Unfolding Short Stories: “You don’t have to throw your brain in the dustbin to be a Christian.” Justin Brierly explains why he's still a Christian
The Unfolding
Northwestern Media
4.9 • 809 Ratings
🗓️ 8 July 2025
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
“You don’t have to throw your brain in the dustbin to be a Christian.”
Raised in the UK with few Christians around him, Justin Brierly encountered God powerfully at age 15. But later, in the halls of Oxford, doubt crept in. What followed was a deep search for truth that led to a career of asking hard questions and finding better answers.
His book Why I’m Still a Christian tells that story. It's shaped by conversation, discovery, and a thoughtful pursuit of faith.
“We all come to life with a worldview… the question is: which one makes better sense?”
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You didn't have to throw your brain in the dustbin to be a Christian, that actually there was an incredible intellectual tradition in Christianity. |
| 0:07.6 | God's story? Your life. Unfolding short stories. |
| 0:15.7 | Why are you still a Christian? It's the question Justin Briyer-Lee asked himself, and it's pretty close to |
| 0:23.4 | the title of his new book, Why I'm Still a Christian. After encountering God as a teen, he found |
| 0:30.2 | himself later in Oxford, surrounded by skepticism. What he discovered, you don't have to throw your brain away in the dustbin |
| 0:40.0 | to believe. I was born into a Christian family. Growing up in the UK, it's quite a secular |
| 0:47.4 | environment. There aren't that many churches. So being a Christian kind of makes you stand out from the |
| 0:53.4 | crowd somewhat. |
| 0:54.7 | And I had plenty of secular, skeptical friends around me to keep me on my toes. |
| 0:59.8 | But I had an experience in my teenage years that I just couldn't deny. |
| 1:03.7 | It was an experience of God at a youth camp where suddenly the reality of God just came alive for me. |
| 1:09.6 | I was kind of blasted by the Holy Spirit. And from that moment on, from the age of God just came alive for me. I was kind of blasted by the Holy Spirit. |
| 1:12.3 | And from that moment on, from the age of 15, I just knew there was a God. I knew he loved me. |
| 1:17.9 | I wanted to read the Bible. I wanted to pray. I had one of those kind of road to Damascus moments where |
| 1:24.3 | things just came alive for me. So I had this amazing experience of coming to know God through Jesus in that moment as a teenager. |
| 1:34.2 | But a few years later, I found myself at Oxford University, where I was a student, an undergraduate |
| 1:39.7 | studying politics, philosophy and economics. And I found myself surrounded once again by people who |
| 1:45.8 | were very skeptical about the Christian faith. Very few of the people I knew at my university |
| 1:50.9 | were Christians, and lots of them were quite skeptical about Christianity. And so I ended up having a lot |
| 1:57.5 | of conversations and being challenged very frequently about my faith by the people |
| 2:02.0 | I was around at university. It kind of had a difficult effect on me. There was at least one term |
| 2:09.1 | when I was in that kind of undergraduate phase where I questioned everything. Maybe it was all in my |
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