Lee Strobel on Atheism, Angels and God’s Love
Justin Camp
12 min read ⭑
“My life goal is to drag as many people to heaven with me as I can.”
I thought I knew what to expect when I called Lee Strobel. Forty books. Eighteen million copies sold. A major motion picture. The Washington Post called him one of evangelicalism’s most popular apologists. His whole career has been built on evidence — rigorous, courtroom-style investigation of the claims of Christ. The man wrote The Case for Christ, for crying out loud.
So I expected confidence. I expected certainty.
What I didn’t expect was this: Lee Strobel, at seventy-two, still struggles to believe the simplest Christian doctrine of all.
That God loves him.
I have to be honest — that stopped me cold. Here’s a guy who can marshal evidence for the resurrection like a prosecutor building a case. And yet, when it comes to receiving God’s love? He wrestles. Just like you. Just like me.
Our conversation wandered through some unexpected territory: the wound that drove him toward atheism, an angel who visited him at age twelve and why he spends his retirement befriending restaurant servers. What emerged wasn’t polished apologetics. It was something rawer and, honestly, more helpful — a portrait of a man still learning that intellectual certainty about God is far easier than emotional trust in him.
STRATEGIC CONSUMERISM
I started where we always start at Rapt — with food and home and love. It’s our way of getting beyond the public persona to the actual person — and what’s most important in life. And Strobel’s answer surprised me.
“It’s funny you ask,” he said, “because my wife, Leslie, and I sort of have a ministry to restaurant workers — an informal ministry. We go out and eat quite a bit because Leslie is not the world’s greatest cook, and she admits that. But it gives us an opportunity to build relationships.”
Years ago, they made a decision: rather than eating at random places, they’d return to the same handful of restaurants again and again. Get to know the servers, the managers, the cooks. Build actual friendships. He calls it “strategic consumerism.”
“There's one particular little restaurant called El Chaparro in [The Woodlands, near Houston, Texas] that we go back to often. It’s a Mexican restaurant owned by a local family. I like to eat fajitas because it takes some time to make them. Putting them together gives you time to talk, linger at the table, have conversations.”
Several restaurant workers have come to faith through these relationships. He told me about one waiter from Colombia.
“One day we came to the restaurant. He didn’t have our table, but he glanced over at us and smiled. As he walked past, he said, ‘I did it.’ Later, we got to sit down with him and ask what he meant. He said, ‘I received Christ last night.’ The look on his face — of joy, fulfillment, satisfaction and grace — was just palpable.”
Then Strobel said something I haven’t been able to shake: “My life goal is to drag as many people to heaven with me as I can.”
I love that. Not write more books. Not speak at more conferences. Drag people to heaven. Over fajitas, if necessary.
Dylan Ferreira; Unsplash
FIFTY-THREE YEARS AND COUNTING
When I asked about the “nonspiritual” activities that refresh his soul, Strobel didn’t hesitate.
“For me, it’s doing anything with my wife, Leslie. We met when we were fourteen years old in a chance encounter on a sidewalk in Chicago. She went home and told her mom, ‘I met the boy I’m going to marry.’ We dated on and off in high school and got married. She was nineteen, and I was twenty. We’ve been married for almost fifty-three years now.”
The specifics don’t seem to matter much. It’s the presence.
“It can be anything. Going for a car ride. Going to an ice cream shop. Sitting around the house and chatting. We just sync up so well and enjoy each other so much that hanging with Leslie is my favorite pastime.”
They have four grandchildren — three girls and one boy, Oliver Lee, the youngest at twelve. “He’s named after me,” Strobel added.
“I DON’T HAVE ENOUGH LOVE FOR YOU TO FILL MY LITTLE FINGER”
Here’s where the conversation took another turn I wasn’t expecting.
I asked Strobel about his kryptonite — his weakness, the thing he’d like to be rid of forever. Some people mention smaller things, manageable things. But I should have known that, given his public testimony, he would go straight to the heart of it.
“One of the most difficult things for me revolves around probably the simplest doctrine about God: that he loves us.” He paused. “I have a difficult time accepting that he loves me personally.”
Think about that for a second. This is a man who has spent forty years building intellectual cases for Christianity. He knows the theology. He trusts the Bible. He’s even felt God’s love. But knowing something in your head and receiving it in your heart? Those are two different things.
“I lived a very immoral, drunken, profane, narcissistic and self-absorbed life when I was an atheist. I hurt a lot of people. It’s hard for me sometimes to accept the fact that God has forgiven me and loves me. I know it’s true intellectually, but emotionally, it can be difficult.”
But the roots go deeper than his years as an atheist. They go back to childhood.
“My parents had three children in rapid succession. They threw themselves into their lives. Then my dad was kind of done with the dad thing. Several years went by, and then — oops — all of a sudden, my mom found herself pregnant with me unexpectedly. My dad and I just never jived. We never connected. We had a very difficult relationship.”
Then came the words that shaped everything.
“We had a big argument on the eve of my high school graduation, and he told me, ‘I don’t have enough love for you to fill my little finger.’”
I don’t know about you, but I had to sit with that one for a minute.
Strobel has studied the psychology: children who experience rejection from their fathers often walk toward atheism. They don’t want to know a heavenly Father because their earthly one hurt them too much.
“I had intellectual objections to the faith,” he acknowledged, “but my father issues also propelled me down that path.”
The cure, he discovered, comes through imagination.
“Imagine what the perfect father would be like. We can all imagine that. He’d be loving, kind, gracious, our biggest cheerleader. That is a picture of our heavenly Father. He’s not a magnified version of our earthly father. He’s the Father we need.”
Even so, the old wounds surface. Strobel mentioned arranging an abortion during college — “the destruction of an innocent, unborn child” — as one of the sins that still haunts him.
“These things linger and sometimes nag us at moments when we wonder if God truly loves us and has forgiven us. I believe he has, but the emotional side of that can be difficult for me.”
EVIDENCE FOR THE UNSEEN
Strobel’s latest book, “Seeing the Supernatural,” takes his investigative instincts into new territory: angels, near-death experiences and miracles.
“My background is in journalism and law. I tend to be very analytical. I’m always looking for corroboration. I wanted to see what evidence there was that there is a realm beyond what we can see and touch and put to the test.”
He investigated deathbed visions — those experiences where dying people see glimpses of the world to come. Researchers at one New York hospice found that 88% of patients reported such visions. “We’ve studied thousands of them and concluded that they’re definitely not hallucinations, fantasies or projections of the subconscious mind.”
The cases that caught his attention involved people seeing deceased relatives they didn’t know had died.
“There was a woman named Doris. She was on her deathbed, and she saw the heavens open up. She saw angelic beings and her father, who had died several years earlier, welcoming her. Then she got this puzzled look and said, ‘Wait a minute. Why is Vida with my father? That doesn’t make any sense.’”
Vida was Doris’s sister, who had died three weeks earlier. But no one had told Doris, fearing the shock would kill her.
“And yet, on her deathbed, she saw her sister in the realm to come. That’s the kind of corroboration I’m looking for.”
He also researched medically verified miracles — like a woman who had been blind for 12 years receiving instantaneous, permanent healing when her husband prayed. The case was documented by medical researchers and published in a peer-reviewed journal.
“I’m trying to help people understand that there is a realm beyond what we can see and touch and put to the test.”
THE $500 TEST
Here’s something else I didn’t expect from a guy known for meticulous research: he also listens for the quiet voice of the Holy Spirit.
“One of the things I’ve learned to do after I pray daily is to pause and say, ‘Lord, if you want to speak to me, if your Holy Spirit wants to convict me or guide me, I want to be quiet and invite you.’ I’ll be still for several minutes, sometimes ten or fifteen, to see if God is speaking.”
Most of the time, he said, he doesn’t feel anything particular. But sometimes.
“When I was a pretty new Christian, I felt very specifically from the Holy Spirit that he wanted me to empty my bank account and give the money anonymously to a young woman in our church.” The instruction was precise: get an anonymous cashier’s check and mail it on Friday.
The problem? He and Leslie only had five hundred dollars to their name.
“I told Leslie about this. She prayed. We prayed together. She said, ‘Honey, I feel the same thing. I feel this is from the Lord.’ So we emptied our account. We got an anonymous cashier’s check on Friday afternoon and mailed it.”
Monday morning, his phone rang. It was the woman — calling before the mail arrived.
“She was crying. ‘Something terrible has happened. My car broke down over the weekend, and it’s going to cost $500 to fix. I don’t have five hundred dollars. If I can’t get my car fixed, I’m going to lose my job and my apartment. Would you please pray?”
That afternoon, she opened her mail.
“What was cool about that,” Strobel said, “is God didn’t have to do it that way. He could have prevented her car from breaking down. But then my wife and I wouldn’t have had the joy of being an answer to her prayer. My faith wouldn’t have been deepened. It gave me confidence that when he guides, I need to follow — even if it seems risky, even if that’s all the money we have in the world.”
“SOMEDAY YOU’LL UNDERSTAND”
Given his research into supernatural experiences, I had to ask: Was his interest purely academic? It wasn’t.
“I had an encounter with an angel when I was twelve years old.” He said it matter-of-factly, though he admitted he was embarrassed to tell anyone for years. “I thought maybe it was just bad pizza I ate or something.”
It was the only dream from his childhood that he remembers. In it, he stood in his kitchen when an angel appeared and began describing the wonders of heaven.
“I casually said to him, ‘I’m going to go there someday.’ He looked at me and said, ‘How do you know?’”
The question shocked him. “What kind of question is that? I’m a good kid. I got good grades in school. I pretty much obeyed my parents.” He listed all the reasons a twelve-year-old might think himself worthy of paradise.
The angel’s response: “That doesn’t matter.”
“This chill went down my spine. How can that not matter? All my efforts to be dutiful as a son and do good things.”
Then the angel said something else: “Someday you’ll understand.”
Strobel suppressed the memory. He walked into atheism, into drinking, into a self-absorbed life that lasted until his late twenties. Then his wife brought him to church, and he heard the gospel for the first time: salvation isn’t earned by good deeds; it’s a free gift of grace.
“My mind instantly flashed back to that encounter.”
He now sees two forms of corroboration. First, the angel told him something he didn’t know at twelve — that salvation comes by grace alone. Second, the angel made a prophecy that came true sixteen years later.
“I remember my ordination. They always have these theologians there questioning you about your doctrine. I’m thinking, ‘Do I tell them about this experience? Are they going to think I’m weird?’ But I did. And their basic reaction was, ‘Yeah, OK, that’s fine.’ They weren’t surprised that sometimes God does stuff like that.”
Wikimedia Commons
STRIPPED DOWN TO NOTHING
In 2011, Strobel nearly died. His son Kyle — now a professor of spiritual formation at Biola University’s Talbot School of Theology — ministered to him in a way that has shaped his prayer life ever since.
“My son took me on a prayer journey I still use to this day. It’s called a Prayer of Relinquishment.” Kyle guided him through a process of systematically stripping away every identity he relied upon.
“He said, ‘OK, you’re not a father. You’re not a grandfather. You feel that being stripped away from you. You’re not an author. You’re not a pastor. You’re not a speaker. You’re not a husband.’”
It took about an hour. At the end, nothing remained but Lee and God.
“No identity to try to color or influence things. Just simply me and God. That was very profound — to connect with God at that kind of level. Not as a pastor, not as an author, not as a father, but just as me, as a child of God.”
He still practices it. “I periodically take time to strip away all of the things that people see, strip everything down to just me and God, so I can reconnect with him at that level.”
I’ve been thinking about that ever since we talked. What would it feel like to stand before God with no titles, no accomplishments, no failures — just you?
THE BOOKS THAT SHAPED HIM
I asked Strobel about the resources that most shaped his faith. Three stood out.
“Knowing God” by J.I. Packer. “It’s about not just knowing God in an intellectual sense but experiencing God in a profound, personal way. There’s this great line: ‘To be forgiven by God the Judge is a wonderful thing, but to be adopted by God the Father is better yet.’” Given his father wound, you can see why Packer’s emphasis on adoption struck so deep.
“To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee. “It’s not a Christian book. But reading it as a young person opened my eyes to racism and how insidious it is. It’s a great story of someone doing the right thing in a very tumultuous time.”
“Mere Christianity” by C.S. Lewis. “It influences so many people who have an intellectual bent to faith and are trying to understand the philosophy of faith and how it syncs up with the reality of God.”
ANALOG STROBEL
Given his prolific output, I assumed Strobel would have sophisticated systems for leveraging technology. I was wrong.
“I have been unsuccessful.” He laughed. “My nickname is Analog Strobel.”
He wrote his first book on an IBM Selectric typewriter. He prefers Microsoft Word now. But he doesn’t pretend to understand the digital world.
“I’ll be honest. I’m in my seventies. I’ve got a bad heart, one kidney and five bulging discs in my back. I’m not going to live that much longer. The average American male lives to about seventy-six, and I’m almost seventy-three.”
He’s at peace with that.
“As I see AI come in, I don’t know that I have the capacity to engage with it in any meaningful way. I’m ready to go to the next realm, be with God and let other people who are smarter than me wrestle with this newfound artificial intelligence. It’s unbelievably wonderful and terrible at the same time.”
His IT department? His grandkids.
“When my computer breaks down, they come over and fix it. Somehow, they shake their heads and fix it in about two seconds. Then they say, ‘Oh, Papa, you just don’t get it, do you?’ And I don’t.”
LOOKING AHEAD
With mortality clearly on his mind, I asked what’s next.
“God is continuing to sharpen the focus of my calling. Over time, I’ve sharpened my focus on what God has called me to do, which is to drag as many people to heaven with me as I can. That’s where I want to spend the rest of my years.”
He mentioned a documentary, “The Case for Miracles,” set to release in theaters, along with “The Case for Christmas,” a book examining evidence for the incarnation.
“I’m a writer by nature, by temperament and by giftedness. And because I love to do it, I’m going to keep writing books that I hope will open people’s eyes to God for the rest of my life.”
Then he circled back to what matters most.
“The greatest joy of my life is when people send me a note saying, ‘God used your book to bring me to faith in Christ.’ That, to me, is the greatest sense of satisfaction I can get.”
A FINAL THOUGHT
According to one study, 26% of adult children are estranged from their fathers — compared to only 6% with their mothers. The number who carry wounds, even without full estrangement, is surely far higher. If Lee Strobel’s story teaches us anything, it’s that those wounds don’t simply vanish when we come to faith. They linger. They shape how we receive God’s love, even when we can prove his existence beyond a reasonable doubt.
But here’s what forty years of investigation has taught him: the evidence for God’s love isn’t found in a book. It’s found in returning to him, again and again, with all your doubts and failures and father wounds — and discovering he’s still there. Still loving. Still offering what your earthly father never could.
If you struggle to believe God loves you, you’re in good company. The man who wrote “The Case for Christ” struggles too. But he keeps showing up. And so can you.
Atheist-turned-Christian Lee Strobel, the former award-winning legal editor of The Chicago Tribune, is a New York Times bestselling author of more than 40 books and curricula that have sold 18 million copies worldwide. A former spiritual skeptic, Lee became a Christian in 1981 after probing the evidence for Jesus for nearly two years — as depicted in the film The Case for Christ. His books include award-winners like The Case for Christ, The Case for Faith, The Case for a Creator and The Case for Grace. His latest is Seeing the Supernatural. Lee and Leslie have been married for over 52 years.