Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World’s Largest Religion is Rebecca McLaughlin’s 2019 book addressing major objections to Christian belief. It is a work of Christian apologetics: an attempt to explain and defend the faith through argument, evidence, biblical interpretation, and personal experience. Its central question is whether familiar objections reveal Christianity to be untrue or harmful, or whether closer examination changes the picture.
What kind of book is Confronting Christianity?
Crossway’s publication information identifies McLaughlin as the author and gives the original publication date as April 30, 2019. The publisher places it in apologetics. That classification matters: the author argues from a Christian position while engaging questions raised by people who may not share it.
The book is consequently best read as an argument to examine. Its examples, interpretations, and conclusions can be considered separately: a historical example may challenge a stereotype without establishing an entire theology, while an account of Christian hope may explain a believer’s experience without persuading every reader that the belief is true.
McLaughlin’s approach brings intellectual questions into conversation with ordinary relationships. A reader can consider the reasoning seriously while also attending to the experience of people affected by religious communities. Both questions matter: what Christianity teaches, and how Christians actually behave.
The twelve questions: a map of the discussion
The publisher’s contents list organizes the book around twelve objections. They fall into several connected areas:
- Religion and public life: whether people flourish without religion, whether Christianity accommodates diversity, and how its exclusive truth claims should be understood.
- Morality and history: the relationship between faith and ethical conduct, religious violence, and biblical texts concerning slavery.
- Evidence and interpretation: how to read the Bible and whether scientific knowledge rules out Christian belief.
- Human dignity and ultimate questions: women’s place, same-sex relationships, suffering, and final judgment.
These themes are connected without being interchangeable. The existence of abusive Christians is a question about conduct and institutions; a proposed contradiction in a biblical text is a question about interpretation. A useful reading identifies the particular claim before deciding whether an answer addresses it.
Science: challenging an automatic conflict
An authorized excerpt published by BioLogos shows one of McLaughlin’s methods. She discusses religious scientists, including Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell, to challenge the idea that scientific achievement necessarily requires atheism. Her account also notes that Isaac Newton’s religious convictions were not orthodox Trinitarian Christianity.
The distinction is useful. A scientist’s religious belief can disprove a sweeping claim that no serious scientist believes in God. It does not establish that every religious interpretation agrees with every scientific finding. Nor does the existence of an atheist scientist prove that atheism follows inevitably from science.
Readers can therefore separate three questions: what a scientific theory explains, what historical scientists believed, and what philosophical or theological conclusions follow. An example about a person’s faith addresses the second question most directly. Moving from it to a claim about God’s existence requires further reasoning.
Diversity: whose Christianity is being considered?
In her discussion of racial diversity, McLaughlin challenges the habit of treating Western white Christians as the whole of Christianity. She describes Christian communities containing people from different national and cultural backgrounds. The underlying argument is that a narrow cultural image can distort an assessment of the religion.
That argument invites a further distinction between Christianity’s universal claims and the conduct of particular institutions. An ethnically varied congregation supplies an example of diversity; it does not by itself establish that discrimination is absent. Similarly, documenting racism in a church does not show that every Christian community has the same composition or behavior.
Historical trends and population forecasts also need dates and methods. Figures discussed in material published around the book’s release should be read in their original context, rather than treated as current measurements. The broader question remains how Christian beliefs about belonging relate to the lives of different communities.
Women: examining Jesus’s encounters
McLaughlin develops her account of women’s dignity through Gospel narratives. In a later article on Christianity and women, she points to Jesus welcoming women as learners and engaging women whom others dismissed. This is related author commentary, rather than a substitute for reading every argument in the book’s chapter.
The account of Mary and Martha in Luke 10:38–42 supplies a concrete example. Mary listens at Jesus’s feet; Martha asks for help with serving; Jesus defends Mary’s choice. The narrative supports a discussion of a woman’s participation as a learner.
A further argument is needed to move from this episode to a complete position on church leadership or gender roles. Readers can distinguish the textual observation from later theological conclusions. Recognizing a meaningful example of dignity does not settle every disagreement about how churches should organize authority.
Sexuality: understanding the position being defended
In her 2019 Crossway interview, McLaughlin acknowledges that Christians have acted with hostility toward gay and lesbian people. She distinguishes that conduct from the conservative sexual ethic she defends: sexual intimacy within marriage between a man and a woman. She connects that teaching with marriage as an image of Christ’s relationship with the church.
This is a substantive theological position. It should be represented accurately, including both its restrictions and the way its defender explains them. A reader can then assess whether the interpretation is convincing and whether the proposed distinction between conviction and hostility is adequately realized in practice.
Disagreement is not resolved by attributing identical motives to everyone involved. The interpretation of biblical passages, the meaning of marriage, people’s lived experiences, and their treatment within a community are related questions that each deserve attention.
Slavery: interpretation must face difficult texts
A later Logos discussion with McLaughlin explores biblical slavery through historical context, the Exodus, and Paul’s appeal concerning Onesimus. Its summary emphasizes a movement toward treating the enslaved person as a brother rather than merely as property.
In Philemon 8–21, Paul asks Philemon to welcome Onesimus as a beloved brother and as he would welcome Paul. Interpreters can examine the implications of that appeal while recognizing that the letter does not provide a general legal decree abolishing slavery.
The difficult passages must remain visible too. Leviticus 25:39–46 distinguishes an impoverished fellow Israelite’s service from the acquisition and inheritance of foreign slaves. Its release provisions therefore cannot accurately be summarized as automatically freeing every enslaved person. Historical context can clarify differences between systems of slavery; calling all ancient slavery ordinary employment would conceal the coercion and unequal status in the text.
This example shows why a claim about the Bible’s overall ethical direction requires close reading. Readers should be able to see both the passages used to support the argument and those that make the argument difficult.
Suffering: Christian hope alongside grief
In an adaptation from the book on suffering, McLaughlin turns to John 11 and the death of Lazarus. She emphasizes the sisters’ distress, Jesus’s delayed arrival, and the relationship between his compassion and his promise of resurrection. Her answer centers on the Christian understanding of Jesus entering human suffering.
This approach explains the shape of a Christian response rather than supplying an identifiable cause for every tragedy. The claim that God can bring hope through suffering differs from the claim that an observer knows why a particular person suffered. It also differs from promising that faith will immediately remove pain.
The distinction helps preserve the seriousness of grief. Philosophical explanation, personal lament, care for someone in distress, and belief in resurrection perform different roles. An account of hope can be assessed without making suffering seem trivial.
Conclusion
Confronting Christianity argues that major objections to Christian faith deserve closer examination through Scripture, history, reasoning, and personal experience. Its recurring themes include the difference between Christian teachings and Christians’ failures, the challenge of interpreting difficult texts, and the significance of Jesus for questions of dignity and suffering.
The most useful reading follows each argument carefully: identify the objection, examine the evidence, distinguish interpretation from observation, and consider what the conclusion actually establishes. That makes the book a starting point for informed discussion, with room for conviction, critical questions, and serious disagreement.
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