Confronting Christianity with Rebecca McLaughlin
Nov 3, 2026 · 47 min · 12 segments
What does it actually mean to be an evangelical? Rebecca talks with theologian Walter Strickland II about how a word rooted in the good news of Jesus became so closely tied to American politics. Use…
Walter StricklandGuest
Rebecca McLaughlinHostYeah, I was talking to someone just last night who was talking about a friend of theirs who had walked away from Christianity because he had been through a lot of really hard experiences and he felt like Christianity didn't make sense of those experiences for him or didn't offer him a refuge from those hard experiences.
And what I asked this guy who was telling me about his friend, I asked him, where did he go to? He walked away from Christianity.
Where did he walk to? And he said, well, he walked to a kind of general agnosticism.
And I thought, you know, how heartbreaking, because for sure, being a follower of Jesus doesn't sort of suddenly heal all the pain in your own life or as you see around the world.
And even the ability to name something like the Holocaust as profoundly evil, that also goes.
Because if we're nothing but mammals at best, or atoms and molecules at the most basic level, who cares about the arrangement of atoms and molecules? Who cares about someone, you know, person A killing person B or sort of regime A killing millions of people because those people didn't have value in the first place.
None of us have value if there is no God and there is no meaning or hope or right or wrong as I think Richard Dawkins puts it, you know, as he looks at the world.
He says there is a bottom, no good, no evil, no purpose, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
And to that, I would say Christianity does actually speak very clearly to these things.
You know, as I do funerals as a pastor, you know, it's not that God just said, hey guys, buck up i'm gonna fix it it was no i am going to enter into this world that i created and not only just you know and not bark at people the right way to go or they don't do this but do that it's i'm going to suffer alongside them and in fact the the evil that is in the world is actually going to like jesus experienced that evil And then even, you know, when Lazarus died, he entered into that situation, not just as somebody who was going to go heal him and raise him from the dead, as the story of scripture says, he approached his sisters and he cried with them.
Where else do we see that in a deity? Where else do we, you know, so the Bible has no, Christianity has no answer for this.
Well, we have a creator who empathizes with us in our experiencing sin and brokenness, which I think where death comes from is a consequence of sin having entered the world, as you read in the Bible.
And, you know, if I was Jesus, I would have walked into that scenario and said, you know what? Hey guys, stop crying.
But Jesus was actually very, very tender, very soft, very, just entered into the depth of their pain and then did the miraculous.
healed him, which Lazarus' death and then his resurrection is like a microcosm of what's going to happen to everybody who's in Christ, because we too will die.
But then, you know, the dead in Christ, the Bible says, will rise first to meet the Lord.
And so if we're in Christ, if we're a believer in Jesus, you know, he's a gentleman.
So he's going to allow us to receive him and not just to assert himself on us.
Yeah, I was talking to someone just last night who was talking about a friend of theirs who had walked away from Christianity because he had been through a lot of really hard experiences and he felt like Christianity didn't make sense of those experiences for him or didn't offer him a refuge from those hard experiences.
And what I asked this guy who was telling me about his friend, I asked him, where did he go to? He walked away from Christianity.
Where did he walk to? And he said, well, he walked to a kind of general agnosticism.
And I thought, you know, how heartbreaking, because for sure, being a follower of Jesus doesn't sort of suddenly heal all the pain in your own life or as you see around the world.
And even the ability to name something like the Holocaust as profoundly evil, that also goes.
Because if we're nothing but mammals at best, or atoms and molecules at the most basic level, who cares about the arrangement of atoms and molecules? Who cares about someone, you know, person A killing person B or sort of regime A killing millions of people because those people didn't have value in the first place.
None of us have value if there is no God and there is no meaning or hope or right or wrong as I think Richard Dawkins puts it, you know, as he looks at the world.
He says there is a bottom, no good, no evil, no purpose, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
And to that, I would say Christianity does actually speak very clearly to these things.
You know, as I do funerals as a pastor, you know, it's not that God just said, hey guys, buck up i'm gonna fix it it was no i am going to enter into this world that i created and not only just you know and not bark at people the right way to go or they don't do this but do that it's i'm going to suffer alongside them and in fact the the evil that is in the world is actually going to like jesus experienced that evil And then even, you know, when Lazarus died, he entered into that situation, not just as somebody who was going to go heal him and raise him from the dead, as the story of scripture says, he approached his sisters and he cried with them.
Where else do we see that in a deity? Where else do we, you know, so the Bible has no, Christianity has no answer for this.
Well, we have a creator who empathizes with us in our experiencing sin and brokenness, which I think where death comes from is a consequence of sin having entered the world, as you read in the Bible.
And, you know, if I was Jesus, I would have walked into that scenario and said, you know what? Hey guys, stop crying.
But Jesus was actually very, very tender, very soft, very, just entered into the depth of their pain and then did the miraculous.
healed him, which Lazarus' death and then his resurrection is like a microcosm of what's going to happen to everybody who's in Christ, because we too will die.
But then, you know, the dead in Christ, the Bible says, will rise first to meet the Lord.
And so if we're in Christ, if we're a believer in Jesus, you know, he's a gentleman.
So he's going to allow us to receive him and not just to assert himself on us.
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