Start by recognizing what kind of objection you are facing. When someone says Christianity has done more harm than good, they are usually delivering a moral verdict, not reporting a failed proof. Joshua Chatraw, resident theologian at Holy Trinity Anglican Church in Raleigh, North Carolina, argues that a verdict like this is not overturned by a sharper syllogism. It is answered by stepping into the person’s story, affirming what is right in it, showing honestly where it falls short, and offering the gospel as the better story. That story has to be lived as well as told.
That is a different task from winning a debate, and it asks more of the Christian, not less.
What exactly is the objection now?
Chatraw traces a change in what skeptics are rejecting. In his account, earlier generations of American unbelievers often doubted Christianity’s metaphysical claims but still granted that it was good for society. Someone could deny that Jesus is the only way and still tell a struggling friend to go to church and get some morality. Chatraw is quick to say that advice was not the gospel. But it carried a kind of warmth toward the faith.
That warmth is gone in many places. “But now the claim is, Hey, actually Christianity is oppressive. Christianity isn’t good for society,” Chatraw says. He puts the shift this way: “It’s not just that people don’t think it’s true, they don’t think it’s beautiful.” Facts still matter inside that verdict, because a charge of harm makes claims about history. But the verdict itself asks whether this faith makes people and communities better or worse. A list of reasons God exists does not touch that question at all.
Whose story is the verdict telling?
Before responding, it helps to ask where the verdict comes from. Chatraw draws on philosopher Charles Taylor’s book A Secular Age and Taylor’s idea of the social imaginary, which Chatraw describes as how we spontaneously view the world. People do not usually reason their way into it. In Chatraw’s words, “we have inherited a way of seeing the world, and it just seems like common sense.”
That point changes how you hear the harm objection. For some people, the verdict is the conclusion of a painful personal history: a leader who abused power, a congregation that shamed them, a family that used Scripture as a weapon. For others, it is simply in the air, absorbed from media and conversation the way an accent is absorbed. Both people may say the same sentence. They are not making the same claim, and they will not hear the same response. Asking whose experience is behind the verdict is not a dodge. It is how you find out what is actually being said. It also keeps you from treating any community as if everyone in it held the verdict in the same way or for the same reasons. Chatraw’s account, following Taylor, is a story about the modern West, and even within it people arrive at suspicion of the church by very different roads.
Whatever the road, one distinction is necessary: the teaching is one thing, and the institutions and individuals who claimed it are another. The distinction is not a way to excuse anyone. It lets you ask the more honest question, which is whether a given injustice followed from what Jesus taught or contradicted it. The failures of leaders are real and grievous, and they are not the same as the failure of Christ.
Why does a better argument so often miss?
Chatraw is candid about his own discipline. He calls apologetics a culminating discipline that brings history, philosophy and theology together to help people. Then he names what he calls a sad irony: “apologists aren’t actually known for having good conversations.” They are known, he says, for monologues.
Lisa Fields raises the same problem from the host’s side. Because apologists take in so much information, she says, “we start answering the questions before we really get to what the person’s question actually is.” When the objection is a moral verdict, answering too fast is worse than unhelpful. It confirms the verdict. A Christian who meets the charge that the church does not listen by refusing to listen has supplied evidence for the prosecution.
There is a second reason arguments stall. If someone’s imagination has been formed to see Christianity as oppressive, Chatraw argues, then “we have to actually find ways to enter their imagination and begin to kind of rebuild their imagination.” An argument addresses a belief. An imagination is the ground the belief grows in. You can refute a claim in a sentence. Rebuilding what seems plausible to someone usually takes time.
Chatraw says ordinary believers already sense this. The people he wrote Telling a Better Story for want to talk with a son who has walked away from the faith or a brother who has always been an atheist, and “they know a debate isn’t going to work out.” His counsel is to think in years. “This isn’t one conversation,” he says, and that changes what counts as progress. Progress might simply be that the person is still willing to talk to you next month.
What does telling a better story involve?
Chatraw’s approach, which he calls Inside Out, is offered as “mental scaffolding” rather than a script. “Conversations don’t typically work five steps,” he says. The movement runs roughly like this. Know the gospel story well. Step into the other person’s story, often by asking something as plain as “what’s your story?” and then asking where they find meaning, what they value most, what they hope for. Listen for what you can honestly affirm and what you will need to challenge. Then tell the Christian story as one that delivers what they were already reaching for.
His example is directly relevant to the harm verdict. Suppose your friend has a deep desire for justice, and that desire is part of why they distrust the church. Chatraw’s first move is to affirm it. Christians and their friends may define justice differently, he says, but the intuition is right. The challenge comes second. If this world is all there is, or if each person is the final measure of morality, then he asks, “whose standard of justice? Where do we get this idea of justice?”
The order matters. The affirmation has to be real. If it is only a setup for the question, the person will hear a trap, and they will be correct.
Then comes the part that speaks most directly to the worry behind the verdict. The critic fears that religious conviction produces oppressors. Chatraw argues that the gospel has the resources “not only to ground morality and justice, but it actually has the existential resources to motivate and to sustain a commitment to justice in a way that doesn’t lead to you becoming the oppressor, for instance.” His reason is christological: “the ultimate one who will judge is also the one who gave his life.”
That claim addresses the objection on its own terms. A cause can turn its followers into the very thing they opposed, especially when they believe they are the final judges of who deserves mercy. The Christian story takes that seat away from them. Judgment belongs to the one who died for his enemies, and Chatraw says his death set the pattern for his followers to love theirs. Jesus states the command plainly in Matthew 5:44: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you.” A person who takes that command seriously has been given a reason not to become the oppressor, even while pursuing justice. And when Christians have dominated or despised their enemies, the critic is right to call it wrong, but the command shows it was a betrayal of Jesus’ teaching rather than an application of it.
Chatraw applies the same pattern to what Taylor calls the ethics of authenticity, the belief that flourishing comes from looking inward and casting off outside expectations. Again he affirms first. That ethic arose partly in reaction to rigid hierarchies that left women, minorities and the poor with little room to move. Christians, he says, should be able to answer, “yes, that wasn’t good, and we’re glad for these kind of opportunities.” Only then does he argue that the inward turn promises a freedom it cannot finally give, because Christianity calls people to look outside themselves to God.
What if the critic is pointing at real failures?
This is the strongest objection, and Chatraw states it himself. Christians can describe the resources their faith offers, and the reply comes back: “look around Christians aren’t doing that. They’re not living that out. And that’s a big problem.” He does not dispute it. “Talk is cheap,” he says.
His answer is not a better rebuttal but a recovered practice. He points to the early church, arguing that Christians were noticed for how they lived, suffered and died for others. That is his historical assertion, and readers should hold it as such. His conclusion is that the church must recover a lived embodiment of its story.
Scripture puts the same weight on conduct. Writing to believers who faced suspicion, Peter tells them to “be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear” (1 Peter 3:15). The next verse continues, “Having a good conscience; that, whereas they speak evil of you, as of evildoers, they may be ashamed that falsely accuse your good conversation in Christ” (1 Peter 3:16). In KJV English, “conversation” means conduct, one’s whole way of living. Peter expects the answer and the life to work together.
Read in context, though, Peter is addressing false accusation. The passage describes believers slandered for doing good. It does not entitle Christians to treat every charge of harm as slander. Some charges are accurate. When they are, the faithful response is to name the wrong plainly and repent of it, not to retell the story more attractively. Telling a better story is not public relations. A story about a God who judges oppression has no credibility when it is used to cover oppression.
There is also a limit to what this method can do. It does not settle any particular historical charge. Whether a specific institution did a specific wrong, and why, is a question of evidence that has to be examined case by case. What Chatraw’s approach supplies is the posture and the frame for that examination: a willingness to concede what is true, and a clear claim about whether the wrong followed from the gospel or betrayed it.
Why does the work start with the Christian?
Chatraw makes one more move, and it may matter most for the harm verdict. He refuses to separate apologetics from spiritual growth. Christians, he argues, absorb the same media, marketing and social scripts as everyone else. Without ever confessing it in a creed, “we live out false gospels,” he says, whether the god in question is consumption, achievement, a relationship or a political party. Growing as a Christian means learning to identify those scripts in our own lives and helping each other see that they end in disappointment.
This connects directly to the critic’s evidence. Much of what people point to when they call Christianity harmful is Christians living by some other story while using Christian words. A believer who has done honest work on their own divided loyalties can hear the critic’s complaint about Christian hypocrisy without flinching, because they have already made the same complaint about themselves.
Chatraw finds a precedent in Augustine. In his reading, the self-examination of the Confessions, where Augustine names his own false gods, equipped him to write the City of God, a public engagement with the unbelievers of his day. The private work came before the public argument.
The result is a different tone. The conversation is no longer the Christian displaying how well they have it together. Chatraw describes it this way: “I know exactly what script you’re on.” And then: “And I tend to be on that script too.” He adds, “That’s a different type of conversation.” It is different because the Christian stops speaking as the defense attorney for an institution and speaks as a person who has been redirected by the gospel and still needs it.
That posture also changes what the long conversation is about. A Christian who concedes real harm, and who confesses the same false scripts in their own life, is no longer asking a friend to believe the church has been good. They are pointing past the church’s record to the one who judges and who gave his life. Over years, the question your friend is weighing may shift from whether Christians have done harm to whether Christ is the one who can make people stop.
Quick answers
Should I concede that Christians have caused harm?
Where it is true, yes. Chatraw affirms what the critic gets right before challenging anything, and conceding real wrongs is part of what makes the rest of the conversation credible.
What is a good first question to ask?
Chatraw suggests simply asking for the person’s story: where they find meaning, what they value most, what they hope for. What you hear will show you what to affirm and what to challenge.
How long should I expect this to take?
Possibly years. Chatraw wrote with family relationships in mind, where trust grows over many conversations rather than in a single exchange.