Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World's Largest Religion

by Rebecca McLaughlin

invest your life in money over relationships, and the returns will not satisfy.

while Christianity held a monopoly on Western culture, Western culture never held a monopoly on Christianity.

The idea that Christianity is a diversity-resistant, white Western religion of privilege is utterly irreconcilable with the New Testament.

Christianity is the most ethnically, culturally, socioeconomically, and racially diverse belief system in all of history.

Christianity took root in India centuries before the Christianization of Britain.

most of the world’s Christians are neither white nor Western, and Christianity is getting less white Western by the day.

We should not be offended when people challenge our beliefs: we should be flattered!

disagreement is not evidence of disrespect.

Values that many of us in the West today consider to be universal and independent of religious thought turn out not to have sprung from the ground during the Enlightenment but to have grown from the gradual spread and influence of Christian beliefs.

The premise of human equality is not a self-evident truth: it is profoundly historically contingent.

Why would we seek to build global morality on atheism, when it represents a relatively small proportion of the world’s population, concentrated primarily in people living under Communist regimes?

Ethical principles are no more divine whims than the laws of gravity. With a theistic worldview, morality and reality spring from the same source.

To be a Christian is to acknowledge your utter moral failure and to throw yourself on the mercy of the only truly good man who ever lived.

science cannot ground the belief that human beings should be valued equally.

Democracy does not just happen, nor is its spread inevitable.

we cannot assume that everyone who identifies as a Christian authentically is one—particularly in societies where claiming to follow Jesus is not a ticket to martyrdom but a path to power.

At the cross, the most powerful man who ever lived submitted to the most brutal death ever died, to save the powerless.

Christianity does not glorify violence. It humiliates it.

Christianity, in particular, has served as a fertilizer for democracy, a motivation for justice, and a mandate for healing. If we think the world would be less violent without it, we may need to check our facts.

We can tell lies with literal words and speak the truth through metaphor.

we humans find metaphors memorable, persuasive, and moving. Our brains are wired for word pictures that liken one thing or experience to another.

failing to recognize the figurative features with the biblical text is like taking a love poem to the grocery store and wondering why you can’t find all the items on its shelves.

if we grasp at our right to self-determination, we must reject Jesus, because he calls us to submit to him completely.

Jesus as the ultimate man. He had strength to command storms, summon angel armies, and defeat death. But his arms held little children, his words elevated women, and his hands reached out to heal the sick.

If Paul’s instructions on marriage are shocking to our modern ears, they would have shocked his first hearers for precisely opposite reasons:

commitment, not unlimited choice, breeds happiness.

People who live together before they marry are more likely to divorce than those who do not,

If we reduce Christian community to sexual relationships and the nuclear family, we are utterly failing to deliver on biblical ethics.

far from expanding the options on sexual relationships, Jesus tightened the Old Testament law.

while we do not choose our sexual attractions, we do choose our sexual actions.

how many generations of faithful black believers do there need to be in America before we stop associating Christianity with white slave-owners and start listening to the voices of black believers that echo down to us through the blood-stained centuries?

Suffering is not an embarrassment to the Christian faith. It is the thread with which Christ’s name is stitched into our lives.

all our relationships hinge, to some extent, on hiding.