Loving Others Who Believe Differently

So I have a distinct memory of our first guest, Ann Wilson.

You can find us at familylifetoday.com or on our Family Life app. This is Family Life Today. I remember that distinctly because you had a look of fear on your face. I mean, you were shocked.

I just said, these are the questions you're asking now? We've kind of given our lives to this work. Yeah. And I remember, you know, we're almost three years into my Christian walk and it just hit me. You know, we've given our life to Christ, but now our vocation full time.

I'm like, we can make a lot more money doing other things. And, you know, I just remember it started to hit me. And I remember thinking, I don't know if this is even true.

And if this isn't true, I got to find out. Because I remember that's what you said. Yeah. I said, like, you better find out for yourself what you're thinking, because I really didn't have problems with believing. But you were more skeptical in nature. Yeah, and I did. I went on a journey and there are questions I needed to ask and there are questions I need to get answers for.

And guess what? I got the answers that did prove I needed some help. I needed some evidence. And there were some great tools and we've got a great tool today for teens. We're excited to have Rebecca McLaughlin back with us today. Welcome, Rebecca.

Thanks for having me. Your book is really written to teens, but it's part of a book you wrote to adults a few years back, Confronting Christianity, and it's really full of the questions that I had to wrestle with. And you're saying teenagers need to wrestle with this.

It's called Ten Questions Every Teen Should Ask and Answer About Christianity. And so obviously you believe it's good to ask questions. I do. And get answers.

Absolutely. And there are answers. Yes, I got to tell you, as I read it, I found it just so well written. I mean, I haven't read Confronting Christianity. I want to know, did you use Moana and Aladdin and Harry Potter and Confronting Christianity? I used a lot of Harry Potter, but no Moana and no Aladdin. Yeah, I mean, you're writing to a younger audience. And man, you talk about grabbing their hearts and grabbing their imaginations. It was so well done.

But here is your background. I mean, you can tell us a little bit more about this because I don't know what a degree, I know what a Ph.D. is, but in Renaissance literature from Cambridge, what is that? Is that Shakespeare? For me, it was Shakespeare. It was three years of writing about prisons in Shakespeare. It was fun. I haven't used it a whole lot since, although I will say as I write, I love understanding things by hearing them. And when I write, I mostly hear what I'm writing and see if the rhythm feels good to me.

And I think the only reason I know whether it does or not is because of all the years I spent with Shakespeare. Well, that's good. And here's the thing. When I was wrestling through my you could call it a crisis of faith or whatever, but it was a great journey because it was pretty exciting for me to dig into. And again, it's a couple of years after I've already committed to Christ.

But that's OK. It's like I'm going to dig in. I was looking for evidence. I wanted to prove that Jesus lived, died, rose from the dead. You know, I'm reading books like Evidence that Demands a Verdict and The Case for Christ and different things. Is that the questions our teens are asking today? Has apologetics or defending faith changed in 30 or 40 years? The generation today, it feels different, is it?

Yeah, I think it's changed a lot. Not because those questions don't still matter. We do still need to know, can we trust the Gospels? Is Jesus who he claimed, like, is there any evidence that Jesus even existed?

All these things. But the questions that are front and center for people today aren't anything to do with did Jesus rise from the dead or is the Bible authoritative or even has science disproved Christianity? They are, isn't Christianity homophobic? Isn't Christianity against diversity? Aren't Christians racist?

Isn't this just like a white centered Western worldview that we're trying to impose on other people? Those kinds of questions, the moral questions really are front and center for people. And I think one of the transitions that folks may have been aware of as they go from being the teenager or the young adult who was grappling themselves to being the parent now or raising teens is that whereas 20 years ago, maybe depending on where you lived in the US, but certainly where my husband grew up in Oklahoma, for example, he said that even if people didn't go to church, they respect the fact that he did. It was kind of considered like you had a little bit of a moral high ground.

Yeah. If you were a Christian who went to church and today in most parts of the country, at least, if you're a Christian who goes to church and really believes these things, you kind of have a moral low ground. People see you not just as sort of deluded and foolish, but actually as immoral in a lot of spaces.

So that's really, I think, where the main frontiers are for us now and where we need to both grapple with the questions for ourselves, but also help our kids to navigate those questions. Yeah, I do know that in the 90s, since we started our church in 1990, it was you were respected when you used the title pastor. What do you do? I'm a pastor. Oh, that's nice. Now, yeah, you're it's almost like you're afraid to say, yeah, you're judged. You know, I was a chaplain for an NFL football team and I felt like half of my job in that locker room was to show them I'm not weird just to be a normal guy.

How did that go for you? Yeah, it's like it's like I mean, I remember I'm not kidding. I remember one time literally speaking to the team. We called a chapel service, which is voluntary.

The guys that want to come Saturday night before our Sunday game. And I used an illustration in my talk of listening to some song that was on the radio. And this guy, there's 20, 25 people in the room, goes, wait, wait, wait. You listen to music? I'm like, what?

He goes, well, you're a pastor and a chaplain. I don't think you listen to music. You don't listen to the radio. I'm like, are you kidding me? I love, you know, good music. But it was just that whole thing.

It's like they think you're weird. And like you said, there's a there's a generation now that's like there's beliefs about you if you call yourself a Christian that may not be anywhere near true, but that's some of the questions we got to answer. Yet in your book, you still go after some of the questions that I had to answer in the 70s and 80s because they're still really important questions. Yeah, absolutely. Right. So let's talk about some of those.

I mean, one of them is third chapters. Can Jesus be true for you, but not for me? Talk about that a little bit, because that is a important question for a teenager or an adult. I think, and as you talk about it, think about the parents that are listening.

They're wanting to know how they can answer these questions with their kids. It's a popular story that's often told to help people supposedly understand the different world religions, because people will say, you know, there are so many religions out there. It's fine if Christianity is true for you and it works for you and it fits with your cultural background, but you can possibly say that it's true regardless of where you come from or what your background is. Like, it's actually really offensive to say, for example, that Hindus are just mistaken in their beliefs and that they would need to, in fact, convert to become followers of Jesus. And so people will sometimes tell the story of, like, an elephant that walked into a village of blind people and different people came up to the elephant and felt different parts of it. You know, one guy felt the leg and said, oh, this this elephant's like a tree. And somebody else felt the ear and said, oh, no, no, no, it's not like a tree. It's like a fan. And someone else felt a tusk and said, oh, no, no, no, that's not like a tree or like a fan.

It's like a spear. And people tell that story to say, you know, really the different world religions are all kind of grasping at different truths about God. And really, if we could see the full picture, we'd see that there wasn't real contradiction between these different beliefs. Now, that seems at first to be a really kind of humble attitude to say, you know, my religion doesn't contain all the truth there is to know. So maybe we have to take truth from different places.

But if you think about it, the story is told from the perspective of someone who can see the whole elephant. So it's actually kind of condescending to say, like, all you different religious people with your little ideas about God are like blind people kind of trying to figure out what an elephant is. And I think the more that we work through this sort of mentality people have about saying, you know, we can't possibly say that one religion is true and others aren't, the more what felt like it was maybe very respectful in the first place actually becomes kind of disrespectful.

I think that we most respect a Muslim friend or neighbor, for example, by being real about the fact that they believe different things than we do. And to say, you know, both of us are making real claims about God. And whereas there's some overlap, you know, Muslim friends would also believe that God created everything, like certainly some overlap.

There are massively important differences. If you look even just at the three religions in the world that are closest to each other, actually Christianity, Islam and Judaism, like at least all believe there's one created God, share some of the Old Testament scriptures. If we look at what people of those three different beliefs say about Jesus, you know, Christians say that Jesus died and was raised from the dead. Muslims say that Jesus didn't really die on the cross, but that he just seemed to and he was taken into heaven. And Jews and for that matter, Hindus and Buddhists and atheists and agnostics say that Jesus died and was not raised from the dead. Now, we may not be able to go back two thousand years with a video camera and kind of see exactly what happened in the tomb, but those three explanations are incompatible.

Like it cannot be the case that each of those are all correct. And so we're not being respectful if we say, well, all these different religions, even the most sort of similar ones in some ways, are really saying the same thing because they're not. This isn't just a kind of detail on the edge of a religion. This is like the absolute central claim of the Christian faith, without which Christianity is dead in the water.

Right. So I think as we as we walk through these questions, you know, both for ourselves and with our kids, we need to help folks to make the distinction between being disrespectful in our attitude and manner towards somebody, which isn't something that Jesus calls us to at all, actually. He calls us to always be loving, especially to those who are different from us. Or, you know, Peter said that we should always be ready to give a reason for the hope that we have. But to do so with gentleness and respect, like that should very much be our posture, love, gentleness and respect. But at the same time, making very clear that we do believe different things and we know in different spheres of life that it's not the case that, you know, your truth can just be your truth and mine can just be mine. That's fine if it's like, who's cooking is best?

You know, I'm sure your wife cooks better than my husband in your eyes, and I'm sure my husband cooks better than your wife and mine. But when it comes to matters of more universal truth, matters of history, whether something really happened or not, whether it's in our own lives or in broader history that's truly relevant to today, we all know that we can't just say, you know, it's fine if you think the Holocaust didn't happen, that can be your truth. But my truth is that it did.

No, we know that that's not OK. So I think we need to help people see that actually there's no special category of religious truth that makes it something that can be true for you, but not for me. Actually, Christianity in particular is making very real historical claims that are either true or false. You are an evangelist in my eyes because you basically have been sharing Christ with your friends. One of the reasons you've written some of your books is to share Christ with your friends and just showing them what you believe. And so as we talk about that, like, what would you say to your friends about this point? And I bet you've had a lot of great conversations about this. Yeah, I think one of the really helpful things to bring up, actually, again, whether our kids are with friends, is that far from being primarily a white Western religion, Christianity has always been, from the scriptures onwards, a multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural movement.

Actually, today, Christianity is the largest global belief system and it is the most diverse, whether you're looking at race or geography or culture in all of the respects that you can look. Do you think most people are aware of that? I don't think they are. I don't either.

I really don't. I think it just changes the framework in which a lot of people think about this question in particular, actually, because once you realize that there are soon going to be more Christians in China than in America, or when you realize that by 2060, experts think that 40 percent of the world's Christians will be living in sub-Saharan Africa, or when you realize that actually from literal day one of the church at Pentecost, as we see in the Book of Acts, we see the Spirit pulled out and then people from all these different countries, including places like Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Egypt and Libya, coming to put their trust in Jesus that day, we realize Christianity, sure, it's shaped, you know, white European folk like me and sort of the white European West, but we don't own it. It's been around the world from the get go. And increasingly so today is a multiethnic, multicultural, multiracial faith. Actually, the demographic globally that is where Christianity is declining is white Western men. How is it that we don't know this? The general population thinks it's a white, more European centered religion.

Where is that coming from? And I don't think it's just in America that we think that. Yeah, I think part of it is just that even in the last 40 years, as sociologists of religion have kind of studied religion, they used to think that Christianity was just going to decline because as the world becomes more modern and more educated, more scientific, religious belief naturally declines. And because that was what had happened in Western Europe, they thought the rest of the world would follow on. So they weren't really paying as much attention to the growth of Christianity across the world. But actually, in the last 40 years, what we've seen is an increasing diversification of folks who are putting their trust in Jesus and they're expecting that in the next 40 years, Christianity is going to continue to be the world's largest religion and the most diverse and it's going to increase slightly globally rather than decreasing.

But for too long, I think this is true, honestly, both in my country, the UK and in America, there's been this sort of marrying together in people's minds of Christianity with a sort of white centered nationalism. And that's not something we see in the Bible at all. And it's almost absurd from a biblical perspective. We're late comers to the Christian family from the Bible's perspective.

But it's also it just doesn't align with the reality of the church today. Yeah. And the truth is, as you say all this and you have a chapter about the, you know, Christianity and diversity, it's not known. Right.

As you answer this question and you write about it to help teens answer this question, this needs to be known and understood not only for our own faith, but as we seek to share our faith with others, these are truths we have to have so that when they do have questions or push back against it, we can answer like you just did. Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of kids today have become very disillusioned with Christianity because of the history of racism in the white church in America. And I understand that. I think there are real things to grieve and lament and repent of that. But I think what the information that those kids are missing is that God has been growing the black church in America for centuries and that actually, rather than if we only align Christianity in our minds with the sort of the white Christian slaveholder or the white Christian segregationist, we're actually ignoring the voices of the millions of black Christians that God's raised up through the centuries down to today.

Yeah. And it is interesting, again, I can feel it in your book in the way you answer, even in this interview, your gentleness and respect, which is so key. As we are interacting with people that are on a journey toward faith and maybe don't believe what we do. It's like we're not answering their questions. We're answering a person with gentleness and respect.

I'll never forget one time early in the beginning of our church, I made a comment in a sermon, something like it was early 90s. So I don't remember, but I got confronted by somebody. And that's why I remember I said something to the effect, making a comment about a Muslim or someone that would be of the Islam faith. And I just I was trying to debate different things.

And I said, can you imagine somebody actually believes that? And just went on. Right. Just a flippant little comment just went on. This young man came up to me right after and waited patiently. And he goes, hey, dude. And I knew him. So he was part of our arts team.

So we had a little bit of relationship. But he said, hey, Dave, just wanted to make a comment on something you said today in your sermon. I'm thinking, oh, good.

This is going to be a good thing. He goes, you know, you made this comment that I can't believe somebody would like how could they believe that? He goes, my mom is a Muslim and I think she's coming next week to church. That comment, you know, it just destroys her as a person. She is not less than you because she believes something else. Please don't make a comment like that. And I was like, thank you. That is so true.

I need to hear that. And that's the attitude part, right? It's like I'm making a flippant comment, like totally dishing somebody who's made in the image of God who has a different belief than I do. Well, let's be real. We believe crazy things. Yeah. We believe that a first century Jewish man died on a cross and was supposedly raised from the dead three days later.

Like, that is crazy. The thing is, the more that I have read and learned from atheist and agnostic authors and thinkers today, we're not choosing between Christianity with all its crazy beliefs and a perfectly coherent kind of secular worldview that does all the things Christianity does, but without having to believe in the crazy stuff. We're choosing between Christianity and utter incoherence. Well, and I think, too, the way we talk about other people, other religions, other beliefs is critical for us in the home. I mean, you're on the stage at a church, but what are we saying around our dinner table and how are we viewing people? And how do our tones come across or our biases come across?

I think as parents, as followers of Christ, we need to be loving, because as we watch Jesus encounter various people of all different kinds of faith, he is loving. He sees them. He speaks to them. He acknowledges them. He acknowledges their pain and he loves them. And don't we all want that?

I don't care what your background is. We all want that. I mean, and as we all know, he's also full of truth.

Yes. So he's full of grace and truth. So he isn't withholding or hiding the truth. He's blatantly speaking, this is the truth, but he's doing it with such a grace package.

It's appealing. We should be that. And we see it modeled as well by Paul, actually, who often has a bad reputation in people's minds, because I don't think we read Paul all that carefully sometimes. But I love what he says in his first letter to Timothy, where he says, this is a trustworthy saying, worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners of whom I am the foremost. And I think we so quickly forget that as Christians. We so quickly start thinking we're on some sort of moral high ground, looking down on all those sinners out there or all those foolish people who believe other things and don't know who Jesus is.

No, no, no. We're the people who, as Paul puts it for himself, like it's such an evidence of God's grace that he would send Jesus to say to someone even like him, even as bad as Paul, we are the foremost sinners. We're probably the worst sinners we know. And we need to have that posture always as we come to our non-Christian friends. As you're with your three kids and you're talking, what is your dialogue about these kind of conversations or people of different faith or beliefs? Yeah, it's great.

My kids are all well, my older kids who are in school are in a public school in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And one of the delightful things is that they get to learn alongside people who come from all sorts of different parts of the world. And sometimes that means they're encountering Christians from Ethiopia and Eritrea and other parts of Africa and China, etc. And sometimes it means that they're rubbing shoulders with Muslims or Hindus or people from a whole range of different faith backgrounds. They have the privilege, I think, of growing up knowing real people who believe very different things from them. I like that you called it a privilege. I think that's important.

It really is. It's an opportunity for them to learn in real time that God's people transcends any racial, cultural or national barrier from their Christian friends from all over the world and to learn to love people and not just to sort of have this idea in their mind of what is a Muslim like or what is a Hindu like or what is a Jewish person like, but actually to know and love people from the ground up who believe very different things from them or whose families do. And to some extent, having that passed on to them. And as we'll know, often people growing up in religious homes aren't necessarily actually learning a whole lot about their religious tradition. So, yeah, I try to talk to my kids from the ground up about these these questions and help them to engage at their level with their friends and stand for their faith in conversation with friends and with teachers at school.

Yeah. And the most beautiful thing, I think, would be if our neighbors and our kids classmates would want to run or come to our home, because when they're around us as followers of Christ, they maybe they can't even articulate. But like, there's grace and truth. They're going to be totally honest. They're not going to fudge anything. They're going to be truthful, but they're going to be fully loving. I want to be at the McLaughlin's house.

I want to be at the Wilson's house. I don't know what it is about being there. I don't think that's what a lot of people feel about church people.

They sort of want to run away because there's judgment and those kind of attitudes. And yet, number one, pick up the book. So we know the truth and we can articulate it for ourselves and to others and also then live it out in grace and truth. The word that comes to mind for me as I'm listening to Dave and Anne Wilson talk today with Rebecca McLaughlin is the word winsome, I think, as we present the truth of the scriptures. We need to recognize that people are going to be as influenced by our demeanor, by our winsome, kind, caring, loving nature, as they are by the truth claims that we're making. As Dave just said, we need to be people who are full of grace and truth. And one of the things I love about Rebecca McLaughlin's book, 10 Questions Every Teen Should Ask, is that as she defends the faith, she does it winsomely.

She does it in a compelling, kind, generous way. I think this is a great book for moms and dads to go through together with their teenagers. It may be that your youth pastor would want to take the youth group through a book like this.

We would like to make a copy of Rebecca's book available to you this week. If you can help support the Ministry of Family Life Today with a donation of any amount. Family Life Today is listener supported.

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That's 1-800-F as in family, L as in life, and then the word today. Now, tomorrow, Dave and Ann Wilson will talk with Rebecca McLaughlin about some of the hot button issues in our culture today because our teens are facing these issues in school with their peer group, issues about gender, sexuality, diversity, racism, how do we respond to those issues in a way that's biblical? We'll have that conversation tomorrow. Hope you can tune in for that. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Ann Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. We'll see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life, a crew ministry helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.