Arguing with someone who has given up on God usually fails because the argument is aimed at the wrong target. The reason a person gives for leaving is often not the reason that moved them. Lisa Fields, founder of Jude 3 Project, has found that someone who says evolution ended their faith may really be carrying a prayer God did not answer. You can win the debate about the stated reason and still lose the person. What works better is listening long enough to hear what actually happened.
Fields has heard more of these explanations than most. She says people seem to seek her out on their way out of the faith, as if to give her an exit interview. “They wanna tell me why they left the faith.” Listening to all those departures taught her that what comes out first is rarely the whole story, and that how you respond to it decides whether you ever hear the rest.
Why the first reason is the one you hear
Fields describes how it often goes. A person says they don’t believe because of evolution. If you keep listening, she says, “their real reason is they had a prayer that God didn’t answer or they felt he didn’t answer.” Then other things happened, and in her words “atheism became their reality.” The scientific objection may be sincere. It is simply the part that is easiest to say out loud.
Many people learned in church that the other part is not allowed. Fields names that belief directly. Some sit in church frustrated that God didn’t heal a parent or mend a relationship, and “you felt like I can’t express that to God because he doesn’t make mistakes.” If someone believes they cannot say it to God, they are unlikely to say it to God’s people. So the first thing you hear is a test, even if neither of you knows it. Your friend is offering the safe version and watching what you do with it.
What answering the surface claim costs you
The obvious cost is wasted effort. Fields says that if you don’t listen for the pain point, you end up arguing about matters that are real but are not the root of the person’s problem. You can spend an hour on radiometric dating while the actual wound sits untouched.
The deeper cost is what the conversation teaches your friend about you. Suppose you win. They concede the point about evolution. Nothing changes, because evolution was never what kept them away. But they have now learned something. When they brought you a reason, you treated it as a position to defeat. That tells them what would happen if they brought you the real thing. The unanswered prayer, the grief, the shame stays hidden, now with good evidence that it should.
This is why a lost argument is often less damaging than a won one aimed at the wrong target. Fields describes a culture whose guard is already up toward Christians, and she says “when people’s guards are up, it’s hard to penetrate.” Every conversation either lowers that guard a little or confirms why it went up. A friend who leaves your debate defeated and unheard is less likely to start the next conversation, and the next one is usually where the truth comes out.
There is also a risk in the argument itself. Fields passes along a point from Alister McGrath’s Mere Apologetics, in her paraphrase: the argument that convinced you may be the very argument that pushes someone else away, because God draws people by different paths. Your best argument is not neutral. Used on the wrong person at the wrong moment, it can push them further off.
Fields knows this from her own life. In seminary she was shaken by news of children murdered by terrorists. Her class was studying the problem of evil at the time. “I could explain the problem theologically, philosophically, logically, but emotionally it just didn’t hit.” She went to one of her New Testament professors and told him she was wrestling. He said, me too. “That was the answer I needed to know.” She already had the arguments. What reached her was someone who stayed in the struggle with her instead of trying to close it.
Isn’t it condescending to assume their reasons are a cover?
It would be, if the lesson were that you should never take an objection at face value. That is not Fields’s lesson.
She does not dismiss argument. Drawing on a distinction from an apologetics reference work, she separates informational apologetics, which brings evidence to answer false claims, from incarnational apologetics, which lives that truth out. She wants both. “We need the facts, we need the logic, we need the reason, but we need to approach people in a way that embodies and models Christ.” She even grants that the cynicism many people feel toward the faith has causes, and “some of them are very good reasons.”
The point is about order and attention, not diagnosis. You don’t decide in advance what is really going on. You ask, and you listen. Sometimes the intellectual question really is the question, and then you owe it a careful, honest answer. Assuming every objection is a wound is as careless as assuming none is. Both skip the person. And listening guarantees nothing. Some people never tell you more. Some tell you and still walk away. Fields’s approach cannot promise an outcome. It only makes sure you are speaking to the person who is actually there.
What Scripture gives you for this conversation
Start with the Psalms, because they show that complaint against God is part of Scripture. Psalm 13:1 opens, “How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me?” This is poetry and lament, not a command. Still, the Bible preserves a believer’s accusation that God has gone missing and does not edit it out. Fields notes that David often moves from asking where God is to thanking him by the end of a psalm, and she counts herself a witness that disappointment with God and faith in God can live together. If God made room for that speech, you can let your friend say it without rushing to defend him.
Then look at 1 Peter 3:15, the verse often treated as the charter for apologetics: “be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear.” Peter is writing to believers under pressure, in a passage about how they conduct themselves. The answer goes to someone who asks, and it comes with meekness. Fields reads the passage this way: a distinct, loving life should prompt the question, and then the reason follows. Her diagnosis of where many Christians go wrong is blunt: “We’re trying to give a reason before we show them our lives.”
Fields also points to the shape of Jesus’s own life. The Gospels record almost nothing he said in his first thirty years apart from the episode at the temple when he was twelve (Luke 2:41-52). She reads that silence as years of living among ordinary people before public ministry. “He didn’t come out the gate talking, he didn’t come out the gate arguing.” Instead, “he came out the gate being among us.” This is her interpretation of a gap in the record, and it is better held as an insight than a rule. It is still a fair one, and she draws the present-day conclusion: “I think we’re in a culture where we as Christians have to earn the right to talk again by the way we treat people.”
What changes once you hear the real reason
Ask what happened, not only what they now believe. Asking why don’t you believe anymore? invites a position. Asking when did it start to fall apart for you? invites a story, and you let them choose how much of it to tell. Fields describes the shift that comes when the story surfaces. You realize, “I think I’m dealing with somebody who is lacking peace or trying to find identity.” That realization, she says, makes you “less judgmental and more ministering to the heart of the person.”
It also changes what you say next. Take the Florida A&M student who asked Fields whether his skin color was a product of the fall. On the surface it is a question about Genesis. Fields heard something else: “this guy thinks that he’s only black because of the fall.” A lecture on the doctrine of the fall would answer his words and miss his worth. Her response was to affirm that every person is made in the image of God, and then to go further, because “you can only see the value of being made in the image of God when you know who God is.” When identity is the pain point, the conversation that helps is about the character of the God whose image he bears.
Or take provision, a pain point Fields knows firsthand. She was frustrated with God for years, then realized she had never lacked food or shelter. She had lacked the income, the home and the travel she wanted. “It was not that God lied to me, it was that I didn’t like the provision that he gave me.” Sometimes, as she puts it about people raised on a prosperity message, the disappointment is with a promise God never made. Jesus told his disciples in John 16:33, “In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.” Helping a friend see that can matter a great deal. But Fields also insists that some people have gone days without eating while staying faithful, and that the tension is real. Offered before your friend knows you have heard what they lost, the reframing sounds like blaming them for being hurt.
Through all of this you can hold your convictions without holding the person at arm’s length. Fields repeats a line she heard: “People don’t change positions, they change postures usually in arguments.” She describes talking with a Hebrew Israelite at Southern University. As he revealed that he was wrestling with pain and identity, she did not adopt his beliefs, but her posture toward him changed. Her summary: “our position shouldn’t change because we believe they’re the truth, but our posture towards them should.”
That frees you from treating every conversation as a sale you must close. Fields says she is not offended when people don’t believe, because she would not believe either unless God drew her. “It is God who penetrates the heart. It is only the Holy Spirit that transforms us.” Your part is narrower and harder: “I should listen to understand how they got there and then share the hope of the gospel on the other side.”
The stated reason is the door your friend chose to show you. Argue only at the door, and you may be right and never be let in.