Cancel culture needs a new type of Christian apologetics

In our postmodern culture, lived experience and personal conviction trump evidence, reason and appeal to authority. Benjamin Chang suggests that instead of arguing and reasoning, Christians need to tell a better story

Richard Dawkins best-selling book The God Delusion was published 17 years ago. In the introduction, he boldly declares that his ambition is for: “religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down.” At the time, Dawkins was one of a group of increasingly prominent individuals known as New Atheists, who were beginning to publish popular books defending the worldview of atheism and arguing that belief in God is irrational and unscientific.

This necessitated an approach to Christian apologetics that could meet the intellectual questions, challenges and arguments of atheism. And so Christian apologists, particularly in the areas of science and philosophy, set out to give a robust and reasoned intellectual defence for Christian faith through books, talks and public debates. When Dawkins argued that faith in God is delusional, it required a response from those who could show that it is not.

However, nearly two decades on from its publication, the tectonic plates of culture have shifted.