I ran into a former student who once took my Weird Science course. She’s pretty religious and a creationist, and she told me that she recently watched a movie featuring Lee Strobel that she liked. It made her think of my course.

I’ve read a couple of Strobel books, and I regularly lend out his The Case for a Creator to students who want to learn more about creationism and intelligent design firsthand. It’s basic conservative Christian apologetics. In other words, intellectually dishonest propaganda. Strobel makes a point of repeating how he once used to be an atheist but then saw the light, and his trick of the trade is to go visiting conservative Christian scholars, interviewing them and popularizing their views in such a way as to give the impression that conservative Christianity is an intellectually formidable edifice. All the best science, all the best historical scholarship turns out to prove fundamentalist Christianity correct. Strobel creates this impression by being extremely selective in the views he represents, giving little indication of the fringe nature of most of his interviewees positions as far as mainstream academia is concerned. He certainly does not detail why in most of the intellectual world, such fundamentalism is not taken seriously.

And yet, Lee Strobel is apparently a big shot in popular Christian apologetics. I read this as an indication of the insularity of conservative Christian culture. Most believers who read Strobel and similar literature are apparently satisfied with such highly selective presentations. I expect most don’t know or perhaps even care about the misrepresentation of intellectual life in such apologetics. It’s enough that someone out there is doing battle for the Lord, I suppose.

Now, most people, I imagine, tend to read and watch things that they tend to agree with. Most people who read my books must be nonbelievers. But I have to say, I don’t think nonbelievers are anywhere near as insular as conservative Christians in this regard. If Richard Dawkins, for example, is an icon of nonbelief today, he may get a lot of criticism but it would be hard to make a charge of gross misrepresentation of the current intellectual landscape stick against him. And I don’t think people who own a copy of The God Delusion are quite as insular as the audience for Lee Strobel and company.