That’s the title of this short piece I posted the last Sunday of January on National Review Online. I’ll note that the post has attracted 168 comments so far, but I have no idea whether that is a high or low number for this venue. Anyway, here’s the post (and I hope all my fellow Christians — as well as any non-Christians — will enjoy it, whatever their political stripe):
A couple of times in my life I’ve witnessed astonishingly fast disintegrations of what had appeared to be intractable threats. The first was the collapse of the Soviet Empire in the late 1980s/early 1990s, and the second the collapse of DEI/racial preferences over the past two years. I hasten to say that in neither case is the resolution necessarily permanent — nothing in politics is permanent — and indeed there are still Communist countries and a despotic Russia, and the Left’s fanatical support of race-mongering will not end and its resourcefulness should never be underestimated. Still, the transformations were astonishing and wonderful.
I’m hoping that I will witness a third transformation in my lifetime, namely a worldwide embrace of Christianity. This is not fanciful: People everywhere could and should see that, Gee, yes, there is increasingly strong evidence of the existence of a God and, conversely, a lot of implausibilities with a God-absent universe; and they could and should see that, Gee, yes, the historical evidence supporting Jesus of Nazareth being a triune part of that God is overwhelming, too. And the costs of rejecting faith are potentially very high, and the benefits of embracing it are also very high — not only after this life but even during it, given the attractiveness of living and dying as a Christian believer. With modern communications, this transformation could happen very quickly.
Anyway, here’s hoping and praying. A third of the world’s individuals are Christians already, but it should be closer to triple that. Stranger things have happened.
P.S. Of course, there are many good apologetic works out there, but I will offer here a short list of short books: On the existence of God and Jesus’s divinity, there are Richard Swinburne’s Is There a God? and Was Jesus God?, respectively; and Lee Strobel’s The Case for a Creator and The Case for Christ, also respectively. The historicity of Jesus’s Resurrection (and, thus, his divinity) is compactly presented in The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus, by Gary R. Habermas and Michael R. Licona. Best of all is C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, and I’ll end with Blaise Pascal’s Pensées, with a special nod to his famous wager.