6 Christians Vs. 1 Secret Atheist | Asking the Right Questions

Questions That Reveal Nominal Christianity

Seven people all professing to be Christians getting to a boxing ring, but there's a twist one of them is lying. And is actually a secret atheist. So everyone's job is to ask questions and have conversations in order to determine who the secret atheist is tonight.

Gina Logan I think we should chat about this video because there are some.

Really interesting pieces there and I think some helpful takeaways. I wanted to ask you is your church queer friendly. LGBTQ friendly.

Yes, actually, there's two pastors and one is a biracial lesbian. Wow. Why did you choose a non-denominational church?

Let's just. I mean I was just born into it. So my dad's a pastor.

Anyone else? Okay. No, I am.

What the PK.

Pastors kid. Yeah, I've never heard that. Yeah, they usually the bad kids at your school. So.

There's like certain terms. I think a lot of people just know. I Assumed his lack of knowledge meant he wasn't a Christian and he was trying to like pick up on things as we said them.

Logan I'll go to you first. Having watched the video What did you observe about the types of questions? But the general conversation that was discussed.

Well, first of all who and the heck doesn't know what a PK is that. That's weird, but.

Oh.

Really you never heard that before. I've never heard the term PK like the shortened. Oh, man.

I hear that all the time. Yeah. Anyway, so it just cracked me up. But um, so in general something that Kind of jumped out at me. Is it all not just in these clips, but in general, these are all very experientially based questions.

So I'm thinking if I want to know who's the Christian who's the atheist I'm thinking ask people to give what I would. Want to ask is ask people to give reasons for their faith because you're only Be able to fake, you know.

Giving reasons you don't agree with for so long, but the questions are all very experiential. Um, have you. You know asking about a supernatural experience. So the angel appearance. And then there's a lot of questions about what's your experience at church like so I'll ask about.

Because there are more questions like the one at the end. So they asked, you know, is your church? I'm queer friendly. There's also questions about well, how did you decide on your church? Do you attend?

Are you at a regular church now? Stuff like that. And so it seems like these questions are all very. They're they're very experience based and they're very Not so much to do with what we've just been talking about like objective truth, they're more to do with your subjective experience.

Which tells me that on some level that's how these people are thinking of Christianity. They're thinking of it as a very personal personal and customizable. Sort of aspect of their lives.

Right, I you know the. So there's so much going on. I had to watch it a couple times, you know. And I had so many questions on different levels like I one set of questions was purely on the people in front of the camera.

I had a whole other I don't know about you guys. I had a whole other set of questions about who was behind the camera who was putting this on in the first place. Did you notice this little detail they were using?

Prompts that were provided to them in order to ask questions. You see that. Oh, I hadn't caught that. That's what they're walking up to and looking at. That's what they're walking up to and looking at.

Why the Video Relies on Experiential Questions

So Gene same question. Like what did you notice about these kinds of questions? The the first round is difficult because it was only a minute long.

I would have loved I would love to see an unedited version of this because there was four rounds and Rounds two through four were each ten minutes, but this whole video is only 11 minutes long. I would have loved to see some more questions.

But Logan kind of nailed it all. Everything that's discussed is experiential. It is all What has happened to me how I got here? This kind of stuff. I don't know if I can think of a declarative statement in the entire in the entire video nothing like well, Jesus is God or Bible says this.

And then it seems to me this would have been a very Very easy opportunity to kind of test people on that type of stuff. You know, what's what's your favorite verse in the Bible?

What's.

What's the Bible say about fill in the blank? There just wasn't much of that at all. If you're testing someone you're trying to figure out if they truly believe this thing and You are presumably a believer of the thing then you should ask questions that believers would know.

Don't just ask questions. That they can just make up a story, you know experiential stuff. Now anyone think that almost Tony?

I think did did mention that in the Bible people are usually terrified when they see an angel. We said that in the like the post interview part. Yeah. Yeah, which is interesting to me because not enough Christians You know even in our circles really.

Recognize that I think sometimes but otherwise you're right I think that's really the only mention of you know, comparing something against the Bible that we really see in the video. Now, there is also the fact that Reality TV or game show type things are sometimes, you know.

Sometimes the editor tells their own story. So it's very edited. Yeah, there might be things that are clipped out. But at the same time there, you know, what we have to go on is what we have to go on.

I.

Agree with what you're saying, which is why it's so fascinating because I know it's edited it has to be right. It's just so fascinating that the question prompts are Also experiential. Yeah, so it's like I I can't.

Yeah, it's just really interesting it to me. It's almost like getting a bunch of seven people in a room saying we're all scientists. We're all chemists. And then one of them is not really a chemist. They're just faking and then they all just talk to each other like so what's it feel like to wear a lab coat?

You know like what? What aren't there.

Yeah, what's your church like? Anyone you could lie your your till the days long about that kind of question.

Well, and you get a spoiler. To give a spoiler the. The atheist who's eventually unveiled at the end of the video is someone who grew up going to church.

Yeah, and and so that a little bit too. Did you guys know who it was like partway through it or anything?

No, so my guess made it to the last round.

But it was not the person that was eventually outed. My wife figured it out in the second round like halfway through their second round questioning stuff.

If you just look I Mean. Are we not trying to spoil this for our listeners. If you. Not till the end. Not till the end. Okay. All right. I will make my. Maybe not at all. They got to watch the video. You guys have to earn it.

We can't that's right spoon feed you.

Church Background, Nominal Christianity, and the Limits of the Game

Let me play one more. Let me play another clip. There's the kindness and the grace of God coming out of me.

Let me play another clip for you. Here we go. How long have you been Lutheran my whole life?

Yeah, you know, I grew up in Scandia, Minnesota and like a big part of the town was the church. So I was baptized there. Do you go to a church? Yeah, I go to this one out in Riverside. I just started going there about two months ago now because I grew up going to more of like a strict church and then I Kind of branched away from it and then went back.

What do you mean a strict church? So I grew up Mormon. You know, I kind of had to take my own path and figure out what worked best for me.

I've definitely I've stepped away from church because it's hard for me to find a church.

Especially a Baptist Church that's accepting of the queer community. So I stopped going. Are you looking for something. Are you actively I?

Think that clip is representative of the Level of theological discourse in the entire video. Would you agree?

Yeah, I think so. So and they've mentioned those same issues a couple of different times throughout the video too, right?

That was a recurring pattern, which seems very important. What do you think about that level of?

Discourse. Is it helpful? Is it unhelpful? What do you think you mean. Just like the types of questions that they're asking?

Yeah, like they never it's like Jean pointed out. Did did. We go through the entire video and nobody mentions Jesus.

Yeah so.

Yeah, I think that. So there are two things that jump to my mind. One is what we sometimes talk about which is the generalation. Generationally over the past couple generations, we've seen an increasing Biblical illiteracy and we've seen an increasing amount of people who don't want to publicly Talk about the controversial things about their faith, right?

And so they talk a lot more about the community of the church, but without all the Jesus II stuff, right? It also reminds me. This is gonna sound like of taking the long way around the bend, but trust me.

It's relevant.

So.

Where I so where I grew up in southern, Indiana there was a billboard that I always remember passing because it was on the way to the movie theater and Also to the Christian bookstore that we would go to sometimes and it was a billboard for a church and it was a tie and somebody with scissors cutting the tie and That was the advertisement for the church.

And.

The name of the church is important. It was just a I think was a non-denominational church of some sort but that always kind of rubbed me the wrong way because it would be but their big Marketing pitch was come here.

You don't have to dress up.

Now.

Yeah, and so like now I the church that I grew up in like a lot of the people there were country folk like Almost nobody wore a tie. Our preacher didn't wear a tie most the time like it. So it wasn't that that was offensive to me, but it was like why is that the thing that you're pitching and it has and then Another church who also got tired of seeing it bought out the billboard and put like a respectable church billboard up but as I Just keep coming back to that as like watching this video and thinking about those sorts of things because it does seem that even aside from things like biblical illiteracy things like You know more culturally friendly theology.

Changing our theology be more friendly to the culture. It also seems like there has been Just sort of a cultural focus on You know choose the church that works best for you. That's more most convenient for you.

That's the easiest for you. That's the most comfortable for you. Instead of choose the church is going to challenge you to serve God the most choose the church that's going to Push you into a closer relationship with God, even if that means challenging your comfort level.

Choose the church that is going to enable you to do the most good to to do the most service for others seems like the two things most missing in this video that I think can be indicative of some of the problems in Christian culture is that there's There's too little mention of Jesus right not at all in this case and there's not really any mention of service.

You know, I look at the New Testament and I see service for others all over the place. Both inside the church and outside the church in the community and there's just nothing about that in this video at all.

Right Gene what do you think? What do you think could have been. Better question. I know we kind of touched on this before but what do you think could have been better things to ask and better? Things to say to identify Christians in that in that environment.

You need to try to nail people down and get concrete answers to concrete questions and. They were almost there. So the one question that was asked to Andrew I think the guy in the middle someone asked him what church he goes to or whatever and he said he's been a Lutheran his Whole life.

Okay follow-up. When did the Lutheran Church start. Who founded the Lutheran Church? Where is your church? Who's your pastor all this stuff? Concrete things to nail people down. What do Lutherans believe about fill-in-the-blank and.

Those are the type of questions that in this setting would have been beneficial to try to figure somebody out, right? What we got instead was Comfort questions they were where do you work kind of questions, you know.

The kind of questions you ask someone who you just met which is somewhat reasonable these people just met, right? But they're on a show the where they're trying to figure out who the liar is. So they need to kind of cut to the cut through it all.

They're just asking these sort of where do you work kind of questions and they're not getting to the meat of anything. It's all Very like Logan said experiential very feelings-based. Very sharing my story kind of stuff.

They're not there to preach or evangelize to anybody they're there to figure out who the Christian is and Christians believe very specific things. They do very specific things. So you need to ask about those specific things.

Yeah, you know when when someone comes to. To my church. I mean, I'm sure my church is, you know typical. It's kind of the typical response here, but when someone comes to the church, you know. They go to the pastor and they want to get baptized.

It's understood that this person has professed faith in Jesus Christ prior to getting baptized. But in order to determine like if that has not just happened in order to determine the like the reality of the regenerate heart.

That this person truly believes in Jesus the church has to ask some questions. I mean, this is exactly what the group in the boxing ring was trying to do, you know. Determine whether someone truly believes in Jesus.

But the questions that my church asks the questions that I've been taught to ask Are entirely different. Who is Jesus, you know, what is sin? What does sin do to our relationship with God? Why did Jesus die on the cross?

Like those are gospel.

Why did Jesus die on the cross? You would you would have found the atheist out right there with that question.

Gospel Questions, Regeneration, and the Misuse of Matthew 7:1

Yeah, you know and I think that because I I know that there are some Christians out there that are like no. No, you can't judge somebody's heart, you know, even if they can't quite answer the questions can't judge somebody's heart you know, yeah, but there are.

There are answers at a certain level of clarity I mean little kids come in that can answer these kinds of questions with enough clarity and understanding. That will show you whether or not they they're they're really in it, you know.

And on the other side of that coin, can someone answer all those gospel questions and fake their way through it? Sure, but you know, I don't know. I just think it's very unlikely that someone would take the time to truly understand the answers to these questions.

Try to understand the gospel and not be saved.

Well, and you kind of got two things going on here so one is kind of the application that we're talking about as far as what this shows about Cultural Christianity and some of the weaknesses that we might want to think about addressing, right?

The other thing is also people are trying to you know Figure out who the bull is so they can just get the money right? So the questions I might ask in the actual like game show.

Sort of.

Context are not necessarily the same questions. I ask when it comes to Thinking about Christians who might be like this in our own churches but I mean one of the things that I keep thinking about it is that.

You know.

We have a lot I think a lot of Christians that are kind of in this boat that don't have the will to think about their faith experientially because one of the things that I was thinking about is whenever one of those first questions that they ask that chance responds to The what's a religious experience you had.

He's like, oh I saw an angel when I was a kid. That kind of reminds me of what a lot of our kind of share your testimony. Sharing your testimony at like a small group meeting or you know. Whatever it might be a lot of those kind of look like that, you know.

And like I'm not saying that it's like an anti share your testimony thing. I mean we did that when we first started the podcast. We each had an episode where we kind of talked about our testimonies. But I think that it kind of shows What the basis for a lot of us tends to be us meaning Christians.

Kind of a quote-unquote writ large. But I think it shows that we need to start thinking about how to take What however people came to faith and sort of deepen it and the questions that we've been talking about amongst ourselves.

Our questions, maybe we need to start taking the time to ask other brothers and sisters within our own churches.

Personal Experience, Emotion, and Truth in Evangelism

Yeah.

Gentlemen, let me play one last clip for you here. By the way, Neil Tremblin, hello Neil. Looks like you spent some time with Logan and survived. So thanks for that. Thanks for letting everybody know and thanks for listening and watching.

I'm gonna play one last clip for you and.

I'll just get your thoughts. Here we go. Personal experience. I think is Huge in the way that we experience religion.

I would say that a lot of times we look at Christianity is like a monolithic kind of thing and that everyone does the same. Thing, you know, even like if you say the word evangelical that usually means one thing.

But that's not that doesn't usually represent all Christians. Even the word Christian barely represents all Christians is I think it's Sierra.

That first speaker there it does she have a point. I mean is personal experience. Does that play a role in Christianity. Now she said it's really important. But where is personal experience in the whole relationship with Christ thing?

What do you think?

Well, the the word relationship with Christ tells you that the experience is important. So she's right in some degree the Bible describes God as our father. You know, we're commanded to commune with our Lord and we're to be members of a body.

So there are experiences all throughout those relationships with the father the son the rest of your congregants. So those are important. Yes. Is that the best way to discern whether someone is a Christian or not?

No, I don't think so not in this setting in the setting of trying to evangelize to someone and try to get them to consider Christ. You you would talk about your experiences, of course. But it's not at the exclusion of truth.

It's not the exclusion of Clarative statements about Jesus why this person needs Jesus and why? Jesus is the is the only answer for all the problems that we have. There are so I'm gonna take one one step onto my pedestal here and Because I think this applies to what we're seeing in this video the misuse of Matthew 7 verse 1 is.

The reason we get these kinds of questions in a contest where they're trying to figure out who the Christian is. You don't figure out who a Christian is by asking their experiences. Experiences can be made up on the spot you ask.

Questions about who Christian is by asking who Jesus is. Questions like you addressed Nate what what does Jesus a sacrifice do for us? Doctrinal questions. And those are the type of things that need to be involved in our evangelism.

Not just Experiential stories or the way you felt when you went to this or that church. So again the misuse of Matthew 7 1 judge not that thou that you be not judged. It does doesn't mean that you abstain from all declarative statements or abstain from all truth claims.

Worried that that someone's gonna get their feelings hurt. The gospel hurts feelings it has to because it should convict you of your sin. And so that needs to be part of our evangelism. And it needs to be part of something like this, too.

Yeah, you know watching this video reminds me that you know people Whenever somebody said something in the moment, I mean even when I'm speaking even when when you guys are speaking. It's almost like This is what we present and so, you know right now You're just everybody else is just as they're listening to me seeing the tip of my iceberg.

But underneath the surface, there's a lot going on there's my foundational beliefs that inform the words that I'm saying right now and I'm seeing a lot of pieces that are under the surface that inform what?

Somebody like Sierra is saying and it reminds me Logan of episodes that we previously did episodes where we talked about how Experience got pushed up in the level of priority in history and how it has altered the church's view and in all of those things.

It's fascinating. It's fat. It's sad. It's fascinating, but I guess Logan. So here's my question to you How sad should I be, you know, do you do you think that this video it's highly stylized it's highly edited.

I understand all of that. Do you think this video or excuse me? This group in the video is really like representative of the typical Christian in today's culture.

So I think if you're talking about people who are nominally Christian people who You know, they claim the name. And they certainly claim a belief in Christ. But aren't necessarily regular church attendees.

I think this is definitely Representative of that segment and there are people in here who regularly attend a church. But a lot of them, I mean, I don't necessarily know without asking them. But I would venture a guess that a lot of these belong to churches that are probably in the universalist camp or in the I'm forgetting the the name of the domination, but Shoot I forget it now, but in the like, let's just say the very very progressive wing of Christianity culturally, right?

I think when we're talking more about people in more conservative Evangelical churches I think that this is not representative. I think there are other cultural issues in conservative evangelical churches sometimes but I think that that is not the same group as we're seeing here if that makes sense, so.

Now with that said there are certainly some, you know concerning things culturally and those people, you know, we want those people to pursue Jesus in truth also. So, so it's not as though it's like well, you know, we don't care about them they're not really in our sub sub camp but.

But I think that that's not indicative of the entirety of Christendom so I think that you know when there are several problems with the statement like The word even when he's saying like the word evangelical doesn't represent the word Christians.

But then he says but even the word Christian doesn't. I can't believe that. And to be fair, this is the one guy out of the Christians in the video that says he hasn't a tit he hasn't had a church in something like yeah, that's true.

So so to be fair.

He is probably the most nominal out of all of them just by the fact that like he Does it hasn't had a church for three years and isn't even looking for one? But I think that is a problematic. Yeah to use the.

The hip kids were problematic these days. So that's problematic. I do think there's some truth to the fact that this group is not representative of.

All of American Christianity. Yeah. Yeah Logan G Neal says on Facebook. We are to worship in spirit and truth just from John chapter 4 emotions must flow from truth. Not the other way around gene. What do you think?

Yeah, that's that's a good word Neil.

And also Christian should be the most basic way to rep to describe all Christians. Yes, like that's. So anyway, but to your question. So there's seven people on this panel, right? It's only seven people.

Two of them were gay. Do we really think two out of seven Christians are gay? I don't think so. Three of them said that whether a church is friendly to the LGBTQ lifestyle is a main concern of theirs.

Three out of seven, I don't think that's the case either three of them were white guys. There were only two females and there was one black person. So we already know just just from the sampling that we see on the screen and what we learn from them.

This isn't a good sampling. This isn't a good cross-cut of of Christianity in in America. So the sampling is either accidentally terrible or intentionally manufactured and I would definitely lean towards the latter.

But all of them did focus on how they felt about their church or an experience that they had whether it was good or bad. Sierra I think talked about how she was hurt by her church. She never went on to say what that meant or anything.

I suspect it means a specific member of her church hurt her.

And.

That's that's terrible and everything we want to shine light on those things and eliminate them. But all of them talked about these experiences and how they felt about their church. So despite the terrible sample size and demographic That was a consistent thing seven out of seven of these.

And I think that's probably to what you were saying Logan. That's probably the nominal Christian side of it. Considering how they feel about their church the people they worship with the vibe they get when they go there and then also What their experiences are like and that's what they are going to judge truth on unfortunately.

Right. Gentlemen, we have a couple minutes left. So this is really open to anybody. Just final conclusions here. Walking away from the video. Is there anything useful in here. And I'll go ahead and say yes.

Especially with Sierra, I think you know hearing about her experiences. Gave me some insight that I had not considered which is you know, that's beneficial. Is there anything useful in here that might help us and our listeners and our viewers about how to have conversations with others in today's culture about Jesus.

Well, so something that jumps out at me is and this is largely from Sierra, but with a couple of the others also. And I can't remember his name, but the guy who said that he grew up Mormon I was thinking about this with him, too.

I think that Those of us who are especially interested in apologetics we can sometimes be in danger of so being so sensitive to the fact that pure experience based faith is a Shallow is a bad way to do.

Our faith is bad way to have it defensive of faith. We can sometimes be so focused on not being that that we tend to expect people to be Robotic logic machines, and I think it's important to recognize that.

That their experiences do not change what is objectively right or wrong, but it's also true that person a person's experience has a really big impact on how they process things and the conclusions that they come to and so I think for me that's a reminder that if I'm If I just know so let's take Sierra as an example if I only know what her views on certain Theological things are I'm gonna be tempted to say well, there's a Shallow Christian with bad theology, right?

But if once I'm talking to her I hear about her story and know she had this whatever this traumatic Experience was or this person that hurt her all of a sudden that puts a new kind of perspective on that.

And so I think that even though we need to be very we need to be Firm and objective when it comes to what are the truth claims about Christianity? What does the Bible actually teach we also need to keep in mind that we have to be sensitive to people's actual? experiences and to keep in mind that there are reasons people come to the conclusions that we do and we need to Be aware of those.

Even if our conclusion is still the same with regards to the actual truth claims. We need to be sensitive to people's experiences.

You're absolutely right Jean. What you got? No, I was just gonna say that's a good point.

As far as what we can take away from this video I I think it's best for use probably for analysis kind of like what we've done sitting down with Somebody maybe this would be a good thing to show to like a high school class or an apologetics class or something and it kind of break things down and say what would you have asked here in this scenario or What can we observe about how they're talking to each other and.

And take that as knowledge kind of background knowledge for how people expect conversations to go In in the real world, right? Because it's gonna be it's gonna start very similar ways, you know, where do you work?

It's gonna start. Where do you go to church? How'd you how'd you become a Christian now that start so it's gonna be beneficial in that way I think I think as far as Taking direct questions or anything from it.

I don't know. I don't know about that But I Logan what you what you pulled away there, especially with what Sierra was expressing I think that's a really good point. We need to we need to learn People's backgrounds on things and that's gonna inform Kind of their views on stuff and and we need to be sensitive to those so great point on that.

Curtis says yes, absolutely. Those that are further along in our walk need to recognize and be sympathetic to those not so far. Visit with them ask questions give truth as an answer. Neil says God gave us the feelings that we have he created us that way.

I Take that to mean that something that we've said a lot Neil which is that we are Emotions and intellect. I mean, this is the way that yeah, God created us emotions and intellect and Very often very very often it is the case that it's the emotions that Lead the logic and so yeah, Logan is absolutely right.

We really need to respect The the the emotional experience that people are having it's an it's all above-board approach basically, but You know if you strip that away and you become a logical robot Then yeah, you're not you're not hitting the felt need where it is, I think my Response then we'll go.

I think when watching a video like this, you know, there are questions that I ask. You know the ones that were coming back to me was what is motivating these people to call themselves Christians in the first place?

You know what brings them to church every Sunday and it's what you said Jean and Logan. It's experience community. Feelings of belonging political correctness those seem to be the motivating factors for why those people call themselves Christians.

Except none of those things are pathways to truth. And so, you know, how do we have conversations? I would spend my time on that right there, you know. And I by the way, I've done this with students in my classroom.

Okay, so personal experience is really important to you. Okay, what do you mean by that? Why do you think that is the case? You know, are you saying that personal experience leads to truth. Emerson thought so Whitman thought so.

But has personal experience ever led you into trouble. See, that's the issue, right? Okay pastors who are pro LGBT is the motivating factor to go find a church. Why should that be the motivating factor?

Shouldn't a church that teaches the Bible accurately and disciples. Well be the motivating factor. You know, what does the Bible actually say about homosexuality? I think those are the questions that we can get into where we can pinpoint exactly What is driving these people to call themselves Christians and to go to church in the first place?

And if we handle those questions correctly, I think that we can deal with the flaws.