Questions to Ask About Christianity
Questions for talking with a Christian about what they believe and how they live it: how they came to the faith, how they read scripture, what they do with doubt, and where they part company with their own church. Written for curiosity rather than debate.
The questions
Open any question for the note
How did you come to this: were you raised in it, or did you arrive later?
Why ask it
Converts and lifelong believers answer everything differently. One has a before and after with reasons attached; the other has a faith bound up with family and habit that is harder to state as propositions. Knowing which you are speaking to tells you whether arguments or memories will come first.
What does an ordinary Tuesday look like differently because of your faith?
Why ask it
This moves off doctrine and onto practice, where the unrehearsed answers are. Some people describe grace before meals; others describe how they handle a difficult colleague. If nothing in the day is different, that gap is usually something they have already noticed themselves.
Which church do you go to, and how did you end up choosing it?
Why ask it
Denomination, congregation, and route in explain more than any label. People pick churches for theology, for one preacher, for the music, or because it is eight minutes from the house. Whichever reason comes first tells you what they actually go for.
When you pray, what is that actually like?
Why ask it
Descriptions vary enormously: set words, a running commentary, silence, lists, complaint. Asking what it is like rather than what it means gets past the catechism answer, and many people use this question to admit it has become drier than it used to be.
Which parts of the Bible do you find hardest to read?
Why ask it
Almost every serious reader has passages they avoid: the conquest narratives, stretches of the law, the harsher psalms. Naming one is a sign of actual reading rather than received summary. Someone who says none of it is difficult has probably not read all of it.
How do you handle the passages that seem to contradict each other?
Why ask it
The interest is in the method rather than the verdict. Answers range from harmonizing the texts, to reading genre by genre, to accepting scripture as a record of an argument between its authors. A flat denial that any tension exists tends to close the subject.
What do you understand to have happened at the resurrection?
Why ask it
This is the load-bearing claim, and people hold it in different ways: bodily and historical, symbolic, or deliberately unsettled. Asking what they understand happened is less confrontational than asking whether they believe it, and it usually yields more.
What does salvation mean in practice, rather than as a definition?
Why ask it
The definition arrives fluent and rehearsed, so ask for the lived version: what it changes about how they regard their own failures, or their own death. Some hesitation here is common and is not a sign of insincerity.
How would you explain the Trinity to someone who thinks it doesn't add up?
Why ask it
How a person handles a doctrine they cannot fully explain shows what they do with mystery in general. Watch whether they reach for an analogy, admit the limit, or treat the question as illegitimate. The third response usually marks where the conversation will stop.
What do you do with a doubt you can't resolve?
Why ask it
Nearly everyone has one, and what they do with it, hold it, shelve it, take it to someone, reveals more than the doubt itself. Treat the claim that no doubt has ever arisen with some care; it more often means doubt is not permitted than that none exists.
Has anything you believe changed in the last ten years?
Why ask it
Ten years is long enough for real movement and recent enough to recall. People commonly shift on hell, on sexuality, on politics, or on whose authority they accept. If nothing has moved at all, ask what would have to happen for anything to.
How do you square the opening of Genesis with the age of the earth?
Why ask it
This is a live disagreement among Christians rather than a trap, and the answer places someone fairly precisely: young earth, day-age, framework, or simply uninterested in the question. Notice whether they can state positions other than their own fairly.
What do you think is true in other religions?
Why ask it
Asking what is true rather than what is wrong produces the more considered answer. Responses range from all faiths arriving at the same place to a firm exclusivity that still credits real devotion elsewhere, and the difference between those two matters in practice.
What do you think happens to people who never believed?
Why ask it
Here the comfortable version of a belief system meets its hardest implication, and many people are genuinely uneasy. Ask gently and accept an unfinished answer. An instant, cheerful reply usually means the question has not been sat with.
How do you think about suffering that has no explanation?
Why ask it
The stock answers, a plan we cannot see, free will, a greater good, are available to anyone. Ask instead what they thought during a specific loss of their own. That account is far less tidy and much more worth hearing.
Which teaching do you find hardest to actually follow?
Why ask it
Asking what is hard to obey rather than hard to believe changes the register completely: money, forgiveness, honesty about desire, loving one particular person. Answers here are self-critical in a way that doctrinal questions never produce.
Where does your church stand on women in leadership, and where do you stand?
Why ask it
The two halves are often not the same, which is the point of asking them together. It also opens the wider matter of when someone stays inside an institution they partly disagree with, a real and recurring dilemma rather than a hypothetical one.
What do you make of Christians whose politics are the opposite of yours?
Why ask it
Christian belief spans the whole political range, and how someone accounts for that shows whether they treat their own reading of scripture as the obvious meaning or as one reading among several. Contempt in the answer is itself informative.
Which parts of church history would you rather not have to defend?
Why ask it
The crusades, slavery, residential schools, abuse and its concealment. A thoughtful believer has already reckoned with some of this and does not need protecting from the question. An answer that assigns every wrong to people who were not really Christians is worth noting.
Do you want the people close to you to believe, and how do you handle it when they don't?
Why ask it
Whether they hope you convert is often the unspoken question in the room, and raising it directly relieves the pressure for both of you. The second half matters more: what happens to a friendship where the other person is never going to agree.
What would change your mind?
Why ask it
This belongs at the end and it works in both directions. An answer with content, a piece of evidence, an experience, a moral failure of the church, means the belief is held rather than assumed. Nothing would change it is also an answer, and worth taking at face value.
How to have this conversation
Practical guidance for the conversation itself
Before you start
Decide whether you are asking or arguing
Both are legitimate, but they will not fit in the same half hour. If you want to understand, say so and park your objections. If you want to debate, say that too, so nobody feels ambushed halfway through.
There is no single Christian position
Answers to almost everything here differ between Catholic, Orthodox, mainline Protestant, evangelical, and Pentecostal believers, and between congregations within each. Ask which tradition they come from before assuming what they think about scripture or authority.
Ask about practice, not only belief
Doctrinal questions get rehearsed answers. What they did last Sunday, what they pray about, what they give money to, and who they call when things go wrong will get you the specific version.
Answer if they ask you back
If they want to know where you stand, say so briefly and honestly. Deflecting turns the exchange into an interview, and interviews do not produce candid answers for long.
Follow-ups that get past the prepared answer
- Can you give me an example from your own life?
- Is that your church's position, or yours?
- How would someone in your tradition who disagrees with you put it?
- When did you last change your mind about that?
- What do you say when someone asks you that and you have no answer?
Common pitfalls
Stacking the hard questions
Violence in the Old Testament, hell, hypocrisy in the church: each is fair to raise, and all three in a row will be felt as an ambush. Take one, and stay for the whole answer.
Inferring their politics from their faith
Christian belief maps poorly onto any voting bloc, and worse across national and denominational lines. Ask rather than assume, and expect to be wrong about the pairing.
Treating an admitted doubt as an opening
When someone tells you about an unresolved doubt, that is trust rather than a crack to lean on. Pressing there is the quickest way to make everything after it guarded.
Explaining their tradition back to them
Even if you have read more theology, telling someone what their church really teaches ends the conversation. Ask how they understand it and where they know that reading is contested.
An order that tends to work
- Open with how they came to it and what an ordinary week involves.
- Move to reading: which passages are hard, and how they handle tension in the text.
- Then the central claims: the resurrection, salvation, the Trinity.
- Only after that the contested ground: other religions, hell, politics, church history.
- Close with what would change their mind, and be prepared to answer the same question.