‘The central plank of women’s rights is the cross’

Rebecca McLaughlin holds a PhD from Cambridge University and a theology degree from Oak Hill Theological College in London. She is the author of several books including Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World’s Largest Religion. She spoke to Rebecca Chapman for en.

en: Tell me how you came to faith?

RM: I was raised in a mixed Christian family. My mum’s side of family is Catholic, my dad’s is Church of England. There was a range of belief on both sides, with some attending because it was what you did. I was raised going to an extremely high Anglican Church – you would not have known it wasn’t Catholic. It’s probably not a church I would necessarily recommend to somebody today who was looking for a church in London, but it was the church within which I became a Christian.

I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t following Jesus. From quite early on, I knew following Jesus meant telling other people about Him, even though I was going to non-Christian schools and my friends were generally hostile to Christianity. I was having conversations with them about their intellectual and moral reasons for not considering Christianity. Today I’m still trying to make the gospel plausible to people who have real objections. I don’t ever remember questioning my faith for myself, but I wanted to know answers so I could share them with my friends. At the same time, for as long as I can remember I’ve been attracted to other women, so that was always a piece of what was going on for me. But I never questioned whether the Bible said no to same-sex sexual relationship. I knew that it did; I think I hoped that it was a phase I would grow out of. But by the time I got to grad school, I stopped believing that I was going to grow out of it. One of the things that’s important to me, in terms of my more recent public ministry, is trying to uphold Christian sexual ethics from a position of understanding and empathy, rather than some of the ways that Christians have tried to uphold Christian sexual ethics, which haven’t necessarily been like that.

en: And in 2015 same-sex marriage was legalised in America?

RM: Yes - at that point, I hadn’t told even my closest friends in America about my own experience of same-sex attraction. I had simultaneously a strong desire to start talking about these things, and a recognition that I probably wasn’t actually ready to. I knew I needed to talk to my closest friends before I started talking to the world in general. That took a couple of years, but by the time my book Confronting Christianity came out in 2019 I was pretty clear that this needed to be part of what I was talking about.

en: Have you always been this passionate about your faith?

RM: Basically! I don’t know how to not be passionate about my faith. Obviously we all have different personalities, and there are pros and cons to every personality type. For instance, I’m a major extrovert, so I love going to church – but I find sitting by myself reading my Bible, and praying by myself, much more of a spiritual discipline. Conversely, I have introvert friends who could sit and read the Bible all day and pray by themselves all the livelong day, but going to church and having to interact with a lot of people is actually more challenging for them. I’m old enough to have learned that every personality type is different does not mean that because I’m an extrovert I therefore don’t need to read the Bible and pray by myself. Nor is it that my introvert friends don’t need to go to church. We all do! But there’s probably a piece of my exuberance that is personality rather than holiness.

en: You talk about lots of your friends and their ideas, and have previously described yourself as being a little like a magpie, stealing shiny things and then sharing them?

RM: I’ve since been told that that’s not actually what magpies do! In the first nine years that I lived in America I worked for an organisation called The Veritas Forum, where I was working with a number of Christian professors. First, finding them – finding professors at major secular universities in the USA and in Europe, and learning about their own faith stories and their research, and how they think about their research in relation to their faith. In many ways Confronting Christianity was the fruit of that, as I wanted to share those insights, their stories, that research, with a broader audience. Because in every field that is supposed to have disproved or discredited Christianity, there are actual world-class experts in that field who are very serious followers of Jesus. I wanted their research to be known. In our day, stories are really powerful. Often stories are told of people going to university, discovering their same-sex sexuality and walking away from their faith. I think we need to hear the stories of people who have precisely the reverse experience. Whether it’s intellectual, personal, moral, whatever it is, we need to hear the stories of people who put their faith in Jesus in unusual, unlikely places and surprising circumstances. If you look more closely at every seeming objection to Christianity, it stops being a roadblock to faith in Jesus and becomes a signpost to Him.

en: You’ve said that the power of words and the message of the gospel always fascinated you. How do you see those two things fitting together?

RM: I studied English literature for seven years, and I loved it. When I went to study theology for three years, I realised that the only person who loves metaphors more than Shakespeare is Jesus. We see in the Bible, from the very beginning, how God creates the universe with His words in Genesis. We see Jesus presented as the Word of God. Then we see Jesus spewing out metaphor after metaphor, story after story – not just communicating information, but communicating it through these really powerful, often non-literal modes of expression. I think words are incredibly powerful. They can be wielded to beautiful ends, but also for really disruptive ends. I’m fascinated by that, and would love to see Christians learn to be more wise and strategic with our words. The church in which I was most formed as an undergrad was a wonderful Bible-teaching church, with a vicar at the time who had also studied English at university, so was in many ways in tune with this idea. At the same time, it seemed that often we were slightly apologetic about the fact that the Bible wasn’t a set of propositions, but was more a set of stories and conversations and metaphors, full of things that are a little less directly didactic, and that appeal to the heart as well as to the mind. I think as Christians sharing the gospel today we need to be ready to appeal to the heart as well as to the mind.

en: That church was in England, but now you live in the US. How have you found it as someone from England adapting to America?

RM: One of the arguments that my husband, Brian, made as to why we should move to America was that whereas if you’re an American in England people are naturally suspicious of you, if you’re English in America, people love you for no reason! I definitely experienced that – people think you’re clever, because you have an English accent, which is definitely not evidence of any such thing. It’s been great in that respect.

One of the things that has really struck me is that, in America, there are millions of people who identify as evangelical but in fact do not know Jesus at all. In the UK, we have a lot of rather historical, cultural Christianity, where people who have no real faith in Jesus might want to go to church to get married or get their baby christened. Whereas in America there is a cultural evangelicalism, which wears the clothes of evangelical faith without actually having any kind of legitimate understanding of who Jesus is. I keep having to be reminded of that.

The other thing that’s been disorienting, sad and sobering, is that whereas when I lived in the UK and I heard that white evangelical Christians in America were associated in some people’s minds with racism, I thought that cannot be true. I thought it must be a slander against God’s people, because it’s so obvious in the Bible that people of every tribe and tongue and nation are equally made an image of God and will be worshipping Him together; obvious that there is a profoundly multicultural, multiethnic, multiracial dimension to the church from the beginning. Yet after living a number of years in America, and understanding a bit more of American history and even more contemporary Christian culture, I can see there is a tragic history of white Christian complicity and sin against black Americans. There’s a tragic present reality of racism that still continues to this day.

And I have a similar sadness on a different issue – there is a real homophobia in some church environments here. Homophobia is a term that gets thrown around a lot, but I mean actual fear and hatred of people who identify as gay or lesbian. There are pieces of American Christian culture that are caught up in that, in ways that the Bible would diagnose as sinful. In trying to tease that apart, and help people who might have been raised by Christians who, along with the gospel, communicated to them racism, and, like, actual homophobia, I have found it is not surprising that a number of those people grow up and realise ‘Oh, wait, those two things weren’t right’. So they end up questioning their faith completely.

I think that’s precisely the wrong conclusion. The problem with people who are racist is not that they’re reading their Bibles too carefully, but they’re not reading them half enough. It’s not that they’re too Christian, but that they are insufficiently Christian. I wanted to get my head around that, and try to think through how do we help people to see the beauty of what the Scriptures say. Whereas questions of race and questions of gender and sexuality are tangled up in people’s minds, actually they’re very different issues. We need to look carefully at what the Bible says concerning each.

en: Do you think Christians being seen as immoral because of that racism or homophobia is much more of an issue in America than it has been in Britain?

RM: I think so, although a lot of what happens in America blows across the Atlantic, so I don’t think they’re totally unrelated. It’s really easy to look across the pond from a British perspective and say: ‘Look at all those foolish Americans’. I think Jesus would be quick to remind us that actually we also have plenty of sin baked into our culture and history, and our church set-ups as well. We need to be really careful about casting stones. Some of the racial dynamics look different in the UK, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re better. We outsourced slavery rather than growing it at home, and ultimately we’re equally culpable, and benefitted from it. The economic benefits for the UK of the transatlantic slave trade were extraordinary. I don’t think we can in any way pat ourselves on the back, but we live with the consequences in a slightly different way.

en: You’ve said the central plank of women’s rights is the cross – tell me about that?

RM: Today people tend to think that abortion is the central plank of women’s rights, but I think that’s completely wrong. When Jesus died on the cross, we see the most powerful man who ever lived, dying the most shameful, humiliating and agonising death ever died. He completely reverses the power dynamics that come naturally to us as human beings, and that were actually celebrated in the Greco Roman Empire in which He was being executed. Through His life and ministry, we see Jesus relating to women in ways that completely overturned how women would have been seen in His day. Like His relationships with Mary and with Martha, where He specifically affirms Mary as a disciple. He speaks some of His most famous words to Martha – in the famous ‘I am’ statements of John’s Gospel, one of them is delivered to Martha as an individual. We see from the beginning of Jesus’ life, when both Mary and Elizabeth are specifically highlighted, and given a prophetic role as they speak about Jesus. At the end of Jesus’ life His death, burial and resurrection are primarily witnessed by women. The gospel authors point us to the testimony of women, for confirmation of all of those things.

When we see Jesus relating to women in the Gospels, there’s often a parallel between a woman and a man – and the woman always comes up better. You can read Luke’s Gospel looking for that and you’ll see it everywhere! We see Jesus validating women, protecting women, upholding women, relating to women, loving women. That is actually a much firmer basis for the fundamental equality of men and women than anything the world has to offer. Including when talking about marriage; in Ephesians 5 when Paul presents Christian marriage as a scale model of Jesus’ love for His people, he says: ‘Husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up’, so we see this sacrificial dynamic. Here the marriage relationship protects and upholds women in a way that, again, was quite alien to the culture that it was written in, and sadly, in many ways, is actually quite alien to our culture today. Despite the fact that we think of ourselves as being very progressive and very in favour of women’s rights. Actually, the sexual culture today in particular is measurably bad for women. And we haven’t reckoned with that.

en: Thank you for what you’ve said about your same-sex attraction. What do you think evangelical churches can do to make sure that they are safer spaces for those who are same-sex attracted?

RM: Firstly, we need to recognise that this is not a ‘them and us’ issue. Any room that we’re in, however small, might well include people who experience same-sex attraction, and that may not be written all over their foreheads. I don’t think most people would look at me and think that as a married woman with three kids that I’m someone who’s always been attracted to women, rather than men. Yet I’m actually the most typical kind of same-sex attracted person – i.e. women who experience same-sex attraction, though not so exclusively that they couldn’t be authentically married to somebody of the opposite sex – according to the best statistics on this. We need to stop talking as if we’re assuming everybody in our youth group, or everybody in our home group, or our church, doesn’t have this experience themselves. We need to show up for each other, just as we do in every other sort of struggle. Satan really loves to get us by ourselves. He really loves us to think that our particular struggle or sin is the one that we can’t talk to other people about. The last thing he wants is us shoulder to shoulder with our brothers and sisters. Conversely, as Christians we are we designed to be together, we are designed to need each other – it’s not a sign of weakness. It’s actually appropriate that we need each other.

I have a dear friend in my church here, a guy who’s entirely attracted to men, not women. He’s been part of a support group with some other guys, though for the other guys in the group their temptations are towards women. But they hold each other accountable as a group because they’re all in the same boat – all of them are trying to say no to their sexual desires when they’re leading them in inappropriate directions. I think we need to get much more used to being in each other’s business in a loving way.

I think one of the temptations for Christians who have never experienced same-sex attraction can be that it’s hard for us to believe that our delightful friend is actually naturally drawn towards sin. We have this idea, which is pretty prominent in our culture, that if something comes naturally to us it can’t be bad. Jesus has a completely different perspective on that. He says that out of men’s hearts come evil thoughts, sexual immoralities, adulteries, murder, false witness, slander. He actually says that all of us have sinful stuff naturally popping up out of our hearts all the livelong day. And what we all need is friends who will love us, listen to us, and challenge us. I’m thankful for the close friends I have who I know I can tell anything to. They will listen to me, not to judge me or to squash me, but because they love me. They will help me in situations where I need to be helped – they’ll call me out when I need to be called out. They’ll challenge me, they’ll come alongside me. And we all need that.

en: You’ve got a new book coming up in September on friendship. What led you to write about friendship?

RM: I had wanted to write a book on friendship for years. But as somebody who has made pretty much every friendship mistake in the book, I wanted to wait until I felt like I at least reasonably had my act together. I think especially if you are someone who struggles with same-sex attraction, friendship can be a minefield, but I think Christian friendship is one of God’s greatest gifts to us. While I think male-female friendship can be a really helpful thing, I do think that same-sex friendship is probably the primary site in which we get to claim God’s gift of friendship to us. But for Christians like me, who experience same-sex attraction, it can be a tricky space. I know some people who have pulled away from all close friendships because they’re terrified of messing up, which I think is precisely the wrong strategy. If we’re starving ourselves of the good connections that we need – and that God calls us to – we’re much more likely to reach for the junk food of sin.

I’ve been fascinated by what Jesus said to His disciples the night that He was betrayed, when He says: ‘This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.’ Honestly, in most evangelical churches, we would have ended it differently; we might have said: ‘Greater love has no one than a love of a husband and a wife’, or maybe ‘Greater love has no one than the love of a mother for her children’. But Jesus says: ‘Greater love has no one than he who lays down his life for his friends’. So if that is true and – spoiler alert – I think that what Jesus says is true, we need to get much more serious about Christian friendship. People often mention David and Jonathan, although for lots of reasons, including their Old Testament context with its political alliances, David and Jonathan don’t map very neatly on to our friendships today. But there are a lot of New Testament texts that really help us to think about and call us into deep, missional, Christian friendship – I wanted to examine and explore those.

en: What would be your top tip for anyone who wants to be a witness for Jesus through their own lives, but has absolutely no idea how to engage well with modern culture or is feeling a bit terrified of it?

RM: I think my top tip would be to invite people. Invite people into your home, invite people into your life, invite people to your church, invite people to your Bible study, invite people to meet your friends. We should be a hospitable people. It’s often in the context of hospitality that we have the opportunity to share the message of Jesus.

en: Thank you.