There are some comments here making a parallel between religious apologetics and some local applause lights (rationality, atheism, cryonics). I think there is some important difference, but it's hard to show exactly what it is. Also, I am not familiar with a lot of religious apologetics -- maybe some of it is more analogical and other is less.

I think the difference is in the attitude of the audience (the real target audience, as this article emphasises) towards the discussed topic, and the -uhm- tone of the author's voice (optimistic or desperate). Here is how I imagine a finctional LessWrong-ish apologetics:

"Dear rationalists! These days science is more unpopular than ever. People have many doubts. They say: no one has ever seen an atom with their own eyes. Scientists speak about interference of quantum particles in their laboratories, but no one has ever travelled to a parallel universe and back; some sciensists even doubt those universes really exist. Futurists often get their predictions wrong.

On the other hand, modern life offers a lot of temptations. You can read your horoscope and know what will happen to you. You can pray for success, and become successful, even without scientific research or rationality exercises. Homeopatic pills cure all kinds of diseases, even those where the official medicine offers no solution. Christianity in Africa helped to reduce the wars and feed the starving children, increasing the average lifespan by 20%.

Facing these strong arguments, it is really difficult to remain faithful to the science. Most of scientists privately admit they often have doubts about their life and education. This book is a story of my life, about how I left my university and spent a decade of my life in a religious cult, and what convinced me to come back. I will also share stories of other scientists in similar situations.

Argument 1: Science is old-fashioned and boring.

Preserving the tradition of Bacon's scientific method feels like living a few hundred years ago, while the society invents new and exciting conspiracy theories about everything around us. Young people don't consider spending their days in a lab wearing a white cloak a good use of their time. Test-tubes and pipettes seem boring compared with colorful mandalas. Reading scientific papers seems boring compared with watching The Zeitgeist.

But this is mostly a prejudice based on ignorance of the real science. I have seen many young people excited about spending their lives in labs. They didn't worry about missing the latest fashion or not having social life. They enjoyed learning from textbooks and doing experiments. Some of them later published their own textbooks. Therefore it is not true that science is old-fashioned and boring."

Et cetera. I hope I conveyed successfully the expression of defeat at the beginning, and then some kind of pride in stubborn resistance at the end. There is a list of good reasons to leave, most of them strawmanish but pointing at some real thing, and at the end there is no good argument for staying except for "but people can be happy in our tribe, too". A writer like S.C.Lewis would try convincing the reader that people want to leave our tribe because they want to signal contrarianism (because there is no other reason for wanting to leave our tribe), but the true contrarians play the game one level higher and not-leave. But contrarian or not, there is a stubborn pride in doing something that has so many widely accepted reasons for not doing, most of them very convincing.