 Phillips’s longstanding debate with Nielsen is commonly portrayed as a modern-day contest between faith and reason, but Phillips never regarded it that way himself. Whereas Nielsen treats Phillips’s “contemplative” approach to philosophy of religion as essentially an apologetic strategy meant to shield belief in God from criticism, Phillips contended that “it casts a liberating light on both belief and atheism. Both are rescued from philosophical distortion” (2005, 75). As Phillips saw it, his disagreement with Nielsen was a disagreement not between the advocates of competing first-order commitments, but between Nielsen’s atheism and his own professed desire to do conceptual justice to rival points of view, both religious and anti-religious – an asymmetry that the term “fideism,” with its pietistic connotations, seemed to him to obscure.