Theology in the Raw - 868: Addressing Moral Arguments Against Christianity: Dr. Rebecca McLaughlin

Episode Date: May 20, 2021

Dr. McLaughlin has a Ph.D. in English Literature from Cambridge University (U.K.) and has become a premier apologist for a new generation. Her book Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World’s Largest Religion won Christianity Today’s book award for 2020 and her latest book The Secular Creed is bound to stir things up.  In this episode, we talk about how most of the challenges to Christianity are more ethical in nature. People think Christianity can’t be true in light of its history of racism, slavery, misogyny, and homophobia--among other things. Rebecca addresses these kinds of legitimate arguments with intelligence and wisdom. Support Preston Support Preston by going to patreon.com Venmo: @Preston-Sprinkle-1 Connect with Preston Twitter | @PrestonSprinkle Instagram | @preston.sprinkle Youtube | Preston Sprinkle Check out his website prestonsprinkle.com If you enjoy the podcast, be sure to leave a review.

Welcome back, friends, to another episode of Theology in the Raw. I have on the show today Dr. Rebecca McLaughlin. Oh my goodness, you guys are in for a treat. Dr. McLaughlin, or I'll just call her Rebecca, wrote a book called Confronting Christianity, 12 Hard Christians for the World's Largest Religion, which was published by Crossway and the Gospel Coalition in 2019, and it became the Christianity Today's Book of the Year for 2020. Dr. McLaughlin holds a PhD in English literature from Cambridge, England, and a theology degree from Oak Hill College in London. She wrote another kind of kids version, not kids, a youth version of the book called, wait for it, wait for it,

10 Questions Every Christian Teen Should Ask and Answer About Christianity. And she recently released a very controversial book called The Secular Creed, Engaging the Contemporary Claims. We talk about all of this and more. And oh my gosh, I've only known Rebecca from a distance. We've talked on the phone once, we've emailed back and forth. I actually roped her into another project I'm working on, which I'll probably reveal to the public in due time. But I've just been really quickly impressed with Rebecca, her wisdom, her wit, her intelligence, her faithfulness to the gospel, and her humility and her ability to really kind of see the other side. I mean, I was really impressed in this conversation that unlike some like defenders of the faith, you know, the apologists, they just kind of come out and win

the argument. Rebecca is a fantastic listener. She's very humble and understands kind of where people are coming from. Very relational. And I just, I didn't want to stop talking to her. She just, the hour flew by and I was like, I got to cut this off. You know, even though I have like a thousand more questions. So I know you're going to enjoy this conversation. Please check out her books. I literally just got right when I got off the podcast, I ordered the youth book that

she wrote because I've got four youth. And I'm like, dude, we need to go through this. So my family and I are going to go through this book. I didn't even tell Rebecca that, but I'm super excited about that. If you would like to support the show, patreon.com forward slash Theology in the Raw. Support the show for as little as five bucks a month and all the info is in the show notes. So let's get to know the one and only Dr. Rebecca McLaughlin. All right, I'm here with Dr. Rebecca McLaughlin. We have only met briefly over email, but man, I keep seeing your name pop up kind of everywhere and have been so impressed with how you are engaging some really difficult topics. And I was so delighted when I reached out and I'm like, she's probably going

to be too busy to come on the podcast. I know you got a lot going on, but when you said you're willing to come on Theology in a Row, I was so stoked. So thank you so much for being on the show. You're so welcome. Why don't we start by just telling, for those who might not know your name, like who is Rebecca McLaughlin and how did you get to be doing what you're doing right now? I mean, entering into some pretty tough conversations. Gosh, yes.

Being overly bold and insufficiently pessimistic, I think is part of the answer to that. I come from the UK, as folks may not be totally shocked here. And I married nearly 13 years ago, a guy from Oklahoma, which people are always shocked to hear. They sort of say, oh, real American. I I say, you know, yeah. So he and I met just as I was finishing a PhD in English literature and just before I was going to seminary. And we got married and I had always planned to stay in the UK. I felt very much like there's a huge amount of gospel work to be done in my homeland. And then I ended up marrying this guy who was very keen to move back to the US.

So I had to trust the Lord with that and ended up moving right when he finished his PhD and I finished my seminary degree and I worked for nine years for an organization called the Veritas Forum where a big part of my job was working with Christian professors and helping them to think about how they integrate their faith with their work and then also how to speak about that to a public audience in the university setting. Right. And after nine years of doing that, I felt like I had a roadmap, really, of where the conversation is at on a whole bunch of different fronts because I had the pleasure of talking with some of the leading world experts

on all sorts of issues who are also serious followers of Jesus. Yeah. And I didn't want to keep that to myself. So I mostly wrote my first book on Christianity because I wanted to share that with the world in general. So you did your PhD in English literature, you said, at, was it at Cambridge? It was.

At Cambridge. And is that, I mixed it up. So is that where you met your husband or that was after you guys got married? Yeah. We, we met right at the end of my time at Cambridge. Yeah. And then you went back and then you did a seminary degree or. I was already on track to go to seminary in London when I met Brian. And so we started dating about two weeks before I moved to London and then had a extremely long distance relationship all the way from London to Cambridge, which was about,

we didn't have cars. So on the train, it was about two hours. Okay. Feel for us. And then you did a seminary degree. Did you go to Gordon, Gordon Conwell or? No, in London at Oak Hill College. Oh, you did. Okay. Got it. Yeah, exactly. So how did you end up at, because right now you're in Cambridge Massachusetts the um well I'm not gonna yeah the other Cambridge the other Cambridge yeah yeah I have a preference for Cambridge in the UK I almost called it the real Cambridge but that'd be insulting to the whole city which I don't want to do so um so it would also be true you know um so yeah what brought you to cambridge massachusetts then brian my husband was very keen to move to the us and i got a job with the veritas forum in

cambridge and he felt like it was the kind of area where he could get a job as well so we moved here oh okay oh so it was a very toxic okay that makes sense. Okay. So I want to dive into your first book, Confronting Christianity. That's right. intellectually sound and careful way, but in a way that's really easy to understand. Can you walk through, maybe not all 10, but what are some of those big questions facing Christianity that you had to wrestle with in that book? Yeah, it's interesting. People sometimes ask me, how did I pick the 12 that I picked?

And I tend to say, well, I just sat down one day and I thought, what are the big issues? And questions around diversity and racism, questions around gender and sexuality, questions around violence and crusades. How can you say that there is only one true religion? Isn't that intolerant and small minded? Questions around suffering, questions around hell and heaven and questions about science in the bible so those were some of the ones that just immediately came to mind as i sat down and as i wrote down these these 12 and then since then as i've spoken to various audiences i've sometimes asked like hey tell me the questions that you guys are being asked by your non-christian friends

and people will shout out and ask, it will almost inevitably map onto at least one of the questions out of the 12. So it wasn't actually especially hard to narrow down to what those were. And then as I mentioned, I had the opportunity to leverage some of the insights and even the stories as well, because there are some extraordinary faith stories of brothers and sisters who are now professors in major world-class secular universities who came to faith when they were teenagers or when they were in college or when they were already professors and trying to take both their stories and their research and insights and map it onto some of the big questions. um one of the honestly one of the more surprising features or pieces that i've been able to draw out was that the growing body of evidence that being actively religious especially going to

church every week is measurably good for your mental and physical health i mean there are a lot of people who think that you know religion, and probably Christianity in particular, is not something you should inflict on your children, for example. But over at Harvard School of Public Health, not far from where I live now, study after study is being done to show that, in fact, whether or not belief in God happens to be true, active religious participation participation and not just sort of general spirituality but like showing up to church every week showing up or showing up to you know synagogue or you know another religious practice but like a regular engagement in religious community is reduces your likelihood of suicide and depression

and drug abuse all of these things which you which we struggle with as a society, actually going to church is a big piece of how we can improve on those fronts. Well, it's interesting. I mean, I read a study a while back on the, I forget the title, like the happiness of LGBT people. And it was a secular study, didn't seem to have, well, I mean mean every study typically has some kind of ax to grind. But to their own surprise, they said that LGBT people who are religious marked higher on the happiness scale than those who weren't. And they had this statement kind of tucked away at the end of the study saying it didn't matter whether the religious environment was more liberal or more conservative. Because you would think, okay, well, a hyper-progressive religious environment was more liberal or more conservative because you would think okay well a hyper progressive religious environment obviously lgbt people would be happy

they're happier there but it was actually they said they were shocked that whether conservative or progressive it was it was the same thing and that's that's what lgbt people which we all know have you know it's been a not the best relationship between um the and the LGBT community, generally speaking. But you know, what's interesting about your book is in the classic kind of defending the faith kind of books, they deal more with just kind of existence of God type questions or more like philosophical questions. But you deal a lot with some of the ethical barriers that some people have to the Christian faith. Is that, have you seen that? I mean, obviously that's intentional. Is that where a big shift has been and how we argue Christianity,

maybe 10, 20, 30 years ago versus now the questions that people have are more ethical in nature? Yeah, I think so. And it's even, it was interesting when Brian and I first met, again, he was raised in Oklahoma in a very different cultural and sort of religiously cultural context than I was raised in London. And he said that growing up, even if your friends didn't go to church themselves, they respected the fact that you did. It was sort of seen as a moral plus to be an active Christian.

And people might feel a little bit sheepish about the fact that they weren't. Whereas growing up in London, and certainly I think this is more the case in where I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts now, identifying as Christian and especially identifying as an evangelical Christian is associated with a lot of moral negatives. So I think you're right that rather than the first question out of a non-Christian friend's mouth being, well, how can I believe in the resurrection? We'd love that to be the first question, quite frankly.

Usually it is, how can Christians be so racist? Or how can Christians be so offensive and derogatory and unloving toward LGBT peoplebt people i bet that actually the first place that people's minds go is a moral place and one of the things that i was trying to do in in the book confronting christianity was to say rather than immediately go to you okay this is why i think you're wrong i actually want to start with like this is why I think you're right. I think, for example, when it comes to race, I think we can strongly affirm our non-Christian friends' objection to the history of white Christian racism, for example. if we look more closely at that issue, then we find that firstly, the scriptures are the basis for believing that all human beings are inherently sort of morally equally valuable, regardless of their race or cultural, ethnic heritage or nationality. And it's also,

it's the place where we can go to find out that racism is truly wrong rather than just, you know, my preference versus yours. and then if we look sort of around us sociologically at the global church we find that christianity far from being a you know just a white centered western religion is actually the most diverse belief system in the world by both the largest and the most racially culturally nationally diverse belief system as well so if you care about diversity which you know i hope we do and i think our non-christian friends do as well. So if you care about diversity, which I hope we do, and I think our non-Christian friends do as well, then actually Christianity is the best place to go rather than this being a big defeat for the Christian faith. That's such an obvious point that I haven't heard people make very often. I'm just scanning my brain

right now. Of all of the religionsianity is by far the most ethnically diverse right i mean that's is that's not it's just facts yeah it's not an argument it's an observation right it's true yeah and i think there's a lot that we can do the way that i try to structure the chapters in my book is to actually start with why this objection is so important and actually a good one and then look at like here's the evidence that it doesn't depend on whether you're a christian or an atheist we're looking at the same evidence here so for example the diversity of the ethnic diversity of the the global church and then to to look from there okay what

does the bible say about these things and and how does how is that reflected or not reflected in what we're seeing right around us today so so to kind of start with places of agreement and maybe challenge but challenge that comes from you know not be saying well i'm a christian and i believe this actually to start with saying hey whether we're a christian you're a christian or not let's look at the mental and physical health benefits of religious participation or let's look at the diversity of the global church let's look at the fact that the kids raised in in religious environments are um less vulnerable to the big kind of risks of um teenage years at the moment etc etc so just sort of build that common ground

on the way to saying hey this is why i actually think jesus rather than being kind of a relic of the ancient world is actually the best hope we have in the modern world. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And Christianity, as you said, it offers, you know, our object of authority, God's word contains in its most foundational, in the most foundational way right there in Genesis one and shot all the way through scripture is the, is the basis for why we would say racism, misogyny, slavery, and all these things are wrong. And absolutely, people who claim that authority have not lived up to it. Some of them have done horrible things. So I don't even know if this is

good to acknowledge, because sometimes it could be taken the wrong way. But you look at the church's participation in things like slavery, racism, ethnocentrism. Is it good or do you acknowledge in your book that so did everybody else? It's not like Christians uniquely have been racist and contributed to slavery and stuff. That was – they simply participated in what was just common throughout the world. And Christianity in many circles were the ones to step up and say, hey, this is actually wrong. We need to not do this. Is that worth bringing up or is that – Yeah. Well, here is actually wrong. We need to not do this. Is that worth bringing up? Well, here's the thing. One of the great tragedies, I mean, there are so many,

but one of the great tragedies of more recent slavery, the sort that we saw practiced in the history of America, is that whereas the world into which Jesus was born was a world in which slavery was absolutely normal. Nobody would have questioned that it was in any sense problematic. And I think the New Testament actually radically challenges the practice of slavery, not least in Paul's letter to Philemon, where he takes a runaway slave and says to Philemon, I'm sending him back to you. runaway slave and says to Philemon, I'm sending him back to you. I want you to receive him as a brother. He is my very heart. That's how I feel about him. And in fact, you should receive him like you would receive me, your most respected mentor. The ways in which Paul actually subverts the kind of master-slave relationship with the New Testament are extraordinary.

Never mind the fact that Jesus subverts it ways that Jesus adverts it. Right. So first century, we have a world where slavery is completely pervasive. The early centuries, we have a particular attraction of enslaved people to Christianity. And it was one of the ways Christians were mocked was that they were seeming to attract only women, children and slaves, like the stupid, the uneducated, credulous people, women, slaves, and children. And it wasn't only true, but it was also substantially true that these demographics were very attractive to Christianity.

You then see through to about sort of the 13th century when Thomas Aquinas like specifically condemned slavery as sinful. You see Christianity working its way through Europe. And you see the practice of slavery actually being abolished. You see the Pope officially condemning slavery. So when the transatlantic slave trade started to happen, this was the resurrection, to use a sort of weighted term, of something that Christianity had eradicated in the Western world. Actually, the Christians of Wales. Actually, the Christians of that day knew much better. It wasn't true. I mean, it was true to say that this is something that was practiced in other places as well. But it wasn't true to say like, this was

the abolitionists, William Balfour, etc, you know, in my country, were the first Christians to realize, wait a minute, this is radically wrong. That actually had been worked out a long time ago. So anyway, that is heartbreaking to me. So the abolitionists were tapping into a deeper Christian history of being against slavery. It was not like they just woke up one day out of nowhere and said, this is not the Christian thing to do. They were going back to the very roots of Christianity, you're saying. and said, this is not the Christian thing to do. They were going back to the very roots of Christianity, you're saying. Yeah, and you only have to read the New Testament to see black Christians on literal day one of the church when the spirits pulled out at Pentecost

and you see people from countries including Ethiopia and Libya being among the 3,000 who came to Christ that day. We have, of course, the Ethiopian eunuch of Acts chapter 8. came to christ that day you know we have of course the ethiopian eunuch of acts chapter eight the the racial um the call to racial uh love and equality in the new testament is completely unmistakable but i think the reason that we have sometimes mistaken it is because the racial and cultural barriers of of our day and of recent centuries have been different from those of the first century. We don't always hear it as clearly as we should have done. And at the same time, you're right, if we say, okay, well, what's the alternative? I think it's very easy. And it's almost sort of baked in from the Declaration of Independence onwards. You know, if we say we hold these

truths to be self-evident, all men are created created equal that's actually not a self-evident truth at all that's a specifically biblical claim and a lot of people today think that you could divorce the idea of human equality and love across racial difference and equal value of men and women and care of the poor etc etc from christianity but actually you can't that that it is the philosophical building blocks for it and I find it fascinating and if it's like You all know Harari who's an Israeli historian and an atheist who wrote a best-selling book Sapiens a brief history of humankind a few years ago It's millions worldwide and he's very clear about the fact he said, you know Homo sapiens have no natural rights just as as chimpanzees, hyenas and spiders have no natural rights.

He says the Americans got the idea of human equality from Christianity. But what does it even mean to say that humans are equal if there is no God who made human beings in his image? You know, he says human rights are figments of our fertile imagination. So you're kind of you're comparing what Christianity offers. People think they're comparing it to a perfectly coherent secular worldview that does all the same work as Christianity, except without even crazy things like being raised from the dead. Actually, you're comparing Christianity to a complete moral abyss. Do you say that in the book? Do you know, I haven't read Sapiens when I wrote Companion Christianity, but I do quote

Sapiens in both of my more recent books in the last few months. Your point about Aquinas, I made that claim publicly and somebody challenged me on that and said, that's actually not true. Aquinas did not think it was sinful. He had a kind of more complex view do you are you aware of that i'm not a aquinas scholar i just have always heard not always as if this is like everywhere in pop culture but like i've heard people looked into it that he was kind of opposed to slavery but then some people say no it's more complicated are you aware of that debate yeah my rule of thumb is i'm i'm an actual expert on almost nothing Technically, I'm an expert on prisons and Shakespeare. That's better my PhD on but it was a

So what I always do is I I quote from a face what I'm saying on actual experts Okay, so I believe that section of my book. I'm struggling for Kyle Kyle, his name is Kyle Harper. Thank you, Harper. Yes. I'm pretty sure it was from him. I read his book on sexuality, from shame to sin, where he deals with the early church's sexual ethic. It's one of my top five recommended books. I mean, it's really academic. But I know he originally was kind of an expert in kind of understanding slavery in the ancient world. So I need to check that out. He's a great scholar. Okay, so that's the race.

I mean, we're not going to hit all 12, right? There's 12? Right. Okay. I think I said 10 earlier. 12, right? There's 12. Right. Okay. I think I said 10 earlier. What are some other big ones that come up that you would say these are the most frequently the kind of ethical hangups? Is it the problem of evil? Is it sexual ethics? Is it, yeah, what else do we need to wrestle with? Yeah, I think it's absolutely sexual ethics. And, you know, probably folks listening to your podcast have heard plenty on the subject from people more expert than me, including yourself.

Yeah, I think it's the huge ethical. Well, that and race are the huge ethical questions or challenges of our day. And I think that when it comes to sexuality, we as Christians have tended to have an impoverished view of what the Bible is saying, including about same-sex relationships. One of the things I like to sometimes say kind of controversially is that people will often say the Bible condemns same-sex relationships, but I actually think the bible commands same-sex relationships at a level of intimacy that we seldom reach you know paul um as i mentioned earlier he calls anisimus is very hard he says he was among the thessalonians like a nursing mother with her children and how awkward would you feel saying to a male friend um that he was your very heart or saying to a group of people you'd been discipling that you've been among them like a nursing mother. He talks about Christians as being one body, as being knit together in love, as being comrades in arms. Like all these intensely intimate things that he says about us and that aren't exclusive to sort of same sex friendship,

but are generally kind of best experienced in same-sex friendship we hear jesus saying greater love has no one than this and that he laid down his life for his friends and i think often in in christian culture we elevate marriage so much which is a wonderful i mean christian marriage is a beautiful thing and a picture of Jesus' love for his church, but we elevate it at the expense of singleness, rather than the expense of different forms of sexual expression, whether it's serial monogamy or cohabitation or promiscuity or whatever it is. And so we've lost sight of the fact that we are actually the people who believe... We actually believe more in non-traditional family for example than than our lgbt friends do and we believe in in real intimate family-like

love between people who aren't genetically related to each other between people who aren't in sort of traditional marriage context we believe this because we're christians yeah and as with so many other areas you know for example including the believe this because we're christians yeah and as with so many other areas you know for example including the race questions that we're just talking about i think what what the bible has to offer us is so much better than the things that we we grasp at but we tend to forget those and it's almost like i don't know if you remember before the days when we if you want to take a photo you pick up your iphone and just sort of take a snap when you actually had to have a camera and you had to to take photos on your film then take it to the store to get the

film developed and then it would come back and you'd have the prints but you'd also have these little black and white negatives and if you took that little black and white negative you hold it up to the light and you could just about make out the picture yeah but it's like a little monochrome thing it wasn't the real thing and we've we've held on to christian marriage as if it was the real thing and we've helped we've only focused on the sort of boundaries that the bible gives us around sex which are very real but we haven't seen the beautiful picture of jesus love for his church we haven't seen a picture that jesus gives us of how different kinds of relationship, you know, parent-child, husband-wife, friend-friend, how these all give us different glimpses of Jesus' love for us. So I think

we need to reclaim a much more rich and holistic vision of Christian community. Because if we have, in fact, organized our churches to where you're either married with children, in which case you fit in just fine, or you're not, in which case you're kind of always on the edges, then of course, we're creating a world in which people who are single, because they're exclusively same-sex attracted, or simply because maybe they long for marriage, they haven't found a husband or wife, maybe they don't long for marriage, but we haven't created space for the kind of people that we see all over the New Testament.

Yeah. Or David, it reminds me of David after Jonathan died, right? Your love to me was better than the love of women. And we, you know, modern day people say, well, he must be gay. And it's like, well, no, you're, first of all, there's no evidence for that. Second of all, you don't understand the depth of intimacy that same-sex, non-erotic relationships were in the ancient world. Like even in some of the, as I'm sure you know, I mean, some of the Greek, some of the philosophers and Greek leaders and everything, I mean, they prioritize the kind of friendships. Like marriage, to a fault, was probably just more functional.

Like they would, but their true intimacy wasn't actually with their spouse. It was with their friends. It does seem, Rebecca, that standard evangelical Christianity for the last several decades, maybe longer, has basically adopted a very secular view of marriage and sexuality. But we add a little footnote saying, wait until you're married. I know we, I guess we define marriage between a man and woman without having a more robust, holistic view of the function of the calling of marriage within the kingdom of God. Yeah. So that, like, as you said, I mean, we often think like, if you're not married, then something's wrong. Or like, well, you can't really flourish and succeed as a human unless you're married and having lots of great marital sex. And if you don't get that, then you haven't really arrived. What we've done that I think has really hurt, like now it's kind of come back,

it's kind of blowback that's come back on us, that I often hear people in a more progressive camp saying, well, wait a minute, if you deny gay people, you know, the right to marry who they desire and express their sexuality, then they're not going to, that's going to be harmful. They're not going to be able to function. It's like, all they're doing is taking, it's kind of like a progressive version of purity culture, if I could put it like that. Because it's, it's, it's maintaining this still, this kind of like idolatry of marriage and sexual expression as something that humans need to be doing and engaging in for them to flourish. And if you

deny them that right, like you are sending them into a harmful state. And it's like, it just sounds like purity culture all over again, you know? So it's really unfortunate. So anyway, all that is a long way of me saying I really resonate with what you're saying. Yeah. And I think just to go back for a minute to the place of friendship in the ancient world. Honestly, I think a lot of the reason that opposite sex relationships, especially marriage, were not prized as they hopefully are within Christian circles in the ancient world was sheer misogyny. And I don't think that's what any of us want to get back to. But I think the basis today for love between believers of either sex is shared mission,

which is the most beautiful and intimate thing. I had the pleasure of interviewing a woman a few months ago in the process of writing my latest book, The Secular Creed, because one of the questions that often comes up today is, well, you know, what about gay people who are already married when they become Christians? We know that the Bible is against divorce. So, you know, what if they have children? this woman who has this extraordinary story of she'd actually been divorced in the first instance you had had children with her husband who you know been chronically unfaithful to her ended up getting divorced ended up in a relationship with another woman with whom she had a child and then both of them ended up becoming christians and moving in with her son-in-law who's a pastor and her daughter and their kids with their child,

you know, sort of to create this expansive family where they could not be a couple, but still both be very involved in their daughter's life. And this woman said that now she and her former partner feel closer to each other as sisters in christ than they ever felt as lovers and that to me i mean especially to me as someone who's i've been a christian as long as i can remember i've been attracted to women as long as i can remember like if i were not a christian i think i'd very likely be married to a woman rather than to a man but that to me is just the most beautiful and and precious thing to think no god is never trying to rob us of something good when he says no to our desires. He's actually ultimately always trying to give us something better.

And there'll be an extent to which that something better will be never fully realized until the new creation. But we actually also get glimpses of that something better here and now. Yeah. Did I hear you say that you're attracted to women? Yeah. I honestly didn't even know that about your story. Yeah, well, so here's the other reason that I wrote Confronting Christianity. There was this sort of intellectual side of things.

Yeah. And then there was also the fact that, you know, when gay marriage was legalized across the states in 2015, And then there was also the fact that, you know, when gay marriage was legalized across the states in 2015, I felt a profound sense of wanting to be a little voice in this conversation. Because it seemed to me that many churches were doing a really poor job. the two things that I primarily saw were either churches that were kind of buying into the idea that actually we are, you know, robbing and oppressing same-sex attracted people if we say to Christians that you can only be married to somebody of the opposite sex. And I think often it was people kind of, I'd have conversations with people where they'd grown up in the church and then they'd say, well, you know,

I used to think that gay marriage was wrong. And then, you know, I met a really nice guy through work who's gay and he seems to have a really great relationship with his partner and, you know, he's a really generous, friendly, caring person. And so now I'm not sure. And I'm thinking, OK, if that's what's challenging you, then you weren't brought up with biblical sexual ethics. You were brought up with homophobia, actually.

You're brought up to expect that every gay person was somehow sort of generally morally worse than every heterosexual person. So, you know, all sorts of ways I think the church meaningfully, you know, does need to repent, but not repent and throw out biblical sexual ethics you know with the bathwater so that was you know one kind of church that was was wanting to change what the bible very very clearly says and the other kind

of church that was wanting to just double down on really a culture wars mentality of saying you know there's a them and us of the lgbtq community versus christians and this is you know about us um yeah really just doubling down on what frankly often had a a sort of swirl of homophobia in in the mix um and so you know at that point i was wanting to to contribute my little sort of tiny voice of my own experience to the conversation but at that point I wasn't even talking to any of my closest friends let alone you know was I really ready to talk about this in public or you know write a book talking about it but did some of that work over the few years between that moment and my book coming out and yeah because I think in the kind of work that

you're doing amongst other things helping um connect people with folks who who have always experienced same-sex attraction who are speaking as serious christians who are upholding biblical sexual ethics but they were doing so from a perspective of deep and genuine empathy not from you know not somebody who can be dismissed as a homophobic bigot who just doesn't get it right totally it's it's so funny because i almost didn't even because in in my world i if i feel like i've been around it's it's more odd for me to be around somebody who's straight so it's it's just so for somebody it might be like, like you're all excited to

interview a straight. No, for no. Yeah. Yeah. I'm like, can I, Oh no. Another seems like a track. No, for me, it's like, I didn't even notice it when he said it in passing. I'm like, Oh, wait a minute. Oh yeah. I guess I didn't know that about Rebecca, but yeah, it's so funny for me. It's just another Tuesday, but, um, I want to talk about your newest book because I mean, this is, wow, you, we have a common bond here, I guess, because people often tell me like, how come you always seem to address the controversial issues? And I'm like, I don't even, I just like interesting topics and I want to understand them. And they have to be some of the most interesting ones seem to happen to be controversial. But man, so this newest book is probably even more controversial than your first book.

So tell us about the secular creed, what it is about. And then maybe we can dive into one or two or three or all of the topics that you wrestle with. Sure. Yeah. In some ways. So Confirming Christianity was 12 questions. I wrote a teen version called 10 Questions Every Teen Should Ask and Answer About Christianity which is 10 questions just really boiling down, it's covering very similar ground but boiling it down for a younger audience

and then this most recent book, The Secular Creed is looking at five issues, one day I'll write a book that doesn't have a number in the title the premise of this book is to look at the yard signs that in the last couple years at least in my neighborhood and probably in yours as well that say they begin something like this in this house we believe that black lives matter love is love women's rights human rights and then usually there are various other candidates for the other couple of claims so it could be um no human is illegal or diversity makes us stronger or kindness is everything or science is real like there's a sort of yeah seems to be a combination of other ideas but usually

some version of those first three black lives women's rights human rights uh appear on this sign and so the my book the secular creed is looking at that sign it's the first book i've actually written that's sort of primarily for christians rather than primarily directly a christian addressed to non-christians and what i'm trying to look at is we tend to be presented with a sign like this as if it's like an all-or-nothing package deal either you take the sign and you hammer it into your yard or you kind of take your mallet out and try and knock it down on other people's guards at least sort of ideologically speaking it's you're you're in or you're out and what i'm trying to do in that book is to look at those

claims and a couple of other related ones and to say okay what do we as christians strongly affirm about this and where do we as christians strongly uh depart from what's intended by um by these these various claims and then to look at like what's the secular alternative so what i'm arguing is that the the ground into which these these yard signs are sort of hammered ideologically actually as christian ground even on the statements with which we might most disagree because the the idea of human equality the idea that the the strong shouldn't be able to oppress the weak and the historically oppressed and marginalized should actually be championed rather than crushed like all of these come to us from christianity none of them are in fact sort of self-evident claims. So I want to say the ground in which these yard signs are planted is ultimately Christian ground. But also that as

Christians, the important ways in which we have failed, especially on the first claim that Black Lives Matter, and I speak as a white evangelical on this issue, means that in fact that the way that we need to move forward here in in our own hearts and in our communities and in our conversations on non-christian friends is actually first and foremost to repent and that that's a step forward and it's not a step back because i think that there's a strong tendency that people have again because they see all these ideas sort of grouped together. They think that this is an all or nothing. And in fact, we can both, we need to measure all of these, all of these statements according to what the scripture says and where on

reading the scriptures, we find that our tribe has been wrong. We need to repent just as much as we need to call our friends to repentance um and faith in jesus we also need to be repentant believing and i think that's yeah especially true with the black lives matter claim um which is something that is purely our white christian sin actually that's kind of got us into the place that we're in today and one of the most embarrassing moves I see from Christians, regardless of BLM movement, what it stands for, all this, like, let's just set that aside for a second. If you're a Christian leader, church, whatever, and you kind of come out of the woodwork in the race conversation just to address why Black Lives Matter, the movement is wrong, and you haven't even cared about the race conversation up

until then, you probably won't after. You just want to refute a claim. That is so bad. It's just so bad. There's such a rich history in the Bible, as we said earlier, within Christianity, of Christianity being a multi-ethnic kingdom. And we have not always done that well, especially in the US. And to be silent on that, on racial reconciliation until BLM comes up and then you step out and refute it and then go back into your monochromatic, mono, what's the word?

Is that it? Yeah. Community, like that's just, it's so embarrassing. So just stop. Like there could be critiques on the BLM movement, whatever, like we can have that conversation, but let's not just have that conversation. Yeah. Yeah. I honestly, one of the greatest ironies at the moment, which is also the place where I have a lot of hope, really, is that the people who have suffered most from white Christian sin on these issues are actually Bible believing Christians themselves so we I mean it's

extraordinary the the way that God called um enslaved black people to himself at the time of the great great awakening and following you know the birthing of the time of the Great Awakening and following, you know, the birthing of the black church, the reality that today black Americans are substantially more likely to identify as Christian than their white peers, to go to church every week, to read their bible, to pray, to hold core evangelical beliefs, to not affirm LGBT identities actually. Like, I mean, we don't talk about that because it's so like that would be so problematic in the minds of many of my liberal friends. I mean, it's one of one of the things that I sometimes sort of provocatively like to say as well as let's talk about intersectionality for a minute. Right. So people, my non-Christian friends would say we really need to listen to black women.

I would say, absolutely. I couldn't agree more. But you know what? If you listen to black women in America, you'll hear a lot of people telling you to repent and believe in Jesus. In fact, black women are the most likely to be Christian of anybody in America. And not to be progressive, sort of more liberal Christians, actually. Those are the voices that tend to be sort of platformed. liberal Christians, actually, those are the voices that tend to be sort of platformed. But actually, the majority of black Christians in America are like quite theologically conservative. Right. Yeah. And I think if both, you know, white evangelicals like me and our sort of secular progressive friends like truly listened to black women in America, we would be having a very different conversation. Well, yeah, I don't. Yeah. And when that's a talking point from, for lack of better terms,

more progressive people, I kind of call BS on that a little bit. It's like, we need to listen to black women. It's like, obviously. Yeah. So what about Candace Owen? Oh, not her. I don't like what she says. Okay. So it's not black women. It's black women with a certain viewpoint that you want to listen to because you know like yeah honestly i i i understand the not candace owens response to be brutally honest i think it's easy and here i'm going in all the difficult places i think it's very easy for white evangelicals to find the the very small handful of black you know problem black people who will be saying the things that will affirm what they already think and ignore the large majority of our brothers and sisters of color who are saying very different things.

So I think I don't disagree with your call of BS holistically. But I think there are certain instances where I'm like yeah we really are kind of only wanting to listen to um to a very tiny minority of yeah i guess my point is like there's we have i think intertwined ideological agreement into the race conversation i think and sometimes not not just a race conversation that the yeah broader social justice kind of conversation so that, yeah, we, we have almost, yeah, well, you know, it's, it's what, you know, Joe Biden's kind of slip up. I think he was hammered a little too hard. I think he was kind of joking, but like when he told Charlemagne, the God, um, a black podcaster, super popular, you know, if, if this

is before the election, like if, well, if you don't, if you don't vote for me, then you ain't black, you know, as if like being black means you must be a Democrat or on a certain side of a certain issue or whatever, without acknowledging the vast diversity of independent, intellectually sound opinions within a certain community. And this is where I do think, while I think the right, and I don't get mixed up in the political stuff. I kind of sit back as an observer. It's kind of interesting and entertaining all at the same time.

Yeah, I do think identity politics can, or I mean call it what you want. I mean by assuming certain things about every individual that happens to participate in a certain demographic based on their socioeconomic status or gender, their race, whatever. I just think that that's – it's resurrecting what conservatives used to do all the time of stereotyping people, right? I mean it's what I face in the LGBT conversation. When you say gay or lesbian trans, like everybody has a stereotype of what that individual must be. And I'm like, you know, there's a wide diversity of opinions within LGBT community because there's a

wide diversity of viewpoints within any kind of group of people. Anyway, whenever somebody says, yeah, listen to this voice or this voice and they just have a kind of one size fits all of what that voice must say. And if somebody steps outside of that, like, Oh no, not that person. No, not that person. It's like, so we just want to hear voices of people that agree with us at the end of the day, regardless of skin color. Right. And I think that's something that we're all vulnerable to and all of us probably have to work hard to not to um whatever like even if we're right i think it's important to understand and and i think you know especially as you say when it comes to um lgbt folk and and

even most especially i think when it comes to people who identify as transgender that it's very easy to start painting with a broad brush on the basis of, you know, very limited understanding of conversations. And I think I appreciate the ways that you don't do that. And I try to not do that as well. I want to clarify too. I'm not really a Candace Owens fan. I just threw that out as an example. I assume people know that, but I'd be like, no, maybe they don't. Maybe they're like, I'm trying to because I mean, yeah, no, I I think she's sharp and it's she's she's interesting and entertaining to listen to. But she's so political. It drives me crazy. So anyway, I what what are some other.

Um, what, what are some other, um, yeah, what are the other, so, uh, yeah, go through the list of slogans you deal with again in the secular creed and let's pick another, let's pick another one to wrestle with. Sure. Yeah. So the, the chapters are, um, number one, black lives matter. Number two, love is love. Number three, the gay rights movement is the new civil rights movement. Okay.

Number four, um, women's rights are human rights. And number five, transgender women are women. Women's rights are human rights. Obviously. So what's going on there? I've heard that slogan, but what's the – yeah, let's get underneath that idea. How do you address it? Yeah.

No, I'd love to. Yeah. So that is code for uh abortion rights okay in case that's not evident to to folks that today the right to abortion is seen as the central plank of women's rights and okay i what i what i argue in the book is I actually think the central plank of women's rights is not abortion, it's the cross. And in fact, the idea of abortion, it actually goes against women's rights in some really fundamental ways, not least because the basis for us believing that men and women are equal, which again is a Christian idea. It is not something that was self-evident in the history of the world. In the Greco-Roman Empire, baby

girls were frequently abandoned because they were girls and they were simply less valuable in that society. We've seen the same thing actually in China, where we, you know, disproportionate number of baby girls aborted. Same in India, disproportionate number of baby girls aborted. Same in India, disproportionate number of baby girls aborted, leading to a significant gender imbalance in both of those countries. It is not at all a self-evident truth throughout history or across culture that women are equally valuable to men. That is a truth brought to us by Christianity. And Jesus's treatment of women, if we could see it with with first century eyes we would be utterly shocked by the way that jesus interacts with women and the ways that he validates women and lifts women

up and relates to women in in love and friendship and care um including and especially the women he should have had least to do with you know think of the samaritan woman at the well who sexually immoral i mean she's a samaritan which makes her a member of the hated ethnic group anyway for jews and she's a woman and she's a sexually immoral woman she's like literally the last person that jesus should have been associated with and yet he has his longest recorded private conversation with her in john's gospel she's the first person to reveal himself as the christ etc etc um or you look at how he relates to the woman who the sort of sinful woman of the city who comes and weeps on his feet and

how he holds her up as a moral example to the self-righteous pharisee um or how he relates to Mary and Martha who I like that relationship I just John 11 and Jesus is raising of Lazarus is so beautiful to me it's the basis for my chapter on suffering. But one of the things that's beautiful is the fact that the ways in which he relates to Martha and Mary in that conversation. And so you see, historically, you see the equality of men and women being something that's kind of brought to us by Christianity. You also see the fact that there have always been more Christian women in the church than men. And that was true, as far as we can tell in the early church. It's true today in the Western church.

It's true in the church in China quite substantially, which is one of the most rapidly growing churches in the world that will have, I think China's going to have more Christians than America by 2030 and could be a majority Christian country country someone expects by 2060 so you know wherever you want to look there are more christian women than men you sort of have to ask why why is this um i think it's a whole number of reasons but it's not least that actually christian sexual ethics massively protects women and if you think about the the in the Greco-Roman world, the idea that a man would have to be faithful to just his wife would have been laughable. I mean, of course, a man, and especially a free man, it was fine for him to sleep with other women. It was fine for him to sleep with

other men, so long as he was the penetrated, not the penetrated. It was fine for him to sexually use his slaves, male or female. The idea that the wife is actually not to be kind of exploited or marginalized, but in fact, to be sort of held as precious and sacrificed for. It's completely radical and extraordinary. And then we look, I mean, if you look even at today, the vast majority of women in the US who are having abortions and not doing so because they're living their emancipated dream, they're doing so because they're poor and they've been abandoned. And that's very much the same theme that we see running through history. Women who are pregnant by men to whom they're not married and are left you know sort of literally holding the baby and not not properly supported so I think there's some really I mean there's

there's theological work we need to do they're sort of thinking about our current context that we need to do and at the end of the day we need to recognize like if there is no God and if Christianity isn't true then yes the fetus in the mother's womb is just a bundle of cells yeah but if there is no god and if christianity is true then that's all that you and i are as well so actually i was gonna say what is the best argument for be not abortion but like pro pro, pro choice. Um, cause I, it's a small percentage of Christians that would hold to that view that would be for abortion under certain circumstances. What's the best argument for that? Cause I, to me, it just doesn't, it's kind of, to me,

it's kind of the ethical elephant in the room. Like how can anybody who claims to be for social justice, for the helpless, the marginalized, the oppressed before abortion? Like to me, it just doesn't. And the little I've looked into, I'm still like, I don't, how are we not like, yeah. What's the best intellectual argument that it's, that it's a life, but not a person. I've heard that, that you can be a living, but you're not actually fully human yet or not a person yet until you're a living, but you're not actually fully human yet or not a person yet until you're out of the womb or independent or have a heartbeat or something. I don't know.

Well, this is the thing. And I assume you're asking for the best sort of secular argument rather than the best Christian argument for abortion. From a non-Christian perspective, it is truly hard to distinguish meaningfully between a baby in the womb and a baby outside the womb like actually i mean you can make you can say like in an early stage there are fewer capacities that a baby has in the womb but like really a lot of the things that you can say about a baby in the womb, you can also say about a newborn baby. And when I was first engaging in these kinds of arguments when I was a teenager in the UK and sort of getting involved in pro-life things there, there was generally a very strong resistance from pro-choice people to saying that abortion was in any sense equivalent to infanticide. They were saying, you know, there's a very bright white line and we are not at all saying we're pro-infanticide. We're saying that this is not that. Infanticide being like killing a baby after it's born.

Infanticide being killing a baby that's been born, which is typically in the ancient world how it was done. Partly because you couldn't tell if you were having a boy or a girl until after they were born, right? Today, increasingly, sort of leading secular philosophers are saying you know making as you pointed out a minute ago the kind of person being distinction and saying sure of course these are human beings like an aborted a baby in the womb is a human being a member of the species homo sapiens but in order to be a person you actually have to have certain kind of capacities and those would be you know ability to um to understand your own suffering ability to kind of be self-reflective etc etc kind of know who you are in the world and that a newborn baby actually doesn't have those either so a philosopher like

peter singer for example in a very well-respected philosopher at princeton university um he would say that if you evaluate beings according to their capacities then a human infant is less morally valuable than an adult pig for example um and and the the fact is once we let go of the idea that god made all human beings in his image and he calls us into sort of a particular kind of relationship with it then we are left with a world in which infanticide may be no less morally uh no more morally problematic than eating bacon like really um that that's that's the place that we're in and i think yeah so people are trying pushing hard for this person being distinction um but it's it's so deeply problematic because it's again as soon as you say

that your value as a human and my value as a human resides in our capacities then we can kind of compare and contrast okay like how like let's look at what are these capacities and who has more of them and less of them and how can we therefore evaluate these you know the worth of one human versus another it just feels like eugenics is the next logical step right where you can start eliminating humans who don't have enough capacities or i don't know like it's just well even p i mean peter singer the one thing i the little i've read of him he seems to be quite consistent because i think he would even say that no and if you're like you that doesn't he say that like

infanticide if you if you are don't think abortion is wrong, then infanticide is basically, there's no real argument to say a baby who, you can kill the baby an hour before it's born, but not an hour after it's born. Like that just doesn't logically make a lot of sense. Yeah, absolutely. And he's not the only philosopher who's saying that. Really?

And as you say, actually, logically, if you take Christianity out of the equation, there's no reason to not say it. Right, right. Man, it's crazy. Well, I've taken you up to about an hour here, Rebecca. I have so many more questions. I need to have you back on. So the book is The Secular Creed, is that what it is? The Secular Creed. So I would highly recommend it. I have not read it yet, but based on what I know about you and even this conversation, I'm going to go ahead and recommend it.

And then the other book is Confronting Christianity. There's both like an adult version and a youth version. Is the youth version for like a teenager? Is that who it's directed? I need to get that book for my kids. They would love it. Yeah. So the youth version is called 10 Questions Every Teen Should Ask and Answer About Christianity.

Okay. And I promise you it's better than its title um and yeah it's essentially a a junior version i wrote it in a way that i would be happy for my daughter who's 10 about 10 11 to read okay and different parents have different comfort levels it speaks to a lot of difficult issues um including like lgbt questions including abortion etc etc but i think the reality is especially if you you know if you like me if your kids are in public school they're encountering these questions from their friends their teachers already my eight-year-old is already encountering um you know her teachers talking about transgender questions, et cetera, et cetera.

So I think we're kidding ourselves. If you're a parent, I think we're probably kidding ourselves to think that we can wait until some time in the future when our kids are old enough to have adult conversations. I think actually we need to start laying those foundations now. Would you recommend even like the adult adult the parent reading the adult version and the kid reading the kid version having a discussion is kind of designed for that kind of interaction or yeah that kid that kid well i've not quite thought of it that way um i have had some adults say that actually they found the kids version sort of worked better for them because it's it's a lot

shorter it's covering the same content but in a less sort of uh academically um fewer footnotes let's put it that way still some yeah i can't write a book without any footnotes yeah i i've had the same feedback with my book um living in a gray world um a christian teen's guide to homosexuality a lot of parents who who maybe are not natural readers. You know, they're like, I read like two books a year. That's not how I learn. They found the shorter, kind of more conversational version easier to digest. So, well, Rebecca, thank you so much for what you do.

I mean, I love that you have a smile on your face. You're engaging the most volatile topics of our day and you're doing so with, I mean, I love, I mean, obviously, I should get a PhD from Cambridge. Obviously, it's going to be intellectually like sound and careful, but your posture and your humility and your willingness to say, yeah, we need to repent from this and we need to be way more kind here. We got this wrong. Like, I think that posture is what is absolutely needed in these conversations because then Christians, I think we'll maybe be actually listened to a little more when people see us having a more humble posture. So thank you for modeling that. And thanks for coming on the show. Appreciate it. You're welcome. Thank you.