Over the years, I’ve heard my share of nonsensical and weird evangelism advice to Christians. Effectiveness stopped being a concern ages ago, replaced by just getting out there and trying to evangelize. But one bit of that advice stands out as the worst I’ve ever heard. It stands head and shoulders above the other candidates for the title, and so I need to show it to you today. I need us both to have seen it and to know it exists in this world. It’s that bad.
Today, I offer up a post by H.W. Crocker III in the ultra-hardline Crisis Magazine, humbly titled “The Secret to Evangelizing the Nones.”
(This post and its audio ‘cast first went live on Patreon on 9/29/2026. They’re both available there now. Please support my work—see the end of this writeup for options, and thank you for whatever you decide to do! From introduction: Cradle Catholics. And yes, Greek pagans who are Greek aren’t thrilled with non-Greek Greek pagans.)
SITUATION REPORT: ‘The Secret to Evangelizing the Nones’ turns out to be, seriously and for real, insulting people who reject your evangelism
This 2023 post has been making the rounds lately in skept-o-sphere circles: “The Secret to Evangelizing the Nones,” by H.W. Crocker III in Crisis Magazine. In it, he outlines his startling new strategy for converting tons of adults to his adopted flavor of hardline Catholicism: Insult them if they refuse. He writes (emphases from original sources):
Too often I hear: “Thank you, sir, but I’ll cast my lot with the satanic forces of darkness—they’re not so bad.” To which I reply, “Then God go with you—you idiot.”
“You idiot” is crucial to that exchange. It is, I believe, one of the most useful but neglected phrases in any effective evangelical strategy. [. . .] [B]efore we can reach the adult nones with the good, the beautiful, and the true, we need to shake them out of their willed imbecility. [. . .] You want to win the nones? Treat ’em rough.
To get to this conclusion, he cites a couple of sources we’ll examine today. Neither source has anything whatsoever to do with insulting adults for rejecting evangelism.
I’m mind-blown. Dude really and truly wrote that acting like a jackass to people refusing his sales pitches is the perfect way to make sales. When I first read his post, I checked to make sure Crisis Magazine isn’t some satirical site like The Onion, but it does seem to be on the level. It’s a typical hardline Catholic site full of culture-war sneering and rhetoric.
It’s also not surprising that the post took time to reach the outer world. It largely vanished on impact, with only one person even bothering to respond to it. As we’ll see, that fact runs completely to Crocker’s—and that site’s—benefit. The fewer people seeing this post, the better for both of ’em.
Today, though, I’ll show you his post so we can marvel together that a Christian actually wrote this and then a Christian site actually published it. It’s seriously that disastrously bad.
Everyone, meet H.W. Crocker III
H.W. Crocker III is what folks today call a “tradcath,” though some folks don’t find that movement very traditional at all. Tradcaths hate regular Catholicism and embrace a particularly weird authoritarian version of it. If the current Pope isn’t “God’s Rottweiler,” as people nicknamed tradcaths’ beloved Pope Benedict, then they rally and agitate against him. Some, like the abusive tradcath SSPX offshoot recently flirting with schism, even deliberately flout the Pope’s authority.
Also like every tradcath I’ve ever encountered, Crocker is a convert. That means he didn’t live Catholicism growing up in a family and community immersed in its rituals and daily life. So naturally, he focuses far more on its propaganda, history, lore, and dogma. A quick glance at his author bio page at Crisis Magazine verifies that focus: His most recent (May 2026) post there criticizes post-Vatican II leadership. Vatican II was a set of changes to Catholic rituals that tradcaths really hate. They think these changes explain why Catholicism has “shed members like a mangy dog sheds fur,” to use his phrasing.
Somehow, tradcath converts manage to ignore the most important part of being Catholic: Obedience to the hierarchy, including the Pope. Obedience to the amassed wisdom of past Catholic leaders. Instead, they treat their adopted faith like it’s just advanced evangelicalism with more smells-n-bells. They treat Catholicism’s entrenched, centuries-old network of bishops, cardinals, and popes like the local down-home pastor’s crony network and their own personal revelation as more binding than the Magisterium. To someone like me, raised Catholic in an intensely Catholic family, their disobedience is completely breathtaking.
And I haven’t even gotten to how bizarre I think it is that anyone converts to a faith full of authority figures who allowed a child-rape crisis to extend for centuries all over the world. If a Catholic ever tried to evangelize me, the ongoing nature of and dishonesty of Catholic response to that crisis would be the first thing out of my mouth. All that glorious Catholic triumph, all that history and dogma that Crocker loves, it comes at the expense of almost two millennia of broken, abused, kidnapped, sometimes even murdered children. And yet it captured the heart of the guy who insults people who don’t find Catholicism compelling.
I wonder how he’d like my theory of why Christianity is in decline. Maybe he’d love it—his writing has, after all, a distinct authoritarian whiff of wishing Catholicism could regain its lost temporal power in America. That opening scene in Spotlight (2015) happened regularly across America for a reason.
How Crocker arrives at his startling evangelism suggestion
In his 2023 post we’re looking at today (relink), Crocker suggests two sources for his suggestion of insulting anyone who turns down his evangelism.
First, he cites a recent Lyman Stone report, writing of it:
The risk is less that a young person will lose his faith in college than that he lost his faith before he was fifteen, when he accepted that social media, online computer games, pop culture, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe constituted all the philosophy he needed; religion was irrelevant.
We’re going to ignore the massive mischaracterizations there of both disaffiliation and Stone’s study. In that study, “Secularization Begins at Home,” Stone does indeed draw upon studies and surveys to conclude that children start thinking religion is irrelevant to them early on, with their parents none the wiser. He suggests that parents do more to insulate their children from outside influences and deliberately, heavily indoctrinate them starting in earliest childhood.
Crocker does not mention how he was raised, but one presumes it wasn’t Catholic. Stone doesn’t talk about adult converts, either, which Crocker is trying to get. Nor does Stone suggest anywhere that insulting adults will undo a childhood of increasing secularity.
In addition, Crocker cites Robert Barron, a Catholic bishop. Barron’s name has come up before around here, in 2017 and then 2022, both times with derision. But he’s not quite tradcath, having carefully skirted around the schismatics’ camp. Barron’s quote in Crocker’s post concerns how Catholic leaders have “dumbed down the faith for way too long.” Barron thinks that Catholic children check out of their faith because they haven’t been indoctrinated well enough into the deep, “vibrant, smart, beautiful Catholicism that people find compelling.”
To me, a proper synthesis of these two sources would look like earlier and deeper childhood indoctrination. Even that doesn’t pass the smell test, since lots of well-indoctrinated, fervent Catholic kids leave Catholicism later (like I did). It’s doubtful that a young child could even understand some of the deeper Catholic ideas anyway. But it’d be the proper synthesis.
Somehow, Crocker synthesizes these two sources to come up with insulting adults who reject his evangelism and making sure they know he holds them in utter contempt. His conclusion and his sources are not on speaking terms with each other. That conclusion sure isn’t what Catholic leaders usually suggest, in terms of evangelism approaches. Even Pope John Paul II didn’t say anything like that.
How Crocker’s evangelism advice is bad salesmanship
In marketing, insulting people who don’t use the brand can backfire dramatically. Some sites, like Neuromarketing, offer guidelines from times that it’s worked well: Lighthearted jabs at unfair accusations and responses that don’t question other people’s morality—or minimize fair criticisms. Other than that, marketing advice abounds about not insulting customers, ever, not even the ones who reject the project.
There is one very particular exception to that rule, however. Luxury brands’ salespeople can be rude and abrasive. They actually can make better sales that way. It’s likely a gatekeeping thing. But this trick doesn’t work with anything but high-end luxury sales. Even then, good service is still the best way to gain and retain customers. For regular brands, rudeness is the kiss of death to sales.
So even if Crocker is drawing upon this effect for his evangelism strategy, he’s still messing it up. Nobody views Catholicism as a high-end luxury product that any prestigious person hungers to have. His aggression waves a red flag to any sensible religion shopper, just as it does in any other marketplace. That’s likely why the US Army’s marketing slogan is “Be all you can be,” not “We will think you are a raging [insert slur] if you don’t join up.”
For evangelism, the usual salesmanship tips apply upon rejection: Politeness, positivity, and cheerful invitations to return if anything changes. There’s skill involved in responding to rejection. Crocker’s advice ain’t it. It’s the polar opposite of it.
And I get that evangelism-minded Christians get very tetchy about any comparison of their product, which is active membership in one of their own churches, with other marketed products. I’m genuinely sorry to step on their last nerve there. That doesn’t change the fact that evangelism is, in fact, marketing and salesmanship of a product nobody actually wants. If evangelists understood that point and responded accordingly, they’d probably score a lot more sales.
Insult-oriented evangelism is more like incel behavior
I’m hardly the first or only person to notice that any hardline Christian’s evangelism looks more like high-pressure sales tactics. Nor am I the first to notice such evangelists’ similarity to pickup artist behavior. Libby Anne wrote about it almost ten years ago. But Crocker moves past pickup artist tricks and hard sales into full incel behavior upon rejection.
The word “incel” stands for “involuntarily celibate.” It means men who are very upset and angry about not getting laid or finding mates. They blame women for their problem, rather than themselves. And all their negative emotions pour out upon women who reject them—they’re famous for it. The viral “Bye Felipe” Instagram account catalogues the post-rejection abuse women face from these entitled men.
Incels do this to punish women as a whole for all of the rejections they’ve ever faced, not just the particular woman who rejected them right then. That’s why their response is so disproportional. They clearly don’t expect a woman treated this way to turn around and decide to date or have sex with them. Instead, they’ve decided at some level that a temporary ego repair is worth more to them than any future success with women.
That’s really what Crocker’s suggestion feels like. He says it will sting targets into reconsidering Catholicism. But that’s extremely unlikely. His product just isn’t valuable enough to provoke a high-end luxury response from religious consumers. Instead, it’s far more likely to alienate his targets further, just as incels’ abuse does.
And I think he knows that, because he doesn’t even try to suggest that his approach has ever worked on anybody, ever, in the entire history of his using it.
In his crowd, you absolutely, positively can count on one thing above all:
If a salesperson doesn’t explicitly describe sales success, it’s because there isn’t any to report.
Perhaps the reason he likes his advice anyway is simpler than we imagine.
The Convert’s Mirror Mistake: The mockery hardline Christians fear most, weaponized in the stupidest way possible
A Creationist leader will lean hard on Creationism and literalism in general as retention tactics. Benedict Option pushers and Shepherding Movement/discipleship leaders will focus on ultra-hardline Christian indoctrination as the solution to keeping kids Christian for life. Apologists of all stripes sell apologetics training as the surefire way to retain faith and gain converts. When you look at their conversion testimonies, you won’t often find their own product types being what convinced them.
For evangelists that aren’t big leaders, though, like Crocker, they tend to focus on whatever worked on them—or would have. That’s why my ears prick up like they do when I encounter someone suggesting something that immediately triggers my impulse to murmur: oh no honey, what is you doing. It’s like seeing a psyche parading around in the nude.
For example, Crocker writes:
But what they really need to fear is our mockery, our derision of their juvenile prejudices, our contempt for their puerility. [. . .] Christian humility, charity, and generosity will not move them.
Seeing that, I immediately wonder how much Crocker fears and hates mockery. Probably a lot, if he thinks it’d sting his targets so much. And I wonder how much he disdains humility, charity, and generosity? Sounds like quite a lot too, if he views the display of these qualities as a way to “move” evangelism targets. And I doubt that people moved to join a religion by derision and contempt are going to be able to pivot to those ideals later. You can’t hate people into love.
To be sure, nothing Crocker has ever written has given me any kind of sense of his overall embodiment of those ideals anyway.
Instead, it sounds like he himself is extremely vulnerable to mockery, derision, and contempt. It also sounds like he views his brand of Catholicism as a luxury brand—and he is angry that others don’t see it that way. To be viewed as irrelevant or lacking by others, to be known for spending too much on a product nobody else wants, that all sounds like his own personal nightmare.
He’s made his private issues into everyone else’s problem, just like incels do. He’s taken others’ rejection personally as a statement about himself, just like the very worst salespeople do. And in the end, he’s doing his part to make sure Catholicism continues to decline in membership and cultural relevance.
Really, we ought to send him a thank-you note.
NEXT UP: We look back at Christian predictions from the early-mid 2010s about how their decline would affect them. See you soon! <3
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