Over the next few weeks, we continue to feature the winners of this year’s Zenger Prize. What is this prize and why does it matter? See Marvin Olasky’s introduction and explanation.
Just before Easter, Fox News and The Daily Caller decried a “ban” on religious symbols at the annual White House Easter egg hunt, despite the rules remaining unchanged for the event’s 45-year history. Such sloppy reporting is one piece of evidence for the 80 percent of Americans who say religion is losing its influence in public life, according to Pew Research Center. But if intellectual culture eventually had an influence on popular culture, maybe the situation is not so dire. As Fox raged, Britain’s Justin Brierley won a 2024 Zenger Prize for his podcast series “The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God.”
Brierley launched his first podcast, Unbelievable? as an examination of the “new atheism” movement led by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris. He told me that as time went by “conversations were starting to change. And increasingly many of the non-believers who came on to have the discussions were distancing themselves from that movement. They were perhaps saying, ‘I’m not a Richard Dawkins-style atheist.’ And I noticed that a lot more of my guests were starting to recognize the value of Christianity, even if they weren’t believers themselves. They weren’t ready to dismiss it out of hand.”
One example, Brierley said, is Douglas Murray: “He is someone who’s not a Christian—he had a faith growing up, but lost it in his late teens, early twenties…. He still has this longing for [Christianity] to be true and recognizes that the values and virtues he believes in as a 21st century, Western person still essentially find their basis in Christianity.” Murray quoted the well-known line from poet Matthew Arnold about the long withdrawing roar of the sea of faith and said “the sea could come back in again. And he was talking about this in the context of some surprising conversions of his secular peers to Christianity.”
Brierley went on to write a book about that “surprising rebirth” and then launched a podcast with the same name. He said many Christians find the podcast “encouraging because we obviously live in a world where there’s a lot of bad news, and often the climate around Christianity is often one of the stories about the failures and the decline and all of that stuff. And I’m not saying that stuff doesn’t exist, but I think what people have appreciated is that while acknowledging that it does exist, there are still signs of hope that actually the story’s not over for the church. Sometimes things do have to die off to be reborn.”
Zenger House chairman Marvin Olasky said Brierley gained his Zenger Prize for “rugged reporting about atheists and atheists-become-Christians that shows how hearts and minds are restless until they rest in God, and for offering listeners complex theological truths in understandable ways.” ###
Katie Gaultney is a Dallas journalist, mom, and Zenger House interviewer.