As our AV group watched Alpha Course 14 recently, one thing that went through my mind afterward was happy pagans. That’s a somewhat dated evangelical term from the 2010s describing people who are perfectly content without Christianity. The video kept hammering at how Christians’ “good news” would intrigue others, and how “little acts of kindness” impressed heathens like nothing else.
Today, let me show you why none of it will impress those happy, happy pagans.
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SITUATION REPORT: Evangelizing those happy, happy pagans
When Christians talk about happy pagans, they’re not talking about actual pagans in the sense of people who worship pagan gods. Rather, they mean non-Christians who are perfectly content in life without Christianity.
While updating some old posts’ links, I ran across mention of the phrase and realized I hadn’t heard it in a while. Since it’s an important idea for evangelicals, I want to show it to you.
One major reason why this idea is important is because happy pagans are nearly impervious to evangelism. Their worldview is the equivalent of iron chariots! Since most evangelism is based around ferreting out deeply felt needs in the target, a general state of satisfaction with life can stymie evangelists from the jump.
Today, I’ll show you who these happy pagans are, why their happiness is such a dealbreaker, and how Christians think they can be evangelized.
The beginning of the idea of happy pagans
Originally, as you might suspect, happy pagans were actual pagans. Missionaries described natives in foreign lands this way. It meant they were contented and difficult to persuade to convert.
A 1971 newsletter called The Fraternal might be the first major instance of the phrase happy pagans as applied to people who aren’t actually pagan. A pair of earnest missionaries referred to the people of Chelmsley Wood, England that way. They had a tough time persuading them they needed to revamp their entire worldview!
The phrase happy pagans gained greater currency in the 1990s. Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ (now called Cru), referred to himself that way before his conversion. From a 1995 news story:
Bill Bright says he was a “happy pagan” when he left Oklahoma in 1944 to go to California to seek the good life for himself and his wife, Vonette. But after a few years of financial success, first in manufacturing specialty foods and then in the oil business, he says his values changed when his mother’s prayers caught up with him and he became a Christian. [. . .]
“I was basically a happy pagan. Very materialistic. Very self-centered,” Bright said.
Leaving aside his mischaracterization of pagans, that’s what he means when he says “pagan” at all. Because nobody has ever once known an evangelical who was materialistic or self-centered.
In 1994, Christianity Today ran an interview with Ravi Zacharias in which he claimed to target his evangelism to the “happy pagan.”
Most evangelism is geared toward people in crisis. But how do we reach the countless people out there who sense no need for God? This caused me to want to study under the finest atheistic thinkers of our times so that I could respond with tenable and forceful arguments. I wanted to be an evangelist to the thinker—to the honest skeptic, to what I call the Happy Pagan.
He’s certainly not wrong. Most evangelism, indeed, targets people who feel a desperate need for something. But though the interview article is called “Reaching the Happy Pagans,” it doesn’t dwell even a little on exactly how one evangelizes them. The next year, Christianity Today ran another article about happy pagans. In it, Ravi Zacharias went into a bit more detail:
The happy pagan is wrapped up in the belief that this world and the success it affords are the greatest pursuits in life. He or she feels no need for anything transcendent. Life has been reduced to temporal pursuits disconnected from all the other disciplines necessary for life to be meaningfully engaged. Some are completely unreflective; they don’t think enough to know they have no right to be happy.
It’s quite a stunning admission, one that really makes Christianity look downright sinister. I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me that the man who imagines that humans have “no right to be happy” was also a secret sexual predator for decades. However, the actual question Zacharias is answering here is “Are ‘happy pagans’ as happy as they seem?” And that quote is Zacharias’ answer. He never actually answered the actual question.
(I really, truly do not understand how Christians don’t see this stuff and keep giving their money to evangelism hucksters. I guess antiprocess is a helluva drug.)
Later evolution of happy pagans
After the 1990s, the term happy pagans fell out of popularity. We only see it come up occasionally. In 2013, it pops up briefly in a discussion of the sheer horrors of insufficiently-evangelistic Christian counseling:
And the people that scare me to death are Christian psychologists who, as motivational psychologists, perhaps in their business, are able to provide happy pagans with a therapeutically joyous, happy life that doesn’t need God. I mean that is outrageous to think that Christian[s] in psychology can be so focused on their profession as psychologists that they’re actually enabling pagans to be happy, healthy, secure pagans.
A 2016 Luther Seminary student thesis, Preaching Effectively to the Unchurched, also draws upon the idea of happy pagans:
[T]hey are: (1) Religious (while not necessarily Christian most believe in some deity); (2) Open and searching for meaning; and (3) “Happy Pagans” (many are educated and have a very good life). [P. 34]
A Presbyterian News Service article from 2016 similarly quotes a big name in discipleship, Mike Breen, describing his parents as “happy pagans, normal non-Christians in England.”
And a 2021 Lifeway book, Apatheism, features a recommendation blurb from Tony Merida. He plaintively asks: “How do we reach happy pagans—those who are apathetic toward belief in God?”
Based on these sources’ treatment of the phrase, happy pagans are not Christians, yet they muddle along just fine without Christianity. They’re happy with life. There’s nothing they need that a god might provide.
Evangelists faced with happy pagans tend to default to a few different strategies. We’ll go through these each in turn.
Strat 1: Happy pagans aren’t really truly actually for realsies happy
They can try to reframe the targets’ lives as not being truly really for realsies happy. Ex-Christians are well familiar with this strategy. It’s simple gaslighting.
One Redditor summarizes this strategy:
[S]urveying the answers here, I’m pretty sure the answer is to break down someone’s sense that they’re [sic] life is going well so you can offer Jesus as a solution. To convince them that they’re broken, guilty, or purposeless so that Jesus can than [sic] fill the newly created void offering repair, forgiveness, and meaning.
Indeed, numerous sources online instruct aspiring evangelists to see happy pagans as secretly miserable. As a post from Starting With God tells us:
Though people might seem positive, happy…God tells us what is really going on. They are without hope and without God in the world. They are living without all that we experience in knowing God. Being able to learn from God. Know his love. Be guided by him. Able to go to him in prayer. Experience his peace as we rest in him.
On the official Billy Graham site, we get the same instruction:
Often, I’ve found, the hardest person to talk to about spiritual matters is the one who feels absolutely no need of God. [. . .] But this doesn’t mean a person with no apparent interest in God is living a full and satisfying life. In fact, the opposite is often the case. They get caught up in a mad scramble for happiness, or success, or approval, or pleasure, or any of a number of other things that consume them. [. . .]
The tragedy, however, is that eventually they will discover these things can’t give them lasting happiness.
And even Carey Nieuwhof, who generally styles himself as the nicer sort of evangelical, suggests this strategy of contempt for secular happiness:
Talk about success, but ask questions about its emptiness. Most successful people I know are always on a quest for more. Success promises, but never (quite) fully delivers. Speak to that. Ask questions like “do you ever wonder if there’s more?” Or “ever wonder what that gnawing desire is really all about?”
This cultural contempt for secular happiness also models a warning for the flocks themselves: If you leave our group, you won’t ever feel happiness again.
Unfortunately for the aspiring evangelists, this strategy backfires anyway. Even a writer for Desiring God in 2018 describes the contempt approach as “frustrating” and “rarely” effective. When the guy at Desiring God knows it’s dumb, that’s saying it’s incredibly dumb indeed.
Strat 2: Threatening the targets with Hell (or promising them Heaven)
For the second strategy, evangelists threaten or cajole their targets with descriptions of the Christian afterlife. Yes, we may be happy now, but we won’t be happy after we die and Jesus sets our ghosts on fire forever! And we won’t see our dead Christian relatives ever again!
This strategy backfires even harder. Way back when in 2014, I reviewed Shane Hayes’ apologetics book, The End of Unbelief. He’d recently made a splash in the skept-o-sphere with it. In it, he sought to persuade atheists that some kind of god existed, though gosh we don’t know exactly who yet, so it made more sense to believe in that god. Yes, it really was that bad. I went along fat and happy with my commentary till I got to his use of dead relatives as an evangelism tactic: If I didn’t convert, I’d never see my dead mother again! Did I not want to see her again? Then I needed to be Christian!
Oh, I exploded into profanity at that. Like Henry V put it so well, “I was not angry since I came to France until this instant.”
Hayes also suggested that his god might offer us divine help that we wouldn’t otherwise receive if we weren’t Christians, so (he said) it made sense to believe to get that possible help. It reminds me of “Kissing Hank’s Ass!” As you might guess, I didn’t like that much either. These are not Christians’ promises to give, just as they are not Christians’ threats to make. It’s painfully obvious they have nothing else in their toolbox when they even try it.
And yet they sure do, with more and more lurid descriptions of Hell with every passing year. Evangelism based on “I sure hope you’re right about Hell not existing” is the worst evangelism ever. If the happy pagan doesn’t believe in the Christian afterlife, it doesn’t work. And it’ll be obvious to see what the evangelist is trying to do.
Strat 3: “Joy-based apologetics” reframe targets’ happiness
The first two strategies were ones I’ve seen for years. When I was Christian, I even used them myself. But the third is one I hadn’t heard before. As we’ll see, it combines the first two strategies!
It emerged in that 2018 Desiring God post (relink): “Joy-based apologetics.” The author of that post, Randy Newman, is (or was; he’s dead now) a big proponent of the idea. One of his books, Bringing the Gospel Home, went on at length about how “joy-based apologetics” could successfully evangelize close friends and family members. Even the extremely-hardline evangelical site The Gospel Coalition liked it overall.
In this approach, aspiring evangelists suggest to their targets that yes, they’re happy now, that’s fine, that’s just lovely really, but don’t they want more of that feeling? Don’t they want the source of that feeling? In his 2018 post, Newman suggests finding common ground in loveliness like sunsets and examples of human kindness, then using those as a foot in the door to talk about his product:
At some point after these potential starting points, we can turn the conversation more specifically toward the gospel. There’s more to life than just temporal happiness. It’s not that temporal happiness is bad or sinful. (Well, some of it certainly is.) But these momentary pleasures are pointers, not ends. They can persuade us that God is good. Even better, he’s gracious, pouring blessings on people who don’t deserve it — people like you and me.
They can try to reframe the satisfaction in life that happy pagans feel as actually being totally Yahweh’s doing, and those happy pagans can be even happier if they convert:
We share our story and tell how God has brought us overarching, timeless happiness that adds meaning and fullness to many temporal happy experiences. Finding relief from our greatest source of unhappiness — our sin that separates us from God and messes up all sorts of aspects of life — we can find joy and happiness in even the smallest things. The pleasures of temporal life provide a bittersweet launching pad for conveying the gospel. Earthly happiness is great but fleeting. Earthly pleasure promises more, but then disappoints.
But someone can only find relief from the burden of sinfulness if one buys into sin as a concept. It sounds to this particular happy pagan like Christians are working themselves up into a lather over something that’s not even real—and trying desperately to manufacture a need that doesn’t naturally exist.
Happy pagans also find joy and happiness in even the smallest things. And yes, happiness is great but fleeting. That’s what makes it so wondrous. It’s great but fleeting in Christianity too, which any Christian already knows well. Happiness isn’t Christian or not-Christian. It’s part of the human situation itself.
And notably, I’ve never heard of Newman’s approach working. I’ve never heard of someone using “joy-based apologetics” to bring about the conversion of anyone, much less a family member. Newman claims to have successfully converted several family members, but I trust that story about as much as I’d trust an all-inclusive resort’s brochure. At best, it might alienate family members a bit less, so it’s got its uses.
But as evangelism, it’s a non-starter. Bill Bright, the one self-identified “happy pagan” in our sources who converted, says he did so because he and his wife “came to a place in their lives where they realized God’s way was better than their own.” So none of these approaches got used on him.
Happy pagans pose serious challenges to evangelists
In their way, happy pagans are a living middle finger raised to the Christian party line about Christian faith being the only way to achieve happiness and a sense of meaning in life. They’re not supposed to exist. They shouldn’t be happy. Nobody can possibly be happy without strong faith in Jesus!
And yet it moves. Here they are.
Christianity adds nothing to these targets’ lives that they need, so evangelists have a particularly rough time selling them on the humongous need for conversion. They tend to reject the idea of Heaven and Hell, as well, so they aren’t vulnerable to threats or promises along those lines. And nowadays, they’ve certainly experienced the wide range of skill Christians display in both amateur apologetics and evangelism.
The worst thing the flocks can see is a living contradiction to the party lines. Indeed, when I knew actual happy pagans in college, it baffled me that they seemed so completely okay without Christianity. Most of them were atheists, and some were actual pagans who worshiped pagan gods, but either way they didn’t seem to feel false joy or incomplete joy. And they laughed at any attempt to use the Christian afterlife as a selling point.
My beliefs, it turned out, needed everyone to play along or they didn’t seem as real. Without shared context, they looked exactly like they were: vain, evil, cruel, manipulative, nonsensical, contradictory, you name it. The more context got ripped away from my beliefs, the worse they looked.
Today’s evangelicals face these same challenges. They sell a product that people increasingly don’t want and don’t need. That’s got to be rough. But losing the shared context of “joy and satisfaction in life only come from Jesus” must be rougher still.
NEXT UP: Alpha Course #15 covers magical healing—sorta. We’ll see how Yahweh always heals upon request unless he doesn’t, except everything’s healing anyway so it’s, like, whatever. See you soon! <3
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