Podcast: The Surprising Health Benefits of Going to Church (Rebecca McLaughlin)

October 27, 2025 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

The Real Effects of Church in the World

In this podcast, Rebecca McLaughlin discusses how the effects of the great dechurching in the last decades has come with massive upticks in depression, substance abuse, loneliness, anxiety, etc., and how research has shown one of the best solutions to these issues is found in the embodied, loving community of the church.

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How Church Could (Literally) Save Your Life

How Church Could (Literally) Save Your Life

Rebecca McLaughlin

Rebecca McLaughlin presents scientific evidence that weekly church attendance guards against depression, increases mental and physical well-being, and extends life expectancy. Most importantly, it gives people the chance to meet the Great Physician, who alone offers eternal life.

Topics Addressed in This Interview:

00:44 - Does Going to Church Affect Mental and Physical Health?

Matt Tully
Rebecca McLaughlin is a well-known speaker and author of a number of bestselling books, including Confronting Christianity; Confronting Jesus; Jesus Through the Eyes of Women; and brand new from Crossway, How Church Could (Literally) Save Your Life. Rebecca, thanks so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Rebecca McLaughlin
Thanks for having me.

Matt Tully
The premise of this new book that you’ve written is pretty bold. It’s essentially saying that going to church could literally save your life. And so I wonder if you could just start by sharing some of the high-level stats insights that exist today that back that claim up.

Rebecca McLaughlin
I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and one of the joys of that is being close to some of the top universities in the US, including MIT and Harvard. And several years ago I became familiar with the work that’s coming out of the Harvard School of Public Health, particularly a guy named Tyler Vanderweele, who is leading a group there that’s looking at the relationship between religious participation (what we might historically have called "organized religion") and people’s mental and physical health outcomes. Now, that’s not the only place that’s looking at this, but it’s certainly one of the world-leading institutions that’s looking at these things. Contrary to many people’s expectations, especially folks who, like me, grew up in more secularized environments where there was this narrative that said going to church is probably, if anything, bad for your mental health, actually, going to church every week is extraordinarily good for your mental health. You are less likely to become depressed and more likely to recover from depression if you are going to church once a week or more. You are dramatically less likely to commit suicide, which is obviously a very painful topic for many even to touch on. And there will be stories that all of us will have of people we’ve deeply loved who’ve been in such mental health crisis that that’s been the choice they made or the risk that they’ve been faced with. I remember when I first read a paper that Tyler Vanderweele had published on this topic that was looking at the fact that women who attend church every week are five times less likely to kill themselves than women who never attended. I remember emailing Tyler and saying, "This seems so extraordinary. Is this really representative of the research in general?" And he said it actually is. Perhaps the most protective mechanism that we’ve discovered when it comes to suicide prevention is regular religious participation.

Matt Tully
I wanted to ask about that too. Have you actually met with Tyler? Have you spent time with him? What’s his background? Why is he doing this research?

Rebecca McLaughlin
Tyler is one of the most extraordinarily smart people I’ve had the pleasure of coming across, because he’s somebody who’s got degrees in everything from economics to theology. He’s a true academic expert. He himself is a convinced Catholic. In some ways we have personal reasons to be very pleased with the results of his work, but he’s also a very careful academic, absolutely working to make sure that his research is quite robust and not just depending on any observer bias, as it were. And he works with a team that has a diversity of views in terms of their own spiritual beliefs or otherwise. So this is very robust research that’s coming out of his institution and also multiple others working on this with large data sets. Not only in the US but also in the UK and other parts of the world, they’ve been doing some studies that feature all sorts of different countries as well, looking at the relationship between regular religious participation and the mental and physical health outcomes.

Matt Tully
So this isn’t just evidence in the US; it’s actually global kinds of trends that they can see here.

Rebecca McLaughlin
Yes. Now, in the US most of the research has been done on people who go to church, because that’s obviously the vast majority of religious participation that we see. The interesting thing is these effects don’t seem to be specific to the religious participation. So for example, if somebody was going to Jewish services once a week or more, you could expect to see similar effects. They do depend on it being religious though. So it’s not just the social component and the community support of being part of something. In fact, Tyler and his colleagues have studied that, and the social support piece accounts for about 25 to 30 percent of the effect.

Matt Tully
Whereas 75 percent is the religious component.

Rebecca McLaughlin
Yeah. It’s hard to know exactly where that comes from from a observational perspective. Obviously, from a Christian perspective, it makes sense to think that if God made humans in his image and designed us for relationship with him, that we would have a yearning for connection to a spiritual being. And so obviously, as Christians, we fully understand that the God of all the universe revealed himself in the person of Jesus Christ. But it’s also perhaps not surprising that humans thrive when they have a sense that we’re not alone in the universe.

Matt Tully
We’re not the end all, be all.

Rebecca McLaughlin
Yeah, that the universe doesn’t actually revolve around us. This is, again, something that you can look at other psychologists who’ve come from very different perspectives who would say that actually humans need work, love, and a sense of connection to something greater than themselves, which, of course, religious participation provides in spades.

Matt Tully
Yeah, absolutely. One of the maybe obvious objections or "Yeah, buts" that could come from this is just the cliched phrase correlation doesn’t prove cause and effect. So how do we know that religious participation is actually causing these beneficial outcomes psychologically, mentally, and spiritually versus the possibility that the people who tend to be more psychologically stable or healthy in different ways tend to be drawn towards church in some way? How do you think about that question?

Rebecca McLaughlin
One of the things I know about myself is I am an expert in very few things, but I’m quite good at finding the experts on various questions. And so that’s exactly the kind of challenge that folks in Tyler Vanderweele’s group are looking at and trying to eliminate as many factors as possible to figure out that they’re actually looking at something that’s an effect rather than something that could be explained by some other dimension. Now, it’s for sure the case, for example, when you look at depression, if somebody is already depressed, they’re less likely to have the activation energy to go to church, for example.

Matt Tully
To struggle to establish and maintain strong relational bonds.

Rebecca McLaughlin
Yes. There’s for sure going to be some of that effect. But if you eliminate that feature and if you compare like with like, in terms of people have the same baseline symptoms in the first place, and then you look at people who do become part of a regular worshiping community versus people who don’t. And if you look at people who perhaps are already embedded in a worshiping community and then become depressed and look at whether they’re more likely to recover from depression if they stay or if they leave, you can see some of these effects by comparing like with the like.

08:36 - The Great Dechurching

Matt Tully
It’s so interesting too that this maybe groundbreaking research on the impact of religious participation is happening in an era that is often referred to as "the great dechurching." We look around and many people are leaving organized religion in big ways. Actually, to start, could you just summarize what we have seen? What are some of the basic trends with this? If someone hasn’t ever heard the phrase "the great dechurching," what does that mean? What has been happening around us, even if we’re not maybe as familiar with it?

Rebecca McLaughlin
In the last twenty-five years or so, the proportion of people in America who go to church weekly, or who go to church twice a month, or who go to church once a month (all of those populations) have been on average decreasing, as far as we can see. Now, there’s complexity around some of the data. Some of what we might assume was driving that turns out to not have been the main driver. In many people’s minds, the New Atheist movement, the various ways in which people have been caused to question the Christian faith. In particular in the last twenty-five years, I think a lot of people’s think that’s caused this massive exodus from church, where people are leaving the church and slamming the door behind them.

Matt Tully
Like overt criticisms of Christianity.

Rebecca McLaughlin
Yeah. Sort of hardened, Richard Dawkins types, imagining people growing up in church and then becoming very well-thought-through skeptics. And for sure there’s some of that. There’s been a lot more of what sometimes has been called "casualty churching"—i.e. people who maybe used to go to church but then moved to a new city and didn’t find a new church, or went through a particular life change, whether it’s having children or going through a divorce or some sort of life change that has meant that they didn’t end up becoming part of a worshiping community again, rather than it being something they really intended or something that sort of happened.

Matt Tully
Less like a definite decision and more of just kind of didn’t get around to it.

Rebecca McLaughlin
Yes. There’s been a surprising proportion of people who’ve been more in that category. And I think it’s fair to say that what we’re seeing right now is a resurgence in church attendance. One of the things I’ve been kind of saying for the last couple of years is, yes, we’ve seen a fair bit of de churching, but I think we’re now ready for "the great rechurching"—not only in the US but also in the UK where I come from, which saw church attendance decline well before the US did. I think a lot of the secular tapes are sort of playing out. As in, we in Cambridge, Massachusetts are seeing more and more people who grew up without any kind of religious framework and have tried everything that the world has to offer them, saying, "I’ve tried tarot cards, I’ve tried crystals, I’ve tried meditation, I’ve tried yoga, I’ve tried sexual relationships with men, I’ve tried sexual relationships with women, I’ve tried drugs, and I’ve tried alcohol. Nothing works. I still feel meaninglessness in my life. I still am lonely and lack community. I still don’t have the answers to the questions that my soul is asking." They’re showing up at church and saying, "Tell me about Jesus." So I think we’re actually in a transition phase right now where more and more people are actually being drawn to church, whether they used to go to church and they’ve had a period away and they’re coming back, or whether it’s people who just have no real religious background and are realizing that life without God is no way to live.

Matt Tully
And then there’s an openness too.

Rebecca McLaughlin
Yeah.

12:32 - Your Moral Beliefs Are Most Likely Christian Beliefs

Matt Tully
I wanted to dial in on the mental health side of things. That’s where you start in the book. The media landscape and the news stories that we tend to hear are almost always stories of someone was in a church, it was oppressive, it was restrictive, there was abuse, there was some kind of misbehavior. When someone finally made the hard decision to leave the church and to get out of that, then their mental health really just improved dramatically. I don’t know if that resonates with you, but I just feel like the dominant storyline is that, not the other way around that says, When you joined a church, look at how you know you got healthier in many different ways. Why do you think that is the dominant storyline that we so often hear?

Rebecca McLaughlin
I think it’s the one that fits with the narrative that we’ve been telling ourselves in the West, or at least in the UK where I grew up for decades, which is that as the world becomes more educated, more sophisticated, more just, more all the good things that we want, it’s naturally going to become less religious and, in particular, less Christian. There’s an association in people’s minds between Christianity and a previous regime almost and a way of thinking that is at odds with many of the values that people in our society hold today. I think, in fact, when you look at the deep substructure of the values that people in our society hold today, many of them turn out to be very Christian. Even people who are landing in quite anti-Christian positions when it comes to, for example, sexuality and gender are drawing on essentially Christian arguments about universal human equality and rights, care for and protection of the marginalized, sexual consent—actually something that came to us from Christianity.

Matt Tully
This is a really important point because I think sometimes, as conservative Christians, we think of issues like sexuality and think there is a massive moral chasm between our viewpoint on a biblical sexual ethic and what the prevailing secular culture views. But you’re kind of saying that even though there is a big difference at the end results area, there is a shared moral framework perhaps at play still.

Rebecca McLaughlin
Yeah, it’s really interesting. There’s a guy called Tom Holland—the historian Tom Holland, not the Spider-Man Tom Holland—he’s a British historian.

Matt Tully
That’s an important distinction.

Rebecca McLaughlin
Yes, indeed. And he is not a Christian; he’s agnostic. Several years ago he wrote a really interesting book called Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. And he wrote that book as an agnostic. And in the course of his research of looking at Christianity in the West over the last 2,000 years, he discovered that many of his own deepest moral beliefs are actually Christian beliefs that he doesn’t have a grounding for aside from Christianity. And he’s very open about that.

Matt Tully
No good explanation for.

Rebecca McLaughlin
Yeah. And in fact, if you look at the Greco-Roman Empire into which Christianity was born, it was a very different ethical frameworks on all sorts of fronts. It was very much a might-is-right ethos. Sexual consent only applied to certain people, not to others. If you’re a freeborn woman, you could expect to have your sexual integrity defended by the men around you, but if you’re not free—if you are enslaved or if you are working as a prostitute, which is often what would happen (the overlap between the enslaved and those who are working as prostitutes in the ancient world is very, very large)—then those people’s bodies just didn’t count. Nobody was asking if they were consenting, because they didn’t matter. It was the ancient equivalent of sex robots in people’s minds. And interestingly, from a Greco-Roman man’s perspective, it didn’t really matter whether you were having sex with somebody who was male or female. The role that you were taking was what mattered, not the sex of the other person. It feels to us today like we’re a million miles away from that world, and a lot of people think that that’s because of secular progress that now, thanks to the enlightenment or thanks to the moves of secular progress in recent years, that we now recognize that women actually shouldn’t be raped and that rape is morally wrong, regardless of the circumstances. And we now realize that it’s not okay for the strong and the rich and the powerful to sort of trample and the weak and the poor and the marginalized. We now realize that men and women are fundamentally morally equal. All of those are Christian beliefs. And again, going back to Tom Holland, he makes it very clear that even in the debates that we see in our culture around questions of sexuality and gender, both sides are sort of standing on Christian turf as they’re hurling grenades. If you don’t have a Christian substructure, you don’t have a grounds for saying that rape is actually wrong, not just something that I don’t prefer or a kind of a taste that I happen to have against such a thing, but in fact, like morally wrong. I think our current culture is in some ways more Christian than it realizes, and I say that even when it’s landing on very anti-Christian positions.

Matt Tully
So you wouldn’t deny that some of the conclusions are very anti-Christian. It’s just that there are certain assumptions about the way the world is, the dignity of all human beings, and that kind of thing that they’re kind of unknowingly stealing from a Christian worldview.

Rebecca McLaughlin
Yeah. You see this very vividly, for example, in questions of pro-life/pro-choice sort of debates. From a pro-life perspective, and as a Christian, I’m very, very strongly pro-life, I would say the baby in a mother’s womb is made in the image of God, regardless of what sort of stage of development that baby is at. This is a human being, and the life is precious. Non-believing friends of mine who might feel passionately pro-choice, they would say it’s absolutely unfair and unjust and cruel—especially to poor women who have an unexpected pregnancy and don’t have the ability to provide for their child, especially for women who’ve been raped or have had terrible things happen to them—it’s completely immoral to expect that woman to bear a child who she didn’t intend to conceive. And so there’s a sort of profound concern for that vulnerable woman. Now, why do we have a concern for the vulnerable woman? Actually, it’s because of Christianity. One way of looking at it is to say if there is no God and if Jesus isn’t who he claims to be, and if his teachings about both men and women and about children and infants are not worth us standing on, then yeah, the baby in the mother’s womb is just a collection of atoms and molecules. It has no moral value whatsoever. If there is no God and if Jesus isn’t who he claims to be and we can’t sort of stake our lives on his teachings, then that’s just what the mother is as well. That’s just what you are. That’s just what I am. We’re nothing but atoms and molecules. At best, we are mammals. And rape is very common in the animal world, and we don’t seek to legislate the sexual behavior of animals because we know they’re not making moral decisions in the ways that we are. So, why do we think that we’re making those moral decisions? Why do I even think that I’m a valid moral agent? That’s all because of Christianity.

Matt Tully
And that just becomes purely arbitrary in a secular kind of worldview.

Rebecca McLaughlin
Yeah. And people will passionately believe things that their non-belief in God does not support.

20:38 - The Offense of the Gospel

Matt Tully
One of the stories that you tell in the book is about a friend of yours whose life was dramatically changed through their decision to commit to a church and get involved in a church. I wonder if you could just share a little bit more about that story and give us one glimpse into an actual person’s experience of joining a church?

Rebecca McLaughlin
Yeah, for sure. This is a young friend of mine who joined our church about eighteen months ago. She grew up in a non-church-going family and had all the freedoms that we, in our modern culture, think are a blessing to young people.

Matt Tully
Things that will make us happy.

Rebecca McLaughlin
Yeah. So she had all the freedom to sleep with who she wanted to, to take whatever substances she wanted to take. She quite early developed an alcohol addiction, and she was living a very free and unconstrained life. She actually first heard the gospel when she was a student studying abroad in Madrid, Spain. She was following a beauty YouTuber for makeup tips, and she clicked on the video by this woman and she explained how Jesus had saved her from an eating disorder. And my friend was so moved by this. She’d never heard the gospel before. She truly never heard the message of the gospel.

Matt Tully
She literally never heard it.

Rebecca McLaughlin
Yeah. She just didn’t know what the claim of Christianity was. And she was so moved by it that she was sort of weeping in her little dorm room in Madrid. She started going to a church for a few weeks there, because she thought, This is amazing! I need to find out what’s going on here with this Christianity stuff! But after a few weeks of going to that church, her boyfriend and her friends and her family were all sort of saying, This is ridiculous. What are you doing? You can’t be a Christian. Christians are stupid Christians are bigots. And after a few weeks she thought, Maybe they’re right. It is crazy and it’s going to require way too many changes in my life to actually be serious about following Jesus. So she stopped going to church, moved back to Boston, started actually dating women exclusively after a number of experiences with men that she’d sort of found disappointing. And so I think for about eighteen months she was exclusively dating other women. But even during that time, she couldn’t quite get Jesus out of her mind. And she kept listening to podcasts and starting to read books. She started reading my friend Rachel Gilson’s book, Born Again This Way, and she got halfway through it on our Kindle and then deleted it, because she, as she puts it now, it made her angry. She didn’t want to repent, and she wanted to kind of expunge it from her reading record. But then eventually, months later, she got to the point of saying, Actually, I’ve truly tried everything. I’ve tried tarot cards and crystals and meditation and astrology, and all the things, and none of it is actually changing anything for me. She was struggling with her mental health and a sense of meaninglessness that is pretty hard to avoid if you are trying to live your life without God. And so she started coming to our church.

Matt Tully
How did she find your church in particular?

Rebecca McLaughlin
She stalked me on Instagram and figured out where I went to church.

Matt Tully
So she’d been reading or listening to some of your stuff.

Rebecca McLaughlin
She’d actually been listening to my podcast, The Confronting Christianity Podcast. And it was so interesting because when I first met her, she said, "Your podcast helped me turn to Jesus." And I was like, "Oh, that’s the best thing I’ve heard. That makes it worth it. If all the work I’ve ever done for this podcast is just for you, that’s enough." And a few weeks later I said to her, "Was there a particular episode or a particular issue that really helped you?" And she said, "No. I’d heard people talk about the kinds of things you’re talking about, whether it’s questions of sort of sexuality and gender or abortion or, you know, all the things. I could hear the love in your voice as you talked about those things. And honestly, I hadn’t heard that love in a lot of people’s voices as they were talking. That was what made the gospel real to me, that this is actually ultimately founded on love." That’s one of the most moving conversations I’ve had recently of realizing, oh yeah, the fact that the New Testament calls us insistently to love one another and to love our neighbor and to love our enemies, which includes our ideological enemies, the fact that everything we should say and do must, if we’re Christians, be steeped in love is part and parcel of our testimony. A couple of weeks after she joined our church, I remember her coming to me and saying, "I’ve just realized you guys have to love me! I could join any other group in Boston and they could decide that I’m weird and not want me anymore, but you guys don’t have the choice. You have to love me." And I said, "Yeah, the problem is you have to love us too." I think in our current world that is really hurting, the levels of loneliness, of depression, of anxiety, of addiction that we’ve seen, the great dechurching in the last couple of decades has come with massive upticks in depression, massive upticks substance abuse, etc. And these are not uncorrelated, according to Tyler Vanderweele’s research. We have the answer in Jesus, and it’s an answer as embodied in the loving community of the church.

Matt Tully
And I think that’s such an important thing to emphasize. How do you think in your own ministry about the process of speaking with somebody, of doing this evangelism and apologetics, in a way that ultimately leads to sharing the hope of the gospel with them? You don’t always start there, it seems, but you ultimately do want to get there.

Rebecca McLaughlin
I often do pretty much start there. In some ways, it’s a straightforward starting point for me because as soon as somebody asks me, "What do you do?" I then tell them, "I write books about Jesus." It’s not a conversation I could avoid even if I wanted to. What I try to do, exceedingly imperfectly, is to make it evident from how I’m relating to somebody that I love and respect them, and that I, from the beginning through the middle and right to the end, will only and ever be pointing them to Jesus. And I think actually the offensiveness of the gospel is so much more than any other potential offense that we might cause as a Christian. So for example, the offensiveness of the Christian message when it comes to sexual ethics right now is nothing compared with the offense of the gospel itself, which says you and I were so sinful that we needed Jesus to die for us because of our sinful lives and hearts. It’s sin that goes right down to the core of you and me. It’s not just a surface-level problem. It’s like I have sin bubbling up from my very heart. Because of that, I’m facing God’s judgment. I’m destined for hell apart from Christ. That’s extraordinarily offensive.

Matt Tully
If that’s true, though, why doesn’t it seem to be more offensive? The story of Jesus and the fact that he came and he died for our sins—they wouldn’t necessarily find that nearly as offensive as the idea that Christians don’t believe that two women or two men should get married.

Rebecca McLaughlin
I think sexual ethics is one of the places where our culture finds Christianity to be most offensive, for sure. If I say I believe in Jesus, everyone around me in Cambridge, Massachusetts says, "Great. I’m glad it makes you happy." If I say Jesus rose from the dead, they’re like, "I’m so glad you believe that. Kind of silly, but lovely. I wish I could believe in something lovely like that." If I say the reason Jesus died was because all of us are, in fact, destined for hell, and right now, however nice a person you might seem to be or however nice a person I might seem to be, I, in and of myself, am destined for hell, it’s only because I’m hidden in Christ that I have hope in the coming judgment, that’s offensive. I think that’s where we. as Christians, and I fully understand it, tend to veer away.

Matt Tully
We sometimes use euphemisms. We don’t really want to always say that that clearly.

Rebecca McLaughlin
I never want to say it. It’s the last thing that I want to say because it’s exceedingly painful to think about and exceedingly painful to share with somebody. But it’s also the most loving thing that I can do. In some ways, I feel like I keep coming back to the questions of sexual ethics because it is such a flashpoint in our cultural conversations. But rather than dreading being asked questions about what Christians believe about same sex marriage, etc., I actually more and more see that as an opportunity to say Christianity’s saying some really crazy things, like wild things. I had a conversation just a couple of weeks ago at a kid’s birthday party with somebody I’d never met before. She had some Catholic background but hadn’t been to church in a long time. And as we were talking, it was evident that she was sort of interested in the possibility of church, and I had a sense that she might like to start going to church. And I said, "Oh, we would love to have you come and check out our church if you’re ever interested." And she said, "Sorry to ask a blunt question, but is your church inclusive of queer people?" And I said, "There’s a long answer to that. I talked her through all the people at our church, including my new young friend, who were they not Christians could easily be identified as queer or LGBT, or under that umbrella. But because they’re followers of Jesus, they’re not. At our church, we believe in crazy things like the fact that Jesus rose from the dead, and that sex is only for a male/female marriage."

Matt Tully
Link those two things together.

Rebecca McLaughlin
Because they’re profoundly linked. If we look at what the Bible has to say about marriage, as is beautifully articulated in Ephesians 5, we’ll find that actually Christian marriage is about Christ and the church.

Matt Tully
It’s not just a random rule that God set up.

Rebecca McLaughlin
It’s not just a random rule. It’s not just a sort of conservative family values understanding. It’s actually something much more weird and wonderful than that. And again, that’s something that I sometimes say to people—Christian sexual ethics is much weirder than you think. It’s not just that I believe sex only belongs in a male/female marriage, but I believe this is all about a metaphor. It’s actually about something much greater than itself. And then that reframes the whole conversation, because we are not trying to fit Christianity around the edges of what somebody already believes and sort of try to downplay the offensiveness of it. Instead, we’re saying, Christianity’s making some wild claims on reality, and if you look at those claims carefully, one of the things you’ll find is that love is staked right at the center of it. And many of the things that you might be longing for as a non-Christian, many of those things you’ll actually find fulfilled in Christianity in ways that you didn’t expect. It’s making wild claims, but rather than Christianity being the only belief system making wild claims, if you think about your own current belief system, you won’t find that you are believing a perfectly coherent secular worldview that does all the work Christianity does without the crazy stuff. You’ll find you’re making, if anything, more crazy claims. For example, that a bunch of atoms and molecules have intrinsic value. You are living as if your life has any kind of meaning when it doesn’t. If there’s no God, it just doesn’t. Actually, depression is a perfectly rational response to a world without God. It’s not the response we need to have, because we actually have the potential to believe in a world that is oriented around love, where there is a massive story being told that we can actually be part of. But nihilism is the right conclusion, I think. There is no generic idea of God actually. I go back and forth on this with a young friend of mine who’s not a Christian who sort of deeply believes in God and really wants to be able to sort of reconcile in her mind different religious traditions that are all sort of maybe saying the same thing, and they’re just not. There’s no generic God idea. The Christian claims are very specific and don’t fit with any store-bought, non-brand version, as it were. So it’s all or nothing on Jesus.

Matt Tully
That’s one of the things I love about this is rather than viewing some of these controversial moral issues, the things that for many of us as Christians, if someone were to ask the question, Before I come to church with you, tell me if your church is inclusive, we get nervous. That feels like the hardest question to ask. But it seems like what you’re saying is you almost see those less as obstacles to overcome but as opportunities—opportunities to actually take them deeper into the Christian faith, deeper into the core theological truths that we believe, and show why if you’ve got concerns about that, let me tell you about this. This is actually more fundamental.

Rebecca McLaughlin
You cannot explain Christian sexual ethics without the gospel. Because if you’re trying to, it’s not Christian sexual ethics. According to the New Testament, it is about the gospel. It is about Jesus and his people in a one flesh, everlasting union. It’s about Jesus dying for the love of his people. And so we need to go straight there, and that’s why it’s an opportunity. Now, I do have the—I’m going to use the word blessing, I think, although I realize there are some complexities around that, because I for sure am not wanting to celebrate, for example, my own experience of same sex attraction or the sexual sin in the past of any of my Christian friends. None of that is good and to be rejoiced in. At the same time, my young friend who made the simple and foolish decision to get lesbian tattoos on her leg is now somebody I can point to for my non-believing friends and say, Hey, you might think that the two options are sort of affirming of same sex sexual relationships or bigots who just don’t understand and are hateful. Those two options just aren’t going to work if you look at my actual Christian community, because you’ll see person after person who has recognized that following Jesus is actually better than following your own sexual and romantic desires. And that’s heresy in our world today, right? In our world today, there’s nothing better than following your sexual, romantic desires. And as Christians, we don’t want to deny that the draw of sexual romantic desires isn’t strong, because probably for all of us, in one way or another at some point in our life, it is strong.

Matt Tully
We all struggle with sinful desires or urges.

Rebecca McLaughlin
But actually, Jesus has the right to tell us what to do with our bodies. He’s the one person who knows the best and worst of our hearts, and he’s the one person who has literally died for love of us. So if you are seeking love, look carefully, you might just find Jesus, and you might just find all of your other desires sort of relativized compared with him. And I think it’s important to recognize that’s not just true for people who are attracted to folks of their same sex; it’s actually also true for people who are only ever attracted to somebody of the opposite sex. If we orient our lives around fulfilling our sexual romantic desires as our highest goal and the thing you know before which everything else must bow, we won’t find ourselves worshiping Jesus. We may well find ourselves consuming pornography. We may well find ourselves in sexual romantic relationships that the Bible forbids. But we won’t find ourselves on the path of discipleship. I think increasingly in our culture today, having a willingness and an ability within the church for all of us to kind of come clean about what we’re struggling with—whether it’s pornography, whether it’s same sex attraction, whether it’s attraction to people with the opposite sex you’re not married to, whatever it is, whether it’s alcohol abuse, whether it’s drug addiction, whether it’s addiction to social media, you name it—for all of us to be able to come alongside one another in those struggles against sin and to be the encouragement that we need. And I think that’s actually an incredibly mentally healthy community to be part of, because nobody’s pretending. And if your struggle is with depression or your struggle is with anxiety or just your struggle is with suicidal ideation, that should be something that we, as brothers and sisters in Christ, are able to come alongside one another and give each other the sort of love and encouragement that we need in the midst of all of those struggles.

40:00 - The Mark of Jesus’s Disciples

Matt Tully
So maybe as a last question, Rebecca, some people have legitimately had really bad experiences with churches, and that can sometimes play a big part in people feeling like, I don’t want anything to do with the church. So I wonder if you could speak to that kind of person listening, or maybe someone who knows someone who has had those kinds of experiences, and the thought of church being good for them is just so beyond the pale because of their own experiences. What would you say to someone who’s in that situation?

Rebecca McLaughlin
Number one, it’s vital that we acknowledge the sinful behaviors that we’ve seen in church and the sinful cover of abuse that’s also been true across the denominations actually. It’s whether you are Catholic or Baptist or Anglican or you name it, I don’t think there’s a denomination that hasn’t been touched by this. We need to recognize the wrongness of that, and we need to recognize the wrongness of complicity with abuse as well as the wrongness of abuse itself. And just like any other area in which the churches have been mired in sin, we diagnose that sin from Scripture. That’s true of the history of racism. That’s true of the history of Christians being genuinely hateful toward people who identify as LGB or T. Which, as I say, if Jesus calls us to love our neighbor and to love our enemy, there’s no category of people in your town or in your city or in the rural area way you’re living who you are not called to love. And acting genuinely hatefully towards people is not faithfully following Jesus and needs to be repented of. And so all of those things we diagnose from the pages of the Scriptures as sinful. I think there are two things that are really helpful to recognize. One is that if you read the New Testament, you will find that you should expect to see sin in the church. The New Testament does not include a bunch of letters to perfect churches.

Matt Tully
It’s not a very rosy picture of the early church.

Rebecca McLaughlin
No. It’s a bunch of letters to churches that are a hot mess. Paul, for instance, will be calling on the one hand for profound unity, and on the other hand, calling for a clear condemnation of sexual sin. And that applies to sexual abuse. It also applies to any sort of sexual relationships outside of male/female marriage. But one of the interesting metaphors that the New Testament uses for the church is that it is a family. And I think that’s something that we need to lean into and recognize far more than we do in our modern Western culture. Rather than the church being composed of individual families, that actually we, together, whether married or single or whatever our marital status is, or whether we have children, etc., we are all a family together—that’s profoundly theologically important and pastorally significant. And when we realize that and we think about questions of abuse, the reality is a lot of people experience abuse in the context of their families. That’s just a tragic reality that that’s the case. Few people would conclude from that that family is bad. Instead, what we conclude from that is family can be the most beautiful and life-giving and wonderful thing, and it can be a place where people experience horrific abuse. So we need to put up significant guardrails against abuse in the family and in the family of the church. But we wouldn’t want to throw out the family because of the evidence that many people who are abused are abused in the context of their family. And likewise, all the data shows that throwing out the church because of the abuse that people have tragically, horrifically experienced in the context of church actually lands us in a far worse place. The exit of the church is not the entry point to human flourishing and thriving and relief of depression. It’s actually, on average, the polar opposite. For example, I am raising three children in the church. One of the most dangerous things I could do for my kids is take them out of church.

Matt Tully
Rebecca, thank you so much for helping us to think about inviting people into the incredible community that we have as Christians.

Rebecca McLaughlin
Yes, because that beautiful community is what Jesus says is the mark of his disciples, that people will know that we are his disciples because of our love for one another. And we have the opportunity to invite other people into that.

Matt Tully
Thanks, Rebecca.

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