Writing About Faith in this Cultural Moment
An Interview with Lisa V. Fields
This Weekend Edition of Ecstatic features Lisa V. Fields
Lisa V. Fields is the founder of the Jude 3 Project, the curator behind the YouTube series “Why I Don’t Go,” and a creator and producer of two documentaries: Unspoken and Juneteenth: Faith and Freedom. Her new book, When Faith Disappoints: The Gap Between What We Believe and What We Experience, is both a memoir of her own attempts to untangle the Gospel from Christianity’s complicated legacy in the cultural West, and an argument for the durability of Scripture amidst the pain of daily life in a broken world.
Yi Ning Chiu: The first question I have for you is about the title of the book. I thought it was interesting that you chose to open with the title When Faith Disappoints, because many apologetics books have assertive titles like The Case for Christ or Evidence That Demands a Verdict. They’re worded to assume that Christianity holds a position of strength in the debate around belief.
You chose to start with the admission that Christian faith is going to disappoint, and that it may have already done so. Why did you choose to bring the reader in from this angle?
Lisa Fields: I think Christianity is a faith that many people have some familiarity with, especially in the US. We're not talking to a blank slate. When you're talking to a blank slate, sometimes you may want to assume a position of strength, but the majority of people that I talk to who are non-Christians have already had some experience with faith, and usually their experience has been disappointment. Maybe they’ve seen hypocrisy, or a faith that just hasn't lived up to their expectations. Maybe they were brought up in a harsh religious environment, or were taught Scripture out of context.
So, the posture they bring to Christianity is one of being disappointed. I felt like addressing this was a better way to begin a piece of writing about belief.
YC: What else were you observing around people’s current attitudes towards belief as you prepared to write this book?
LF: People have been disappointed before, but I think Gen Z and Millennials give more voice to disappointment. There’s an angst that needs to be wrestled with, so there’s a strong emotional component to contemporary questions around faith.
Apologetics is a discipline of reason and logic. When I think about how people make decisions, though, they also consider emotion. Think about how we choose our relationships: When people get into relationships and you ask them what drew them to a particular person, they can’t fully explain everything about why they love someone. Similarly, with choices around belief, you can’t always justify through pure reason why you think something is true.
With this book, I lean into that, knowing that people make decisions emotionally. You can give reasons for why the Bible is true, but if your reader has a friend that may be Muslim or atheist who they feel is a good, loving person, they may not resonate with your arguments about the exclusive truth claims of Scripture. Their experiences, their emotions, and their relationships all need to be taken into consideration.
YC: Let’s talk about the kinds of content you chose to focus on in response to this. Personally, I’ve never read an apologetics book like this, where the argument for Christian faith is blended with personal memoir and your own attempts to grapple with issues like why God allows civilian casualties in war, or whether we can trust the Bible when it’s been co-opted in service of systemic racism. How did you curate your topics?
LF: They really came through prayer. I didn’t want the book to be as vulnerable as it became. I was going to write a kind of manual on how to engage people who are disappointed, and my friend challenged me. She was like, Lisa, you can’t write about pain without including your own pain. That really pushed me.
Then my editor pushed me to really go deep. I think it was necessary, because I think this generation in particular is not looking for people who talk at them, but talk with them and share their same vulnerabilities. As I was writing, seeking the Holy Spirit, and talking to friends and editors, I just felt like I really needed to expose myself in order for people to really know that Christian faith, while it can be disappointing in moments, is transformative and full of hope.
I understand the complexities. I know the frustrations that people have. That’s what I wanted readers to realize: I’m not seeing things like war or injustice and just glossing over them. We’re going to wrestle through. There’s a book called The Popular Encyclopedia of Apologetics, in which the author argues that there are two ways to look at apologetics: there’s the informational way, which is what we are accustomed to, but there’s also the incarnational way, which requires us to be the embodiment of the message. This book is really an incarnational apologetic.
YC: The concept of an incarnational apologetic also makes me curious about the discussions of identity that surround your book. The publicity materials coming out from Penguin Random House highlight your status as one of the few Black women in the traditionally white, male-dominated field of apologetics. How does who you are shape what you write?
LF: That's a great question. Everybody approaches their discipline through the lens of their own experience. I feel that the more you are on the margins, the more you are a minority in your field, the more you have to interact with people that don't think like you. On some level, while it makes things harder, it adds another level of gravitas and care to the way you communicate.
YC: What do you think we miss out on if we don't diversify the voices we hear from in the realm of apologetics?
LF: We’re going to miss out on the truth that God wants to communicate to us, the holistic truth that God wants to communicate to us. If we only hear from people that look like us, we'll miss the blind spots that we have.
I remember reading apologetics books when I was in seminary, just when I was just getting immersed in apologetics. People liked to talk about the moral decline in America. I remember challenging a prominent apologist and saying, hey, you know, you can continue to speak on this moral decline, but from an African American perspective, it's an incline. When America started, we were slaves. When I think about slavery, when I think about segregation, we’re actually on an incline from an African American perspective. You're talking about this moral decline without realizing that maybe it's a moral decline for people that look like you, but not for people that look like me.
There are parts of the truth that God may want to minister to us that we’ll miss if we only listen to people who look like us.
YC: As you’re naming the different forms of complexity that surround talking about Christianity in the West, I’m thinking about how all forms of complexity seem to have intensified in these past few years.
Going back to what you said about Gen Z and Millennials’ vocal disappointments with faith, I’m thinking about how they’ve grown up watching Christians embed themselves with political parties to the detriment of the church. I’m thinking about how they’ve watched churches divide over issues like race, or the legitimacy of elections. How do you think this cultural climate changes the way we need to approach apologetics and writing right now?
LF: I think our apologetic should first be incarnational. It's our embodiment of our message. It's the way we speak about things, the way we tweet, the way we post.
To live as embodiments of the goodness, kindness, love, and justice of God—this is our greatest apologetic. People have heard Christians argue their case. There’s no absence of that kind of content. We don't lack communicators. We lack good people that embody the message they are communicating.
YC: In that case, for people who are writing or producing content, what can they do to cultivate lives that are consistent with their messages?
LF: Build a strong prayer life. A good community. So, not only an individual prayer life, but a communal prayer life. The Apostle James talks about confessing your thoughts to one another, praying for one another, so you can be healed. That healing is a community effort. Prayer practiced individually and with friends helps keep our hearts pure before God. Then, community helps us walk with the Lord through encouragement and through calling out the things in us that need to be dealt with. Finally, maintain a steady devotion through reading the Scriptures. It's really the basics. I think if you do those things you can stay incarnational, and what you communicate will be a reflection of your own spiritual integration and work.
I don't think I could have written this book four years ago, because I needed to have that integration and healing in my own soul. So the book is a reflection of the healing work I've done and the integration that has happened in my own life.
YC: We’ve talked about your book in relation to Millenial or Gen Z anxieties, and as a response to our current cultural climate, but it’s not marketed exclusively to a single demographic or a single issue. In the end, who is this book for?
LF: This book is for everybody because pain and questioning are universal. We all have different levels of suffering and different levels of disappointment in different seasons, and we all need hope. The book is trying to point people to the hope of Christ in the midst of their suffering, to give them freedom to voice their disappointment, to question—and to also show that this journey doesn’t lead just to endless questions but to an answer.
Yi Ning Chiu
Writer & Teacher
Yi Ning is a contributing writer to Christianity Today. Find Lisa’s new book When Faith Disappoints here. What did you think of this interview? Share your thoughts with a comment!
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Incarnational apologetics - I like the sound of that!
The comments around the “moral decline” of America are so on point and an important nuance in those conversations. This idea that a weird utopian 1950s world was the pinnacle of Christian life is so absurd and unbiblical. People forget that secular culture, whether it seems to align with aspects of faith or not, is still secular culture.