Why Public Debates Don’t Change People

The Problem With Public Debates

The problem with modern debate culture isn’t that it’s mean. It’s that it misunderstands how humans actually learn and change.

Put a microphone and a camera in someone’s face—especially a stranger—and you don’t get truth. You get performance. You get posture. You get the version of the self that knows it’s being watched.

That’s why the debate formats popular on college campuses feel powerful and accomplish so little. They’re engineered to expose bad arguments, not to form honest people. And those are fundamentally different goals. 

No one works through what they actually believe on a stage.

The spotlight kills honesty

When there’s an audience—real or imagined—people protect themselves. They simplify. They reach for talking points. They say what sounds strongest, not what feels truest.

But belief doesn’t live in confidence.
It lives in hesitation.
In contradiction.
In half-formed thoughts we’re not sure are safe to say out loud.

A debate stage doesn’t make room for that. It rewards speed, certainty, and cleverness—the very things that keep real reflection from happening.

And most importantly, it offers no safety.

Safety isn’t softness—it’s the condition for truth

Here’s what debate culture misses entirely: people don’t resist truth because they’re ignorant. They resist it because it feels unsafe.

Unsafe to lose community.
Unsafe to admit doubt.
Unsafe to let go of an identity that once held them together.

You don’t untangle those fears while being filmed.

You don’t explore why something feels true to you—and why part of you hopes it isn’t—when strangers are silently keeping score. Real honesty requires permission to be unsure. To contradict yourself. To say, “I don’t know why I believe this, but I’m scared to let it go.”

That kind of honesty only shows up where trust already exists.

Arguments don’t heal insecurity—they activate it

Debate assumes people change when presented with better information. That if you expose a flaw or land the knockout punch, the other person will rethink their worldview.

In reality, when core beliefs are threatened, insecurity takes the wheel. And insecurity doesn’t open people up—it locks them down. People cling harder to ideas not because they’re convinced, but because backing down feels like losing their whole sense of self.

In short: debates don’t soften people—they calcify them.

They teach us to associate truth with humiliation and being wrong with danger. And once those two are welded together, curiosity dies.

Jesus didn’t build stages. He set tables.

This is where the whole thing quietly falls apart: Jesus didn’t host debates. He hosted dinners.

Tables are slow. Personal. Inefficient. You can’t dunk on someone over bread and wine. You have to listen long enough for the story underneath the belief to surface.

At a table, people don’t have to perform. They can exhale. They can admit confusion without being labeled weak. They can sit with tension instead of resolving it in a soundbite.

Tables create the safety truth needs to land without becoming a weapon.

Jesus seemed to understand something we’ve forgotten: people don’t need to be defeated. They need to be met.

The long way is the only way

Debate culture claims to care about truth, but it’s built in a way that makes truth almost impossible to receive. It prioritizes being right over being real, winning over understanding, exposure over transformation.

If truth is something we become able to receive, not something we’re bludgeoned into accepting, then the method matters.

Because you don’t argue people into freedom. You walk with them there.

That’s why Lark is choosing tables of grace over stages—spaces where faith can be honest, unhurried, and human again. That slow work doesn’t look impressive on camera, but it’s where freedom actually shows up.

To learn more, start here.