Summary: Confronting Christianity

The GIST

Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World's Largest Religion by Rebecca McLaughlin takes the twelve objections an educated modern skeptic is most likely to raise against the Christian faith and answers each one head on. Published by Crossway in 2019 as part of The Gospel Coalition series, it was McLaughlin's first book. Publishers Weekly called it a "smart debut," and Christianity Today named it its 2020 Beautiful Orthodoxy Book of the Year. McLaughlin holds a PhD in Renaissance literature from Cambridge University and a theology degree from Oak Hill Theological College in London, and endorsers note that she wrote from long experience of working with secular universities.

Her starting point is that Christianity is the most widespread belief system on earth and is likely to stay that way, yet many thoughtful Westerners regard biblical Christianity as dangerous. So the faith deserves to be wrestled with and not waved away. Her central claim is bolder: the hardest objections, looked at closely, stop being roadblocks and become signposts that point toward faith. What sets the book apart is its candor. McLaughlin freely admits that Christians have twisted Scripture to justify racism, misogyny, homophobia, slavery and imperialism, and she grants that skeptics are often right to be angry. Her argument is that the failures of Christ's followers are not the same thing as Christ.

The Big Ideas

Religion is not dying, and it seems to be good for us

The book opens by challenging an assumption so common in the West that it rarely gets examined: that religion fades as education and technology spread. McLaughlin has called this the secularization hypothesis, and she argues it has simply failed. Around the world Christianity is growing, and that growth is the reason she thinks its claims have to be taken seriously.

The first chapter then asks, "Aren't we better off without religion?" Her answer leans on research. Religious practice, she argues, is linked with good outcomes, and she has pointed to Harvard-backed studies connecting weekly churchgoing with less depression, better health and longer life. She does not stop at "religion is useful." For her those benefits point past religion in general to something specific: Jesus, and the church as a kind of family. This sets the pattern for the whole book. She takes the best current work in sociology, science and psychology and argues that it lines up with what the Bible says far more often than it contradicts it.

A faith for every nation that still claims to be the true one

The next pair of questions deals with Christianity's place among the world's cultures and beliefs. To the charge that it crushes diversity, McLaughlin replies that Christianity has been multiethnic and multicultural from the start. It is not a white, Western religion, and today most Christians live outside the West. Far from flattening difference, she writes, the faith offers "a basis for saying that all human beings are created equal, and a deep call to love across diversity."

That makes the following question sharper: how can anyone say there is only one true faith? Here she turns the objection around. Every worldview makes exclusive claims, she argues, and that includes the secular pluralism that says no religion may claim to be right. Christianity's exclusivity is therefore not unusual. The real question is not whether to hold exclusive beliefs, since everyone does, but which ones are true.

The roots of human rights, and the truth about violence

Two chapters take on the moral record. "Doesn't religion hinder morality?" gets another reversal. McLaughlin argues that Christianity is the foundation beneath modern ideas of human rights and equality, and that Christian morality gives a solid footing for social justice. The belief that every person has equal worth did not appear from nowhere, she contends, and a skeptic who holds it is standing on borrowed ground. This is also where the book touches on abortion and on what morality can rest upon at all.

"Doesn't religion cause violence?" is where her honesty does the most work. She does not excuse the Crusades or any other bloodshed committed in Christ's name. Her argument is that in such cases Christian teaching was distorted, and that the real problem is not Christianity but the human urge to misuse power for selfish ends. Her wide reading, which takes in Solzhenitsyn among many others, is put to work on exactly this point.

Against that record she sets a picture of what the faith looks like when it is lived. One of the book's most memorable stories is that of Rachael Denhollander, a survivor of the abuser Larry Nassar, who spoke from the witness stand and urged him to turn to Christ and find the mercy and grace that are open to everyone, sexual abusers included. For McLaughlin that is the faith in a single scene: evil called by its name, and forgiveness offered anyway.

Reading the Bible, and reading the universe

Next come the intellectual objections. "How can you take the Bible literally?" gathers up several doubts at once: that it is inconsistent to read some passages literally and others not; that non-literal reading is just a way of dodging the miracles; that the Gospels contradict each other; and that the New Testament is not a reliable source about Jesus of Nazareth. McLaughlin, a literature scholar by training, handles these as questions about how any serious text should be read, and she draws on the Bible's overall story more than on isolated proof texts. One of her examples features the mathematics professor Satyan Devadoss, who was pressed about apparent contradictions after giving a talk on Christianity and rationality.

"Hasn't science disproved Christianity?" receives a historian's answer. Many of the pioneers of science were Christians, she argues, and the Christian worldview gives science a firm foundation. She declines to tie the faith to one reading of Genesis and leaves room for Christians to disagree about it, because her purpose is narrower and, she thinks, more important. It is to show that Christianity and science are compatible.

Women, sexuality and slavery

These three chapters deal with the objections most likely to end a conversation, and they are the most personal in the book.

On women, McLaughlin argues that Scripture was strongly countercultural in how it treated them, and she observes that women have always outnumbered men among Christians, perhaps because they found a comfort and acceptance there that other worldviews did not offer. She tackles the passages on marriage directly. Reading Paul's instruction to husbands, she asks how Christ loved the church, and answers: by dying for her. Hence one of her sharpest lines: "the primary command to men is to love, not to lead." She also insists that marriage is not the highest good. The highest good is union with Christ, and so "missing marriage and gaining Christ is like missing out on playing with dolls as a child, but growing up to have a real baby." Marriage, in her account, is a picture of something greater: God created sex and marriage "to give us a glimpse of what it means to be united to Christ."

On the question "Isn't Christianity homophobic?" she writes from her own life. McLaughlin describes a lifelong attraction to women, falling in love with other girls and praying that the desires would go away, and she is happily married to a man. She uses her story to separate attraction from action, and argues that a faith with room for people who experience such attraction should not be called homophobic. She holds to the traditional teaching that sex belongs within marriage between a man and a woman, but she refuses to treat every other kind of love as second best. A major section celebrates the value the Bible places on deep same-sex friendship, and she points out that Jesus, who never married, taught that sacrificial love, not sex, is love's highest form. Her summary is the book's most quoted sentence: "Blue-blood heterosexuality is not the goal of the Christian life: Jesus is."

On slavery she faces the history without flinching. Respected theologians, Jonathan Edwards among them, used the Bible to justify owning human beings, and she says so plainly. The chapter is the clearest example of her method: record the church's guilt in full, then argue that the gospel itself cannot be blamed for what its professed followers did in its name.

Suffering and hell

McLaughlin saves the two hardest questions for last. The chapter on suffering begins with ten harrowing examples of human pain, set down in a paragraph that reviewers describe as hard to read. She will not make the problem smaller than it is, and one endorser says the book is written not only for skeptics but for those who have suffered much. Some readers have called this their favorite chapter.

The final chapter asks how a loving God could send anyone to hell, the question she ranks as the most difficult of all. The book closes on a statement of what, in her view, the Christian faith offers that nothing else does: "a name for evil, and a means of forgiveness," a love far deeper than the human heart can presently hold, and "a diagnosis of human nature as shot through with sin and yet redeemable by grace."

Putting It to Work

• Go to the strongest objection first. McLaughlin's method is to state each challenge in its hardest form and concede what is true in it. Whatever you believe, your position is only as strong as its answer to the best case against it.
• Separate a belief from its believers. Asking whether Christians have behaved badly and asking whether Christianity is true are different questions. Keeping them apart makes for more honest thinking on both sides.
• Check where your values come from. If you hold that all people are equal and that the weak deserve protection, ask what that conviction rests on.
• Notice your own exclusive claims. Everyone thinks some views are wrong. Admitting it makes disagreement more honest and often more respectful.
• Do not make marriage or romance the measure of a life. Her chapters on women and sexuality press the point that friendship and sacrificial love are not lesser goods.
• Use it as a conversation starter. With one question per chapter, the book lends itself to reading groups in which believers and skeptics sit down together.

Who Should Read It

It is written first for skeptics: thoughtful people who suspect that Christianity is intellectually weak or morally harmful and want to hear its best reply from someone who has taken their objections seriously. Christians wrestling with their own doubts, students on secular campuses, and parents or pastors who field these questions will find it just as useful. Publishers Weekly described it as respectful toward opposing views and as lively as a good comparative religions class, with references running from Bertrand Russell to Black Panther and Doctor Who. Readers who reject traditional Christian teaching on sexuality will disagree with her conclusions, but they will find their objections stated fairly.

This has been a summary of Confronting Christianity by Rebecca McLaughlin, giving you the GIST so you can decide if you want the REST.