Walk around central London, and you’ll quickly spot the capital’s famous red buses, their sides adorned with advertisements for upcoming films, fashion lines, or beauty products. But in January 2009, they confronted the city with a more provocative message: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”
Created by the comedy writer Ariane Sherine and backed by the British Humanist Association and renowned atheist Richard Dawkins, the “no God” campaign took place during the heady days of New Atheism. Dawkins’s The God Delusion had been selling in copious numbers—just one contribution to a public discourse striking in its contempt for religious faith. Delusion was one of the kinder epithets applied; it was not unusual to hear religion condemned as indoctrination, even abuse.
In a small studio on Chapter Street, not far from Westminster Abbey, however, one 29-year-old was attempting to inject some civility into the conversation. Justin Brierley started his Unbelievable? show on Premier—a Christian radio station in Britain—in 2005, offering believers the opportunity to sit down with an atheist and talk through their respective positions. It was, according to Brierley, not a universally popular addition to the schedule.
“A lot of listeners at the time said, ‘This is a terrible idea because you are bringing these atheists on to argue for atheism,’” he recalled. People expressed fears that Christians would be “shaken in their faith.” Objectors had a point, he conceded: “The format was quite full-on, and it didn’t pull its punches.”
But 900 episodes later, the host stands by his reasoning.
“In the long run, if your faith can’t stand up to some difficult questions, then you have got to ask whether it’s a faith worth having,” Brierley said. “There’s a kind of growth that requires a certain amount of uncomfortable questioning, but rather like the butterfly emerging from the chrysalis, it can be difficult and painful but ultimately it makes you stronger.”
Brierley took his first job at Premier Christian Radio 22 years ago. In that time, he has grown a large and largely online audience with an appetite for in-depth, unashamedly intellectual debate about Christianity’s claims to truth.
In doing so, he has forged a career as a prominent Christian apologist. It’s a role that he has arrived at by an unusual route—as mediator rather than preacher. His tool is the well-timed question offered in service of the listener rather than the monologue delivered to the camera.
His story also tells us something about the evolution of apologetics in 21st-century Britain, where the internet, rather than the institutional church, has played host to debates about the big questions of life, the universe, and everything.
From humble beginnings—his first show featured an Anglican friend and his atheist neighbor—Brierley went on to host guests including Philip Pullman, Tim Keller, and William Lane Craig. His “Big Conversations” series featured Jordan Peterson on the psychology of belief and Richard Dawkins and Francis Collins debating belief and biology.
With the advent of podcasting—Brierley was an earlier adopter—the show gathered an enormous online following, with nonbelievers prominent among them.
Scroll through thousands of comments beneath the YouTube videos of these debates, and a common theme is praise for Brierley’s hosting.
“This guy is the best moderator on earth,” wrote one enthusiastic contributor watching the debate between Christian theologian Keith Ward and atheist philosopher Daniel Dennett. “I was very impressed by the host,” wrote another. “He was even-handed, totally free of aggression, and he always kept the conversation within the audience’s understanding and interest. Even though I’m an atheist and fully convinced of Dennett’s position, I felt completely welcome as a listener, and I’ll definitely come back to this channel!”
N. T. Wright, who is featured on many of Brierley’s shows (including an “Ask N. T. Wright Anything” series), describes him as a “natural” moderator. “He knows when to prompt a speaker, how to draw out something that was implicit but not quite clear yet, and when to add a fresh point that can turn the conversation in new directions,” the British theologian said. Wright cites as a favorite his own conversation with the historian Tom Holland. “We both learned a lot,” he said, “not just from one another but from what Justin was able to draw out from us.”
Writer and broadcaster Elizabeth Oldfield, whose podcast The Sacred has gained a large audience for its sensitive, probing interviews, describes Brierley as “just intensely personable. He seems like someone who is engaging in the world of ideas and has spoken to a lot of intellectual giants with a remarkably low level of ego.”
“He has more of a hosting posture,” Oldfield added. “He’s not been saying, ‘This is my startling new apologetics argument,’ or ‘This is how I have the answers to how Christians should be doing this.’ It’s been a much more hospitable holding of space for conversations.”
Brierley remembers to “greet people with warmth,” she observed, a vital missional skill. “Acknowledge the presence of people who don’t agree with you, name that they are welcome, seek to see things from their point of view, and ask the questions that they might have. It’s that actual empathy for—and liking of—people with different views that shouldn’t be rare, but it does feel quite rare.”
For those weary of ill-tempered exchanges, Unbelievable?, which Brierley left in 2023, stood out for its civility. But while part of the appeal was the show’s exploration of philosophical, existential questions and in-depth engagement with science, there was also a danger that listeners could get lost in theory.
Watch a debate in action, though, and you’ll notice Brierley politely seek clarification from a speaker or attempt to summarize a particularly dense argument. You’ll also see Brierley’s genuine interest in atheistic arguments. “I’ve always said I’d much rather [hear from] a really dogmatic atheist than ‘I really don’t care’ apathetic agnosticism,” he said.
While the show is primarily known for its atheist-versus-Christian format, Unbelievable? soon broadened to include conversations between those of various faiths and between Christians with different theological convictions. Shortly after the death of Osama bin Laden in May 2011, Brierley hosted a radical Islamist, Anjem Choudary, in a discussion about whether the former Al Qaeda leader represented “the true face of Islam.”
Debates could get heated, Brierley recalled, particularly those between Christians and Muslims. In some instances, guests who had honed their craft at Speakers’ Corner, a section of London’s Hyde Park that has hosted public debates since the mid-1800s (and where arrests occasionally take place), brought a more combative approach to the studio.
But for the most part, the conversations illustrated the value of being face to face. Guests joined Brierley at Premier’s recording space in London, leaning over microphones around a white table, with Brierley as moderator in the middle.
By the time the pandemic pushed conversations onto Zoom, familiarity and rapport were already built up: In 2022, Dawkins challenged fellow scientist Collins on miracles with bafflement rather than contempt.
Brierley’s range of guests is notable given current debates about “no-platforming,” or “canceling,” public figures, with British higher ed regulators tracking speaker rejections by universities amid growing concerns about the protection of free speech.
Unbelievable? hosted Jordan Peterson, who in 2019 had his offer of a visiting fellowship at Cambridge’s Faculty of Divinity rescinded, as well as writer Douglas Murray, who has argued that European civilization is dying by suicide as a result of immigration.
Brierley believes that some of his invitations were in error “because their views were probably either so extreme or a minority position that it wouldn’t have made sense to give them a platform.” But he’s still “not a fan of cancel culture.”
He maintains that the format of the show—matching each guest with someone who had an opposing “substantive point of view”—served an important function. For example, some listeners criticized his decision to feature a young-earth creationist. “But the fact is there are a lot—especially in the US—of young-earth creationists,” Brierley said, “so is it fair to just ignore their perspective?”
Brierley grew up in the Jesus Army, a British incarnation of the Jesus Movement, followed by time in independent charismatic churches. He remembers having a “strong peer group” and a “vibrant faith” in those years. It wasn’t until his arrival at Balliol College, Oxford University—where he studied philosophy, politics, and economics from 1998 to 2001—that he first encountered Christians of other traditions or even “proper hard-boiled skepticism about Christianity.”
Having grown up with a “very experiential” introduction to Christianity, he began to research the intellectual underpinnings of his faith, reading apologists that included a fellow Oxford alum, C. S. Lewis.
He was also part of the Christian Arts and Drama Society, a student group that staged evangelistic skits in the town’s streets. One tradition involved a performance in the square outside the Radcliffe Camera, a famous 18th-century library, on mornings when students would return, slightly worse for wear, from all-night parties.
“I’m sure some of these sketches had a bit of a cringe factor to them,” he said. “But they were also our honest, heartfelt attempts to communicate faith in a different way to the student body; there were interesting conversations that happened off the back of them.”
It proved useful training for his work at Premier Christian Radio. He began working there shortly after graduation, learning the ropes as a presenter, including time as a sidekick on the station’s weekday Inspirational Breakfast show hosted by radio veteran John Pantry. Three years in, he pitched Unbelievable?, which quickly became a flagship show.
Its success occurred in parallel with a broader shift in public debate to online platforms through YouTube, podcasting, and social media. Anybody, technically, could build a following. Among Brierley’s regular interlocutors on the show was Alex O’Connor, who founded his Cosmic Skeptic YouTube channel while still a student at Oxford.
This development has “broken down the control that many churches or church denominations once had,” Brierley said. Congregants now have access to a wealth of information, including attempts to debunk religious tenets, at the click of a button.
There have been “casualties from that, who found it difficult to remain a Christian,” Brierley noted, “partly because they had been perhaps exposed to a very one-dimensional form of Christianity, and suddenly it was difficult to transpose that into a wider category.”
But the internet is now “part of our everyday life,” he added, and churches are left learning to adapt. There are some things that it cannot replace, such as the face-to-face community found in local churches, although the transition from online exploration to life in a local church can
be uncomfortable.
“Church in person is not delivered via an algorithm, and that’s the problem,” he said. “We are used to having our very specific interests met in this online world now…. Then, when you turn up at your local church and it turns out it’s not Tim Keller preaching, or it’s not Jordan Peterson delivering a message, there’s a sense of disappointment.”
Those on this journey need to learn that Christianity is “not interesting intellectuals giving you hourlong philosophical treatises,” Brierley said.
“The whole point of Christianity is seeing God’s grace in the everyday and normal…. It’s all very well to go on these intellectual flights of learning and deep thoughts, but if it can’t be translated into the way you live your life next to someone who you just find completely irritating, it is kind of pointless.”
Brierley’s 2023 book, The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God, suggests that churches in the UK may see more new people, including those who have begun to explore Christianity online, walk through their doors. The book’s thesis is that that the “Sea of Faith” described as being in “melancholy” retreat by the Victorian poet Matthew Arnold could in fact be coming back in.
He writes about the radical change in the tone and substance of public conversation around faith—a shift from the “bombastic debates” he hoped to diffuse on Unbelievable? to something much more considered and curious. In addition to giving a eulogy for the New Atheism of the early 2000s, the book explores the trajectory of high-profile public figures “surprised by the continuing resonance of the Christian faith.”
It’s a story that sits in stark contrast to statistical measures of belief in Britain, where a growing proportion of the public (more than half) identify as “no religion” and church attendance continues its precipitous decline.
Last October, the interim results of a three-year study titled “Exploring Atheism” were presented at London’s Conway Hall. The authors suggested that Britain had entered its first “atheist age,” with more atheists than theists. Brierley is careful to qualify that his book is not describing a revival, but possibly “the beginning conditions of a revival.”
“You would hardly recognize the way people are now talking about faith in the public square,” he said. “The big question is, are these people just using it as a sociopolitical tool, a useful fiction? And arguably some of them are. But I also see a number of these individuals who seem to be attracted on an aesthetic, personal level to Christianity.”
He cites the example of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, once hailed as the fifth “horsewoman” of the New Atheists, who has spoken publicly and candidly about her conversion to Christianity.
Oldfield, another close observer of the climate, describes a shift in the center of gravity from the hostility of New Atheism to an acknowledgement of the inheritance of Christian traditions and institutions “with a sort of wistful envy.”
Among those who have raised concerns about the trend is Luke Bretherton, regius professor of moral and pastoral theology at Oxford, who warned of the tendency to treat Christianity as “an endangered species to be protected on special reservations or weaponized to defend Western culture from internal collapse and
external attack.”
Things are also changing within apologetics. Oldfield recently sat alongside Brierley on a panel exploring the idea of a “rebirth” of Christianity, and, in a clip that became widely shared on social media, spoke of the “falling away of the myth that we make decisions based on arguments.”
Ultimately, she said, people come to conclusions based on relationships—people and “the stories that make sense to us.” For too long, she argued, Christians have tried to meet demands for “neat and tidy and palatable” responses to a “very thin, narrow definition of reason.”
It’s a perspective in tune with Apologetics without Apology. In this book, British theologian Elaine Graham suggests that apologetics has “narrowed its focus into a model of rational propositional argument.” She favors a new model, an “invitation to inhabit an imaginative world, in which religious faith ‘makes sense’ of experience.” Most of the proponents she cites for this propositional form of apologetics are male, and many of Brierley’s interlocutors, at least in the early years of the show, were men too.
Today, Brierley shares Oldfield’s sense that people are “often more guided than they are willing to admit by their gut and by their emotion.” The same applies to Christians, he said. “I still think [Christianity] makes intellectual sense, but I wouldn’t be a Christian if I didn’t feel that I encountered something genuinely transcendent, that stirs my emotions.”
It’s significant that Jordan Peterson often becomes emotional during talks—a vulnerability that is critical to his appeal. “We’ve heard people talking endlessly about science and reason and it’s all been good, but people want to connect again with a real sense of being human and that involves a lot of emotion,” Brierley said. “I think it’s come back again. and I am glad that people are no longer dismissing that as just delusional.”
Oldfield adds that she has “softened towards some of those more intellectual forms of apologetics.” Some people, often young men, need to engage in such debates “to allow themselves to drop down to the emotional, existential level, to give themselves permission that it’s worth paying attention to these metaphysical yearnings.”
Brierley left Premier, where he had served as theology and apologetics editor, in 2023. In addition to running the Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God podcast, he now hosts the Re-Enchanting podcast for Seen & Unseen. It’s a venture by the Centre for Cultural Witness, launched by Anglican bishop Graham Tomlin to “inspire a renewal in the public understanding of Christian faith.”
Brierley’s next release, due in April, is an update of an earlier book: Why I’m Still a Christian After Two Decades of Conversations with Sceptics and Atheists. The book is a testament to the conclusion he reached as a student at Oxford: that believing in God is not a delusion but rather, as he puts it in one video, “a perfectly reasonable conclusion when we look at the fingerprints on our universe.”
Among those convinced by his argument is a viewer who, having watched one of his short YouTube films (“How a Dice can show that God exists”), commented about having a die tattooed on their wrist.
Meanwhile, on Sundays Brierley can be found at the suburban United Reformed Church (URC) congregation led for almost 20 years by his wife, Lucy, who was already exploring a call to ordination when they met at Oxford.
Justin was playing Harry the Horse in a production of Guys and Dolls “with a brilliant New York accent,” Lucy recalls.
“I was helping backstage and had been applying his makeup all week,” she said. “When he approached me at the cast party, it became apparent that he thought we were meeting for the first time.”
They were engaged within six months and married 18 months later. She remembers “intense but exhilarating theological discussions” in their early years that widened their perspectives on Christian faith.
His career path did not surprise her, given his intellect, communication skills, faith, and “beautifully calm—actually I would say unflappable—demeanor.”
Their church today has bucked the trend of mainline decline in Britain, and their four children have found their own faith over the years.
Brierley speaks with great affection about his wife’s ministry and the crucial role it has played in keeping his own perspective in place.
“It keeps you grounded as to what real issues are facing ordinary people,” he said. At its best, the church is “where you really see God in action in the lives of people and in the everyday, mundane ways in which we end up serving each other, hurting each other, forgiving each other.”
Lucy sees their jobs as complementary. While she disciples Christians in times of joy and crisis, journeying beside them in regular life, her husband taps thinkers and teachers in conversation about God.
“We’re both dealing with similar issues and spheres but from different angles,” she said. “What we’ve learned is that there is a place for both in the Christian world …. Faith is a matter of the head and the heart, and our respective roles have certainly shown us that.”
While it’s useful to have a “first-rate apologist” on hand at church, she said, Brierley also plays in the music group, volunteers with the youth group, and leads a home group—all roles he brings up on his shows.
Christian faith includes intellectual debate, but it’s important, he said, “to remind listeners who are used to hearing all these weighty intellectual arguments that …what you are hearing is one niche bit that appeals to you.
“Real Christianity is what my wife does: sitting next to the bed of someone who is dying or being involved in helping someone who hasn’t got enough to pay the bills,” he said.
“That to me is the heart of Christianity … I would not want anyone to mistake these intellectual debates and conversations for the real thing.”
Madeleine Davies is a reporter in London, where she covers the Church of England for Church Times.
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