This guide trains one skill. When someone tells you Christianity is harmful, they are usually also telling you a story about what a good life looks like. Joshua Chatraw’s approach to that story has three moves. Find what the story values. Affirm what is true in that value. Then ask, honestly, whether the story’s own assumptions can supply what it promises. The goal is to understand the person well enough to see where their story and the gospel meet. Winning is not the goal.
You can work through the guide alone in about an hour, or with a group over one long session. Read the Scripture sections slowly, do the mapping exercise on paper, and leave time for the questions near the end. If you are leading a group, read the whole guide before you meet. The exercise works better when the leader has tried it first.
What a moral story is made of
A story about flourishing usually has three parts, even when no one names them. It has a value, something the person cares about, such as justice, freedom or being true to yourself. It has a promise: live this way and you will flourish. And it rests on premises, beliefs about the world that make the promise seem reasonable. The premises are the part people rarely say out loud, because to them they feel like common sense.
Chatraw names two premises he hears often. One is that this world is all there is. The other is that each person is the final measure of what is right, which he calls self relativism. Neither is usually argued for in conversation. Both are simply assumed, and the rest of the story is built on top of them.
This matters for the harm objection. If a friend says the church has done damage, their complaint draws on a value, often justice. You may agree with the value completely. Your question is not whether the value is good. Your question is what the story assumes about the world, and whether those assumptions can hold the value up.
Observation prompt: Think of a sentence you have heard recently that judged Christianity as bad for people. Write it down. Underneath it, write the value the speaker seemed to care about. Do not write any premises yet.
Reading Acts 17 for the order of the moves
Acts 17:16-34 tells how Paul spoke in Athens. Acts is narrative, so the passage describes what Paul did there. It does not hand every Christian a required script. Still, the order of his moves is worth observing closely.
He begins with what he has seen in their city: “Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious. For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you” (Acts 17:22-23). The KJV’s “too superstitious” is rendered by many other translations as “very religious.” Paul is naming their religious seriousness, and he builds on it.
Later he quotes their own literature: “For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring” (Acts 17:28). He affirms a line from their tradition because he believes it is true. He does not affirm everything. In the next verses he says God is not like images of gold or stone, calls his hearers to repent, and points to the resurrection of Jesus as the ground of coming judgment (Acts 17:29-31).
Observation prompts: What exactly does Paul affirm? What does he refuse to affirm? Where in the speech does he move from their story to his? Notice that he affirms a true belief, not their practice of idol worship.
A second text sets the pace. “He that answereth a matter before he heareth it, it is folly and shame unto him” (Proverbs 18:13). Proverbs gives wise principles, not guarantees, but this one names a habit Lisa Fields sees in apologists. Because they take in so much information, she says, “we start answering the questions before we really get to what the person’s question actually is.” You cannot find someone’s premises if you are already answering their conclusion.
The distinction that makes the method work
Chatraw offers his Inside Out approach as what he calls “mental scaffolding,” not a formula. “Conversations don’t typically work five steps,” he says. The movement he describes starts with knowing the gospel story, then asking a person for theirs: where they find meaning, what they value most, what they hope for. As you listen, you hear things you can affirm and things you will need to challenge.
He summarizes the inside work this way: “So I’m finding ways not just to challenge them, but I’m also finding things that I can affirm, but then saying, Hey, I don’t think your story actually lives up to that.”
Look at what that sentence does. The affirmation and the challenge are aimed at different parts of the story. You affirm the value. You challenge the premise that is supposed to support it. That is why the method is honest and not a trick. You are not praising someone’s view and then taking the praise back. You agree with what they love, and you ask whether their picture of the world can keep it.
Without this distinction, conversations tend to fail in one of two ways. Either the Christian attacks the value along with the premise and sounds as if they oppose justice or freedom, or the Christian affirms everything and never raises the question at all.
Two stories to map
A story about justice
Chatraw’s first example is a person with a deep desire for justice. From a Christian perspective, he says, “we might have different conceptions of justice, but there’s something about that intuition.” The intuition is right. That is the affirmation.
Then comes the premise question. If the person holds that this world is all there is, or that each self sets its own moral standard, Chatraw asks, “whose standard of justice? Where do we get this idea of justice?” The question does not accuse the person of being unjust. It asks where the authority of their sense of justice comes from, given what their story assumes.
Last, he describes what the gospel offers the same person. He argues it can do more than ground justice. It can also sustain a commitment to justice without the person becoming an oppressor, because “the ultimate one who will judge is also the one who gave his life.” That speaks directly to someone who distrusts Christianity for its record of harm. The worry is that people who believe they are right become cruel. Chatraw’s answer is that the Christian story places final judgment with one who suffered for others and taught his followers to love their enemies.
A story about being true to yourself
The second story Chatraw takes from philosopher Charles Taylor, who calls it the ethics of authenticity. It says that to really flourish, as Chatraw puts it, “you have to cast off external expectations” and “look into your heart and you be you.” The premise is that the inner self is a trustworthy guide to the good life.
Chatraw affirms what lies behind this. He notes that it grew partly out of societies where women, minorities and people born poor had little chance to move, and he says Christians should welcome those new opportunities. His challenge goes to the premise. “Christianity says you have to look outside yourself,” he says, toward God rather than the self as the center. His claim about delivery is that “there’s this deep aspiration to be free here, but it doesn’t actually give freedom and it doesn’t work out very well.”
That last sentence is Chatraw’s assertion. He says he argues for it in his book, but in this conversation he states it without giving the evidence. A group should treat it as a claim to test, not a conclusion already reached.
Testing the argument before you use it
Before you carry this method into a conversation, put it under some pressure.
Does “cannot deliver” mean unbelievers cannot be good? No, and the difference matters. Plenty of people who reject God act more justly than plenty of Christians. Chatraw’s question is about grounding: what makes justice binding if this world is all there is? A person can live well on borrowed premises. Asking where a value comes from is a different question from asking whether someone lives by it. If you blur the two, you are attacking a straw man, and your friend will rightly notice.
What kind of claim is each move? The grounding question is philosophical. It can be discussed in a single evening, though it rarely settles anything that fast. The claim that a story fails to sustain freedom or justice over time is different. It is a claim about how lives actually turn out, so it is judged by evidence over years. That second test applies to Christians as well. Chatraw admits the obvious reply to talk of Christian resources for loving enemies: look around, Christians are not living that out. His own response is blunt: “talk is cheap.” He argues the church must recover a lived embodiment of its story. If Christian lives do not deliver, the critic has real evidence.
Who is the test for first? Jeremiah 2:13 describes the same failure Chatraw is pointing at: “For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.” In context the prophet is speaking to Israel, God’s own people, not to outsiders. Chatraw makes a similar move. He argues that Christians also live by stories that promise what they cannot give: a political party, a relationship, achievement. Of achievement he says you either never arrive, or “you’ll get to the top and you’ll look around and say, this is all there is.” Someone who has found the broken cisterns in their own life asks the premise question with more honesty and less superiority.
Is affirming first a manipulation? It becomes one if the affirmation is not true. Paul affirmed a line he actually believed. If you cannot sincerely affirm anything in a person’s story, keep listening until you can, or admit you have not understood it yet.
Practice: map one story
Do this on paper. In a group, work in pairs, then share with the whole group.
- Choose a story about the good life that you have actually heard from a friend, a relative, a book or a show. In a group, leave out names and details that would identify a real person.
- Write the story in two or three sentences, as fairly as its strongest defender would tell it. If your partner thinks your version sounds weak, rewrite it.
- Under it, make three short lists:
- What this story values, and what in that you can honestly affirm.
- What it assumes about the world, God and the self that it never says out loud.
- Where those assumptions may not be able to supply what the story promises.
- Write one question you could actually ask the person, aimed at a premise rather than the value. Make it a question you would want to hear the answer to.
- Now test yourself. Write one thing that, if you learned it, would make you think this story can deliver what it promises. Then write one thing that would make you doubt your own Christian story delivers. Be specific.
Step five is the hardest, and groups often skip it. Leaders should protect time for it. If no one can name anything that would change their mind, ask whether they have been doing premise-mapping or simply looking for weak spots in other people’s views.
A note for leaders. Some stories people bring will not be ideas at all. They will be memories of real harm, sometimes at the hands of church leaders. That is not material for an exercise in finding premises, and no one should be pressed to share it. Listen, and take it seriously. Jude 3 teaches that the failures of leaders are real and grievous, and that they are not the same as the failure of Christ. Someone carrying that kind of harm needs care before they need an argument. If abuse in a home is part of what surfaces, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233.
Questions for discussion
- In your mapped story, did the value or the premise turn out to be easier to identify? Why do you think that is?
- Paul affirmed a line from the Athenians’ poets but not their idols. In the story you mapped, where exactly does honest affirmation stop?
- Chatraw asks, in a world without God, whose standard of justice applies. What answers might a thoughtful secular person give? Which of them seems strongest to you, and why?
- What is the difference between saying a story cannot ground justice and saying the people who hold it are unjust? Can you think of a time a Christian blurred those two?
- Chatraw claims the ethics of authenticity does not actually give freedom. What evidence would support that claim, and what evidence would count against it?
- Which of the broken cisterns Chatraw names (a political party, a relationship, achievement) have you seen promise more than it gave, in your own life or a community you know?
A question worth carrying
Chatraw wrote with family conversations in mind: a son who has walked away from the faith, a brother who has always been an atheist. Those are people who, he says, “they know a debate isn’t going to work out.” He also says plainly, “This isn’t one conversation.”
That changes what a good first conversation looks like. You do not need to reach the third move this week. You may only learn what someone values and one thing their story assumes. Before your next real conversation with someone who thinks Christianity does more harm than good, decide which of their premises you most want to understand. Then decide which of your own you are least sure you live by.