Level Up, Not Dumb Down

24 August 2025  Luke 13:22-30

“Many, I tell you, will attempt to enter but will not be strong enough.”

Luke 13:24

To “level up” is gamer slang from the early 2000s. It means to acquire more skills, more power, and become more successful at the game.

Repentance is a kind of “levelling up.”

Bishop Robert Barron has said over and over again how the dumbing down of Catholic teaching in the late 20^th century has been a pastoral disaster. We have lost two entire generations, going on three, that way. We gave up so much intellectual ground that when the “new atheism” emerged in the years immediately following 9/11 many Catholics and other Christians had scarcely any idea what to say, and churches began hemorrhaging young adult members at an unsustainable rate – for every person who comes into the Catholic Church through the front door via Baptism and Confirmation, seven leave through the back door. Other Christian denominations are in even worse shape. This gave rise to Bishop Barron’s Word on Fireevangelical Catholic ministry association, along with Reasonable Faith led by William Lane Craig, and podcasts like Justin Brierly’s Unbelievable, and Matt Fradd’s Pints with Aquinas. They are recognitions that the Church has to “level up” if we are going to be any kind of effective Christian witness.

It is a kind of repentance.

There are some very hopeful signs that this levelling up is starting to bear fruit. Journalist Douglas Murray, who has written best-selling examinations of current cultural trends like The Madness of Crowds, The War on the West, and On Democracies and Death Cults, has said that he gave up his Christian faith for atheism in the early 2000s, and initially he was exhilarated by a sense of liberation and new possibilities. Twenty years on, however, he acknowledges that atheism has almost nothing to say about suffering, tragedy, and death, and can scarcely comprehend forgiveness, remorse, regret, or reconciliation. Atheists believed that philosophy and poetry would take the place of holy scripture, but philosophy classes are still small and arid, and poetry books are piling up in hangars rather than flying off the shelves. In a recent interview, Murray said almost longingly about his abandoned Christian faith, “I don’t really understand people who don’t wish it to be true.”

He’s thinking about repenting.

But the wish to believe is not faith, and it does not make people strong enough to enter through the narrow door. It may be a consolation to Christians that there are millions of Douglas Murrays out there who are wishing the gospel were true, but they will not level up far enough to squeeze through the narrow door until we level up far enough to stand up not just to the cheap shots of critics like Bill Maher, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins, but also the questions of honest inquirers who are seeking answers that respect their intellectual integrity. Our Bibles cannot remain in such pristine condition. They need to be dog-eared, underlined, and annotated in the margins in order for us to “be ready to account for the hope that is in” us (see I Peter 3:15). We need to live our lives in such a way that people ask questions, and then we have to give them answers.

That is what repentance looks like for us now. Because repentance is a kind of levelling up.

Justin Brierly asked Douglas Murray once what it would take for him to reclaim his Christian faith. Murray said, “I need to hear a voice.”

Maybe the voice will be ours. But not until we level up.