How to Talk So Non-Religious People Will Listen

Or, how to listen so non-religious people will talk

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

(An eight-minute read.)

I must admit that I often cringe when I hear many religious people speaking publicly—through whatever medium—because they speak in a way that is unnecessarily alienating to non-religious people (the very people they’re trying to reach).

Because here’s the thing: I think, far too often, non-religious people reject not what we say, but how we say it. And we’re therefore undermining our own agenda.

While I don’t claim to be an expert on the topic, I thought I’d spell out a few principles I’ve learned over the last number of years about how to speak in such a way that it won’t be needlessly distracting or offensive to non-religious people.

But, really, perhaps the most important principle is one that has nothing to do with how or what we say: more important than learning how to talk so non-religious people will listen, is learning how to listen so non-religious people will talk.

I can’t underscore this enough. It seems that many Christian leaders who say cringe-worthy stuff do so because they spend virtually no time listening to non-religious people. They’re simply out of touch with their reality.

They therefore come like a doctor who prescribes medicine for a patient, having never heard a history or a diagnosis.

There are many reasons as to why we Christians should spend a lot more time listening than speaking, but relevant to this post is the simple reality that we won’t know how or what to say to non-religious people if we just come to them with a pre-planned agenda.

As just one example: if you ever want to have any credibility with the LGBTQ+ community (by this I’m not at all implying that the LGBTQ+ community is automatically “non-religious”), you need to listen to people from this community. Doing so has many benefits—but, among others, it will help you learn to use language that isn’t needlessly offensive or distracting.

For example, if you spent any time listening to people from this community, you’d quickly learn that using the term “gay lifestyle” will immediately shut the ears of many people within this community, making it less likely that they’ll listen to anything else you might say.

Of course, we can dogmatically insist on using terms that grate on people’s ears, and then claim they’ve rejected “truth” when they don’t give us an honest hearing, but it seems like that would be the proverbial cutting our nose off to spite our face.

So, again, listening to non-religious people—more than talking—is probably the single most important thing we can do if we want to build goodwill, gain confidence, and understand how to rightly contextualize what it is we want to share.

With that being said, here are a few things I’ve gleaned over the last few years about how and what to say that will make it more likely non-religious people will give a religious person a fair hearing:

1. Lead with affirmation. This principle is seemingly somewhat common sense, and really applies to our interactions with anyone, but it’s one I think we far too often forget or ignore. Despite what many religious people seemingly think, there’s lots to affirm about a “secular” worldview (which I’ll talk about a little bit more below).

We should therefore look for ways to affirm what we can affirm, noting points of commonality as much as we can.

There will definitely be times to note differences, of course—but we shouldn’t be quick to do so, and instead pursue the long and patient task of winning people’s confidence before ever touching on those differences.

This just seems to be Emotional Intelligence 101. We ourselves are most open to people when they genuinely affirm commonalities with us, instead of having an adversarial posture toward us.

But this latter attitude is, unfortunately, what seems to be all too common among religious people. We lead with an adversarial attitude, rather than with affirmation. We therefore attack, demonize, and label—and then claim we’re just doing it out of “love.”

As (the late) Tim Keller put it many times, “bad evangelism” can often be reduced to this underlying attitude: I’m right and you’re wrong and I’d love to tell you about it.

We thus talk about the “gay agenda,” the “woke agenda,” “secular elites,” or “transgender ideology.”

But when we attack, we immediately turn people off—making it unlikely that they’re going to listen to anything else we say.

So having an attacking, adversarial attitude toward non-religious people—and secular society—is no way to gain confidence or win credibility.

Let’s instead seek to affirm everything we can affirm, and cross further bridges if and when we get to them.

2. Speak with humility. This is, perhaps not surprisingly, a big emphasis of mine. A sure way to turn many non-religious people off is by speaking with dogmatism and as if we have it all figured out.

Many religious people think speaking with certainty is a sign of strength—but it’s just the opposite for many non-religious people. They’re turned off by certainty, and attracted to humility and vulnerability.

But too many of us are very black and white, acting and speaking as if we know everything. We have very little room for nuance or complexity, and are seemingly far too confident about far too many things.

Speaking with humility communicates we’re finite, imperfect, and weak people—which, by the way, are all ideas that lie at the heart of the gospel message.

So when we openly and freely acknowledge our limits and finitude, we’re actually implicitly making much of the gospel, which is what we’re supposed to be all about anyway.

Speaking with humility also means we care—and talk—more about our own sins and skeletons, seeking to “sweep” our own side of the street, rather than being myopically focused on the sins of others.

Jesus said, after all, that we should first worry about the plank in our eye before worrying about the speck in anyone else’s.

As an example, many of us Christians spend a lot of time talking about the sexual sins of the non-religious world (e.g., the so-called “gay agenda,” mentioned above), while remaining eerily silent about our own sexual indiscretions (e.g., widespread sexual abuse among Christian clergy).

That simply doesn’t compute with non-religious people, often resulting in charges—quite appropriately—of hypocrisy.

Again, this is Emotional Intelligence 101—but being preoccupied with the faults of others, rather than humbly acknowledging our own faults, is a quick way to lose credibility with non-religious people, causing them to not give us a hearing.

So let’s speak with humility, not claiming to know more than our finite minds can grasp, and freely acknowledging our own faults.

3. Talk about love. Like, a lot. It sometimes feels like many Christians forget that love lies at the very heart of the whole Jesus-story and message. We so often make it about everything else—sexuality, preparation for the “end times,” the culture wars—and neglect what lies at the center of it all.

At least from how I see it, love—and, in particular, God’s love—is what the whole story is all about.

And here’s the really cool part: love travels really well. It’s always relevant and attractive to people from all different walks of life—including non-religious people.

Indeed, love is always—to use an Adventist term—“present truth.”

So let’s make much of love. Let’s speak of it often (and, just as importantly, try to live it always).

Sure, we may not agree on every expression of or viewpoint on love that non-religious people have. But—as I alluded to above—a large part of how non-religious people understand love seems to be more aligned with God’s version of love than how many religious people define it.

Indeed, I’d say that many non-religious people have a deep yearning for the kind of love that Scripture reveals—and their grasp of and yearning for its inclusive, embracing, non-condemning dimensions is something we should wholly affirm and frequently appeal to (as someone has said: if John 3:16-17 says that God, out of his love, didn’t send Jesus into the world to condemn the world, it’s rather unlikely he’s sent us into the world to condemn it either).

A quick story along these lines: a few weeks ago I was hanging out with a new friend who is “spiritual” but not “religious.” Over the course of the six or seven hours we spent together, we talked a lot about spirituality, and I probed his thinking on the topic, asking lots of questions and committing myself to listening.

Eventually he asked me how I understood spirituality, and I started sharing the Jesus-story with him—about how I believe love lies at the center of God’s existence, about how we were all created to love and to be loved, and how God will ultimately restore the universe to experience only love.

As I explained this all to him, I could see his eyes lighting up. I don’t believe he’d ever heard Christianity presented in this way—in such a love-centered way.

He then asked me how I defined “love,” and I told him I believed love is when a person acts in the best-interest of another—and that, ultimately, God always and ever acts in the best-interest of his creatures, putting our needs and existence above and before his own (as Christ’s death on the cross most clearly demonstrates).

He loved that. It totally spoke to his heart and resonated deeply.

As I said, love travels well. It reaches across all languages and religious (or non-religious) persuasions. And—beautifully, wonderfully, amazingly— it lies at the heart of the Christian message.

So making much of love means we’re not contradicting the Jesus-story; it means we’re actually emphasizing the whole plotline.

We should thus make much of it—because, among other things, doing so helps us speak in such a way that non-religious people, who are also yearning for love, will listen.

So these are a few of the principles I’ve gleaned when it comes to interacting with and talking to non-religious people.

In my experience, as I’ve shared before, if we can learn how to implement some of these principles, I think we’d discover that non-religious people are a lot less hostile to the Jesus-story than we’ve made them out to be (and, in fact, very open to it).

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Just a heads up: due to the holiday coming next week, and the many competing demands I have in my life right now, I don’t anticipate I’ll send anything out for a couple weeks. But I’ll be back!

In the meantime, please enjoy the holiday—if you’re an American—and, if you’re not an American, enjoy that we Americans are enjoying it.

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Shawn is a pastor in Maine, whose life, ministry, and writing focus on incarnational expressions of faith. The author of four books and a columnist for Adventist Review, he is also a DPhil (PhD) student at the University of Oxford, focusing on nineteenth-century American Christianity. You can follow him on Instagram, and listen to his podcast Mission Lab.