Christianity has splintered into tens of thousands of denominations disagreeing with each other — if it were really God's revealed truth, there would be unity, not this chaos.

Why people find it persuasive

The sheer number of denominations (often-cited figures run into the tens of thousands) and their real disagreements on important matters (baptism, church governance, sacraments, predestination) seem to be direct evidence against the idea of a single, clearly revealed, coherent divine message being successfully transmitted.

Important distinctions

• • Denominational disagreement on secondary or disputed matters vs. disagreement on the core historic creedal claims (the Trinity, the incarnation, the resurrection, salvation through Christ).
• • Institutional/administrative division vs. doctrinal contradiction on essentials.
• • The commonly cited denomination-count statistic (which typically counts distinct national/organizational bodies, not distinct core theologies) vs. what it is popularly taken to represent.
• • Diversity as evidence of a corrupted message vs. diversity as an expected byproduct of a text and tradition read by billions of people across two millennia and many cultures.

Christian response

• • Examine what the widely cited 'tens of thousands of denominations' statistic (from sources like the World Christian Encyclopedia) actually counts: distinct organizational and national church bodies, which multiplies rapidly for structural and administrative reasons (a single doctrinally identical Baptist tradition organized separately by country or region counts as many separate 'denominations' in this metric), inflating the apparent scale of substantive theological disagreement well beyond what a naive reading of the number suggests.
• • Point to the substantial doctrinal core shared across the overwhelming majority of Christian traditions, historically expressed in the early ecumenical creeds (Nicene, Apostles') — the vast majority of denominated Christian bodies affirm the Trinity, the deity and resurrection of Christ, salvation through him, and the authority of Scripture, and disagree mainly on secondary matters of church governance, sacramental practice, and specific soteriological mechanics, not on whether Jesus rose from the dead or is Lord.
• • Note that other domains of human knowledge with a real, discoverable subject matter — philosophy, and even the physical sciences at their frontiers (interpretations of quantum mechanics, competing cosmological models) — also feature persistent expert disagreement without that disagreement showing there is no truth of the matter or that the entire field is bankrupt; disagreement is evidence of a subject's difficulty and the limits of human reasoning about it, not by itself evidence of its unreality.
• • Bring in the theological point that Scripture itself predicts division and warns against it (Paul rebukes the Corinthian church directly for factionalism in 1 Corinthians 1, and Jesus prays specifically for the unity of believers in John 17, implying it was neither expected to be automatic nor considered unimportant), so denominational division is a real failure to live up to an explicit biblical ideal, not a silent embarrassment the tradition has to explain away.
• • Point out that many divisions historically trace not to indifference to truth but to a serious concern for it — reform movements (like the Reformation) that arose specifically because their leaders believed existing institutions had departed from clear biblical and doctrinal fidelity, meaning much of the division reflects earnest disagreement about how best to be faithful to a shared core, not evidence that no shared core or truth exists at all.

Christian counterresponse

Christian responses vary here (this is itself part of the disagreement): some traditions (Catholic, Orthodox) argue this shows the necessity of a living teaching authority beyond individual scriptural interpretation to resolve exactly these disputes, while Protestant traditions argue that disagreement on secondary matters is a tolerable and even expected cost of taking Scripture's perspicuity and every believer's access to it seriously, provided the core gospel remains intact — reasonable and faithful people within Christianity itself hold different views on how big a problem this really is.