The Dr. Jeff Show Ep. 54 – Natasha Crain

Episode 54: Summary & Transcript

Disclaimer: Please note that this is an automatically generated transcript. Although the transcription is largely accurate, it may be incomplete or inaccurate in some cases due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.

Episode Summary

In this episode, Dr. Jeff interviews author Natasha Crain about her book, Faithfully Different, focusing on the challenge for Christians living in a secular culture. Crain presents research from George Barna indicating that only 6% of Americans and 21% of evangelical Protestant churchgoers possess a biblical worldview. She defines the dominant secular worldview as being based on the “authority of the self,” where feelings are the ultimate guide and happiness is the ultimate goal.

To counter this, Crain proposes a framework for Christians to rebuild their worldview through faithfully different believing, thinking, and living, beginning with regaining a supernatural perspective grounded in apologetics. She concludes by offering practical advice for engaging with non-believers, emphasizing the importance of asking questions to understand their perspective before sharing truth, and focusing on obedience to God rather than on specific cultural outcomes.

Episode Transcript

Dr. Jeff Myers (00:02):
Hey everyone. Welcome to the Dr. Jeff Show. This show’s available on Apple, Google, Spotify, Edifi, Liftable, wherever you get your podcasts. Please review the show and share it with your friends. This is the show where I interview major thought leaders from many fields of influence, showing how our worldview changes everything.

My guest today has written several books. She’s a speaker, blogger, and podcaster who comes to speak about her new book, which I am so happy to endorse. It’s called Faithfully Different: Regaining Biblical Clarity in a Secular Culture. From our guest, Natasha Crain, we’re going to learn about how to live with a biblical worldview and a culture that definitely is against it. Welcome Natasha to the show. Natasha Crain, welcome to the Dr. Jeff Show.

Natasha Crain (00:54):
Thanks so much. It’s great to talk with you.

Dr. Jeff Myers (00:56):
I have read your book or different books for years, How to Help Your Children Have a Strong Faith in God. What questions your kids are asking about God? What questions your kids are asking about Jesus? And I’ve had a chance to review some of those. But the new book that you wrote really gets to my heart as the president of Summit Ministries trying to train a generation to live out a biblical worldview because that’s the whole thing.

It’s like, this is the book we need at this moment in time to help Christians know how to handle life in a secular culture. So it’s called Faithfully Different. I’ve got my copy right here, at least one of my copies. The copy that I marked up is all still in a three-ring binder from the pre-publication version that you sent me. But I am so excited to just talk about Christian worldview and the secular culture and what Christians can actually do. So anyway, I’m excited, as you can tell.

Natasha Crain (01:52):
Well, I’m excited too. It’s great to dig into this with you. I love the work that Summit does, so it’s an honor to be on here with you.

Dr. Jeff Myers (01:59):
Natasha, let’s just start with the basics here because I know a lot of the people who are watching and listening are familiar with Summit. A lot of Summit graduates are listening to Washington show. There are a lot of people who are downloading this and paying attention to it all the way across the world. And so they may not be that familiar with the cultural moment in the United States and what’s happening with a biblical Christian worldview.

But this is the heart of why this book is so important is that people’s understanding of a biblical worldview might be at its lowest ebb in history. Can you talk about that a little bit and what some of the research was that made you think we have to address this now?

Natasha Crain (02:47):
Yeah. These are such good and big questions about, where are we right now? Because it can be confusing. We sometimes hear the research and it doesn’t line up with what we think. And I think that probably the most common data, if anyone’s heard anything about this, comes from the Pew Forum. And they’re very well known for doing their religious landscape surveys and really tracking religious trends in America to see, how do people identify?

So they’ll call people up and give them a list of identifications, atheists, agnostic, Christian, Jewish, Mormon, whatever it might be and see how people respond to that. And when they do that, what they find is that about 65% of Americans identify as Christian. So when we hear that, it sounds like, wow, number one, that’s surprising.That’s a pretty big number. We’re actually in the majority. But then number two, a lot of us go, “It really doesn’t seem like that.”

(03:38):
It doesn’t feel like that. And that’s something I’ve heard from a lot of people who are reading the book right now, faithfully different, is that when they read the data in the chapter, they’re saying, “Yes, that’s not how I feel that 65% of people are Christians.” But the reason for that is that we have to remember that kind of research is based on how someone self-identifies.

It’s based on them saying, “I’m a Christian,” but it doesn’t get into, “Well, what does that mean to you? What does that actually entail in terms of your beliefs and how you live that out in your life?” Somebody might say they’re a Christian just because their family was Christian when they went to church as kids and they haven’t really thought about it much since. So what is really interesting is to dig into what do people actually believe?

(04:18):
And for that kind of research, we can go to the work that’s being done out of Arizona Christian University’s Cultural Research Center, and that’s led by Dr. George Barna. A lot of people are familiar with him and the Barna group, and they’ve done just amazing research along these lines, the American Worldview Inventory.

And what they do is, using dozens of questions, so not just the single self-identification question, but dozens of questions about what people believe to be truth about reality and how they live that out in their lives. They try to identify to the best that they can, how many people actually have a functioning biblical worldview, that they adhere to the core truths as taught in the Bible and seek to live accordingly. And based on those estimates, they say that about 6% of Americans have a biblical worldview.

(05:06):
And if you narrow that down further to 18 to 29 year olds, it’s about 2%. So it’s a very small percentage. When we say we’re in a worldview minority, like I talk about in the book, the very first chapter is welcome to your place in a worldview minority. We’re not saying that the minority is people who identify as Christians. We’re talking about how they actually see the world in terms of being consistent with the Bible.

And from that perspective, absolutely. If the Bible is your authority, if God is your ultimate authority as he’s revealed himself through scripture, you are in a tiny minority. And it’s not just amongst Americans, it’s also in the church, which I think is just so fascinating because that same research has shown that 21% of evangelical Protestant churchgoers have a biblical worldview. So even in the church, one in five have a biblical worldview.

(05:57):
When you start to look at those gaps in that data, you start to realize, “Ah, now I can put my finger on why I don’t feel like two thirds of the people around me are Christians in the sense that I identify with that word.” So looking at the data, I think helps us to really envision, okay, this is where we are, this is why it feels the way that it does. Now what?

Dr. Jeff Myers (06:20):
So a lot of the polls ask, “What religion are you?” And so people might be thinking, “Well, I’m not Muslim. I guess I’m Christian.” Or they might be thinking, “Yeah, my mom would want me to say that I’m Christian. I’ll just say Christian, what does it hurt?” But the truth is when you really drill down on it, if you went even into church and you said 21% of people have a biblical worldview, what do they think?

So you’ve got a pew pre-social distancing, there are 10 people in it, and two of them out of 10 then have a biblical worldview. When they hear what the pastor is saying, it’s like they’re in a different service than the others. Something is happening that’s different in their minds and in their hearts as opposed to the other eight. And can you describe that difference a little bit?

Natasha Crain (07:21):
Wow, that is a really good question. We could do a whole show just on that because I think it’s fascinating. I do think this is fascinating because I think when you get into what’s going on with the other people who are sitting in the pews in the churches, some of them think they have a biblical worldview, but actually don’t. And others, if you define for them what a biblical worldview would be, they would consciously say, “Well, I don’t have that view of the Bible.”

So I think it breaks down into those two distinctions between those who think they have a biblical worldview, but don’t actually, and those who would consciously reject what is inhaled by that. So just to briefly comment on each of those groups, I think the people who think that they have a biblical worldview but don’t, by and large, they just haven’t been discipled.

(08:09):
They’re not necessarily new believers. You might think, well, maybe they’re just coming to know the Lord, and certainly that’s going to be the case sometimes, but there are lifelong Christians who just haven’t been in churches that are preaching the word in depth. They’re saying they’re getting some pop level psychology in some churches as opposed to really getting deep into what the Bible talks about or thinking more deeply about worldviews in general.

And so they just don’t know. And when it comes down to certain questions about what they believe and truths about what the Bible teaches, they’re confused. They’re not sure. They’re getting more of their information from culture and those influences than they are from their church because the church hasn’t trained them to think clearly. So I definitely think that there’s a large percent of those people sitting in the pews every Sunday. I don’t know how to quantify that.

(08:56):
I’m not sure if George Barna has quantified that specifically or not. That would be an interesting question. But the other part of people there would be people who are sitting in the churches who, if you were to ask them if they think directly that the Bible is God’s inspired, an authoritative word for all time without error, that this is eternal truth, not just man’s best guess about God at some points in history.

You have a lot of people who would kind of hem and haw about that and say, “Well, generally speaking, yes, I believe in Jesus.” Maybe they would say that he died for my sins and he’s my savior if they’re at least somewhat theologically conservative. But then when it comes down to some of the moral claims of the Bible and what that means for us about things like sexuality and marriage and abortion, some of these hot issues of today, then there’s confusion there.

(09:45):
So I think that there are a lot of those people, and we would classify them a lot of times as progressive Christians. There are a lot of people who are sitting in those pews, even if there are evangelical churches who have more progressive viewpoints on things. And so I think that’s a lot of that other group is people who would acknowledge, “Hey, according to your definition, I don’t have that kind of biblical worldview.”

They might claim to have a biblical worldview in a different sense, but they would define it differently, which is a whole other thing, how you define a biblical worldview. They might say, “Well, I think the Bible’s a beautiful thing. I think that we can gain a lot from it. I think that it’s inspiring, not inspired.” So they’ll have a biblical worldview in their own sense, but in the sense of it being the inspired authoritative word of God, they’re not going to agree with that.

Dr. Jeff Myers (10:34):
So they might be in church because they’re saying, “I don’t know. I’m not sure I believe all of this stuff, but something good happens here that makes me feel good about myself, helps me center, helps me live a better life, that kind of thing, but don’t start telling me what to believe about anything else because when I leave here, I have a different world and I don’t want those two to intersect.” Is that kind of what’s going on, you think, in their minds.

Natasha Crain (11:02):
Yeah. For the people who would more consciously reject a biblical worldview in the sense that we’re talking about it, absolutely. I think that so many of our churches are attracting people to a community rather than to truth, and that’s a really big problem. I see that in pretty much every church that I have attended and visited.

So it’s not like that’s limited to just a few churches having a problem here or there, but you see, for example, the introductory videos when they tell a story of someone coming to the church, a lot of times it’s, “I was having a hard time in my life and I needed a place to go. I found this great community at this church and then you see the stock footage of them enjoying this new group of people.” Well, guess what? You could find that at a church or some kind of community gathering with a bunch of people who don’t even believe in God.

(11:50):
Half the time these videos don’t even mention that Jesus is involved or that there’s truth that’s to be found. And this just really gets me because I think that when we continue to try to hit on the felt need without ever getting to the real need that underlies that, I think we’re going to continue to see this happen.

So I think it would go so far to have these kinds of, when we’re trying to attract people to the church, sure, you want a great community, that’s great, but we don’t want you to come here just because you’re finding a good community. You can find that by gardening with some friends on Sunday. That’s not why we’re here. We’re here because we believe that there is truth to be found for all of mankind. Come and let us show you what that is and why there’s good evidence for that being true.

Dr. Jeff Myers (12:33):
Yeah. Yeah. So a church that is bolded that way is going to be automatically going against the grain of the culture, which says at this point, truth is up to the individual, that truth is socially constructed at best and that what you’re talking about in Christianity is just your tribe.

But there are other tribes. I could join the LGBTQ tribe, I could join the CRT tribe, but this is the Christian tribe and you people seem nice, you’re not offensive, so I’m going to go. But that seems to be the core of the whole problem that you’re addressing, that secularization of the culture has now gotten to be so complete that people don’t even see the relevance of a claim that God is truth or that Jesus is truth.

Natasha Crain (13:29):
Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. And we see this all the time online. I think if you’re in any kind of local group in your community, you will occasionally see somebody say, “Hey, I’m looking for a new church, something that’s generally in this area and has a good kids program.” And it just blows my mind that people will post those kinds of things while not even identifying, “Well, what religion are you talking about? What beliefs do you, what kind of statement of faith is behind this?”

Because they’re coming from this secular perspective, in Faithfully Different, I call it, God is the ultimate guess. In other words, well, no one knows for sure anything about God. We certainly can’t know with certainty. So I’m not looking for specific beliefs, but I’m looking for something that’s going to keep my kids happy, that’s going to be a good community.

(14:17):
Where I feel like they’re doing something good for the world. And so you can see that secular type of seeking. And as a church, if we’re not going to make bold claims that we actually are offering truth and that we’re not just offering another answer to God as the ultimate guess, then we’re just going to see that this continues to bring in people who are only looking for community. We need to be bolder in saying, “We’re here to offer truth. Come and check out what we’re saying and see if there’s evidence for it.”

And so it’s really important how we approach that. And that’s not to say we shouldn’t tell people, “Hey, there’s a great community here, of course.” But he can’t just be that. And we know, by the way, that people are going to hate us for claiming that there’s an objective truth that we have to offer. So I’m not saying that’s an easy sell in today’s culture whatsoever, but I’m saying it’s a necessary cell.

Dr. Jeff Myers (15:11):
Yes. Yeah. At Summit, one of the things we talk about is that truth and relationship are two strands of the DNA of influence and that you have to have both. And so I really appreciate this. This is great. So churches that would say, “By the way, the reason we have a great community is because there’s something that brings us together that is true and we’re going to show you how it’s true and help you learn to conform your life to it.” I love that.

I’m thinking, okay, after church now, these 10 people leave and the two who do have a biblical worldview, who do believe that what they’ve been presented with is truth. They’ve got to now go out into a culture that probably thinks they’re intolerant for even thinking that. Talk about some of the challenges, and this is one thing I love about your book is you use so many examples from current podcasts and Twitter and a lot of social media that’s really current, what people are facing. But talk a little bit about the world that they’re moving out into those who do have a biblical worldview.

Natasha Crain (16:23):
That’s a great question because I think if we only get stuck in the, we’re a worldview minority and how do we just function within this little pocket, we’re never going to be able to be the salt and light in culture that we’re called to be. So we have to understand the dominant cultural worldview around us. It’s always interesting to me that sometimes Christians will reply to me on social media and say, “I don’t care what anyone else is saying. I only care what’s in the Bible.”

Well, okay, yes, we want to care about truth, but there are a lot of Christians who are getting swept into secular ways of thinking because they don’t really understand the worldview of the culture that they’re walking out into on Sunday morning. So I summarize it this way in the book in terms of secularism being the dominant worldview, that secularism is ultimately about the authority of the self.

(17:10):
So people who are secular can have all kinds of different views within secularism. Some might believe there’s some kind of higher power. Some might believe that there’s nothing supernatural that’s out there. They can have all kinds of different beliefs, but the tie that ultimately functionally binds the worldviews of millions of people is this authority of the self. And it’s interesting because you might think, well, if everyone’s on their own authority, then we kind of have millions of different ideas about things, but there’s a lot that they will converge on because of the nature of the authority of the self.

And so I summarize it with four basic tenets of a secular worldview, and I think that these are helpful for people to remember as they evaluate what they’re seeing around them. Number one is that feelings are the ultimate guide. Number two is that happiness is the ultimate goal. Number three is judging is the ultimate sin. And number four, God is the ultimate guess, which I mentioned earlier.

(18:08):
So as we see those things, those are all what people have in common whose authority is the self. So for example, feelings are the ultimate guide. You’re talking about some of these examples. I talk about the follow your heart phenomenon. Everyone wants you to follow your heart and it’s just assumed that you’re the authority on you. Well, for us as Christians with the biblical worldview, sometimes that’s confusing and we’re looking at it and saying, “But how can you just say that you should follow your feelings because feelings are not the ultimate guide. The heart is deceitful above all things.”

We’re looking at it from within our own worldview box, but we have to jump out of our worldview box to see it from within secularism, this authority of the self, in which case, of course they see feelings as the ultimate guide. Because if you’re your own authority, then the only guide that you have is what’s within.

(18:56):
No one else can tell you anything because the feelings are within you. And the same thing for that second tenant about happiness being the ultimate goal. Well, no one can tell you what makes you happy. That’s totally subjective. So if you want to be happy by being a drug addict on the streets and you’re saying, “Well, this is what I want and I’m happy,” then who is someone else to tell you anything differently? You’re claiming that that’s what happiness is.

So again, it’s all about that authority of the self. What’s interesting to me though is that of course this doesn’t play out all the way logically speaking when you try to take people there. So what if I’m following my heart and I want to go kill someone?

(19:39):
Okay. We can always take thinking to the extreme to see where it fails. This is something I’m always emphasizing with my kids. No one, no secular person, well, okay, you might find someone out there, but no reasonable, healthy secular person is going to say, “Yeah, you should follow your heart and go kill that person.” Obviously there are limits to that and what we accept in society in terms of the authority of the self.

So that fails because at some point people will say, “Well, no, no, no. We all know that you shouldn’t do that. You shouldn’t harm anyone else.” And so a lot of times the only type of morality that they want to come down to being objective is don’t hurt someone else according to their own definition. But the problem with that is that everyone’s going to have a different definition if you don’t have any objective basis for your morality, which you don’t have in a secular worldview.

(20:29):
So if you don’t have room for objective morality, you don’t have room for even one objective moral claim. And that’s the important thing I think for people to understand when you’re evaluating and filtering all these secular ideas is that they don’t work together. They’re not logically coherent. And that should tell you something about your worldview if you have to keep going back to another worldview to pull those ideas out of.

Dr. Jeff Myers (20:51):
Right. Yeah, that’s so good. We did a study, I guess it was five years ago now at Summit Ministries with the Barna Group. And one of the questions we asked was about truth and being offended and so forth. And it was, 65% of church attending, self-identified Christian millennials said that if what you believe offends someone or hurts their feelings, it is wrong. Two thirds of young church attending Christian millennials said, “No, that’s about it. ” It’s exactly what you’re describing.

Natasha Crain (21:28):
Yeah. And we have to get comfortable as Christians with the biblical worldview with understanding that we can’t judge what’s true and not true by how people respond to it. And because ultimately that’s so subjective. What if I’m hurt by you saying that? What if you’re hurting my feelings by saying exactly what you just said? Well, how do we break this tie? Right? We’re all hurt. Now what? Someone’s wrong here. And so unless you’re going to go with pure relativism saying, yes, I acknowledge there’s no objective basis for morality, you have a different view than mine, but that’s okay.

All these are equally valid because we understand there’s no objective basis for it, which by the way, no one in secular culture is saying right now, except maybe the most hardened atheist who wants to be philosophically consistent, but when you don’t see that kind of view, and when you don’t see that and people are saying, “Well, we’re just going to decide what’s right or wrong, and it’s going to be based on our view specifically of what makes other people feel hurt.” You just get this walking contradiction.

(22:28):
And that’s tough for us as Christians because we start thinking, “Well, if I just shared something from God’s word and someone says they’re hurt by it, I did something wrong or the truth that I shared is wrong, but we cannot gauge it that way.” Jesus already told us to expect that the world will hate us. So I think that that should tell us something right away. We don’t want to be hated because we’re being jerks, of course, but the message itself is offensive because ultimately the message says you’re not your own authority.

This whole authority of the self thing, that’s not true. God is your authority and he has revealed all kinds of things about what you need to know about who he is, who you are and what your relationship is. He’s revealed that in the Bible. That is offensive to culture because they’re coming from authority of the self position. Nothing’s more offensive than to say, “Actually, there’s an authority outside of you.”

Dr. Jeff Myers (23:17):
Right. Yeah. I think you’ve perfectly described what secular culture is like. And you referenced Charles Taylor in your book, his work on the growing secularism, which is fascinating and it’s also a huge work. But he says that the spiritual nature of culture has been being drained away for a long time. I think he says about a couple of hundred years that it’s been draining away and now it’s almost completely drained away.

But in your book, you’re helping Christians figure out how do you live as if what God says is true in a culture like this, in a way that helps bring truth back to the forefront. So I kind of want to turn the corner a little bit and talk about that. Walk me through what a Christian who says, “Okay, I may not have a really good biblical worldview, but I want to. I believe that the Bible tells the truth about God and about Jesus and about me.” What’s the rebuilding project look like?

Natasha Crain (24:44):
Yeah. So personally or within culture? Which way do you want to go with that?

Dr. Jeff Myers (24:48):
Well, personally first, because I do want to ask you about the culture, but as we talked about before the show, it’s such a huge question that we can only really guess what the effect might really be, but just start personally, what’s the rebuilding project look like? Okay, I know I’m in a secular culture, I’ve been influenced by it more than I want to admit. I want to have a biblical worldview. What now?

Natasha Crain (25:11):
Yeah. So I break out the rest of the book after the first section where I talk about the kinds of things that we’ve been talking about here into faithfully different believing, which is a third of that, and then faithfully different thinking, another third, and faithfully different living and a final third. And I really think those are the three components for people to remember as we process what it does mean now, that we are where we are in the culture that we’re in.

It’s not just, well, I’m going to keep on loving people according to some definition, which is a lot of times what I hear from Christians. I’m just going to keep being nice and keep bringing my neighbor flowers or whatever the case may be. And there’s a living part of our faith for sure when it’s defined rightly, of course, according to the Bible, but it starts with the believing because if our beliefs don’t line up with the reality of God’s word that he’s told us, everything else down the chain there, we’re going to get wrong.

(26:01):
Our thinking’s going to be wrong and our living is going to be wrong. So it has to start with the believing, which then informs the thinking in a biblical way, which then informs the living. So it’s really putting together those three pieces. And I start off that section on believing, you’re saying, “Well, what’s the first step after that? ” It started off with a chapter called Regaining a Supernatural Worldview.

And I talk about Charles Taylor in that because I think that is such a difficulty for a lot of people. I hear from a lot of people who say, “Yes, I’m a Christian, but sometimes it’s just hard to imagine God is there because he seems so far removed from our day-to-day life right now.” And so some of us kind of function as atheists in a sense. Of course, that’s not what we believe, but we live our day-to-day life prayerlessly without reading the Bible.

(26:48):
We kind of go on with just this cognitive dissonance almost where intellectually it’s like, yes, I believe these things, but how is that practically playing out? And there are all kinds of reasons for that. Charles Taylor asked this big question in this huge book that you’re talking about, a secular age, he’s asking this question, how was it that back in the year, say 1500, it was almost impossible to not believe in God, and today it becomes almost impossible to believe in God. And he traces how culture has changed over that time.

But the big takeaway is that when you’re talking about 1500, God and religion and society, they were so intertwined in most of these Western cultures. They were so intertwined that at every turn, the society was upholding the assumption that God exists and that Jesus was God and Christianity was true. And so you saw this manifested all the time, everywhere that you went in society.

(27:47):
Today, the tables have turned completely where nothing is manifested by default in our society, and so we have to overcome what is almost this default belief that God doesn’t exist, and that can be difficult. We’re not in a place anymore where we can just immediately turn in every direction to people and institutions that are assuming the existence of God or the truth of Christianity.

So we’ve got more of this default barrier that we have to cross. And there are lots and lots of ways that we get across that, but I think a really important one that I know is important for both of us, especially, is that Christians would gain more of an understanding of apologetics, how you make a case for and defend the truth of Christianity, but starting with, how do we know God even exists? And if you ask that question to a lot of Christians, they’ll say, “Oh, I felt him,” or, “I’ve experienced him.” They will resort to their personal experiences.

(28:38):
Those experiences are really important. I’m not trivializing that at all. As Christians, of course, we have experiences with God, but when times get difficult, when the darkness comes, when people ask you how you know that God exists, we need to be able to point to something objective outside of ourselves that everyone can look at because I can’t just export my experience. We need to point to something outside of ourselves to be able to say, “These are all good reasons to believe that God exists.” And that’s where we get into these traditional apologetics arguments like cosmological argument and design argument and the moral argument.

All these, I tease them out very briefly compared to what you can get in a lot of books because I just want to get people interested in the fact that there is a lot of evidence that points to God as the best explanation of reality and get them to start thinking, “Okay, I need to know more about these.” And so I try to offer a lot of resources, but I think that’s the first stepping point is regaining a supernatural worldview, not just intellectually, but actually having that deeper anchor and sense that that is true, no matter what the society defaults to.

Dr. Jeff Myers (29:42):
Yeah, that’s so good. And I would recommend to anybody who’s watching or listening, Natasha’s books on helping your children learn about God and get answers about God, or the questions that your children are asking about Jesus. I haven’t told you this before, but one thing I really appreciated about those books This is I thought I can actually imagine having this conversation, not just with my children, but with anybody else, because you break it down and make it conversational so you’re learning, but you’re learning to also communicate at the same time.

Natasha Crain (30:15):
Thank you. That’s great. I appreciate that.

Dr. Jeff Myers (30:17):
Let’s talk about the larger culture a little bit, because if what Charles Taylor was saying in the secular age is true, we’re sort of on this trajectory where it may be too late. I think a lot of people believe that. I think there are a lot of Christians who say, “Yeah, I’m just going to try to live as faithfully as I can because this thing, this airplane is corkscrewing into the ground. It’s going to be a big fiery crash. God’s going to rescue me from it, but there’s not a whole lot I can do.”

But your approach to this isn’t an escape approach. It’s an engagement approach. And I’d love for you to just talk about why you have that approach and what vision you would like to see achieved. Yeah.

Natasha Crain (31:10):
I think that it’s easy to look around and feel like everything’s just tanking because there’s so much going on. I mean, when you read your Bible and when you love the Lord and you see where culture’s going, it’s totally natural and I think it’s right to feel grieved by what we’re seeing. So feeling the grief, and this is what I tell my kids too, because sometimes they’re like, “It’s so sad everything that’s happening.” But feeling the grief means that you actually have a biblical conviction about sin.

(31:38):
And where things are going. So I think that’s a healthy starting point, but we can’t let it turn to bitterness. And I also don’t think that we should be doing our own kinds of projections about, well, the society is lost or we’re going to win society either way. We always say the battle has already been won because God ultimately knows what’s going to happen. God ultimately has his plans. He is sovereign.

We don’t need to figure out, well, what’s going to happen to America specifically? We need to be faithful to our calling. We need to be obedient no matter where the culture goes. Of course, we pray and we work toward wanting certain outcomes, but the outcome in any particular culture is not guaranteed. God’s ultimate outcomes are guaranteed. And so I think there’s an important distinction there that’s healthy for Christians to remember because sometimes people think, “Well, we’re just saving America.” Well, we don’t know.

(32:30):
Look back at history. There are a lot of cultures that have been great and they’ve come and gone and we don’t know where things are going to go, but we do know that we have been called to make disciples, to be salt and light wherever we are, and we have to leave the rest of God. So it’s obedience that I think is so important. And you can’t be obedient if you’re just staying quiet in your house, having a private faith because you’re missing out on a lot of what the Lord wants for us.

So we have to keep speaking truth. We have to keep stepping out and we can’t take it as a failure if our salt and light doesn’t completely change the culture and the direction. We just have to know that God’s going to use that in the ways that he sees fit, but obedience is key.

Dr. Jeff Myers (33:14):
Yeah. Yeah. That’s so good. And so you’re being faithful to God. It’s not just, am I making a measurable difference? It’s, I’m doing what God tells me to do. I’m faithfully walking with him in this culture, but the outcome is ultimately up to him. There’s a lot of freedom in that, because I think, oh, we got to save this or we’ve got to save that. Or if we don’t do this, we’re going to lose all of these things. There’s so much fear and anxiety that can come through that.

Natasha Crain (33:53):
Yeah. And you definitely see a lot of that fear. And sometimes when Christians are just operating from that, and that’s clear to other people, to non-believers. At the same time, I think that a lot of non-believers accuse us of fear just because we are stating our beliefs. And so the motive of fear gets imputed to us a lot when it doesn’t exist. So I think we have to make that distinction too. We shouldn’t be fearful in what we’re doing and speaking truth because we’re afraid. We have to trust in God and his sovereignty.

Like you’re saying, it’s not about trusting in the specific outcome, but at the same time, don’t let anyone convince you that because you are standing up for what you believe to be truth in the public square, that you’re necessarily doing that out of fear because you’re afraid of what’s going to happen otherwise. Check your own heart and see where it’s coming from. Don’t let somebody else tell you that just because they don’t like the nature of objective truth.

Dr. Jeff Myers (34:46):
That’s good. Before we finish our show, just walk us through the conversation. So let’s say somebody watching or listening to this is thinking, “I love this. I’m going to listen to this twice, but then I’ve got to go to the office and the person in the cubicle next to me is the office atheist.” And so I know we’re going to have some conversations about this and now I’m a little bit nervous about what to say. Can you walk us through, not just through the conversation necessarily, but we know this is what’s happening, right? These are my neighbors. These are people I’m around all of the time. Help us prepare a little bit.

Natasha Crain (35:32):
So those office atheist conversations can go in all kinds of directions depending on who the office atheist is, obviously. So there’s not going to be one size fits all kind of answer for this, but maybe you can just offer a couple of thoughts on that. And actually I talk about a lot of this in chapter 11, which is about regaining a commitment to speaking truth. So if anyone’s really struggling with like, how do you speak truth? I would point you to that chapter.

(35:56):
But I think one of the first things, and it’s a little bit counterintuitive for a lot of us because we immediately think, I need to speak truth. I will now speak truth, but we’re not just truth bulldozers, right? And I think that the first step is always to ask questions about what people actually believe.

So if the office atheist, for example, isn’t really saying anything about their atheism and you want the chance to start opening a conversation, well, then you’re going to lunch and maybe asking them what they believe in and why they believe things like that to start the conversation. But even if that office atheist is sort of prodding at you and being antagonistic, you can a lot of times diffuse that kind of scenario by saying, “Hey, I would love to know why you’re an atheist, what led you to those conclusions and take them to lunch there too.” So don’t let the hostility get to you.

(36:45):
People love to talk about themselves. And so use the opportunity to just ask lots of questions about what exactly is it that they believe? How did they come to that conclusion? And if you don’t ask those questions and you’re just trying to speak truth to them, you might be answering questions that they don’t actually have and don’t reflect any kind of issue for them.

So just to give an example of that, maybe you’ve been brushing up on your apologetics, you’re super excited to break down the cosmological argument with the office atheist, but he’s just said that he’s an atheist. And if you were to actually talk to him, you might find out that he’s more of an agnostic and he thinks that there is some evidence that something is out there. He just doesn’t know what it is. Those are going to be different conversations.

(37:32):
He might not need the cosmological argument that you have also wonderfully brushed up on. So you have to ask all these kinds of questions to understand where exactly someone is. And then you can have more conversations about if it’s evidence or if it’s answering specific questions or if it’s based on experience. And once you get into those conversations, then you’re in a much better position to have those back and forth.

Some people, I would add, don’t have any interest in conversation. And I hear a lot from Christians who are like, “Okay, I’ve had these 28 conversations with this person and we’re going nowhere. What do I say now?” And sometimes the answer to that is maybe it’s time for a break. It’s not that you’re giving up on the individual, it’s that at this particular point, they might not just be receptive enough to have more conversations.

(38:22):
And so speaking truth doesn’t mean that you have to talk to the same person at all times about all things. I think that all of our days are limited and I think that we have to choose well with whom we’re having these conversations, when we’re having these conversations, where we’re having these conversations. Is it on social media? Is it privately, through emails, through calls, in person? Those are a lot of the kinds of questions that we have to ask. And I outlined some of those considerations as a filter in that chapter too.

Dr. Jeff Myers (38:51):
Yeah. Yeah. I appreciate the wisdom that you’re giving and I feel relaxed. I feel like, all right. I live in Manitous or I work in Manitou Springs, Colorado and all of my neighbors virtually are atheists or involved in some alternative lifestyle. There are all kinds of tribes, probably 15 different tribes of all different beliefs just in our neighborhood. And so I’m always feeling a little bit on edge. “Oh, what if I end up in this conversation or that conversation? “But when you know that you can ask questions, trust God’s sovereignty and prepare as best you know how, and then just leave the results to him. That’s tremendous. That’s helpful.

Natasha Crain (39:39):
It takes a lot of it off of us that we know we don’t have to lead them all the way from a hard atheism to a disciple in one conversation or even many conversations. We can just be one person along the way that’s sharing truth.

Dr. Jeff Myers (39:55):
That’s so good. Well, Natasha, thank you for the book. Thank you for the work that you’ve done. And we’re going to tell everybody in the show notes how to find your website so they can look at your blog and see some of the other things that you’ve done. But it’s just really fun to have this conversation face to face, digitally, and congratulations on the book.

Natasha Crain (40:16):
Hey, thanks so much. And it’s been really wonderful to talk with you.

Dr. Jeff Myers (40:19):
A special thanks to my guest today, Natasha Crain. All right, you’re going to want to stay in touch with Natasha. So here’s how you do it. You can get her books and podcasts at natashacrain.com. And Crain is spelled C-R-A-I-N. So natashacrain.com. We need to know what we believe so that we can go about our lives and give a reasonable and respectful defense for the hope that we have. Natasha’s book helps us to do just that. Thanks for listening. See you next week.

Hey, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Dr. Jeff Show. It’s a podcast from Summit Ministries, summit.org. Summit is a nonprofit ministry that exists to equip and support the rising generation to embrace God’s truth and champion a biblical worldview. For nearly 60 years, Summit Ministries has been training students and those who work with students to develop, deepen, and defend a biblical worldview through life-changing conferences, thoughtful church, homeschool, and Christian school, curriculum books, free online resources and more.

(41:22):
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