Former journalist turned megachurch pastor and Christian apologist Lee Strobel is the star and main driving force behind The Case for Faith, a video documentary companion piece to his book of the same title. While the subtitle for this video is “A Journalist Investigates the Toughest Objections to Christianity,” the case as laid out in this video is paper-thin and lacking in real substance. In fact, sad as it is to say, commercials for Vegas vacations offer more specifics.
The movie is very roughly divided up into three main acts. The first act features a lot of nice photography of people from around the world, while Strobel drones on endlessly about the “need for a connection with the divine” that exists “within us all.” There’s nothing new or particularly convincing about this act, as it is the sort of standard PowerPoint presentation that might move some people to tears if on display at a Sunday morning worship service, among a community of like-minded believers, but contains little content that would influence the mind of a skeptic.
The second act focuses on the early career of evangelist Charles Templeton, who started his career around the same time as Billy Graham, but who experienced doubt and ultimately fell away from a life of faith and declared himself an agnostic. This is a very tricky portion of the documentary, due to how it’s constructed.
Strobel intersperses segments of an interview with Templeton conducted before his death in 2001, when Templeton was struggling with Alzheimer’s disease, complications of which ultimately took his life. Strobel’s interview segments with Templeton feature the former evangelist explaining why he stopped believing in God, but then cuts to Strobel explaining how he “defended the faith” to Templeton. While Strobel never directly claims to have influenced Templeton back to a life of faith, one is left with the impression that may have happened, an incredibly self-aggrandizing claim.
However, there is no evidence that the Alzheimer’s-stricken Templeton ever did retreat from his agnosticism late in life, even though he was able to talk about his former spiritual beliefs quite cogently.
Worse, however, is that this second act, also, is lacking in depth of content; for someone who is supposedly one of Christianity’s top apologists, there is a surprising lack of apologetics on display in this video; in fact, little of what he offers in answer to these “toughest objections” is unique or presented in a new way, and most of what he does offer goes beyond the simple homilies one might find in a “daily devotional” book of prayer.
The third act is perhaps the most convincing, and redeeming, act of the documentary. It focuses on the individual story of a husband and wife whose daughter was tragically killed in a driveway accident. The pain of their loss is clear and understandable in a way that Strobel’s over-simplified homilies of faith just are not.
The accident happened one winter, when his wife and son were preparing to leave to go to the store; his daughter was initially going to stay at home with her dad, but changed her mind and rushed out the door to join her mom and brother. The mother was backing up in the driveway, the daughter slipped on the snow and ice and she ended up beneath the car, dying almost instantly.
Such a mind-numbing loss would destroy many marriages. Guilt, recrimination and bitterness would be natural and understandable reactions. The testimony of how this family relied on their faith in God to overcome the emotional fallout of such an accident is emotional and moving. Their claim that is was a reliance on divine power that helped them overcome this tragedy may not convince everyone that God is real, but it is a far more convincing exhibit than any of Strobel’s simplistic devotional thoughts throughout the rest of the film.
Even those hard-pressed to be moved by any “evidence” in the movie will still find this family’s story moving and evocative. Strobel wisely backs off during this third act and reduces his own on-screen time, since the testimony of this family easily speaks for itself.
In the end, “The Case for Faith” presents and overwhelmingly weak case for, well, faith. The first two-thirds of the film are largely emotional and somewhat manipulative, and in the case of Charles Templeton’s final disposition toward faith, potentially misleading. They are definitely portions of your life you can never get back.
However, the final third of the film is, at minimum, watchable if not exactly convincing when it comes to answering logical doubts and questions about faith in Christianity. Over the years, many fine books of Christian apologetics have been written, many of them arguing persuasively for an evidential basis for faith in the God of the Bible; however, Strobel’s “The Case for Faith” is not among those more scholarly works. While his work may draw applause from a sympathetic audience at one of his megachurch homes, it is simply far too lacking in research, evidence and depth to influence most skeptics of faith.
Works like “Evidence That Demands a Verdict” by Josh McDowell, “Scaling the Secular City: A Defense of Christianity” by J.P. Moreland, “Hard Questions, Real Answers” by William Lane Craig, and “The Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics” by Norman L. Geisler are all works that would provide a more intellectually-satisfying defense of Christian faith than anything Strobel offers here; sure, these books and authors are older and less trendy, but sometimes that’s not such a bad thing.
