Cliff and Stuart Knechtl are on an apologetics mission to break down doubt and help people come to a deeper understanding of the gospel.
Their new book, Demolishing Doubt: Discover Your Deepest questions Can Lead How To Lesgive Faith, helps people navigate faith uncertainties and arrive at important answers that can help them on their faith journeys.
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Cliff recently told CBN News that his long history of apologies helped prepare the father-son duo for this project.
“For 46 years, I’ve been interacting with college students on campuses across the country, and whenever I’m faced with an atheist, I like to look first at the evidence for the existence of God, then the evidence for the reliability of the New Testament Gospels, then the evidence for the reliability of Christ, and then…what is real faith?” he said.
He said a friend challenged him to write a book that followed this logic, and the apologist ended up following that advice.
“This is the line of thinking that I followed from atheism to evidence for the existence of God, evidence for the reliability of the Gospels, evidence for the reliability of Christ, and what true faith is,” Cliff said.
It’s this very approach that has made both Cliff and Stuart talked about again and again, as their interactions and reactions tend to resonate deeply with those they encounter.
Stewart said he believes part of the duo’s online success comes from speaking out about free speech concerns. The dynamic became more political and eventually shifted to an apology.
“When we started, our videos were actually primarily aimed at countering the anti-free speech that we see in our country, certain anti-free religions, anti-free speech, and other ideologies that have come along with it that I can’t name right now,” he said. “I think in the first few months when we started using social media, people were just talking about free speech. Then, after a few months, they slowly brought in the gospel, because that was our pre-evangelism work.”
One of the most fascinating elements of Cliff’s journey is the decades he has spent sharing the gospel. Over that time, he said, there hasn’t been much of a change in the types of questions people have about God.
“There are great similarities between the questions asked 45 years ago and the questions being asked today,” he said. “But the definition of tolerance has definitely changed. When I first started using the word tolerance, it meant let’s disagree but respect each other. Then it changed and said, ‘Well, even though we contradict each other, we’re actually all saying the same thing. And tolerance means… being brain dead and accepting everything as equally valid, even if we contradict each other.’
Mr. Cliff continued. “But now…tolerance has turned into, ‘Well, I’m right, you’re wrong, and I’m canceling you.’ I think it was epitomized by two lesbians at Texas State University who said to me, ‘You can’t really love us. You can’t be our friends.'”
He recalled telling the women that he truly loved them and that Jesus had commanded them to do just that. He told the couple that although he disagreed with such sentiments, he also had love for racists.
“While I strongly oppose racism and will tell the person why racism is wrong, I still respect them as human beings created in the image of God, loved by God, and gifted by God,” Cliff said.
One of the most interesting elements of Cliff and Stuart’s research is their first-hand accounts of witnessing spiritual outpourings across the country. When asked if he believed anything was really happening on that front, Stuart was candid.
“Every organization we talk to on all these major campuses will say, ‘The numbers have skyrocketed,'” he says. “Some, I mean, can grow exponentially within just six to 12 months.”
He believes that something may be afoot, as faith seems to be rapidly increasing among Gen Z.
“No matter how you define it, when you look at it numerically, I think there’s definitely statistics, not just anecdotal evidence,” Stewart said.
Cliff agreed, saying he sees a resurgence as “in our pocket.”
“Whether you like it or not, when you go to the University of Tennessee, the University of Georgia, Texas A&M, Mississippi State, there are much bigger crowds than when you go to Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Yale, Brown, Cornell,” he said. “So the Northeast and the Northwest are dominated by incredible secularism, materialism, atheism and agnosticism.”
But Cliff added that even in these geographically challenging areas, there is growing excitement and openness for Christ, even among a small number of people.
“I’m so excited about what the Holy Spirit is doing in people’s hearts and minds,” he said.
Despite the excitement, Cliff also offered a warning. Revival aside, there is also a “squeezing of secularism” on some college campuses, and many of the movements are being led by professors at public universities. And the impact on young people is enormous.
With all this in mind, the duo hopes that “Demolishing Doubt: Discover How Your Deepest questions Can Lead To Life-Giving Faith” will help people confront their questions.
“Sometimes a little doubt is a good thing,” Cliff says. “Doubt motivated me to study. I’m not a natural student. It doesn’t come naturally to me. But when I have doubts, and when my faith in Christ is seriously challenged, either in my head or from the mouth of a skeptic standing before me, it must motivate me to study more and find better answers.”
He said unbelief increases when people stop thinking and become absorbed in their emotions. See Cliff and Stuart discuss these issues above.
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