Somewhere in evangelical culture there’s an unwritten bylaw that says: if someone believes something wildly different than you, put on your spiritual hazmat suit and back away slowly.
Don’t debate the atheist. Don’t date the deconstructing ex-youth-pastor. Don’t follow the guy on Instagram who “asks too many questions.”
He might rub off on you.
Here’s the part nobody says out loud at the church potluck: the hazmat suit isn’t really about protecting the truth. It’s about protecting the fact that most of us never checked whether what we’re holding is true in the first place.
We just know it came from somewhere trustworthy: mom, a youth pastor, a VBS coloring sheet circa 1978. And that felt like enough. Because it eliminated the need to do the difficult work of study ourselves.
Maybe it was enough. But “maybe” is not the same as “verified,” and a lot of us have been treating those two words as synonyms since roughly the Nixon administration.
Nobody Actually Knows What They Believe. They Just Know Who Told Them.
I’ll say the uncomfortable part plainly, hedged only slightly: I think a real reason evangelical culture teaches avoidance is that most of us don’t actually know what we believe. Or, more specifically, what we’re supposedly called to believe versus what just got handed to us at a formative age by someone we trusted and never had reason to interrogate.
That’s not a knock on faith. It’s a knock on inheritance dressed up as conviction.
There’s a real difference between “I believe this because I studied it, wrestled with it, and it held” and “I believe this because Mamaw believed it, and Mamaw was a lovely human being.”
Most of us, if we’re honest, are living off Mamaw’s homework. And here’s the twist that stings a little: a lot of the people we’ve been trained to avoid (the skeptics, the ex-believers, the “difficult” ones) have frequently done more actual studying on the subject than we have.
They read the footnotes. We read the felt board.
Avoidance, then, isn’t really a defense of the faith. It’s often a defense of not having to find out we never did the reading.
The Verse That Ruins the Avoidance Strategy
Which brings us to 1 Peter 3:15, a verse evangelical culture loves to quote and, apparently, has never actually read in context:
“Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.”
Read that plainly and the avoidance strategy falls apart on its own terms.
Here’s why: the verse only makes sense if you’re expected to be in regular contact with people who think you’re wrong. You don’t prep a defense for a courtroom you’ve made sure never to enter.
And notice the assignment isn’t “have a feeling ready.” It’s “have a reason ready.”
A reason is something you can hand to someone else and have it survive contact. A feeling is something you can only hand to someone who already agrees with you, which defeats the entire purpose of an “answer to everyone.”
If the command is to hold reasons, not just warm associations, then maybe, and I say this as someone who was raised to never say it, the convictions you can’t actually back up with scripture or evidence aren’t covered by the command at all.
They’re not the hope you were told to defend. They might just be furniture nobody measured for the room.
Superman’s Alter Ego Ran a Better Bible Study Than Yours
Here’s where I bring in a man best known for wearing a bow tie and yelling “Will the real John Doe please stand up,” because apparently that’s my brand now.
NEW YORK – CBS Radio quiz program Winner Take All with host Bud Collyer at microphone. Image dated July 18, 1949. (Photo by CBS via Getty Images)
I’m talking about a guy named Bud Collyer. Most of you probably have no idea who he is. But, in the middle of the 20th century, Collyer was one of the most recognizable names in the world of entertainment.
As a very young child, I came to know him as the host of a TV show called To Tell the Truth. But before that, he was the guy timing couples through wacky stunts on Beat the Clock, as well as the original radio voice of Superman.
Even before that, though, he was a college kid in a church discussion group that met every Sunday evening in the basement of Broadway Presbyterian Church, near Columbia University in New York City.
His faith would shape the rest of his life. And, he once recounted an encounter in that group setting that helped shape his faith.
One rainy fall night, a stranger slipped into the back row. Near the end of the meeting, he stood up and introduced himself: “My name is Alfred Wall. I come from Texas, and I’m a freshman at Columbia, like most of you. May I take part in your discussion…because I don’t believe in your ideas. I’m an atheist.”
And here’s the detail that should embarrass every church small group that’s ever quietly frozen out the one guy who “asks too many questions”: they let him stay. For years. Wall reportedly stuck around through the rest of everyone’s college years while Collyer and friends tried to argue him into the divinity of Christ and the truth of scripture.
By their senior year, Wall told them flat-out that nobody had convinced him, and then explained why their arguments hadn’t landed, in a line better than most of what gets preached from an actual pulpit: “The divinity of Christ is not a theological argument. The divinity of Christ is an experience.”
Then he added that because he’d had that experience with the members of the group, he wanted to join the church anyway.
Collyer, to his credit, never wrapped the story up in a neat bow.
Years later he was still asking himself whether Wall had been “a unique, unconventional kind of evangelist,” whether the whole atheist routine was a deliberate provocation to force the group to actually learn their own religion instead of reciting it, or whether Wall was ever an atheist at all.
He landed on unresolved — which, ironically, is the most convincing part of his testimony.
Instead of dwelling too long on Wall’s motives or authenticity, Collyer’s most important takeaway was this: the sustained presence of someone arguing against him pushed him to actually understand what he believed instead of just repeating it.
The Part of the Verse Nobody Puts on a Bumper Sticker
Here’s the harder part of 1 Peter 3:15 that never makes it onto the church sign out front: if you’re explicitly commanded to hold reasons, you’re implicitly told to release the convictions that don’t have any.
Doubt isn’t the sin the verse is worried about. Undefended certainty is.
In other words, the stuff we keep insisting on with our whole chest despite having (if we’re honest) no idea where it actually came from beyond “that’s just what we’ve always said.”
Maybe that sounds like heresy to the version of you that grew up terrified of the word “deconstruction.” But, maybe it’s actually the most biblical instinct you’ll have all year.
The Altar Call You Weren’t Expecting
So, here’s your altar call: not “come forward and believe harder,” but come forward and check your work.
Find the person whose worldview makes you the most uncomfortable and let them stay in the room longer than feels polite. If what you believe is actually load-bearing, it will still be standing afterward — sturdier, probably, the way Collyer’s was.
And if it isn’t standing afterward, you didn’t lose your faith. You just found out you never actually had the piece you thought you did.
That’s not a tragedy. According to the guy who wrote 1 Peter, that’s the assignment you agreed to the moment you called yourself ready to answer.
Randomly Rudimentary Life Stuff 
Even Superman Let the Atheist Stay in the Room
By LONNIE KING
Somewhere in evangelical culture there’s an unwritten bylaw that says: if someone believes something wildly different than you, put on your spiritual hazmat suit and back away slowly.
Don’t debate the atheist. Don’t date the deconstructing ex-youth-pastor. Don’t follow the guy on Instagram who “asks too many questions.”
He might rub off on you.
Here’s the part nobody says out loud at the church potluck: the hazmat suit isn’t really about protecting the truth. It’s about protecting the fact that most of us never checked whether what we’re holding is true in the first place.
We just know it came from somewhere trustworthy: mom, a youth pastor, a VBS coloring sheet circa 1978. And that felt like enough. Because it eliminated the need to do the difficult work of study ourselves.
Maybe it was enough. But “maybe” is not the same as “verified,” and a lot of us have been treating those two words as synonyms since roughly the Nixon administration.
Nobody Actually Knows What They Believe. They Just Know Who Told Them.
I’ll say the uncomfortable part plainly, hedged only slightly: I think a real reason evangelical culture teaches avoidance is that most of us don’t actually know what we believe. Or, more specifically, what we’re supposedly called to believe versus what just got handed to us at a formative age by someone we trusted and never had reason to interrogate.
That’s not a knock on faith. It’s a knock on inheritance dressed up as conviction.
There’s a real difference between “I believe this because I studied it, wrestled with it, and it held” and “I believe this because Mamaw believed it, and Mamaw was a lovely human being.”
Most of us, if we’re honest, are living off Mamaw’s homework. And here’s the twist that stings a little: a lot of the people we’ve been trained to avoid (the skeptics, the ex-believers, the “difficult” ones) have frequently done more actual studying on the subject than we have.
They read the footnotes. We read the felt board.
Avoidance, then, isn’t really a defense of the faith. It’s often a defense of not having to find out we never did the reading.
The Verse That Ruins the Avoidance Strategy
Which brings us to 1 Peter 3:15, a verse evangelical culture loves to quote and, apparently, has never actually read in context:
Read that plainly and the avoidance strategy falls apart on its own terms.
Here’s why: the verse only makes sense if you’re expected to be in regular contact with people who think you’re wrong. You don’t prep a defense for a courtroom you’ve made sure never to enter.
And notice the assignment isn’t “have a feeling ready.” It’s “have a reason ready.”
A reason is something you can hand to someone else and have it survive contact. A feeling is something you can only hand to someone who already agrees with you, which defeats the entire purpose of an “answer to everyone.”
If the command is to hold reasons, not just warm associations, then maybe, and I say this as someone who was raised to never say it, the convictions you can’t actually back up with scripture or evidence aren’t covered by the command at all.
They’re not the hope you were told to defend. They might just be furniture nobody measured for the room.
Superman’s Alter Ego Ran a Better Bible Study Than Yours
Here’s where I bring in a man best known for wearing a bow tie and yelling “Will the real John Doe please stand up,” because apparently that’s my brand now.
I’m talking about a guy named Bud Collyer. Most of you probably have no idea who he is. But, in the middle of the 20th century, Collyer was one of the most recognizable names in the world of entertainment.
As a very young child, I came to know him as the host of a TV show called To Tell the Truth. But before that, he was the guy timing couples through wacky stunts on Beat the Clock, as well as the original radio voice of Superman.
Even before that, though, he was a college kid in a church discussion group that met every Sunday evening in the basement of Broadway Presbyterian Church, near Columbia University in New York City.
His faith would shape the rest of his life. And, he once recounted an encounter in that group setting that helped shape his faith.
One rainy fall night, a stranger slipped into the back row. Near the end of the meeting, he stood up and introduced himself: “My name is Alfred Wall. I come from Texas, and I’m a freshman at Columbia, like most of you. May I take part in your discussion…because I don’t believe in your ideas. I’m an atheist.”
And here’s the detail that should embarrass every church small group that’s ever quietly frozen out the one guy who “asks too many questions”: they let him stay. For years. Wall reportedly stuck around through the rest of everyone’s college years while Collyer and friends tried to argue him into the divinity of Christ and the truth of scripture.
By their senior year, Wall told them flat-out that nobody had convinced him, and then explained why their arguments hadn’t landed, in a line better than most of what gets preached from an actual pulpit: “The divinity of Christ is not a theological argument. The divinity of Christ is an experience.”
Then he added that because he’d had that experience with the members of the group, he wanted to join the church anyway.
Collyer, to his credit, never wrapped the story up in a neat bow.
Years later he was still asking himself whether Wall had been “a unique, unconventional kind of evangelist,” whether the whole atheist routine was a deliberate provocation to force the group to actually learn their own religion instead of reciting it, or whether Wall was ever an atheist at all.
He landed on unresolved — which, ironically, is the most convincing part of his testimony.
Instead of dwelling too long on Wall’s motives or authenticity, Collyer’s most important takeaway was this: the sustained presence of someone arguing against him pushed him to actually understand what he believed instead of just repeating it.
The Part of the Verse Nobody Puts on a Bumper Sticker
Here’s the harder part of 1 Peter 3:15 that never makes it onto the church sign out front: if you’re explicitly commanded to hold reasons, you’re implicitly told to release the convictions that don’t have any.
Doubt isn’t the sin the verse is worried about. Undefended certainty is.
In other words, the stuff we keep insisting on with our whole chest despite having (if we’re honest) no idea where it actually came from beyond “that’s just what we’ve always said.”
Maybe that sounds like heresy to the version of you that grew up terrified of the word “deconstruction.” But, maybe it’s actually the most biblical instinct you’ll have all year.
The Altar Call You Weren’t Expecting
So, here’s your altar call: not “come forward and believe harder,” but come forward and check your work.
Find the person whose worldview makes you the most uncomfortable and let them stay in the room longer than feels polite. If what you believe is actually load-bearing, it will still be standing afterward — sturdier, probably, the way Collyer’s was.
And if it isn’t standing afterward, you didn’t lose your faith. You just found out you never actually had the piece you thought you did.
That’s not a tragedy. According to the guy who wrote 1 Peter, that’s the assignment you agreed to the moment you called yourself ready to answer.
Grace and grit to you! —LK
This is SO good, I've gotta share it!
Related