Rebecca McLaughlin: The best arguments against Christianity

Can Christianity survive its hardest objections? After this conversation with Rebecca McLaughlin, I think the honest answer is yes, and for a reason I didn’t expect: several of the strongest arguments against the faith turn out to lean on ideas Christianity introduced in the first place. That matters, because the objections themselves are serious. The church’s history of injustice, the problem of suffering, the supposed conflict between science and religion, these deserve honest engagement, not pat answers.

Rebecca is unusually well placed to give it. She grew up in London surrounded by highly intelligent people who had compelling reasons to reject Christianity, and she didn’t run from those challenges. She leaned into them, spending years working alongside Christian professors at universities like Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, and MIT. What she discovered surprised me, and I think it might surprise you too.

Objections from people she respected

Rebecca’s story starts in a place many of us can relate to: feeling alone in your faith. She described singing hymns at school assemblies while 650 other girls looked at their hymn books and laughed. It’s a vivid picture of what it means to hold beliefs that don’t fit the cultural moment.

But instead of retreating into a defensive posture, she listened, and she took what she heard seriously.

“From a pretty early age, I was having conversations with highly intelligent people who had really good reasons for not being Christians.”

Her friends thought Christianity was bigoted. They thought the Bible had been discredited, that science had disproved the idea of a creator, and that religious diversity made choosing one faith both arbitrary and offensive. These weren’t straw-man arguments. They were thoughtful objections from people she respected.

Why Christianity looks different up close

Rebecca shared an illustration I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. In the penultimate Harry Potter book, Severus Snape, Harry’s longtime antagonist, appears to commit the ultimate betrayal: he kills Dumbledore. As a reader, you think you finally have proof that Snape is evil. Then the final book takes you inside Snape’s memories, and everything flips. What looked like hatred was driven by love. The act you thought was villainy was actually mercy.

“Similarly, I think there are areas where if you look at Christianity kind of from a distance, it looks like Snape killing Dumbledore. And then when you dive more deeply, you realize, no, actually there is something very different going on here.”

That’s the invitation at the heart of honest faith exploration: keep the difficult parts in view, look more closely, and see whether the picture changes.

The moral critiques borrow Christian tools

One moment in our conversation stopped me in my tracks. Rebecca pointed out that many of the moral frameworks people use to critique Christianity actually come from Christianity itself. When someone says the church has been on the wrong side of racial justice, they’re appealing to the principle that all humans have equal worth and dignity. When someone critiques historical misogyny in the church, they’re assuming women deserve equal treatment, which is a biblical claim. When someone argues that the powerful shouldn’t exploit the weak, they’re drawing on values that entered Western civilization through the influence of Scripture.

“The sword that they are using to jab at Christianity is actually a Christian sword.”

None of that makes the critiques invalid. Churches have absolutely failed to live up to biblical standards. But it forces a deeper question: without Christianity, what foundation do these moral claims actually stand on? Rebecca pushed the point further with Richard Dawkins’ famous statement that the universe has “no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” If that’s true, on what basis do we condemn injustice? Our deepest moral convictions become evolutionary accidents with no real grounding. This is less a gotcha than an invitation to trace our beliefs back to their source.

What the Lazarus story says about suffering

Shelby raised the objection that sits heaviest for many of us, how a loving God can allow so much suffering, and she was honest about her own wrestling: “I struggle to know whether it’s more of an emotional or an intellectual battle for me.”

Rebecca’s response was gentle and, I think, profound. Rather than trying to solve the problem of suffering in a neat philosophical package, she pointed us to a story. In John chapter 11, Jesus receives word that his close friend Lazarus is desperately sick. The message from Lazarus’s sisters appeals to his affection, “Lord, the one you love is sick,” and they clearly expect him to come immediately. He doesn’t. Jesus deliberately waits until Lazarus has died, and when he finally arrives, Martha says what any of us would say: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

Then something happens that I find stunning. Jesus stands outside the tomb and weeps. He has the power to prevent this death, and in a few moments he will prove it by raising Lazarus from the grave. And still he weeps.

“I think part of the answer is that he enters into the suffering of those he loves. It’s not that our suffering doesn’t matter to God, actually. It matters enough to bring tears to the eyes of the Son of God, even though he could have stopped it happening.”

That doesn’t answer every question about suffering. But it does something more important for many of us: it shows a God who doesn’t stand at a distance from our pain. The cross is the ultimate expression of that same movement, God entering into the worst of human suffering rather than avoiding it.

The baby, the needle, and Frodo’s unfinished story

Two more images from the conversation have stayed with me. The first comes from Rebecca’s own life. She remembered holding her infant daughter for immunizations, a tiny person who trusted her completely, while strangers stuck needles into her.

“I just remember the look in her eye of like betrayal. How could you do this? You’re supposed to be caring for me and you’re letting these people hurt me.”

She couldn’t explain to a baby that the pain was evidence of love, not its absence. The shots were for her daughter’s good, even though they felt like harm.

“I think if we take the narrative of the Bible seriously, there are times when we are like that baby. We cannot understand why God is allowing us to suffer, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that there couldn’t be a reason.”

The second image comes from The Lord of the Rings. At their darkest hour, Frodo and Sam imagine their story being written down someday. From where they stand, the ending looks terrible; at best they succeed and die in the process. But readers see what they can’t, that the hopeless middle was part of a redemptive arc all along.

“Often we’re where Frodo and Sam were. We’re kind of in the middle thinking, gosh, I wonder how this story is going to end.”

Neither image dismisses the pain. Both acknowledge that we may be working with incomplete information, and both invite us to trust that the same God who wept at Lazarus’s tomb might care more than we know.

The audacious claim Jesus makes at the tomb

There’s a moment in the Lazarus story we often rush past. When Martha confronts Jesus, he doesn’t just comfort her. He makes one of the most staggering claims ever spoken: “I am the resurrection and the life. Anyone who believes in me, even though he dies, will live and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”

As Rebecca pointed out, Jesus isn’t saying he knows how to help with resurrection, or that he’s a conduit to something larger. He claims to be the resurrection and the life in his own person.

“He’s saying anyone who believes in him has life even if they’re dead, and anyone who is walking around today and doesn’t know Jesus is in fact dead even though they look like they’re alive.”

That’s either the most profound truth ever uttered or the most outrageous delusion, with no comfortable middle ground, and Jesus puts the question directly to Martha, and by extension to all of us. I appreciated that Rebecca never softened the claim for modern ears. The Jesus we meet in the Gospels invites investigation, but he leaves no room for casual acknowledgment.

What struck me most about the whole conversation was Rebecca’s tone. She was neither defensive nor combative, and she never pretended the hard questions were easy, yet she still made clear, substantive claims about who Jesus is and why his story matters for everyone. If you’re in the middle of deconstruction, this episode might feel like fresh air: someone who has heard all the objections, taken them seriously, and still finds Christianity compelling. If you’ve been a believer for years, it might give you new language for conversations with skeptical friends. And if you’re unsure what you believe, I hope it gives you permission to keep exploring.

Rebecca’s closing thought has stayed with me: “Rather than Christianity looking like the enemy, actually it becomes the best friend you have.” That’s a bold claim. But if there’s even a chance it’s true, it’s worth investigating.

Common questions

Were the Gospels written by eyewitnesses or much later?

Earlier than most people assume. Mark, generally considered the earliest Gospel, was written roughly 35 to 45 years after Jesus’ ministry, and John about 60 years after the events, well within the lifetimes of people who witnessed Jesus firsthand. Decades sound like a long time until you remember that your grandparents can reliably recall their wedding day or the birth of their children.

If God is all-powerful, why doesn’t he just end suffering?

Rebecca doesn’t believe God’s hands are tied; Scripture presents a God who could intervene at any moment. But the Lazarus story shows a God who has the power to prevent suffering and still chooses to enter into it with us, and the cross is the ultimate expression of that choice.

Why should I trust the Bible when the church has done so much harm?

Real harm has been done by people claiming to follow Christ. But the standards we use to name those failures, human equality and protection of the vulnerable, come from biblical teaching, so a church that fails there is failing to live up to its own Scriptures. The remedy is more faithful engagement with what the Bible actually teaches, not less.

Does Rebecca McLaughlin dismiss the objections to Christianity?

No. She grew up among people with serious reasons for rejecting the faith and spent years working alongside Christian professors at Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, and MIT. Her argument is that the hardest objections look different when you examine them up close, not that they don’t matter.

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