It is easy for Christians to talk about unbelievers, atheists, and people of other faiths in ways that reveal how little we actually know them.
I’ve seen this while serving in youth ministries, especially among students who didn’t attend public school. Many of them were rarely around unbelievers in any meaningful way. They were surrounded by Christians at church, in their schools, in their families, and in many of their friendships. As a result, their understanding of unbelievers and skeptics was often shaped less by real relationships and more by assumptions from Christian subculture.
On one particularly memorable evening, a student in a high school guys’ small group asked, “How can atheists possibly remain unconvinced of Scripture’s reliability when the historical evidence so clearly says otherwise?” Roughly half an hour earlier, I taught on how manuscript evidence, internal coherence, archaeological discoveries, and extrabiblical sources give Christians good reasons to trust Scripture. His question may have been influenced by the recency of what I just taught, and I’m confident he meant well. But still, the other small group leaders and I recognized how the question could sound, especially if a visiting student that evening hadn’t yet placed faith in Christ. Before I opened my mouth, a small group leader who had been with the group much longer than I gently corrected the student’s question before responding.
I confess that I may not have noticed the problem so quickly if I hadn’t made a similar mistake a few months earlier. What makes my confession more sobering is that I wasn’t sheltered from unbelievers in the same way. I attended public school, had cross country and tennis teammates who did not identify with Christianity, and was involved in Boy Scouts with a handful of unbelievers. But that background didn’t make me immune to the misrepresentations I created in my mind.
While developing a survey for one of my honors classes at North Greenville University, I wrote questions about the relationship between stated convictions and self-reported moral decisions. One of those questions, as I later realized, forced unbelieving respondents into a false choice. They could either identify themselves as people whose moral convictions came from the Bible, even if they had already said that was not their belief, or they could choose an answer that made it sound as though they affirmed immoral choices they did not actually affirm.
One question about recreational drug and alcohol use exposed the problem especially clearly:
Explain your conviction on recreational drug and alcohol use (substances used for enjoyment or leisure rather than for medical reasons).
- Drug and alcohol use are personal choices with no moral significance.
a. Moderate use of alcohol or recreational drugs is acceptable if not abused.
b. Moderate alcohol use is acceptable, but drug use is sinful.
c. I should avoid drug and alcohol use entirely to remain holy.
d. I’m not sure.
Since I have already drawn attention to the problem, you may have noticed the issue immediately. I did not. But I was not the only one who missed it. Before finalizing the survey, I shared the question with several Christian classmates and asked whether they thought it was suitable. None of us saw the problem. Neither I nor four other Christian students realized that we had backed atheists, unbelievers, and people of other faiths into a corner. Without meaning to, we had written the question as though a person had to choose between grounding morality explicitly in Christianity or abandoning morality altogether.
I did not recognize the issue until I shared the question with unbelievers and received their feedback. They were the ones who pointed out how poor the question was. They helped me see that I had failed to account for the fact that people of other faiths, and even people who do not identify with any faith, can still make choices Christians would rightly call “moral.”
One respondent later explained, “[On poorly written questions] I was forced to respond ‘I’m not sure,’ when in fact I had an opinion. Most often, there was a position closely matching my own, but it was stated in terms of something being sin. But I, as an atheist, have no belief in sin and could not adopt that answer.”
That feedback was humbling because it exposed a problem I had failed to see. Most Christians do not mean to misrepresent unbelievers. But when the loudest or most antagonistic examples shape our imagination, we can begin speaking about atheists, Muslims, skeptics, secular neighbors, and people of other faiths as though they are all angry, irrational, immoral, or hostile to Christianity.
The original God’s Not Dead film offers a memorable example. Christians, not atheists, agnostics, or Muslims, are clearly the film’s intended audience. That raises an important question: What do portrayals like this reinforce in the minds of Christian viewers? In the film, the main atheist character screams, “I HATE GOD! ALL I HAVE FOR HIM IS HATE!” In another scene, an atheist responds to his girlfriend’s cancer diagnosis by asking, “This couldn’t wait until tomorrow?” A Muslim father is also shown beating and disowning his daughter after discovering her conversion to Christianity.
While such hostility and uncompassionate attitudes can exist, portrayals like these can easily train Christians to expect unbelievers to be angrier, harsher, and more unreasonable than many actually are. Many unbelievers are thoughtful and kind, but simply unconvinced. They are not all like Richard Dawkins, wishing that all religion would go extinct. Sometimes we confuse atheism with antitheism, and that confusion hinders our willingness to form meaningful relationships with non-Christians.
We’ve forgotten that God has written the law on human hearts (Rom. 2:15). We’ve forgotten that creation bears witness to God’s character and that God has made certain truths plain to all people (Ps. 19:1; Rom. 1:19). Christians believe Scripture gives the only sufficient foundation for morality, but we should not speak as though unbelievers are incapable of recognizing moral truth or acting according to it. People who do not yet know Christ are still made in the image of God (Gen. 1:26–27). Even though Scripture teaches that sin darkens the mind and hardens the heart, it also teaches that unbelievers can still recognize and practice what is right by nature (Eph. 4:18–19; Rom. 2:14–16).
This is why our words matter. If we speak about unbelievers as though they are all intellectually dishonest or morally bankrupt, we make it harder for our neighbors to hear us. We can believe Scripture is true without misrepresenting those who do not yet believe it. We can defend the faith without minimizing unbelievers into caricatures. They are not merely arguments to answer or worldviews to refute. They are image-bearers to love, neighbors to know, and, by God’s grace, future brothers and sisters to welcome.
— Chandler McCraw graduated from North Greenville University with a major in Christian Studies. He and his wife, Annalynn, recently moved to Louisville to pursue his M.Div. at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.