Biola University
Dr. Rebecca McLaughlin (Ph.D. Cambridge University) joins today's episode to speak with Tim on how to engage challenging questions and challenging people. Through the course of the conversation they consider such questions as: How can persuasion be an act of love? When can challenging a person’s belief be a sign of respect? What are the telltale signs that someone is listening to you? And what might loving and respectful engagement look like in contentious topics such as homosexuality and abortion? If Jesus is the truth and the life, this should shape the manner in which Christians engage with others, especially when we engage with people who do not believe in the claims of Christianity.
Transcript
Tim Muehlhoff: Welcome to the Winsome Conviction Podcast. My name is Tim Muehlhoff. I'm a professor of Communication at Biola University in La Mirada, California. I'm flying solo today.
One of the fun things about doing a podcast is, you get to read some great books, and then you actually have a chance to have the author on the podcast. So, a book that I absolutely love is called Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World's Largest Religion.
We have a group that has been meeting almost for 13 years. It's a marriage group, but we've moved on from marriage topics. We exhausted those topics a long time ago, so now we just pick favorite books. And so, somebody picked Confronting Christianity, and we stayed in that book for months and months, and had just some riveting conversations.
The book is written by Rebecca McLaughlin. She has a PhD in Renaissance literature from Cambridge University, and a Theology degree from Oak Hill College, she's Co-founder of Vocable Communications, and former Vice President of Content at the Veritas Forum. Welcome, Rebecca McLaughlin.
Rebecca McLaughlin: Thank you for having me.
Tim Muehlhoff: I did my very first Veritas Forum ever just this past semester at Cal Poly Slo-
Rebecca McLaughlin: Oh, nice.
Tim Muehlhoff: ... with a professor of Psychology, who wanted to argue that religion, any religion was totally fine, it didn't matter which one, and why get bogged down in the truth question. So, I did my very first one. It was packed beyond words, and it was really fun, it was really engaging. What's your background with the Veritas Forum?
Rebecca McLaughlin: After I finished my PhD in the UK and then went to seminary, I managed to marry a guy from Oklahoma. Well, actually, on the way. It was the year before I left seminary, and he really wanted to move back to the US.
And I had been planning on going into some Gospel-evangelistic ministry in the UK, but I didn't really know anything about the US other than I knew that America had many more Christians, proportionally, than the UK does.
So, I was like, "Oh, this feels so weird to be moving to a relatively Gospel-rich country coming from a relatively Gospel-poor country. But you trust the Lord.
And my husband, Brian, suggested that I reach out to somebody who, at the time, worked for Ravi Zacharias International Ministries, whole nother story, and he kindly put me in touch with the guy who was running the Veritas Forum at that time, and thought that I'd be a great fit for the role they were recruiting for.
Which meant that I spent nearly 10 years of about nine years working with campus ministries and with Christian professors at a whole range of leading secular universities in the US and in Europe, and got to know all these professors and their research and their faith stories, and to think alongside them about how they might communicate their faith in Jesus in relation to their studies in Philosophy or History or Physics or Psychology, whatever it was.
Tim Muehlhoff: Oh, that's great.
Rebecca McLaughlin: And part of the reason I wrote Confronting Christianity was because I felt like, after nearly a decade of doing that, it was like I had a roadmap of where the conversations really were at in all these different fields that were supposed to have disproved or discredited the Christian faith. And I knew a world leader in each of those fields, or multiple world leaders.
Tim Muehlhoff: Yeah.
Rebecca McLaughlin: And I wanted everyone else to know about their research and their stories as well.
Tim Muehlhoff: Oh, that is so cool. So, you were researching the book for 10 years, even accidentally?
Rebecca McLaughlin: Right.
Tim Muehlhoff: Oh, that's great. And very quickly, just for the listeners, Veritas Forum is what? What is the Veritas, the purpose of it?
Rebecca McLaughlin: Yeah, it was originally founded at Harvard, and the idea, at least when I was there, was to help the Christian communities on university campuses to engage their university with the person and story of Jesus Christ in a way that was appropriate to the university context.
And so, often, leveraging the credibility and the insights of a Christian academic, often in conversation with someone who is not a Christian at all, and modeling the kind of conversation that you can have, and how we don't need to soft-pedal on Jesus in order to actually seriously engage the academic community.
Tim Muehlhoff: Okay, so you're just a naturally fearless person, because I'm looking at the topics in this book, and Rebecca, it is like the who's who of the hardest questions that Christians get asked.
For example, just quick sampling, Chapter 1, "Aren't we better off without religion?" Chapter 2, "Doesn't Christianity crush diversity?" Number three, "How can you say there's only one true faith?"
Chapter 4, "Doesn't religion hinder morality? Doesn't religion cause violence? How can you take the Bible literally? Hasn't science disproven Christianity? Doesn't Christianity denigrate women? Isn't Christianity homophobic?"
Rebecca, those are the questions that I think many of us run away from rather than run towards, and yet, you chose to tackle these head-on. What was your thought-process of tackling these tough questions, and were they tough for you as you were writing the book?
Rebecca McLaughlin: These are the questions that my non-Christian friends in all the time that I've been a Christian talking with friends who are highly intelligent often and have principled reasons for not considering Christianity. And so, my assumption was that other people were also facing these questions.
And I had concluded that, actually, all of these questions looked like major roadblocks to faith in Jesus, but when you look more closely, they stop being a roadblock and become a signpost.
Tim Muehlhoff: Oh, nice. Explain that signpost.
Rebecca McLaughlin: Well, for example, if you really care about diversity, you can look at the New Testament documents, you can look at the way that Jesus broke through every racial and cultural barrier of His day, you can look at the diversity of the global church today and how, just empirically, Christianity is the greatest movement for diversity in all of human history, if we look at diversity in terms of race and culture and ethnicity and socioeconomic status.
And so, whereas people have understandable reasons for thinking that Christianity is against diversity, it's actually not. And I think people often smush together in their minds a concern for equality between people of different racial and ethnic heritages on the one hand and affirming LGBT identities on the other.
That all gets grouped together in our conversations today under the banner of diversity. But in actual fact, those are very different kinds of conversation, and they need to be, actually, separated out from one another.
Because some of the people who most ardently stand on what the Bible says against affirming same-sex marriage or transgender identities are actually people of color. So, people often have, in their minds, this very oversimplified, and I think, quite misleading idea that if you care about diversity, then you're going to be pulled away from Christianity.
I actually think it's much more true to say that Jesus offers us the richest, deepest experience of community love across difference, and that we need to become not less biblical, but more in order to engage with our modern world.
Tim Muehlhoff: I immediately thought of Nicholas Carr wrote a book called The Shallows, and in it he talks about power browsing, which means, I have all these ideas in my head and they're half-baked ideas. So, people have these half-baked ideas about Christianity that very seldom ever get challenged, but I still have these...
And in fairness, us as Christians, we have a truckload of half-baked ideas about postmodernism, or something like that. So, I immediately thought that, that maybe our friends have opinions, but we need to just have them think a little bit more deeper about those opinions.
Let me say this about the book, which by the way, won Christianity Today's Book of the Year Award, which is just amazing. What year was that, 2000 and what?
Rebecca McLaughlin: 2020.
Tim Muehlhoff: Oh, 2020. That's awesome. Here's what I love about the book though, Rebecca, from the perspective of the Winsome Conviction Project. We believe that communication is broken up into two parts; the content, which is incredibly important, but the relational level is the amount of respect between two people, the amount of compassion, the amount of acknowledgement.
And from Communication studies, if we violate the relational, people don't care about our content per se. I love that, in the book, you move people towards conversations, not away from conversations. So, let me just remind you, I actually have a quote file with my books.
I got into this in grad school. I thought, "You know, I'm reading all these crazy books with yellow highlight, and I'm going to forget them." So, I did this discipline in grad school of, with every book I'm going to do at least five quotes, that's it. Now it's up to 550 pages.
And your book, here are the quotes that really stood out to me. Page 48, "When questions of truth carry life and death consequences, we see persuasion as an act of love." I love that. That is really powerful, that of course, we're about persuasion.
Explain that a little bit, how persuasion can actually be a sign of love with a person. Rather than just saying, "I'm just not gonna rock the relational boat. Rather, I think I'm gonna try to actually persuade them about the truths of Christianity." How might that be an act of love?
Rebecca McLaughlin: I don't know if you saw the amazing film, Titanic?
Tim Muehlhoff: Yeah. Yes, I have.
Rebecca McLaughlin: But it comes to mind for me, and I remember, actually, when I was a student in the UK, hearing a guy, an evangelist using this analogy, and I think it's really helpful, where, if you think about the Titanic, after the iceberg has been hit, but before people know, "Oh, this boat's going down..."
Tim Muehlhoff: Right.
Rebecca McLaughlin: ... a handful of people are in a position of knowledge, and they have the opportunity to tell people so that they can save their lives. And they have to think carefully about how they're going to use that opportunity.
But nobody would say to Rose, for example, who has that understanding, has that information, nobody would say, "Rose, it would be so unloving of you to go and tell that guy who's sitting over there, he's having his dinner, he's having a great time, you would completely ruin his day by going and telling him, 'This ship is going down. You need to get on a lifeboat now.'"
In fact, it'd be really rude. He's having a... Who do you think you are to be butting in on his conversation, raining on his parade to tell him, "This ship is going down." We wouldn't think that because we know that she would be trying to save his life.
And if the message of Christianity is true, then the ship's going down, and we as followers of Jesus have a responsibility of love to those around us to warn them. Now, we can't drag them onto the lifeboat-
Tim Muehlhoff: Yeah.
Rebecca McLaughlin: ... but unlike in the Titanic, there's enough lifeboats to go around because Jesus has room for everybody and anyone who will repent and believe in Him, but they actually need to get off the boat before it's gone. Before it's sunk, they need to be bailing into those lifeboats. And we have the opportunity to tell people that.
And if you were in that situation, you wouldn't just be, "Hey, Tim, by the way, the boat's going down. You might wanna get on a lifeboat. But you do you, like, entirely up to you. I don't wanna press this upon you, or whatever."
If I loved you, I'd plead with you. I'd actually use every rhetorical device in my toolkit to plead with you to jump on that lifeboat because I know the ship's going down.
Tim Muehlhoff: And add to that, it's not just physical death, to do the spiritual analogy, we're talking about the consequences would continue even after that person dies in the water. There would be eternal consequences to them not taking the rescue boat.
Rebecca McLaughlin: Right. And I actually think, the analogy will break down at some point, but one of the things I like about the Titanic analogy is, there's one approach which says, okay, if this is true, then what we need to do is run around the boat just screaming.
And that's one approach. So, some people will take the view that, what I need to do as a follower of Jesus is stand in the streets and tell people about, like, I need to grab passers-by and tell them about Jesus. And actually, I have a lot of space for that. I don't think that's an invalid approach to have.
At the same time, I think it's fair to say that if we have a relationship of trust with somebody, we are much more likely to listen to what they have to say, even if it's something that's very inconvenient for us.
Tim Muehlhoff: Yeah.
Rebecca McLaughlin: So, if Rose goes to some random stranger on the boat, they're less likely to listen to her than if she goes to somebody who actually knows her really well and she says like, "You know me, you know I'm not crazy. Let me tell you, this ship's going down."
Tim Muehlhoff: That's really good.
Rebecca McLaughlin: So, I actually think that, if you're like me as somebody who's desperate for those around you to become followers of Jesus, then, investing in those relationships of trust where people can see we have their best interests... we actually love them, we're not just somebody in the street, and that they might take a little more seriously what we're saying because they know that we're not crazy, I think it's worth the relational investment out of love for that person.
And I don't want to be misheard as saying, oh, build relationships to share the Gospel as a means to an end for sharing the Gospel. It's actually a means to an end for love of that person. I think they are the one who benefits ultimately.
Tim Muehlhoff: That's so good. Do you know the illusionist group, Penn and Jillette? Have you heard of them?
Rebecca McLaughlin: I have not, but I'm on the edge of my seat now.
Tim Muehlhoff: So, they're in Las Vegas right now. They're probably the most famous illusionist group possible. Penn Gillette-
Rebecca McLaughlin: Just heard...
Tim Muehlhoff: Sorry, Rebecca. He's an ardent atheist, and he has a video blog that he routinely rails against God, religion, particularly Christianity. A man walked up to him after a show, gave him a Gideon Bible and said, "I'm proselytizing."
If you were to come up to me as a Communications professor and say, "Hey, I'm thinking about going up to an ardent atheist, give him a New Testament, and say, 'I'm proselytizing,'" I would have said, "I think that's a bad idea."
So, he actually did a video blog on this happening, and he said this, I've never forgotten this, he said, "I'm not against proselytizing." He goes, "I mean, if you think I'm going to get hit by a truck and you do nothing, how cold-hearted." Then he says this, "How much do you have to hate me not to proselytize?"
Rebecca McLaughlin: Yeah.
Tim Muehlhoff: I've never forgotten that. So, if we say to people, with the best of intentions, "I'm doing this just because I care for you. I get nothing from this other than my concern for you," I think that could be a really powerful sign of relational love.
Rebecca McLaughlin: Yeah.
Tim Muehlhoff: Let me give you another quote. I love this one as well. One of the wisest and gentlest seminary professors put it like this, "It's often said that you should respect other people's beliefs. But that's wrong. What's vital is that you respect other people.
Indeed, when examined more closely, attempting to persuade others to change their beliefs is a sign of respect. You are treating them as thinking agents with the ability to decide what they believe, not just products of their cultural environment. We should not be offended when people challenge our beliefs, we should be flattered."
Okay, so here's my question about that. I often see among Christians, that's a one-way street. Of course, I'm going to challenge your beliefs, and I want this to be a conversation. So, then the question becomes, okay, is this a monologue or a conversation? In other words, is that a two-way street?
I want to challenge some of your assumptions and beliefs, but am I willing to you challenge my beliefs, and am I just play-acting, or am I really willing to reconsider some of my beliefs?
Rebecca McLaughlin: Yeah. And I think sometimes people might receive what you just said as saying, "You know, I can learn from your beliefs, you can learn from my beliefs. Neither of us has to be correct," that it becomes this relativization of truth.
That if I enter into a conversation with a friend who might be an atheist or might be Jewish, or whatever their current beliefs are, if I as a Christian enter into that conversation with any openness to the possibility that they might change my mind, then I've somehow lost sight of the truth of Christianity.
Tim Muehlhoff: Right.
Rebecca McLaughlin: And I don't think that's actually correct, because it's because I believe that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life that I am more than happy to hear the best arguments against Jesus.
My faith in Jesus isn't fragile because actually, I've heard the best arguments and they haven't persuaded me, but I don't need to shield myself from that. And I can be open in conversation to genuinely listening to somebody else and understanding why they believe what they believe.
Because for me to say, okay, I want to set out to really understand what my Jewish friend believes or what my atheist friend believes or what my Hindu friend believes, seeking to understand where they're coming from, not just what they believe but actually why, what their life experiences or their story, how that's impacted their belief doesn't for a second relativize the truth of who Jesus is, but it enables me to understand more of where they're coming from.
And I think it's a basic fact of human nature that we are more open to hearing from people who we know actually care enough to listen to us and not just assume. You and I probably hate it when people say, "Because you are Christian, I know exactly what you think about this, and here's why you're wrong."
And you're like, "Well, I actually don't think that," or, "You just seem very assuming that you would know exactly what I think about something without even giving me the courtesy of expressing my view."
I think as followers of Jesus, we should be the most curious people about other people's beliefs, not in an inquisition way, but it feels profoundly loving when somebody actually listens to you and gives you the opportunity to explain what you believe and why.
And I think we can extend that, and we should extend that to those around us who are not followers of Jesus, and we should equally be praying for and looking for opportunities to share what we believe with them.
And the conclusion of that is not, "Well, isn't that lovely, we have different beliefs," and now we can pat ourselves on the back because we've had this conversation across different beliefs.
If I'm wrong about Jesus, it's better for me to know, and if they're wrong, it's actually better for them to know. And we need to be ready to engage with one another in a genuine pursuit of truth. I don't think that means holding the objective truth of Jesus lightly.
Tim Muehlhoff: One quick comment, and then a question. So, I was in grad school, I was actually on staff with Crew. My wife and I were on staff-
Rebecca McLaughlin: I love Crew.
Tim Muehlhoff: Oh, I love Crew, love Crew. We were on staff, my wife for almost 30 years. It was an amazing experience. So, all the time I'm in grad school, I'm on staff with Crew, but I'm teaching at UNC Chapel Hill. And students would pick up a little bit, "I think you're religious."
And so, I remember a student asked me in front of everybody, "Are you a Christian?" I said, "I don't know. How do you define it?" And he came out and said, "You vote this way, you don't like these movies," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I said, "Oh. Then, I'm not a Christian. If that's how you define being a Christian, then yeah, I'm not a Christian."
Later, they got mad at me when I came out, at the end of the semester, and said, "I actually am a Christian, but I'm not that Christian. So, allow me to self-define myself, and I'll allow you to self-define yourself. Let's not use labels." Some Christians did not like that.
But here is my question. I love the thing about listening, and I know it's subjective, but how do you know when somebody's listening to you? What are the telltale signs that a person actually is listening to you and considering your thoughts as you give them?
Rebecca McLaughlin: I think when we really listen to another person, we find ourselves able to repeat back to them what they believe in a way that they say, "Yes, you've got it. Like, that is what I'm saying."
And I think, often, in order to do that, whether it's me listening to somebody else or them listening to me, we may need to ask some clarifying questions. So, to go back to your example there, if somebody had said to you, "Are you a Christian," and you'd said, "Well, tell me more about what you mean by that?
What is your definition of that word so I can understand more," they could have said, "Well, in my experience of Christians, here are the things that come with being a Christian, but I'm curious whether that's whether those things are true of you as well."
And you might say, "Well, actually, they're not." And then, that person might say, "Well, so tell me more. What am I missing here? Why are a lot of my friends who identify as Christians checking these boxes and you are not? Help me to understand?"
And they would hopefully get the point of being able to say, "Okay, this is what you're saying as a Christian." I remember, vividly, a few years ago I was speaking at a church in Missouri, and they had asked me to speak on science and on gender and sexuality, two seminars, but in one day, and it got advertised altogether. So, it understandably drew some comment from the broader community there.
And in fact, there'd been a protest organized by some of the local LGBT leaders against the event because they knew that I was going to be speaking from a Christian perspective on LGBT questions. And most of the people in that community decided to boycott the event and organize a protest.
But there was one woman who decided to come to the event and to listen to what I said. And she came up to me afterwards, and she had a notebook where she had written down what I'd been saying. And I said, "I'd love to get coffee with you, talk more." She graciously agreed to do that.
And what she said to me was, "Okay, I think what I heard you saying is that it's not that people go to hell because they're gay, you're saying that people go to hell because they haven't hidden themselves in Jesus. Is that right? Did I get you right?"
And I was like, "Yes, that is exactly what I'm saying." Now, I was very clear with her about the fact that if you have hidden yourself in Christ, if you're a follower of Jesus, if you repented and believed and put your trust in Him, that's actually going to change a whole lot about your life, including, it's going to change the decisions that you make when it comes to sexual relationships.
But the center of what I'm saying is, we are all headed for hell if we haven't put our trust in Jesus, and that's the heart of this conversation. And we need to start from there before we're talking about anything to do with LGBT questions.
And I really appreciate the fact that she had decided to actually listen to what I was saying. She'd even drawn a little diagram, like, "So, this what you're saying?" And I'm like, "Yes. Let me tell you the Gospel," and we had a lovely, fruitful conversation from there.
But it's rare, and it's rare in both directions that we genuinely listen to what other people are saying because it's easier, often, for us to come to snap decisions about what this person, you know, "I know your demographics, and therefore, I'm gonna assume what you believe."
And I think it happens, especially if we are offended, one way or another, by that person's beliefs. It can be so easy for us to go straight to, "You must be either stupid or evil to hold those beliefs."
Tim Muehlhoff: Yeah.
Rebecca McLaughlin: And we won't take the time to understand why somebody who is well-meaning and highly intelligent could have arrived at a completely different conclusion from us. Now, it's not to say that that conclusion is correct.
So, an example that I sometimes give is, when it comes to the question of abortion, I'm 100% pro-life. And I don't think it's a agree-to-disagree kind of issue, I don't think it's an issue of little moral significance. I think it's a profoundly important issue.
But I know that many people who would identify as pro-choice, their reasons for that spring from concerns that I actually share. So, they might be strongly motivated by desire to care for women who are in vulnerable positions-
Tim Muehlhoff: Right.
Rebecca McLaughlin: ... or to support women who have been abandoned or don't have the money. They can have, actually, a lot of good reasons for landing in the position that they've landed in. Now, I think it's profoundly the wrong position to be...
And again, to just be crystal clear, I think, actually, the way that I sometimes put it is, if there is no God, and if Jesus isn't the Son of God who came to die for us, and if He didn't rise again so that we could have everlasting life with Him, then a baby in a mother's womb is just a collection of atoms and molecules.
Tim Muehlhoff: Yeah.
Rebecca McLaughlin: But if there is no God and Jesus didn't come to die for us, and if we can't have resurrection life with Him, then that's just what the mother is as well. It actually all, a Christian understanding, all ties up and hangs together if Jesus is who He says he is.
Tim Muehlhoff: Right.
Rebecca McLaughlin: But for my pro-choice friends, their desire to protect and care for a vulnerable woman actually comes from the same place as the desire to protect and care for a vulnerable baby, but they've been told this is an either or, and we don't need to weigh both those lives.
But it's so easy, on both sides of that conversation, for people to think you could only be pro-life if you are in fact an evil, heartless, stupid person.
Tim Muehlhoff: And you're murdering the baby.
Rebecca McLaughlin: And conversely, you could only be pro-choice if you're an evil, heartless, stupid person. I'm like, "Well, actually, I think all of us ought to be able to articulate in a way that the other person would recognize-
Tim Muehlhoff: That's so good.
Rebecca McLaughlin: ... what their reasons are for their position," and then try to persuade them to change their mind.
Tim Muehlhoff: Right. But we call that perspective-taking. Can I set aside my perspective long enough, my convictions, to step into your world and see why your world makes sense? If I had those convictions, presuppositions, then I may be thinking that as well, but I need to understand it and feel your perspective, and that might be a great way to show love, through listening and perspective-taking.
Rebecca McLaughlin: Yes. I think I, for a moment, wanted to quibble with setting my beliefs aside because it's actually because of my Christian beliefs that I want to lean into that conversation. But I also like where you landed there of saying, if I was starting where you were starting, I might end there as well.
Tim Muehlhoff: Yes.
Rebecca McLaughlin: So, I need to recognize our different starting points has landed us in different places.
Tim Muehlhoff: And you said something, and we'll probably close with this, but you said something that really resonated. You refer to this person as well-intentioned. "How can a well-intentioned, intelligent person," right?
Rebecca McLaughlin: Hm-mm.
Tim Muehlhoff: Rebecca, I think today people would not concede that. They would say, "No, no, no, I'm talking to people who are not well-intentioned and they're not intelligent, and they want the worst for this country."
That splitting that's happening in the American context where one group's all good, the other group's all bad, and we get in trouble if we start to point out, "You know, I think there's actually people on the other side that are well-intentioned, they love this country, they're concerned about the issues we're concerned about," you start to get policed pretty quick by your in-group if you start to be that charitable to the other side.
And I think that's what's got us stuck a little bit in the division that we're in the country today is, "I can't concede any points to the other side 'cause I come across as being soft."
Rebecca McLaughlin: Yeah. And it's tricky, because on the one hand I want to say, let's imagine that this person I'm talking to is well-intelligent... well-intelligent... is well-intentioned and has genuinely thought about these issues.
Tim Muehlhoff: Right.
Rebecca McLaughlin: At the same time, my theology tells me none of us are really very well... We all bring sin into every conversation that we have. And so, I don't need to say, "Well, the person who's landed in a pro-choice position is really a good person. No, they're not. They're a sinner who's desperately in need of Jesus' salvation."
Tim Muehlhoff: Right.
Rebecca McLaughlin: And as Paul puts it, "This is a trustworthy saying worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came to the world to save sinners of whom I'm the foremost." So, I'm not saying their intentions are pure and their reasoning is sound, and this is why they've landed where they've landed.
I am saying they've had as much messing up from sin as I have, and in this conversation they most likely haven't responded to the Gospel. So, we have a whole lot of stuff going on, but in order to actually persuade anybody, we need to understand what they are and aren't saying.
Tim Muehlhoff: Yeah.
Rebecca McLaughlin: And I think, to flip the script a little bit, I remember, I think I told this story in Confronted Christianity, as a teenager, I was involved in my first-ever pro-life demonstration. It was a silent demonstration from the pro-life side. And on the other side there were people chanting at us, "Pro-life, that's a lie, you don't care if women die."
And I remember standing there thinking, "That's profoundly untrue of me and why I'm standing here today. Of course I care." But the people on that other side, they have been told that anyone who's pro-life must not care about women. This has been their whole narrative.
And conversely, there are plenty of people who are passionately pro-life who have been told, anyone who's advocating on the other side can only have the worst possible intentions and desires.
And again, not to relativize the truth of Jesus or the moral conviction when it comes to abortion, until we can say, "Oh, you know, actually, I can see why that person thinks what they think, I can understand where they're coming from because of the experiences they've had, because of what they've seen, because of maybe some really awful behavior from Christians that they have witnessed, I get why they're where they are."
I desperately don't want them to stay there, but I need to understand where they are in order to reach out to them and speak truth into their lives in a way that they can remotely hear.
Tim Muehlhoff: Boy, that is such good advice. So, the Harvard Negotiation Project, we're huge fans of those guys. They say, and when they say this, when the Harvard Negotiation Project says, "The biggest mistake we make in communication," your antennas go up. They said, "The biggest problem we have is, we only trade conclusions with each other, we don't share how we arrived at the conclusions."
Rebecca McLaughlin: Yeah.
Tim Muehlhoff: And I think what you just said was exactly what they're trying to say is, help me get there where you're at right now, shouting that to my community, help me understand what fueled that anger, that rage, that perspective of my community. Give me the different building blocks that led you to that perspective.
And that's what I meant by setting aside my view long enough that I can step in and live in your world and understand how your world was constructed. I think that is a huge gift to people to say, "Okay, if I had your beliefs, it makes sense why you're shouting at my community. Now, can we have a conversation about some of those beliefs, because I'd like to challenge some of them."
Man, I think that'd be a great gift in today's American political context. So, the Vice Presidential Debate that happened, I think all of us just stepped back and thought, "Oh, my goodness, it's possible." I don't even care if they were play-acting.
I don't even care if the first Presidential Debate was so bad they got the word, "Be civil," they showed that they could actually pull it off and show a little bit of empathy towards each other and say, "Well, I agree with that." I think when the President...
That was such a breath of fresh air. And I think everything we're saying today could be a breath of fresh air with your neighbor, co-worker, family member who has a different perspective.
Rebecca McLaughlin: Yeah, because at the end of the day, if we're followers of Jesus, then we need to hate our enemies. Oh, no, sorry, sorry. At the end of the day, if we're followers of Jesus, we need to love our enemies. And that informs everything that we do.
I mean, we need to love our ideological enemies, we need to love those who think the worst of us, we need to love those who we've been raised to hate for whatever reason. And love doesn't mean, always, affirm or agree with, for sure, but it does mean something very real.
Tim Muehlhoff: So, let me get your impression of this, and we'll close out with this. So, Rick and I, through great ministries like Faith in Law, Campus Crusades, Christian Embassy, Michael Wear's great group, Christianity and the Public Good, we got invited to go to Washington, Capitol Hill.
Spoke in the Pentagon, Capitol Hill. Now, we met with mostly self-identified Christian political leaders. Here's what they said to us, Rebecca. So, all that about loving enemies, everyone we talked to said, "Oh, I believe in Jesus. I believe in the Jesus who overturn tables. That's the Jesus I believed in."
And, said to me and Rick, "You're naive enough to think the tables don't need to be overturned. They do. We are at that point in this country that we need to overturn some tables." So, we were promoting the Jesus who washed feet, love your enemies. They were saying, "Yeah, it's time to overturn some tables."
If you were us, and we were a little bit dumbfounded, what would be your response to somebody who would say, "But Rebecca, Jesus did overturn tables, He did call up the Pharisees." And Paul with the Judaizers. Oh, my gosh, he was calling him dogs, and some, really, things we might not be able to mention, about castration. So, what would be your response, because we get hit with this 24/7.
Rebecca McLaughlin: Yeah.
Tim Muehlhoff: What about Jesus and overturning tables, what would be your quick advice to the Winsome Conviction Project of... And I'm putting you totally on the spot.
Rebecca McLaughlin: No.
Tim Muehlhoff: But whatever you say, we're going to do. So, be very careful. But how would you respond, off the top of your head?
Rebecca McLaughlin: It's really interesting if you read through the Gospels and you see who Jesus went after in a more aggressive way. And it was the hypocritical religious leaders, actually. He didn't go into the Temple of Venus and overturned their tables, He didn't actually go into the Roman soldiers' tent and start overturning their tables.
He was in the temple overturning the tables. And He seemed to have a much harder tone, shall we say, with the people who were claiming to be representatives of the everlasting God as revealed in the Old Testament than he did toward the pagans around him, or the Samaritans, the people who would have been... or the tax collectors, Jewish-
Tim Muehlhoff: Yeah, yeah.
Rebecca McLaughlin: ... but actually, really letting the side down, or the sinners and the prostitute, the people notorious for their sin. He spoke the truth to them, but He actually engaged them in a very loving way.
Jesus acted in perfect love in everything that He did, but His table-turning wasn't for the Samaritans or the tax collectors. Why didn't He turn over the tax booth that Matthew was in? He was actually turning over the tables in His Father's house.
And so, I think we need to be careful as we think about, if we're followers of Jesus today, are we having a prophetic voice within our own constituency, or are we just directing it to those outside? Because actually, Jesus was doing it toward those within His own constituency in that way.
And I think we also need to recognize... Peter says, I'm sure you've quoted many times on this podcast, that we should always be ready to give a reason for the hope that we have, but that we do so with gentleness and respect.
Tim Muehlhoff: Yeah. And give a blessing for an insult.
Rebecca McLaughlin: Yeah. So, we can be quick to want to be the table-turners, when actually, we might be called to gentleness and respect. And again, it's not without conviction or without seriousness, but we should be known for our love not only of our neighbors, not only the people like us, but of our enemies.
Tim Muehlhoff: Yeah. Boy, that's well said. Thank you. The book is called Confronting Christianity. But you have a brand new book. The brand new book is called?
Rebecca McLaughlin: Well-
Tim Muehlhoff: Oh-
Rebecca McLaughlin: ... I'm not sure what to say, because the book that most recently came out is called Does the Bible Affirm Same-Sex Relationships?
Tim Muehlhoff: Okay.
Rebecca McLaughlin: But I have a couple of other books in the pipeline, so I don't know which one you were referring to.
Tim Muehlhoff: We should all have that problem, we should. Oh, I'm sorry. Listen, honestly, I would say, after me, you're probably one of the most sought-after... But no, I'm just kidding, absolutely kidding. But it is not kidding to say, you are one of the most sought-after people today.
And to take time to come to Biola University, speak to our students, which we need to raise up a new generation of Christian communicators who take seriously what you just said about Peter's admonition, to have a reason for the hope, but do it with gentleness, reverence, some translations say.
So, thank you so much for taking time out to be at our university and come to the Winsome Conviction Podcast. We'd love to invite you back in the future, if you are a game.
Rebecca McLaughlin: I'd love to be here.
Tim Muehlhoff: That would be great. Thank you, Rebecca. Thank you for listening to the Winsome Conviction Podcast. If you want more information, please go to our website, winsomeconviction.com. We've got a bunch of free materials.
We also have an interactive website and the stalemate.com totally free that helps you engage in perspective-taking with perspectives that may be different than yours or even opposing to your perspective. And please, like us wherever you get your podcast. Thank you so much. We don't take your listening for granted. Thank you.
