Ask what happened before you answer what they said. When someone you love says they are finished with God after being hurt, the sentence may be sincere, and it may still not be the whole story. Nona Jones, who was sexually abused as a child and came to faith at eleven, argues that unbelief after trauma is often a wound speaking in the language of an argument. The first faithful response is a patient question, asked by someone who is ready to hear the answer and stay.
That is harder than it sounds. When a person we love turns away from God, many of us feel the loss as an emergency, and emergencies make us talk fast. We reach for the verse, the reason, the rebuttal. Jones’s story suggests that the speed itself is part of the problem.
Why the objection is often not the real conversation
Lisa Fields, founder of Jude 3 Project, frames the issue as fruit and root. A spoken objection is the part you can see. Something underneath produced it. In her conversation with Jones, she describes the pattern plainly: “The fruit may be, I don’t believe in God, but the root is some kind of traumatic experience that happened.” If you answer only the fruit, she says, you miss what the person is actually carrying.
Jones goes further. She believes that when someone says God is not real, the right move is to ask why, and she is confident about what the answer usually is: “I guarantee you that nine times out of 10 is because something happened to them that was unexplainably painful, and they’ve just chosen to believe that there couldn’t be a God, because if there was, this would not have happened.”
Read that sentence closely. Jones does not say the person is lying about their unbelief. She says the unbelief follows a logic. If God existed, this would not have happened. It happened. So there is no God. That reasoning is not careless. It is the problem of evil, worked out in a single life instead of a seminar room, by someone standing inside the worst thing that ever happened to them.
Her “nine times out of 10” is a pastoral judgment from experience, not a measured figure, and it should be held that way. Some people leave faith for reasons that really are mostly intellectual, and they deserve to have those reasons taken at face value. Treating every doubter as a hidden trauma case would be its own kind of disrespect. The point is narrower and more useful: when you already know something painful was done to the person you love, do not assume the argument is the only thing in the room.
Fields names what happens when we miss this. Approaching someone who has endured deep trauma with reason alone, she says, “it’s like talking to a brick wall often.” Reason still has its place. It just arrives later, after someone has listened.
What being labeled taught Nona Jones
Jones grew up without church or any talk of God. Her father died around her second birthday. She describes years of sexual abuse by her mother’s boyfriend, from about age five to twelve, along with physical, verbal and emotional abuse from her mother. She also says she tried to end her life at nine and again at eleven.
At school, the pain came out sideways. She acted out, talked back and played the class clown, and she spent a lot of time in the principal’s office. “And nobody ever asked, why are you behaving this way? No one ever asked that. They simply labeled me as a problem child.” She was also labeled as having a learning disability.
Jones draws a direct line from that classroom to the church. When a congregation responds to behavior and stops there, she says, it misses the root. A person who is angry at God, or cold toward church, or newly skeptical, can be treated the way she was treated at school: corrected, managed, given a label. The behavior gets a response. The child inside it does not.
She also explains why the wound can reach all the way to belief. Of trauma, she says, “It changes the way you see the world. It changes the way you see yourself.” If harm reshapes how a person sees the world and themselves, it would be strange if it left their picture of God untouched. A sound argument may simply not land, because the lens it has to pass through has been bent.
What not to do when you are scared for them
The first thing to resist is the urge to explain. Jones is blunt that explanation does not heal: “there is no explanation that can heal something that has already happened.” She gives an ordinary example. If someone you love dies in a car accident, a police officer telling you exactly why it happened does not take the hurt away. You may understand more. You still grieve.
This matters because Christians often treat theodicy as first aid. We offer reasons God might have allowed the harm, or good that might come of it, as if the right explanation would make the pain lie down. For a survivor, a tidy reason can sound like the abuse is being made to fit, or excused. A person reopening their story usually needs company before they need theory.
The second thing to resist is minimizing. If the person you love was harmed by someone in a church, Jude 3 Project’s position on church hurt says it plainly: the failures of leaders are real and grievous, and they are not the same as the failure of Christ. Both halves of that sentence matter, and for someone in pain the first half has to be heard before the second can mean anything.
What Psalm 23 did that an argument could not
Jones did not come to faith by being argued into it. A classmate invited her to church when she was about eleven. The first sermon she heard included the line that God is a father to the fatherless. That phrase echoes Psalm 68:5: “A father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows, is God in his holy habitation.” She had cried herself to sleep many nights wanting her father, believing that if he had lived she would not have suffered what she suffered. So she wanted to know who this God was.
She took a Bible home and started reading the Psalms. By the time she reached Psalm 23, she says, the words felt written for her. The fourth verse reads: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.” (Psalm 23:4)
Notice what the psalm leaves standing. The valley is real. The next verse says, “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies” (Psalm 23:5). The enemies are still present. The comfort is that God is present too. The psalm is a song of trust spoken from inside danger, and it makes no promise about how long the danger lasts.
For Jones, that presence reframed her own survival. Having tried twice to end her life, she began to see that something greater than herself had kept her. She describes the shift this way: “It was me realizing, wait a minute, even though this happened to me, there is still purpose.” What met her first was the discovery that she had been kept, and that her life had a future.
Later she came to her own account of where such evil comes from. She attributes it to sin entering the world through human choice rather than God’s design, and she points to Jesus as God’s refusal to leave people apart from him. That is her reasoning, and many Christians would recognize it. But it came after the psalm met her. The order is instructive for anyone trying to help.
Should you be asking them to forgive?
Forgiveness sits at the center of Jones’s own healing, and she does not hedge it. “The only thing that ever brings peace is choosing forgiveness.” She says that if she had not forgiven her mother, her mother’s boyfriend and others involved, she would be walking around bitter. She even speaks of yielding anger you do not understand to God: “sometimes forgiveness is something that we have to even give to God.”
She is also clear that an apology does not finish the work. In her words, “even if somebody says they’re sorry, that doesn’t make it better.” Healing, she says, is the fruit of forgiveness, so it cannot be produced by the offender saying the right words.
Here is the strongest objection, and it deserves full weight. Forgiveness has often been demanded of the wounded in ways that served the people who wounded them. Fields hears a form of this from young adults who see forgiveness as weakness and believe it has been imposed on Black people to keep injustice in place. The same suspicion lives in many survivors of abuse: if I forgive, the person who hurt me gets off free, and everyone around us gets to stop feeling uncomfortable. That fear is not paranoia. It has a history.
Fields answers, “no, forgiveness is healing,” because unforgiveness poisons the one who carries it. And both she and Jones draw lines that address the fear directly. Forgiveness does not cancel justice. Fields rejects the idea that forgiving someone means not calling the police, and Jones agrees that consequences remain. Forgiveness also does not equal reconciliation. Jones puts the condition on the other side: “the person who offends you, in order to reconcile the relationship, they have to repent.”
Her own story shows why that distinction is not a technicality. She recounts that her mother had the boyfriend jailed for assaulting her, then took the young Nona along to pick him up and bring him back to the house, where the abuse resumed. Whatever forgiveness later meant for Jones, it never meant that a child should have been returned to danger.
Jones describes forgiveness as a decision she made, with God’s help, on her own road. You cannot schedule it for someone else. If you press it on a person who has not yet been able to say aloud what happened, you become one more voice asking them to move on before anyone has listened. You can share Jones’s conviction about forgiveness and still understand that your part right now is to hear the story.
When the person seems fine
Some people who walk away from God look successful rather than broken. Jones did, for years. After a White House reception, alone in her hotel room, she felt an emptiness she could not explain, and she came to see that her achievements had been partly an attempt to outrun feelings of being unwanted that went back to childhood. She found a name for this in Joshua 1:8, which promises that “then thou shalt make thy way prosperous, and then thou shalt have good success.” Her reading is a personal application of the word good: if success can be called good, she reasoned, some success is not.
For anyone watching a loved one, her warning is the useful part: “I think many times people walk into your life on the chapter that you’re in, and they assume that’s the whole story.” A calm, capable friend who speaks evenly about leaving the faith may be exactly as settled as they seem. They may also be living one chapter on top of an older one. Closeness is the only way you will be told which.
Becoming the person who asks
Everything in Jones’s account points to one thing she lacked as a child: someone curious enough to ask why. So ask. “What happened?” offered gently gives the person a door, and they get to decide how far through it to walk, what to share and when. Asking is care. Pressing for details turns their pain into your project. When they do speak, believe them, and let the conversation end without an explanation, a defense of God or a plan. Your steadiness in the valley is the part of Psalm 23 you can actually offer.
Jones is equally clear that a friend’s presence is not the whole of the help a survivor needs. “If you know that you are experiencing trauma, then you have to get help,” she says, and she means “not just prayer, seek a therapist,” someone trained to help a person heal. She speaks as someone who prayed and still needed that help. Encouraging a loved one toward counseling is part of loving them, and it belongs alongside prayer.
If what you hear involves current danger, safety comes before every theological question. If someone is being harmed now, or a child is at risk, involve the appropriate authorities and people who can protect them. In the US, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available at 1-800-799-7233. If the person you love has thoughts of ending their life, as Jones once did, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, and do not leave them to carry it alone.
Jones’s faith began when a God described as father to the fatherless met a girl who had no reason to believe anyone was looking for her. She was found before she was persuaded. You cannot guarantee that the person you love will return to faith, or when. You can make sure that when they finally say what happened, they are saying it to someone who asked.