In Reaction Formation and the Fear of Fire, which I wrote because I caught myself hesitating to write it for fear of the response1, I wrote about the venom some Christians aim at atheists. I suggested it might not be confidence at all but reaction formation — the loud denial of a doubt too frightening to admit.
That piece brought in a firehose of email, almost all of it proselytizing.
I responded to that email in Pratfalls of Proselytizing, Part 1, where I explained what not to say if you actually want to persuade someone like me.
I compared it to that scene in The West Wing where Judge Mulready, the arch-conservative Supreme Court nominee, gives Charlie Young, President Bartlet’s aide, the very lines he ought to be using against him. (30 second clip below).
Part 1 was all the things you should not say.
Here’s part 2: what you should say and do if you want to reach someone like me.
Do own the asymmetry
The process of persuasion through dialectic is part of our Western heritage.
From Socrates pestering his interlocutors in the agora to Aquinas stacking syllogisms in the Summa, we inherit an assumption: that if two people sit down to argue, they enter with the same basic posture.
Each is bound, at least in theory, by the rules of reason, by the give-and-take of questions and answers, by the possibility of being persuaded or corrected.
And I don’t mind that. If you want to meet me on those terms, I’ll meet you there.
But don’t forget: those terms are optional.
Nobody has to play the dialectical game.
If I want to be stubborn, dismissive, sarcastic, even bitchy — I can.
You can’t.
I don’t claim to have been fundamentally remade at the core of my being.
I don’t insist that an infinite God has poured Himself into me, transformed my nature, and filled me with supernatural love.
You do.
That asymmetry matters. It sets the terms for persuasion.
You’re the one saying you’ve been born again (John 3:7).
You’re the one claiming that if anyone is in Christ, “the old has gone, the new has come” (2 Corinthians 5:17).
You’re the one whose own scriptures say the Spirit produces “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control” (Galatians 5:22–23).
And you’re the one explicitly commanded to “always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you…yet do this with gentleness and respect” (1 Peter 3:15).
That doesn’t mean you have to be flawless. Nobody is asking for perfection.
But it does mean that if you come to me claiming to have undergone sanctification via divine transformation, you had better look noticeably more patient, more gracious, and more generous than I am.
I don’t have the Holy Spirit. I don’t get sanctifying grace.
I’m just me — stubborn, damaged, carrying my own scars.
If your claim is true, you should be manifestly, tangibly better than I am.
So no, you don’t get to sneer when I’m bitter.
You don’t get to storm off when I’m sharp.
You don’t get to mirror me, because mirroring me collapses your own claim.
Own the asymmetry. Lean into it.
If you want me to hear you, it isn’t enough to argue well; you have to be what you say you are.
Do tell the truth about your doctrine
After I wrote Reaction Formation and the Fear of Fire, many emails rushed to reassure me: Of course God loves you and wouldn’t send you to hell. Of course the pedophile who abused you isn’t in heaven.
No.
That isn’t what your book says. And if you believe your book, you have to own its terms. And since I’m speaking here in Protestant terms — the plain English of your own book, not appeals to Greek, Aramaic, or church tradition — that means taking the words of Jesus at face value.
Catholics and Orthodox read the fire differently, but if their judgment leaves me outside damnation then the whole quarrel dissolves; it is the Protestant voice, the one that profoundly influences the American culture that shaped me, that I must answer.
Jesus himself wasn’t vague. He spoke more about hell than about heaven, money, or love. “These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life” (Matthew 25:46). “If your eye causes you to sin, tear it out… it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into hell, where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched” (Mark 9:47–48).
That’s eternal conscious torment.
Not annihilation. Not metaphor.
Torment that does not end.
If that sounds harsh, good. It should.
Let’s talk about what we’re really talking about.
Suppose Hitler’s punishment were not infinite but proportionate — one year of torment for each year his six million victims might have lived had he not gassed, starved, or shot them. Give each victim seventy years.
That’s 420,000,000 years of punishment.
153,405,000,000 days.
3,681,720,000,000 agonizing hours.
220,903,200,000,000 torture-filled minutes.
13,254,192,000,000,000 unendurable seconds of conscious torment.
Before we go forward, let’s put this in perspective.
420 million years is more than six times the span since the dinosaurs went extinct, and nearly a tenth the age of the Earth itself.
It’s a long, long time.
And at the end of that agony?
It would amount to nothing. Not a down payment, not a fraction, not even enough to count as a rounding error in eternity.
Eternity is not just long.
It.
Is.
Unending.
If that sounds dramatic, don’t blame me. I didn’t write it. Jesus did.
And maybe it’s a “shitty childhood perk” that I understand this — that I’ve stared it in the face since I was little. When you’ve already wrestled with equally terrifying notions — like that your father, and then God, really didn’t love you — you can look at this squarely and talk about it without flinching.
This is the reality. You are devoting yourself to a faith that says every human being — not just Hitler — deserves that by default.
That I deserve it ever bit as much as Hitler.
So don’t tell me I’ve misunderstood. Don’t tell me my abuser isn’t in and I’m not out. Don’t sand down the hard edges of your doctrine to make it sound less monstrous.
If you believe the book, believe the book. Own it.
Because the moment you start trimming, softening, and hedging, you aren’t defending Christianity anymore. You’re defending a version of Christianity you wish existed.
If you want to persuade me, start by telling the truth about what yours actually says.
Do drop the pretense of airtight logic
Another pattern in the emails was the attempt to make Christianity look like a solved proof. As if God could be deduced the way you prove the Pythagorean theorem — airtight, inevitable, undeniable.
But your own tradition doesn’t even make that claim.
Jesus blessed those “who have not seen and yet have believed” (John 20:29).
Paul wrote, “We walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7).
The book itself tells you that belief is not about clinching the case with evidence; it is about faith, about stepping where you cannot see.
That means you don’t have an airtight case. You can’t. And pretending you do is insulting both to me and to your own scriptures.
Now, let’s separate two things that often get conflated.
The first cause argument — “everything must have a cause, therefore there must be an uncaused cause, which we call God” — is not the slam dunk many Christians think it is. If everything must have a cause, then God also needs a cause, and you’re right back where you started.
If you exempt God from the rule, then you’ve admitted the rule itself is faulty — some things don’t require causes after all.
So invoking God doesn’t answer the problem, it just relocates it.
That’s not the same thing as the much deeper question of why there is something rather than nothing.
Why there is existence at all, instead of sheer nonexistence. That’s not a matter of tracing back a chain of causes until you run out of dominoes.
It’s the fact that there are dominoes in the first place.
And that question is harder to shrug off. It isn’t proof — nothing in this realm is proof — but it is a real and serious philosophical puzzle. The brute fact of existence is the one argument that makes me stop and listen.
Everything else — the historical claims, the moral syllogisms, the fine-tuning rhetoric — frays on contact.
This is the only thread with tensile strength.
So if you want to argue, lean there. Don’t confuse it with the first cause shell game, and don’t pretend your position is geometry when your own book insists it is faith.
And for you evangelicals who want to lean into “the person of Christ”: I can respect that you experience yourself as having an ongoing relationship with an invisible but heavily present being who influences your daily life.
I do not doubt that you believe this, and I do not have disrespect for either the belief itself, or for you.
I can accept that this is your experience, but that doesn’t mean that I have to believe it’s real in any objective sense.
There have been very long periods when Captain Picard — who lived in my imagination as a moral refuge, an example of courage, and a kind of father figure I wanted to impress — was a living presence in my life.
It helped. It mattered. But I’d never expect you to believe it was real, only to trust me that it was real for me.
In other words: make your case honestly: not airtight, but real.
Do acknowledge the ambiguity
Not every Christian handles the doctrine of hell the same way. Some are entirely comfortable with it.
They believe, with perfect clarity, that every human being deserves eternal conscious torment simply for being less than God — for failing, inevitably, at divine perfection.
In their math, the pedophile and the victim start at the same place: both guilty, both deserving hell. If the pedophile accepts the “Get Out of Hell Free” gift through Jesus and the victim does not, then he’s in and she’s out. End of story.
I disagree with the morality of that math, obviously, but at least it is internally consistent. At least they own their doctrine straight.
But many other Christians recoil from it. They don’t like the idea of victims in hell and predators in heaven.
They don’t like the blunt arithmetic of eternal torment for finite failure.
And so they soften, hedge, invent exceptions, or insist that the verses can’t possibly mean what they very plainly say.
Here’s my request: don’t. If it troubles you, admit that it troubles you. Say it aloud.
Say, “I hate the thought that you would burn forever when you’ve so clearly sought the Father. I hate the idea that a rapist could be my brother in Christ while you are damned. I don’t understand it. I trust God’s justice, but I don’t like it.”
That is a very different thing from pretending the doctrine isn’t there. It is there.
Don’t tell me ‘My God wouldn’t do that.’
I’ve read Job. He damn well would, and then He’d brag about it.
Jesus spoke more about hell than about heaven, money, or love. “These will go away into eternal punishment” (Matthew 25:46). “The fire is not quenched, and the worm does not die” (Mark 9:48).
Those aren’t stray verses. They are central.
If you believe them, don’t insult me by acting as though they don’t mean what they say. If you struggle with them, then struggle honestly. Don’t give me the sanitized version.
Because ambiguity is not weakness. Ambiguity is where persuasion begins. When you admit that parts of your own faith trouble you, you show me you’re not just selling a product. You’re wrestling with it, too.
And if you want me to wrestle with it, show me you’re willing to do the same.
Do respect the question — and the questioner
Last night I had dinner with
.Just before I left with my leftovers, he walked me out to the car. Then he gave me one of his unusually-wonderful, male-upper-body-strength-fully-engaged, very big hugs.
I felt quite special. Warm and happy and loved.
I did not feel I was being set up for future betrayal, or that my weakness was being exploited so it could be used against me later.
Then I went home, went straight to bed, and slept all night.
Both of those are new capacities. For years I simply didn’t have them.
Feeling safe in a hug? Trusting that anyone — particularly a human male — could put his arms around me to express affection and not domination?
Falling asleep without the churn of dread? My brain, and my unconscious mind, quieting enough for real, sustained rest?
No. Those capacities were not part of my existence.
Not for years.
Those are hard-won gains, the fruit of therapy and healing. I live them now, but I didn’t before.
That’s a good example of why I talk about belief as a capacity. Because I know firsthand what it is to lack one, and to gain one later.
When I asked in part 1 why you believe in this God and not another — why Yahweh and not Zeus, Allah, or Krishna — not one email (among those I managed to read; there was a mountain) actually answered me. Every single one slid sideways into a different argument.
If the truth is that you’ve only ever seriously considered Christianity, then say that!
Don’t pretend you weighed all the world’s religions like options on a shelf and rationally selected the best. If your familiarity, your culture, your upbringing handed you Christianity, and you never seriously questioned it, fine. Own that.
And if the truth is that belief never felt like a choice for you, then say that too.
Some people can roll their tongues. Some can whistle without ever remembering how they learned. Some people can smell faint whiffs of cilantro as soap while others can’t. These aren’t decisions; they’re capacities.
If you’ve always had the capacity to believe in God, to sense Him as obviously present, then own that. Don’t dress it up as rational deliberation.
Because here’s the thing: I don’t have that capacity. I’ve begged for it, tried to force it, clawed at it with the same stubborn grit I’ve used to overcome every other deficit in my life.
Through healing and therapy, I’ve gained capacities I once didn’t have — empathy, trust, the ability to regulate myself instead of drowning in panic.
I know change is possible.
But at least right now, today, I do not experience myself as having the capacity to believe in a personal God.
If you can’t accept that as true — if you must believe that I do have the capacity but am refusing to use it — then at least give me the respect of accepting that I’m not lying about my own experience.
At this moment, I do not experience myself as having it. And if I die today, under the plain terms of your own doctrine, I go off to the never-ending torture we discussed when we thought about what a proportionate punishment for Hitler would look like.
Respect the question I asked.
And respect me enough not to change it into one you’d rather answer. If your story is narrow or simple, let it be narrow and simple. If your faith is less like solving an equation and more like being able to hear a note I can’t hear, then say so.
Don’t sell me a story that isn’t yours.
Do drop the lazy “Goddidit” answer
One of the most common themes in the emails was a kind of reflexive shorthand: goddidit. You prayed, the thing happened, therefore it was God.
It’s lazy. And it’s insulting.
Some of you even said that I am proof of God because I reconstructed myself against impossible odds — that the abused kid who taught herself math and eventually became a data scientist is evidence of divine intervention.
Really? God was micromanaging my adult self’s ability to learn derivative rules and Python syntax — but when I was five years old, hiding in a closet, begging Him for comfort while I waited for the switch that I would have to choose myself and that would have me wincing for days as I sat and sang the alphabet song in kindergarten — He was too committed to, what? Adult free will and “freedom,” to intervene?
He had time for partial fractions for an angry adult, but not for the comfort and protection for an innocent little kid?
That’s not proof of God. That’s proof of how sloppy it is to slap His name on every outcome that turns out well.
And that’s just one example. Every time you pray for reconciliation and get it, the real explanation is that human beings were finally brave enough to soften their pride.
Every time you pray for healing and get it, when the reality is a team of doctors spent years of their lives training and working and sacrificing to make it possible.
Every time you tack “because I prayed” onto a success that obviously came from decades of sweat, labor, and persistence.
“Goddidit” erases the people who actually did. It erases their effort, their wisdom, their risk. It makes all the blood and skill and sacrifice disappear into thin air so that God can be credited for showing up at the finish line.
If you want to persuade me, don’t take the shortcut. Don’t point to the human and say, “God did it.” Don’t erase the real story in favor of the lazy one.
Show me you can tell the truth about what actually happened, and then explain why you still see God at work through it.
That’s an argument. “Goddidit” is not.
The strongest case you could make
This is the Mulready moment. In The West Wing, Judge Mulready hands Charlie Young the very lines Charlie ought to be using against him.
This is that moment for you, if proselytizing is something you are inclined to do.
Nobody said this in any of the emails I read from the mountain I received. (But on Substack Notes, a Jew did mention the one method of choosing to believe that I’m about to identify.)
Here is what a Christian could say to me that would present the best possible case:
Belief can’t be forced, but it can be cultivated. For most people, the one and only way belief is ever really a “choice” is by pretending. If you act as if it were true long enough, eventually, for many people, there comes a day when they wake up and realize that at some point they were no longer acting. “If anyone’s will is to do God’s will, he will know whether the teaching is from God” (John 7:17). “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief” (Mark 9:24). I know it sounds artificial, but it is the actual lived experience of at least some Christians. I hope you’ll consider trying it.
I admit that, in human terms, Christianity looks monstrously unfair. That a predator could repent at the last second and enter heaven while his victim burns forever defies every moral instinct we have. I don’t like it either. But I trust there’s a higher logic I can’t yet see. Just as mathematicians once treated imaginary numbers as useless abstractions, only to discover they were essential to describing electricity and quantum mechanics, so I trust that God’s mercy and justice, as incoherent as they seem now, may one day prove to be not a bug but the hidden structure of reality itself.
I hope you’ll consider acting as if you believe, even without the capacity yet. Not to manipulate yourself, but to give yourself the chance for the capacity to come later. Because the fruits of a Christian life are so worth it that even if, at death, I discover I was wrong — if Allah meets me, or I find myself waiting to be reincarnated, or I simply fall into nothingness but get a brief moment of consciousness before the abyss — I would have no regrets. I would have lived the best life possible, one shaped by grace, forgiveness, service, and hope. “Taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34:8).
That’s the invitation. It isn’t airtight logic. It isn’t proof. It’s a way of living inside the mystery of why there is something rather than nothing, and trusting that Love might be at its root.
That is the strongest possible case because it is honest.
It doesn’t pretend faith is geometry, or that you can convert atheists with mic-drop moments and rhetorical tricks.
Those are ridiculous. And they make you look like assholes.
The “God knocked over the first domino” routine is no argument at all compared to the deeper puzzle of why there are dominoes in the first place.
Treating belief as a capacity — one that can be stretched, grown, and even awakened — gives someone who actually wants to live a Christian life a way to reach for it without lying to herself or to others. That matters.
Because if faith is real, it just might grow when given soil and water. If it isn’t, no amount of pretending will make it so.
And that’s the point: the best case you can make isn’t a trick or a hedge.
It’s authenticity. It’s acknowledging mystery.
It’s saying plainly that you hope I will act as if in order to give capacity a chance to take root.
If I were ten percent less damaged, and if a Christian had said that to me at any point…it might have been enough.
But I am what I am.
I live inside the ache of capacities I’ve gained and those I still lack.
I can trust a hug now. I can fall asleep in peace.
I can even write this without bitterness.
But I cannot, today, believe.
And if your faith is true, then one day — whether in judgment or in mercy — I will finally see.
Until then, all I can do is tell the truth.
And all you can do is make the case honestly, and let it stand.
Because a few people wondered — “Reaction Formation and the Fear of Fire” cost me nine paid subscriptions. After Substack fees, Stripe fees, and taxes, that’s a net loss of about $600.