Cliffe and Stuart Knechtle are on an apologetics mission to demolish doubt and help people better understand the Gospel.
Their new book, “Demolishing Doubt: Discover How Your Deepest Questions Can Lead to Life-Giving Faith,” helps people navigate the uncertainties of faith and arrive at key answers that will inform their faith journeys.
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Cliffe recently told CBN News his long history in apologetics helped prepare the father-son duo for the project.
“For 46 years, I’ve been dialoguing with university students on campuses around the United States, and whenever I’m confronted by an atheist, I love to, first of all, go through 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 follows this logic, and the apologist ended up heeding that advice.
“That’s the line of thought that I followed from atheism, evidence for the existence of God, to evidence for the reliability of the Gospels, to the evidence for the trustworthiness of Christ, and then to what is real faith,” Cliffe said.
This is the very approach that has repeatedly made both Cliffe and Stuart go viral, as their interactions and responses tend to resonate deeply with those they encounter.
Stuart said he believes some of the duo’s online success stems from speaking out about free speech concerns — a dynamic that started more political and ended up moving into apologetics.
“When we started off, our videos actually were mainly geared towards just refuting the anti-free speech we see in our nation, kind of that anti-free religion, anti-free speech, and then the other ideologies we could name that I won’t right now that have come along with that,” he said. “I think those first few months of us going on social media, people were just all about the free speech, and then slowly we brought the Gospel in after a couple months, ’cause that was kind of our pre-evangelism piece.”
One of the most fascinating elements of Cliffe’s journey has been the many decades he has spent sharing the Gospel. Over that time, he said there hasn’t been much change in the types of questions people have been asking about God.
“There’s a tremendous similarity between the questions that were asked 45 years ago and the questions that are asked today,” he said. “But the definition of tolerance has definitely changed. When I first began, tolerance meant we disagree, but we’re gonna try and respect each other. Then it morphed into, ‘Well, we all really are saying the same thing even if we contradict each other, and tolerance … just means being brain dead and accepting everything as equally valid, even if you’re contradicting each other.”
Cliffe continued, “But now … tolerance has morphed into, ‘Well, I’m right, you’re wrong, and I’m gonna cancel you,’ and 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 friend.'”
He recalled telling the women that he truly loved them and that he was commanded by Jesus to do just that. He told the couple he also has love for people who are racist, despite disagreeing with such sentiment.
“Although I strongly disagree with racism and will communicate to that person why racism is wrong, I still respect them as human beings created in the image of God, loved by God, and given gifts by God,” Cliffe said.
One of the most interesting elements of Cliffe’s and Stuart’s work is their firsthand accounts of seeing spiritual outpouring across the nation. When asked if he believes something is truly unfolding on that front, Stuart was candid.
“Every organization we talk to on all these major campuses, all of them will say, ‘We’ve had a huge spike in numbers,'” he said. “Some, I mean, exponentially larger just within six to 12 months.”
With faith seemingly surging among Gen Z, he believes something could be afoot.
“However you define it, I think if we look at it numerically speaking, definitely the statistics and not just the anecdotal evidence is there,” Stuart said.
Cliffe agreed, noting he sees revival “in pockets.”
“Like it or not, when we go to the University of Tennessee, University of Georgia, Texas A&M, Mississippi State, the crowds are much larger than when we go to Harvard, MIT, Yale, Brown, Cornell,” he said. “So the Northeast and the Northwest are in the grip of an incredible secularism, materialism, atheism, agnosticism.”
Cliffe added, though, that even in those tougher geographic areas there is an increased excitement and openness to Christ, even if among smaller groups of people.
“I’m very excited for what the Holy Spirit is doing in people’s hearts and minds,” he said.
Despite this excitement, Cliffe also offered a caution: revival aside, “there also is a stranglehold that secularism has” on some college campuses, with professors at government colleges driving much of this dynamic. And the impact on young people is profound.
With all of this in mind, the duo is hoping “Demolishing Doubt: Discover How Your Deepest Questions Can Lead to Life-Giving Faith” helps people confront their doubts.
“Doubt can be good,” Cliffe said. “Doubt has motivated me to study. I am not a natural student. It doesn’t come naturally to me. But when I have doubts and when my faith in Christ is being challenged seriously in my own head or from the mouth of a skeptic standing in front of me, that’s gotta be motivating me to study harder and to find better answers.”
He said unbelief grows when people stop thinking and cave into their emotions. Watch Cliffe and Stuart describe these issues above.
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