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00:00:01
With Kyle Beshears
72 Plays3 years ago
What has driven the shift in recent years from hostility towards apathy in relation to the gospel? When people don't care about the questions of God and faith anymore, what DO they care about? Answering that can help us return our conversations back towards the joy in our salvation and pique the interest of the apathetic.
Kyle Beshears is teaching pastor at Mars Hill Church in Mobile, Alabama and teaches courses on worldview and religion at the University of Mobile. He holds a Master of Theology from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary where he is currently a PhD candidate.. He’s the author of Apatheism: How We Share When They Don’t Care.
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Transcript
Introduction of Hosts and Guest
00:00:09
Speaker
Hello, and welcome back to PepTalk, the persuasive evangelism podcast. I'm Christie and joining you from London today. And once more, I am joined by my brilliant co-host, Andy Bannister. Andy. Hey, how's it going for you? Doing well. I like, I like brilliance. I'll take that to the bank, although I probably owe you a check for that. So thank you for that. You're great. I'm also joined by a wonderful guest today. We've got Kyle Beshears. Kyle, how are you doing? Good. How are you?
00:00:38
Speaker
Doing well, thank you. We're really looking forward to our conversation with you today. Well, you've done lots of research in a topic that is just so important and crucial for us to be engaging in and thinking about. I've done a very small amount of it myself, but you've actually written a huge book on it called Apotheism, How We Share When They Don't Care. Carl, what got you into thinking about the topic of apathy? How did you first come across it? What got you involved in it?
Encountering Religious Apathy
00:01:08
Speaker
That's a really good question because actually the first time I encountered apotheism was in the UK. My wife and I relocated to Cambridge and we were there for about three years. And during our time there, I'd like to have evangelistic conversations with people, gospel conversations, and a lot of them were falling flat on their face.
00:01:29
Speaker
And I mistook that for them being hostile to the gospel or like not having enough time to give me the attention to have those kinds of conversations. And interestingly, it wasn't until I was speaking with a Muslim man who was proselytizing in the market square there in the center of the city
00:01:48
Speaker
that he pointed out to me that he was having similar issues. I thought that was really strange because I wasn't going around Cambridge trying to, you know, proselytize people to Islam. But he pointed out, no, no, no, no, no, it's not that. It's that the people that we're trying to talk to are completely indifferent to questions related to God altogether.
00:02:09
Speaker
So it's not so much that they're angry or that they're hostile, like some of the new atheist movement might have been in the past. It's just that they see God as being completely irrelevant. And so having the conversation about Jesus is irrelevant to them. And he asked a question that really haunted me. I'll never forget it. He was kind of looking out into the bustle of the market and he said, so many of these people don't care about God, how can that possibly be?
Cultural Shift: Hostility to Apathy
00:02:38
Speaker
And that question kind of haunted me, and it sent me on this little path of answering it, really, from a Christian perspective. So, Carl, before we get into a little bit on how we had
00:02:50
Speaker
how we address it and how we engage with friends and neighbours and colleagues who are apathetic. Have you got a sense of what's driving it? What's brought that cultural moment? Because, you know, I can imagine, I think it was the case when I was sort of growing up, you know, I won't say how many decades ago, but, you know, not that long ago, those questions around, you know, the more atheistic questions were there, I think, you know, as a
00:03:12
Speaker
a teenager and young adult I think you know most of my friends were probably not not actively like angrily hostile but if you raised faith they would come back with a question or an objection but we now shifted into this cultural moment where there's more of the apathy around what's you've got any sense of what's driving that
00:03:27
Speaker
It is really interesting too because when I was in Cambridge I had the opportunity to go to the Student Union and there was a really thorough debate between a new atheist and a theist and it was very lively and a lot of people were interested and yet at the same time there was this kind of
Understanding Apotheism
00:03:44
Speaker
shift in the air that these kinds of conversations that we're having are a little passé or they're becoming expired and we're moving on to something different and I think that something different was first pointed out by a guy named Jonathan Rauch who wrote an essay called Let It Be in the Atlantic Monthly. He described himself as an atheistic Jew but really he's an apotheist. It's kind of the first one to popularize this term
00:04:10
Speaker
in that he just doesn't really care about whether or not God exists. And the conditions to go from where we're having really lively debates about the question of God to one of complete indifference, I think can only happen when conditions are just right. And those conditions are just right in a lot of Western society.
00:04:30
Speaker
Obviously, I think we can all intuitively imagine secularism as playing into this. And so if belief in God is contestable, maybe he's irrelevant. Or secularism as a plurality of beliefs. So there is just so many different beliefs. And who has the right answer? I don't know.
Comfort and Apathy in Society
00:04:50
Speaker
I'll just let the philosophers sort that out.
00:04:52
Speaker
But I think also too, there's a type of status of life that a lot of Westerners enjoy, which is that we're very comfortable. So we have all of our needs met. None of us really think about the rain being sufficient to give us a harvest so that we can survive through the winter like people did centuries ago or many people do around the world today.
00:05:12
Speaker
And also we're very distracted. We wake up in the morning from sunrise to sunset and our attention is constantly being called by just many, many different voices from our smartphones to our computers, to our tasks. And so we've lost the bandwidth to meditate on some of the most important questions. So you put all of those conditions together, the contestability of God, the diversity of belief in God, with our comfort and our distraction,
00:05:42
Speaker
questions about God and how he relates to our lives, we don't prioritize and the longer we don't prioritize them, I think the more they become irrelevant to us. Thanks so much, Carl. That's such a wonderful overview because I'm familiar with the article in The Atlantic that you refer to because doesn't Rauch talk about how apotheism is kind of like a tonic to take against the extremism of religions and
00:06:11
Speaker
non-religions as well. So how do we, for societies then that have pretty much self-medicated through kind of materialism, as you mentioned, and have pretty much kind of put on this layer of apathy, whether by choice or cultural conditions, how do we go about actually
Apotheism and Extremism
00:06:31
Speaker
engaging that? How do we go about tapping away and trying to kind of just chink through that hard crusty layer of apathy in our conversations?
00:06:41
Speaker
Yeah, so there's two things in there. The first is Rauch's point, as you rightly pointed out, he was arguing that this kind of soothes the extremisms of ideologies. And honestly, to a point, I empathize with the argument that he was trying to make. So we have to remember, this is 2003 when he writes the essay in the United States, in New York, if I'm not mistaken. And so just on the heels of 9-11, there's a lot of questions about what do we do with
00:07:09
Speaker
extreme ideologies that lead to violence. And Rauch's recommendation was, well, if we just don't care about our beliefs, to his credit, whether they're religious or not religious. So he would say, you know, extreme religious beliefs or kind of secular religious beliefs like Stalinism. Now, if we don't care about our beliefs so much, then maybe we'll just kind of drift off into this tranquility, this live and let live type of a type of belief.
00:07:37
Speaker
And to a certain extent, I think his prophecy or prediction is coming true, at least in the United States. And I'm sensing probably something similar in the UK and Western Europe in general. But there's a problem with this, though, because as believers, we know to be completely indifferent to God is to be completely indifferent to not only our holy creator, but also the source of everything that we're looking for in life when it comes to meaning and value and purpose.
00:08:06
Speaker
our question in the place in the universe. I mean, you are shutting yourself off from the questions that your heart desires the most to be answered. So when we encounter apotheism, I think our first response as believers should really be to search for apotheism in our own heart because we're swimming in the same water that all of our neighbors are swimming in.
00:08:27
Speaker
But then second, a brokenness to desire to see them with a true and holy fervor to God. So I guess that kind of leads to the second part of your question, but maybe there's some thoughts in there before
Relevance of Faith in Daily Life
00:08:42
Speaker
we go there. Kind of, what do we do? How do we share?
00:08:45
Speaker
Well, one thought that occurred to me as you shared that remark there, Carl, was that, you know, at the back of my mind, like for many of us actually in recent years, has been, you know, in some sense, not all of this is new, right? And to go, I often, it's interesting to look back to that famous quote that's doing the rounds a lot these days, you know, the Pascal one, you know, first make, present gospel in such a good way that good men wish it were true, and then show that it is. Because, of course,
00:09:13
Speaker
unless you actually appreciate that the gospel matters. And I wonder if there's something in here, right? Because it occurs to me to take it out of a spiritual setting, if you try and sort of say to me that you don't really care about cricket, I'll be sad as an Englishman that as an American, you prefer these strange sort of non-sports like baseball, which is really just hitting things with sticks.
00:09:38
Speaker
But it's not really gonna worry me. On the other hand, if you say, I don't believe in building foundations, I'm not gonna invite you to build the house for me because one doesn't really matter and one really does. And is there a step in the conversations with our friends where we've somehow got to navigate those waters and perhaps help them see what actually stands on Christian faith? Because you hinted at it, but quite a lot actually stands on the question of God, right? It's not just, God is not just one more abstract fact about the universe, right?
00:10:06
Speaker
Yeah, that's absolutely right. I mean, for starters, well, to go back to the baseball thing, maybe we can find common ground on rounders. Children's playground game, Carl, I would say cricket is a culture.
00:10:23
Speaker
But ironically, I was trying to segue that smoother. But there is a sense in which you still share common ground with people that are completely indifferent to God. And that common ground, as you pointed out, Pascal was thinking about these issues long before most people were. And actually, I think you start to see apotheism during the Enlightenment or
00:10:50
Speaker
that, you know, a few hundred years ago when there's just massive amounts of shift in the way that the Western mind thing's happening. But also you have folks like Kierkegaard or Augustine, and they're all pointing out something similar in that there's, because we're created in the image and likeness of God, we were meant for a relationship with Him. And no matter how hard we try to separate or sever ourself from that, there's always going to be residue. There's always going to be an echo of
00:11:19
Speaker
not only the relationship, but our mismatched desires and finding that relationship in the created order. And so that's
Evangelism and Joy
00:11:28
Speaker
where I think we go when it comes to an apotheist. I think the temptation is, because so long we've been trained with evangelistic and to a certain extent apologetic models,
00:11:39
Speaker
of trying to present some kind of rational argument for the existence of God and then to have a dialogue in those objections and then eventually move them then toward the gospel. But the problem with apotheism is that if somebody's not really interested in the questions related to God's existence, they're really not going to be interested in your arguments related to the questions
00:12:01
Speaker
to questions of God's existence. So we need to find something that they are interested in. And of the many things that we could do, I think everybody's interested in their own happiness and their own joy. And so I found personally that the best kinds of conversations with somebody that I sense to be an apotheist have been in asking kind of, what are their joy bringers?
00:12:25
Speaker
recognizing that the joy bringers, whatever they are, are not powerful and permanent enough to sustain them in life's deepest and hardest challenges. And then that kind of allows me a permission from them to share what my greatest joy bringer is, which is the Lord Jesus, and kind of framing the gospel in those terms.
00:12:49
Speaker
I think that's just such a great way, isn't it, of seeing how none of us are actually apathetic about anything and thinking about it as a term like who are the joybringers. That's really quite a powerful phrase, particularly thinking about this culturally. What kind of conversations have you had as you asked that question to people around you?
00:13:12
Speaker
Yeah, so it can become a really uncomfortable conversation to have. And I want to tell you one of one that I think failed first, because so often I think people present all of the Ws, as we say in America, and they never talk about kind of where they messed up.
00:13:34
Speaker
Because the conversation is so hard to have, I remember in specific one fellow in a coffee shop was traveling in town. I don't remember what it was for, but it was his work and the conversation just kind of struck up and he asked me what I did and I told him I was a pastor and he said, oh, okay.
00:13:51
Speaker
Like, I'm sorry, I started this conversation kind of. But when we started talking about things of, you know, spiritual significance, he kind of just told me, you know, God's not really all that interesting to me. I'm kind of indifferent to that question. And so I went with the, you know, well, let's change gears here. What brings you happiness in life?
00:14:10
Speaker
The thing that brought him the most happiness was, if I remember correctly, he was a marathon runner and his family. I asked him, God forbid the day comes you're not able to run and something happens to your family, they're taken away from you, what would then bring you joy?
00:14:34
Speaker
Like, where do you see yourself going if this is, if your family in running are the two primary sources of what gets you up in the morning and what brings you happiness in life? What happens if those things are taken away? And it was a very hard and a personal question that he didn't want to answer, so he slammed his laptop shut and moved to another table.
00:14:55
Speaker
I can only hope and pray that for the first time in his life, he kind of had to take a step back and recognize that his joybringers are not powerful and permanent enough to sustain him all the way through his life.
00:15:12
Speaker
Um, but I will say another time I was speaking with, uh, a gal, um, whose career it was, that was her greatest joy bringer. And I asked the question, what happens if you move from, you know, one career to another, you get fired or something happens. And we kept going from source to source to source until finally she realized and got where I was going with it. And she says, well, what brings you your joy bringer or what's your joy bringer? Right. And I tell her, and I kind of present the gospel to her and my testimony in it.
00:15:42
Speaker
And it was the first time that she had ever heard an expression of Christian faith as it related to a joy that transcends anything that we can find in the created order. And it sparked an interest in her that allowed us to talk for another 45 or so minutes about who is God, who is God's son, how do we know this in his word.
00:16:05
Speaker
And she even let me pray with her at the end of it, which if I had started the conversation with just saying, hey, I've got five really convincing arguments that God exists, I don't think we would have gotten there.
Engaging Conversations through Joy
00:16:19
Speaker
So starting with those joybringers and her heart, I believe, was prepared for that kind of a conversation and being a good steward of those moments. It ended up not only in a gospel presentation, but also prayer.
00:16:33
Speaker
Yeah, I love those stories. And I think what particular about that latter one I find interesting, Kyle, is that it does, in a sense, bring us back to Pascal. While somebody thinks that the Christian faith has nothing to say to those issues of the everyday, no wonder I think that people are going to go wandering off and think, well, there's not a conversation to have here. But when you can see the relevance,
00:16:58
Speaker
So we'll go into our last sort of two or three kind of minutes or so. So I suppose a kind of final question I might have you. You've obviously been thinking about this for a long time and practicing this. And I love your humility of being willing to share stories where it went badly wrong and where it worked. So for someone listening to this who's intrigued and thinking, gosh, this is interesting because this is from what you described.
00:17:21
Speaker
sums up my friends, my colleagues, my neighbors. How does somebody start on this journey? And obviously they can read your excellent book, which we will put a link to in the show notes. People can check that out. What are some of the first steps that somebody practically can take into exploring this kind of approach to sharing their faith with friends and colleagues and so forth?
00:17:39
Speaker
One of the things I argue for in the book is that before we jump out of the gate, we need to check hearts that are as close to us as our own chests. I think the first thing to go to is your own self. Have I been affected by apathy?
00:17:57
Speaker
It was Brendan Manning who said that sometimes Christians when they present the gospel are like unconvincing travel salespeople pitching a place or destination they have never been themselves. And so maybe there's some self-reflection that we need to repent from idolatry of finding our joy bringers in the created order primarily and not primarily in God.
00:18:22
Speaker
And that we would pray, like David did in Psalm 51, to return to me the joy of your salvation, to recognize that we have been given a gift of eternal life by faith through the death, burial, and resurrection of the Lord Jesus, regeneration of his Holy Spirit. Those are all great things that should bring us a tremendous amount of joy, not artificial happiness.
00:18:43
Speaker
but a true and a sincere joy. So before you even begin to approach your neighbors, ask yourself, have I lost the joy of my salvation and do I need it returned? And then second, when you are ready to talk to your neighbors, again, I think the conversations have to be flipped. We're starting from a deficit of interest that for so long we've just assumed people are going to be interested in talking about God. But for a growing number of people, that's just not true anymore.
00:19:12
Speaker
So instead of assuming that they're interested in talking about God, I think we assume they're interested in talking about what they want to talk about themselves. They want to talk about things in culture. And I think you had, I saw, I didn't listen to the episode, but you had a guest on named Paul Gould that he and I have actually talked a lot about this subject and presented papers on it together.
00:19:35
Speaker
And his approach to evangelism and kind of our postmodern secular age is what he calls cultural apologetics. So latching on to the aesthetics or what makes things beautiful, what makes things desirable, what draws our hearts and what orients our affections in our life.
Culture, Beauty, and Faith Discussions
00:19:58
Speaker
To leverage those kinds of conversations and point out that
00:20:04
Speaker
no matter how beautiful we think something is or no matter how lovely or how wonderful, all of those things pale in comparison to the love and the joy and the wonder that is upstream from everything in the created order, who is God Himself. So much there for us to feast on and to take away into our own hearts and into the lives of those that the Lord has given to us around this. Thank you so much, Carl, for your time and for your wisdom.
00:20:33
Speaker
Andy, it's been a joint co-hosting with you. And to our listeners as well, we hope that this will give you kind of just a few kind of ways into conversations with friends who seem to be apathetic about God. Thank you again, Kyle. And we will see you in, not you, Kyle, but listeners. We will see you in a couple of weeks' time with our next wonderful guest. Thanks very much, everybody. Thanks for tuning in. See you soon. Bye.