, destruction, and nihilism. So, if a culture is going to move beyond its religious foundation, to endure, it must replace said religious foundation with another religious type foundation. In Nietzsche’s mind that was the idea of the Übermensch. The Übermensch was the ultimate good (as opposed to the Maximally Great Being revealed in scripture), but one that catered to, instead of restraining, humanity’s base passions and desires.

“The church combats the passions by cutting them off in every sense: its technique, its ‘cure’ is castration. It never asks: ‘how can a desire be spiritualized, beautified, deified?” – Jack Maden, “Ubermensch Explained.”

In other words, it is through the release of “repression” and the embracing of our passions and the self-mastery thereof that we find our purpose, meaning, and hope without a god. In our current moment I believe we are experiencing a shift from Orthodox Cultural Christianity to Post-Christian Cultural Christianity. A type of Christianity that seeks to spiritualize, beautify, and deify our subjective passions, desires and proclivities. We are not progressing towards atheism as much as we are remaking Christianity through the idea of the Übermensch ideal.

This could seem like a contradiction but let me explain:

The New Cultural Christianity

I believe that our current cultural context seeks to remake cultural Christianity from what it was, particularly an orthodox understanding of God’s character and sin, to an Übermensch Cultural Christianity. One that looks inside the man to find the ideal and encourages the living out of our passions and desires.

This shift has made Progressive Christianity the new cultural Christianity of the West.

What do I mean by that?

First, I want to build my case on two different statistics that seem to contradict each other, and these statistics, I believe, have been interpreted wrongly on the individual level, but they help us to understand our new cultural Christianity in the west and in America in particular.

A recent study by Barna Research Group it was found that 71% of people have a high view of Jesus but only 40% have a high view of Church. When narrowed to “no faith” individuals we find 40% having a high view of Jesus with only 21% having a high view of the Church. However, the starkest contrast is between self-described “Christians” wherein 84% have a high view of Jesus but only 58% have a high view of the local Church.

A lot has been made of these statistics. Most have cast aspersions on the local church for misrepresenting Jesus and engaging in rampant hypocrisy. In many ways I do not disagree completely with some of these statements but there is more going on in this statistic than meets the eye and certainly more than an easy explanation of “church hypocrisy” can offer.

For instance, what does one really mean when he or she says the Church is hypocritical? Depending on the reason this could be either a serious charge or a subjective opinion with no basis in reality. Perhaps the next statistic will shed some light on this.

In a separate study led by Probe Ministries it was found that 60% of self-professing born again Christians between the ages of 18 and 40 believe Jesus isn’t the only way to Heaven. In a similar study orchestrated by Pew Research nearly 40% of Americans believe that atheists can get into heaven and a little over one third believe unbelievers can gain access to heaven. This would place all of these people well outside the realm of historic Christian orthodoxy but many within the realm of progressive Christianity.

Obviously, statistics through surveys only tell us how people answer specific questions and not why they answer the question this way. However, if these two or three statistics are accurate in describing our current religiosity in the United States, I believe that we can reasonably conclude that the reason for the low view of Church is not primarily because it represents Christ poorly but because we understand the person and charge of Jesus differently.

I am fully willing to admit that churches have not represented Christ well in a myriad of ways, but I do not believe this explains the wide discrepancy in the statistics. Given the two statistics together I believe it is much more likely that we have redefined Jesus than that the Church has failed to represent Him well enough.

Are there cases of Christian hypocrisy? Absolutely. However, what is called hypocrisy and what is actual hypocrisy can be two different things. For instance, a Christian that holds to a traditional view of heaven and hell and a traditional view of marriage and sexuality might be (and often is) called a hypocrite because this same Christian believes that God is an omnibenevolent God and full of grace and mercy.

But these are only hypocritical beliefs if we redefine the baseline of what it truly means to be Christian. If we replace the cultural definitions of truth, love, mercy, and Jesus with a new Übermensch type redefinition. I believe this is what we are truly experiencing in our current cultural moment. The new cultural religion is not entirely post-Christian, as in materialistic and atheistic, but it is narcissistic spiritualism coopting cultural Christian values and remaking them into progressive cultural Christianity.

Progressive Christianity has redefined Jesus into the Übermensch and repackaged Christianity in its likeness. I am aware that this is a reductive analysis, clearly more philosophical threads could be pulled to analyze how exactly we got here. For a broader case see Carl Trueman’s work The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self (2020).  The point here is to draw a line of thought from the principle elucidated by Nietzsche to our modern moment. This is not to say that the progressive culture is actively adopting the idea of the Übermensch, but rather that the principle introduced by Nietzsche’s recognition of the necessity of God (or something like him) to the success of society is playing itself out through the restructuring of our cultural Christianity.

It is not so much that our culture has moved beyond Christianity but that it has completely redefined it. Jesus, as understood in our current cultural milieu, is a different character altogether. An Übermensch type of character meant to affirm our desires, passions, political systems and aberrant sexuality (for example, here). This cultural Christianity sheds the shackles of historical Christian morality and embraces the subjective nature of the Übermensch. In other words, the vacuum left by the retreat of the orthodox values of the Church has not been replaced by science, reason, or logic but by a new, more palatable form of Christianity (if one can call it Christianity at all). A Christianity that operates smoothly within the fluidity of post-modernism and can adapt with the concepts that can synthesize together seemingly opposing truth claims.

If your desires tell you that to avoid nihilism you must augment your body to conform with your subjective gender identity, then the Übermensch Cultural Christian (we will call them Progressive Christians) will affirm such drastic action. Why? Because this Jesus is a different Jesus and because we have not so much moved beyond a cultural Christianity but have reinvented what it means to be a cultural Christian. This Jesus operates under new definitions of love, truth, morality, holiness and justice.

It is no wonder that progressive Christianity happens to often affirm nearly all the dogmatic moral stances of the current secular cultural values system. This is because progressive Christianity has supplanted orthodox Christianity as the dominant Cultural Christianity. In Progressive Christianity Jesus would not want you to be transformed by the renewing of your mind and away from certain sins but to set yourself free of the sins of certainty, doctrines of hell and the shackles of prudish thought.

Thus, if you express a culturally heterodox position based in classic orthodox Christian theology you will be maligned as hateful, bigoted, or hypocritical. The new cultural Christianity declares you not really a Christian, or at least, a hypocritical one.

The Challenge Before Us

Many have wondered how someone like Joe Biden or Nancy Pelosi could declare their fealty to the Catholic Church while affirming positions on abortion, marriage, and contraception that would have, in the past, excommunicated them from the Church. The answer lies within this new cultural Christianity. Biden and Pelosi are not Catholics in any meaningful or historical sense of the term, but they are cultural Catholics or current cultural Christians. They have adopted progressively loaded theology for political expedience. They have adopted the new cultural Christianity.

30 Years Ago . . .

It seems to me that progressive Christianity is becoming (if it is not already) the cultural Christianity of the West and of the United States in particular. Thirty years ago, cultural Christians would espouse a similar moral framework to born again Christians. This is why the church could open its doors and receive unbelievers from their communities and preach the gospel from the pulpit and it made sense even to the unbeliever. Not everyone believed or responded with faith, but they understood the argument. They understood it because the culture was built upon it. Obviously, this form of cultural Christianity was not without its warts but now we see a completely different effect.

When unbelievers or unchurched people come and sit in our congregations, they may consider themselves “cultural Christians” but their approach to morality has been shaped and molded by progressive cultural Christianity. The gospel from the pulpit in this moment makes no sense to them. Sin is now oppression and repression not immoral behavior that misses the mark of the holy God. Love is affirmation of the inner-man and a necessity to aid in bending reality around those desires to find true happiness.

Sounds a bit like Neitzsche’s Übermensch.

When these cultural Christians come to our churches, they hear the same words but through a completely different cultural lens. They are cultural Christians, but their sense of Christianity is shaped by progressive theology and humanistic philosophy. It becomes a cross-cultural conversation (See: 3 conversations and how to have them) even among people who would call themselves Christians.

Thirty years ago the mainline denominations followed suit with the cultural Christianity of the day. Mainline denominations have often blown with winds of doctrine shaped by cultural Christianity and given the United Methodist Church’s recent removal of the prohibition on gay clergy it is safe to say that their drifting into the progressive cultural Christianity is nearly complete.

Interestingly, many formerly recognized “new atheists” are seeing this before our Christian leaders. People like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, James Lindsey and even Richard Dawkins are seeing it, but they haven’t the faintest clue what to do about it. Dawkins decries the rise of Islam in England but struggles to recognize that the rise of Islam is, at least in part, due to this new form of cultural Christianity. A cultural Christianity that affirms multiple paths to the ultimate good will open itself up to the belief systems of Islam and others. A cultural Christianity that views scripture and sin primarily through the lens of intersectionality and oppressed-oppressor narratives will likely embrace any belief system deemed as being “othered” by the West.

Ironically, it is Dawkins’ belief that real Christianity ought to be abandoned while cultural Christianity ought to remain that leads us into this new cultural Christianity that resembles Nietzsche’s remedy for nihilism in the Übermensch.

So yes, I believe we have moved into a post-Christian era, but more than that I believe that post-Christianity has merely become an embrace of a new kind of cultural Christianity, and it is closely aligned with progressive theology. Once we recognize this, the cultural picture suddenly becomes much clearer and perhaps our strategies for engagement and evangelism will follow suit.

References:

[1] Richard Dawkins, Interview with LBC (May 2024), at: https://youtu.be/COHgEFUFWyg

[2] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Bernard Williams, ed., Josephine Naukhoff, trans. (Cambridge & NY: Cambridge, 2001), 119-120.

Recommended Resources:

Was Jesus Intolerant? (DVD) and (Mp4 Download) by Dr. Frank Turek 

Jesus vs. The Culture by Dr. Frank Turek DVD, Mp4 Download, and Mp3

Stealing From God by Dr. Frank Turek (Book, 10-Part DVD Set, STUDENT Study Guide, TEACHER Study Guide)

Another Gospel? by Alisa Childers (book)

 

Josh Klein is a Pastor from Omaha, Nebraska with over a decade of ministry experience. He graduated with an MDiv from Sioux Falls Seminary and spends his spare time reading and engaging with current and past theological and cultural issues. He has been married for 12 years to Sharalee Klein and they have three young children.

Originally posted at: https://bit.ly/4d2BgjR

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What Harrison Butker and Football Teach Us About Right and Wrong

Were Harrison Butker’s bold statements during his recent Benedictine College commencement speech worth all of the public backlash he received in response? Although many are now hailing the Super Bowl winning NFL kicker as a hero for speaking up, others are calling for him to be fired from the league altogether. What exactly did he say that caused so much outrage and what biblical truths can we gather from the controversial (and now viral) speech?

For this midweek podcast, Frank unpacks Harrison Butker’s words from a biblical worldview and highlights how Butker called out some of the lies, harmful ideologies, and inconsistencies that our culture and national leaders have been feeding us. During this podcast episode, Frank will answer questions like:

  • Does the book of James teach salvation by works?
  • What does the game of football teach us about morality?
  • Do Christians always have to be “nice” in order to be loving?
  • Did Jesus ever engage in politics?
  • How is Joe Biden “neglecting the weightier matters of the law”?
  • Are biblical gender roles oppressive to women?
  • Is comfort the true meaning of life?
  • What are the pros and cons of becoming a Christian?

Later in the episode, Frank will share his own personal experience of being canceled in corporate America due to writing his book ‘Correct, Not Politically Correct: About Same-Sex Marriage and Transgenderism‘ and how it launched him into ministry full-time. He’ll also talk about the importance of being willing to speak up (like Butker) as a means to fight back against cancel culture and to illustrate TRUE love, even if it comes at a cost.

And if you want to learn more about how to stand up for truth in a toxic culture, consider enrolling at Frank’s alma mater, Southern Evangelical Seminary!

To view the entire VIDEO PODCAST be sure to join our CrossExamined private community. It’s the perfect place to jump into some great discussions with like-minded Christians while simultaneously providing financial support for our ministry.

You can also SUPPORT THE PODCAST HERE.

 

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Who Is Living Inside Your Kid’s Head? | with Shanda Fulbright

Why do your kids believe what they believe about the world and the purpose of life? Are you equipping them to make good decisions now and in the future when you’re no longer there to protect them? Will their knowledge of truth, logic, and God’s Word ultimately prevail against the conflicting (and sometimes hidden) messages they might hear from friends, teachers, and TikTok?

If you’re a Christian parent, these are the questions that keep you up at night, but have no fear–the great Shanda Fulbright is here! As a mom, former California public school teacher, and certified apologist, Shanda is no stranger to the challenges Christian parents face during these crazy cultural times. In this week’s podcast episode, Shanda and Frank discuss the subtle ways that secular society is indoctrinating or “discipling” today’s youth with destructive and even anti-Christian ideologies. During their discussion, Frank and Shanda will answer questions like:

  • What made Shanda question her faith as a 17-year old raised in the Church and what helped her overcome her doubts?
  • What are the 3 key characteristics of “discipleship” and how is it more than just a religious term?
  • What are 3 ways that the public school system is strategically discipling K-12 students?
  • How did Shanda react when a teacher shared a book about transgender ideology with her son’s class?
  • What do the statistics show about faith in God among America’s youth and their parents and what does that mean for the Church?
  • What are Shanda’s top 3 tips for parents who want to be more intentional about discipling their kids?

Parents and other caregivers–consider this your wake-up call! The reality is that your kids are being discipled by someone or some thing. If you don’t disciple them with THE truth, who will? We know you’ll benefit from this week’s podcast episode, and as a follow-up, consider enrolling your middle-school student in one of Shanda’s self-paced courses this summer, or join Shanda LIVE in her ‘Train Your Brain: An Introduction to Logic‘ PREMIUM course this fall!

To view the entire VIDEO PODCAST be sure to join our CrossExamined private community. It’s the perfect place to jump into some great discussions with like-minded Christians while simultaneously providing financial support for our ministry.

You can also SUPPORT THE PODCAST HERE.

Shanda’s courses:

Is Hell Real? Understanding a Place Nobody Likes to Talk About – Self-Paced Course
Let’s Get Real: Examining the Evidence for God – Self-Paced Course
Train Your Brain: An Introduction to Logic – Self-Paced Course
Train Your Brain: An Introduction to Logic – PREMIUM Course Starts 9/9/2024

Other resources mentioned during the episode:

Apologetics Curriculum for All Ages – 2nd Grade to Adult!
Jonathan Haidt – Research and articles on effects of social media on adolescents

 

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HELP! My Pastor Doesn’t Talk About Cultural or Political Issues! with Tony Perkins

You love your pastor, but why won’t he address crucial cultural, moral, or political issues from the pulpit? Is there anything that you or your church can do about it? Furthermore, what risks lie ahead for faithful pastors who do actually speak out against the culture and rightly stand up for the truth of God’s Word?

For this midweek podcast episode, pro-life advocate and political leader, Tony Perkins, returns to talk more about the need for Christians and pastors to engage in political issues, and to defend the biblical worldview in the public square. If your pastor or your church seems totally disengaged from the political world, how can you inspire a change of heart? Why do so many pastors choose to remain quiet on culturally taboo issues like the right to life and natural marriage? And what resources are available for those who want to lead the charge and equip people in the church on where the candidates and parties stand on the most important issues? Frank and Tony will discuss all of this and MUCH more in the conclusion of their talk on faith and politics!

To view the entire VIDEO PODCAST be sure to join our CrossExamined private community. It’s the perfect place to jump into some great discussions with like-minded Christians while simultaneously providing financial support for our ministry.

You can also SUPPORT THE PODCAST HERE.

Resources mentioned during the episode:

Part 1: The Top 3 Reasons Why Christians Should Be Involved in Politics with Tony Perkins
Family Research Council: https://www.frc.org/
FRC Action: https://frcaction.org/
Pray Vote Stand: https://prayvotestand.org/
Tony’s website: TonyPerkins.com

 

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The Top 3 Reasons Why Christians Should Be Involved in Politics | with Tony Perkins

Should Christians get involved with politics, or should we just stay out of the way because “religion and politics don’t mix”? While some Christians have the tendency to idolize political influence, others have gone to the opposite end of the spectrum, choosing to completely shy away from engaging in public policy altogether. What does the Bible and common sense have to say about this?

This week Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council who has worked with congress and presidents for decades, joins Frank to talk about the need for Christians to take politics seriously and use it as a means to advance the Gospel by protecting religious freedom and to love their neighbors by protecting them from evil for generations to come. As a pro-life/pro-family advocate and political leader with a background in both the U.S. Marine Corps and ministry, Tony will share some valuable insights into the current political landscape, urging Christians to actively participate in shaping laws and policies. During their conversation, Frank and Tony will answer questions like:

  • How did Tony unexpectedly enter the realm of politics and why does he think more Christians should do the same?
  • How can Christians be salt and light in the government and treat it as a mission field?
  • What should Christians do when candidates for each party are morally compromised?
  • How have Christians been negatively impacted by bad policies?
  • What political issues can Christians disagree over?
  • How can Christians and conservatives make real policy gains?

A force for good in Washington, Tony will lay out just a few reasons why Christians should not only get involved in politics, but view it as a form of ministry. He and Frank will also address the latest controversy with Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, explain the distinction between imposing religion and legislating morality, and lay out some of the key platform differences between Democrats and Republicans. And don’t miss the conclusion to this eye-opening conversation as Tony returns next week for the midweek podcast!

To view the entire VIDEO PODCAST be sure to join our CrossExamined private community. It’s the perfect place to jump into some great discussions with like-minded Christians while simultaneously providing financial support for our ministry.

You can also SUPPORT THE PODCAST HERE.

Resources mentioned during the episode:

Family Research Council: https://www.frc.org/

FRC Voter Guides: https://frcaction.org/

iVoterGuide: https://ivoterguide.com/

Tony’s website: TonyPerkins.com

 

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The #1 Surprising Rule of Life | with J. Warner Wallace

Can Christians learn to love the same way God loves? Cold-case homicide detective turned Christian apologist, J. Warner Wallace, answers that question for us in his brand-new book ‘The Truth in True Crime: What Investigating Death Teaches Us About the Meaning of Life.’ But how exactly did researching some of his own murder investigations lead him to discover the truth about God’s nature and His love for humanity?

For this midweek podcast episode, Jim returns to talk more about his new book and to share what he’s learned about marriage, justice, grace, and mercy through his deep study of contemporary true crime. What key quality is needed to be successful in life? Why do so many police officers struggle in their marriage? Why is pride such a dangerous sin? What’s the distinction between shame and guilt? All of these questions and more will be addressed as Frank and Jim wrap up this intriguing and insightful two-part discussion!

To view the entire VIDEO PODCAST be sure to join our CrossExamined private community. It’s the perfect place to jump into some great discussions with like-minded Christians while simultaneously providing financial support for our ministry.

You can also SUPPORT THE PODCAST HERE.

Order Jim’s Book: The Truth in True Crime

Listen to Part 1 of the discussion: The Truth in True Crime with J. Warner Wallace

 

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The Truth in True Crime with J. Warner Wallace

Have you ever wondered why America is so obsessed with death and murder, or why some of today’s most popular podcasts, shows, and TV networks are all centered around the topic of true crime? What’s the reason for our curiosity with murder and what life lessons can we learn from studying even the worst of these true crime stories?

If you’re a true crime junkie, this is the podcast episode for you! This week, our favorite cold-case homicide detective turned Christian apologist and author, J. Warner Wallace, sits down with Frank to talk about the inspiration behind his brand-new book, ‘The Truth in True Crime: What Investigating Death Teaches Us About the Meaning of Life‘, which explores 15 life-truths that he discovered through his study of the Scriptures and some of his most notorious murder investigations. During their conversation, Frank and Jim will answer questions like:

  • Why are women especially drawn to the genre of true crime?
  • How do men and women view identity differently?
  • What is the true cause of trauma and PTSD?
  • What are two common ways that identity is formed in people?
  • How does humility contribute to human flourishing?

Later in the episode, Jim will open up about his own personal journey through an unexpected season of identity crisis and reveal the most shocking discovery he made while writing the book. Be sure to pick up your copy of ‘The Truth in True Crime‘ and come back next week to hear the conclusion of Frank and Jim’s discussion on how true crime exposes certain truths about human nature.

To view the entire VIDEO PODCAST be sure to join our CrossExamined private community. It’s the perfect place to jump into some great discussions with like-minded Christians while simultaneously providing financial support for our ministry.

You can also SUPPORT THE PODCAST HERE.

Order Jim’s Book: The Truth in True Crime

 

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