Pratfalls of Proselytizing: A Letter to My Inbox
response to reader email, part 1
In season five of The West Wing, the Bartlet Administration faces a problem: a Supreme Court vacancy and a hostile Congress. They devise a clever workaround.
The most liberal justice resigns, creating two vacancies. Then Bartlet strikes a deal with the Republicans: Democrats get their liberal lion, and the GOP gets a mirror-image—a staunch conservative for the other seat.
One of the episode’s best moments comes when Charlie Young, the black college student who serves as the President’s personal aide, spars with Judge Mulready, the arch-conservative nominee.
The clip below is short—double-click to watch.
Judge Mulready and Charlie are arguing about affirmative action. Here’s a transcript:
MULREADY: So, why a racial preference and not an economic one?
CHARLIE: Because affirmative action’s about a legacy of racial oppression.
MULREADY: It’s about compromising admission standards.
CHARLIE: That’s bull… excuse me. It’s about leveling the playing field after 300 years of …
MULREADY: See, this is where the liberal argument goes off the tracks. You get stuck in the past. Now, you want to come back at me with “grading is based on past performance, but admissions should be based on potential, on how a candidate may thrive with this sort of opportunity, and studies show that affirmative action admits have a higher predisposition to contribute to society.”
CHARLIE: Hang on, I gotta write this down.
I thought of it often on Monday while my inbox was filling up like a firehose, thanks to my post “Reaction Formation and the Fear of Fire.”
In that piece, I pointed out a few plain truths about Christian doctrine and speculated on the motives of Christians who spend their free time spewing venom at atheists.
Specifically, I wondered if what we’re hearing isn’t really faith at all, but reaction formation—the psychological trick of shouting the opposite of what you secretly fear. (In this case: not confidence in God, but terror of doubt.)
I also mentioned that I’ve never experienced belief in God as a choice, and asked people to explain how—when they realized they could go from atheist to theist—they decided which God to believe in.
Yahweh? Allah? Krishna? Zeus? Spin the wheel, pick a deity?
I told Josh ahead of time that I would be buried in proselytizing emails and that nobody would answer the actual question.
I was right. But in my defense, I’m always buried in proselytizing emails, and readers almost never read carefully enough to answer a specific question.
(Yes, this is good evidence of my lack of writing ability. Granted. Owned. Acknowledged.)
But in any case, both are as predictable as the sunrise, so it’s not like this was one of Nostradamus’s bolder calls.
Still, I thought maybe—just maybe—someone would take a swing at answering me.
I read the first forty-ish messages, then gave up. I stopped counting at seventy.
Nobody answered my question.
Nobody even circled the neighborhood of my question.
But honestly, I knew that would happen, so I kind of enjoyed the spectacle. Call it my Judge Mulready with Charlie Young moment—when you already know how the other side is going to argue, and you can lean back, half-smiling, while they prove your point for you.
I’m going to give you the Judge Mulready equivalent — the part that will make those of you actually interested in proselytizing someone like me want to take notes — but first, we’ll start with what not to say.
Don’t tell me your inspirational story of being emotionally moved leading to belief in God.
I have been emotionally moved many times, toward both transcendent beauty and torturous psychological and physical pain.
I have experienced extraordinary kindness — including from some of the readers of this newsletter, who know who they are.
I spent a significant portion of my childhood in the hall closet, waiting for my father to come home and send me to the backyard to cut and strip the switch with which he would lacerate my bare skin in punishment for, quite often, simply existing.
And I spent much of that time begging God to comfort me. Not to save me, not to spare me, not to change my father’s mind — just to let me know He was with me, to make me feel not alone.
That never once occurred.
I was nine when I gave up asking and admitted that I was on my own, though at the time I thought I was on my own because God found me as unlovable as my father did.
I was fifteen when I first considered the possibility that God simply did not exist.
A month ago, Josh forgave me for something, and the grace of that moment was a deeply healing thing for me — someone who has been abandoned the moment I failed, or simply stopped being useful, more times than I can count.
Someone I used to be useful to once said, “I’m proud of you, kiddo,” and for a second it felt as if my ribs had opened and light poured through me — not glory, exactly, but the aching radiance of a long-starved need suddenly and briefly met.
And I have been disappointed so bitterly that my nervous system reaction made me Google “early heart attack symptoms in women.”
I have worked very hard to achieve things, achieved them, and then cried myself to sleep from how badly I wanted a father to be proud of me in that moment.
None of those things has changed my ability to believe that an omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent being is also omnibenevolent and personally engaged — that there is a transcendent creator who not only spun the galaxies into motion but knows me, loves me, and answers.
Being emotionally moved is not evidence of that being’s existence.
That being either exists or does not.
He is or He isn’t.
I am an artist and a number theorist; I can locate, explicate, and create beauty sufficient to emotionally move myself and others.
A passing feeling is a brushstroke or a scribbled line — fleeting, imperfect — and God, if He exists, would be the whole canvas, the underlying geometry, the theorem that holds even when you stop believing it.
Your emotional epiphany is no more evidence than anything else ephemeral and easily erased.
Don’t tell me to read C.S. Lewis.
I could, before the sun goes down tomorrow, write a master’s thesis on Lewis that would deserve honors in both theology and literature.
Suggesting Lewis to me is like telling someone with an easily answerable question to “just Google it.”
It doesn’t demonstrate wisdom; it demonstrates that you assume I’ve never left the kiddie pool.
Some of you have no idea what it means to grow up in a church basement school. It means, among other things, that they don’t give a rat’s ass what you learn as long as you’re learning the Bible. I could spell and pronounce—with full understanding—premillennial pre-tribulational rapture theology before I hit puberty, and I could exegete Pauline eschatology with dispensationalist hermeneutics before I could drive.
And here’s the kicker: Lewis himself was a proper heretic by the standards of many of the Christians who idolize him today.
He denied biblical inerrancy, flirted openly with universalism, and suggested that pagans might be saved through Christ without ever knowing His name.
If Lewis ran for office in the US, he would be considered waaaaaay too out there to make any Republican ballot. Well, any Republican ballot outside of New England.
And his most famous apologetic trick—the so-called “trilemma” of liar, lunatic, or Lord—isn’t even logically sound. Jesus could, even if quoted accurately, have simply been wrong.
People are wrong all the time without being liars or lunatics. President Trump, for instance, once declared that he had “done more for Christianity than anyone else.” It wasn’t true—but that false claim didn’t make him insane or deceitful; it just made him wrong.
And if the claim had been accurate, it still wouldn’t have made him divine.
For evangelicals who want to wield Lewis like a club, it’s almost slapstick: you’ve just handed me Exhibit A for my argument. That’s what makes it funny.
The recommendation is meant as a mic drop, but it’s really a pratfall.
Don’t tell me that God did what a human clearly did.
That was a theme in many of the emails — the story of how prayer led to a reconciliation, or a recovery, or a success after years of trying. But every single example was not just human, but overwhelmingly and obviously human.
It is human nature to desperately want to reconcile with your estranged children before you die. It would be far more indicative of divine intervention if you didn’t — if you died clinging stubbornly to spite. That’s the miracle, if there is one.
And if you spend forty years working at something, learning, failing, refining, getting better, and then one day you achieve it — to tack on “because then I prayed” as if that were the decisive factor is laughable.
The achievement was the sweat of forty years, not the murmur of forty seconds.
When I confessed that I had messed up badly with Josh, I braced myself for the moment he would tell me he didn’t want to be my friend anymore. Instead, he forgave me easily. That moment communicated to me that I was valuable, worthy of love, and actually loved, far more powerfully than the Christian story ever has.
The force of that forgiveness was precisely that it was a human choice. I knew he had the right to be angry, and I was prepared to accept that the choice of what came next was his. And if it was going to hurt, well, I had it coming.
That he chose love instead was what made it real.
When I act in a loving way toward someone else, especially when it costs me something, the meaning lies in the fact that I am a limited, flawed human being with finite resources, choosing to stretch myself on behalf of another.
That’s where the weight is — not in omnipotence dispensing grace without risk.
Or take the story of a child who got a terrible diagnosis, and the parents prayed. When the child recovers, what actually happened is that a team of nine specialists with a combined seventy-two years of education and two hundred forty-five years of experience (yes, I did the math) put their hands and minds to the task of saving her.
To give the credit to the prayer is to erase the work, the knowledge, the sacrifice — to pretend that the miracle arrived ex nihilo instead of through human beings dedicating their lives to the care of others.
That’s the common thread. The power in these stories doesn’t come from God intervening. It comes from people — frail, finite people — choosing to forgive, to reconcile, to labor, to heal.
It comes from the human. And that’s more moving than magic could ever be.
Don’t tell me that you made a rational assessment of the evidence.
Jesus himself said, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” Paul told his followers, “We walk by faith, not by sight.”
The entire tradition admits that the leap is not about logic but about faith. To claim otherwise is to argue against your own scriptures.
And even if you were serious about rational evaluation, natural selection provides an elegant, natural explanation for complexity and apparent design. We don’t need an omnipotent engineer to account for wings, eyes, or even the capacity for moral reasoning. The mechanisms of mutation and selection are sufficient.
Not one person who wrote to me about this attempted to weigh the claims of Zeus, or Krishna, or Allah with the same alleged rationality. They simply assumed those could be dismissed out of hand while Christianity alone demanded reverence.
That says a great deal about whether their minds were truly open — or already made up before the “evidence” was ever considered.
Calling it a “rational assessment” when you only ever tested one god is like bragging about passing an exam you wrote the questions for yourself.
Don’t tell me that I don’t understand the terms of my own question.
A surprising number of people wrote in to insist that my parents, or the pedophile I mentioned, couldn’t possibly have been “real” Christians. I think I deserve a world record for getting the most Christians in one day to casually toss sola scriptura out the window.
Because whatever they may wish were true, the text itself says otherwise:
“Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved.” (Acts 16:31)
“For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith…not by works, so that no one can boast.” (Ephesians 2:8–9)
That’s the formula. Faith in Christ alone is enough. My father, my mother, the pedophile — they all had it. I don’t. On the terms of their own book, they’re in, and I’m out.
The same goes for the rejection of hell as eternal conscious torment. Jesus was pretty fucking clear: “These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.” (Matthew 25:46).
There’s no escape clause.
No “Get Out of Hell Free” provision tucked in the fine print for victims of child abuse.
Their religion does in fact say that a pedophile rapist who sincerely claims Jesus makes it, and his victim, if she doesn’t, doesn’t.
That’s not me misunderstanding Christianity. That’s me reading it exactly as written.
If that sounds monstrous, well, the problem isn’t my reading comprehension.
If you believe your book is true, you’re a Protestant.
If you believe some authority knows what the book means, you’re Catholic or Orthodox.
If you believe you can tell me, better than St. Paul or Jesus, how to weasel an exception to God’s Word, I expect you to also offer me the kingdoms of the world.
Don’t tell me how much happier you are now that you believe.
Father hunger has been the defining experience of my life. It has shaped every relationship, every decision, every choice.
I’m hardly unique in that, though being blessed with a brilliant, effective psychodynamic therapist has meant I understand the dynamics better than most.
To suggest that I could simply choose belief in a heavenly Father waiting to embrace me, but stubbornly refuse, is not just presumptuous — it’s obscene.
That’s like telling a starving child whose bones are showing through their skin that the problem is her rebellious refusal to eat more birthday cake.
I know most of you mean well when you say it. And truly, I don’t doubt the sincerity of your joy.
But the casual cruelty of telling someone who has begged for a Father’s presence — begged out of deep emptiness, begged out of the raw wound of living, as a little kid, a life of active hatred for that little kid — that you’re “so happy now” because you’ve found yours, is genuinely unspeakable.
You’re not speaking into a vacuum when you say it. You’re speaking to someone who has lived decades with the ache of wanting that embrace, who has cried out for it and heard nothing, who has longed for it more than for breath.
To present your happiness as evidence, as if it were transferable, as if I had simply refused the gift — that’s not comfort; it’s cruelty.
Yes, born of obliviousness. But it’s still cruelty.
Because if belief really were a matter of choice, I would have chosen it in a heartbeat, years ago, back when I was small and hiding in the closet, desperate for an Abba who never came, hugging a folded blanket and begging Him to let me feel His arms around me if He loved me even a little bit.
And then, after a few years of silence, if He didn’t hate me.
And then, a few silent years after that, if He didn’t want me to kill myself.
As an adult, I tried desperately to believe.
For years I fought to bridge the gap with sheer effort, the way I’ve done in every other area of my life. I clawed my way out of the educational deficits of a basement school with nothing but stubborn hours of work — mastering subjects I was never taught, proving to myself that what was withheld could be reclaimed if I was willing to grind hard enough. (And I was.)
But a father’s love isn’t like algebra or analysis. It isn’t something you can make up for by logging the hours or outworking everyone else.
No matter how many books I read, no matter how much therapy I’ve done, no matter how much I’ve bled into my own growth, I can never, ever, ever work hard enough to give myself a father’s embrace. Or pride.
It is the one thing I can never work hard enough to achieve for myself.
I almost typed, “I still wish there was a God,” but I’m not even sure of that anymore.
What I wish is that the love implied in that word — Father — could ever be available to me.
That ache is not a deficit you can remediate. It’s a wound you carry.
This is a shaping — no longer totalizing, but still profoundly shaping — destiny that I neither chose nor deserved.
Whatever healing comes my way will not come from finally meeting that need, but only from finding — or building — something strong enough to quiet the ache of its absence.
Finally, I stopped bargaining, worked my way through the cycles of grief, and slowly — painfully, and with the help of a good therapist — reached acceptance.
And it’s from that place of acceptance — not bitterness, not rebellion — that I can offer you what Judge Mulready offered Charlie Young.
If you actually want to persuade someone like me, I can, like Judge Mulready, tell you where you should begin. That will be part two.
But this topic has a psychological price tag — and I’m a 5 a.m. riser who is up nearly three hours late finishing this — so part two will arrive when I’ve refilled my emotional gas tank. Hopefully before the weekend.