A 2022 seminary article about a pastor’s evangelism exhortation got me thinking about how evangelicals relate to other evangelicals who don’t believe what they do. More specifically, I wondered how feasible his exhortation is nowadays. The pastor, Dean Inserra, wanted his audience of seminary students to concentrate their evangelism on the people he viewed as fake Christians: Christians whose religious opinions differed from his own and who weren’t as gung-ho as he thought Christians should be.
Today, let’s explore why people who are already Christians seem so singularly resistant to evangelicals’ evangelism. And along the way, let me show you just how resistant they’ve always been and who that pastor’s really talking about!
(This post first went live on Patreon on 11/22/2024. Its audio ‘cast lives there too and is available now! From introduction: The failure of recent games; Dustborn’s player count and Restaurant Empire II’s; BlackRock investment disclosures.)
A brief biography of Captain Cassidy
I’m in my mid-50s. I first converted to the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) at around 16. I didn’t stay long, though. The sheer hypocrisy of my church’s congregation and the money-grubbing of its leaders quickly raised enough red flags that even I couldn’t miss them. Not long afterward, I joined a United Pentecostal (UPCI) church. However, I drifted out of it after a Rapture prediction didn’t pan out. On my 17th birthday, I was a churchless believer.
When I was 17-and-a-half, my then-boyfriend (later husband, ugh) Biff joined the same Pentecostal church. After some serious drama, I rejoined it alongside him. From there, I was Pentecostal until my mid-20s. At that point, I deconverted entirely. Hooboy, that was quite a rough night, but I recovered over time. For about 15 years, I bounced around religion-wise. I became a Greek reconstructionist pagan (which adherents often call Hellenism) and practiced some Zen Buddhism. Finally, just over 10 years ago, I gradually settled into a happy existence as a None-of-the-Above.
I qualify as an atheist because I lack god-beliefs of any kind. That said, I eschew all religious labels—yes, even ones meaning no religion at all—because they got me into so much trouble when I held them. Consider me like a recovering alcoholic, just with religion. The only way for me to stay out of trouble with religious labels is to refuse to use any of them. I’m a None-of-the-Above. That’s all I want to call myself, and it’s all I have called myself for some years now. I know a lot of people obsess about them, but it’s okay not to want labels. It really is.
Before now, I’ve mentioned getting into trouble with religious labels.
Now I’ll share what the trouble was, and why it was such a mistake to hand someone like me at 17 a strong, definitive religious label. Because oh wow, it truly was a terrible, grievous mistake.
Let’s Play: Teen Cas Evangelizing Everyone in Sight (and Failing Miserably)
My evangelism efforts didn’t really begin until I converted to Pentecostalism. I wasn’t a Southern Baptist for long enough to really learn how to recruit anybody. But my first boyfriend got a big taste of what I believed then, and I immediately got the sense that he thought it was silly and irrelevant. That bothered me.
I still dragged him to a Christian pop concert by rising star Amy Grant. We broke up a few days later. Looking back, I’m sure these two events were related.
I converted to Pentecostalism before the end of that school year. At that point, it was on. I fully realized that every single person in my family and every person dear to me was going to Hell. After all, no TRUE CHRISTIANS™ were in their lives except me. They were unlikely to hear the gospel—Christianese for do what I say or Yahweh will set your ghost on fire forever after you die—from anybody but me. So I was all that stood between them and a horrific afterlife.
I had to save them.
Sometimes, a sneering evangelical will assert that I was never supposed to feel responsible for other people’s souls. For whatever it’s worth, I agree. That was an inappropriate burden for such young shoulders. But for every one of them, I can point to dozens of others in my actual life who said otherwise. Even today, we see evangelicals saying they feel the same kind of responsibility I did long ago. They’re getting that idea from somewhere, and it is not being dispelled by their religious leaders.
My desperation to save my loved ones from Hell set in motion a long period of absolutely frantic evangelism that resulted in zero conversions. Instead, I harvested a lot of frazzled nerves on everyone’s part and the loss of quite a lot of social capital. I’m sure my mom breathed a sigh of relief when I left Pentecostalism later that fall. And braced herself when I rejoined it the next summer.
My evangelism sold a product nobody wanted or needed
It freaked me out that something as drastic as the Rapture and Endtimes didn’t concern any of my loved ones in the least. Indeed, they didn’t care. They didn’t even believe these events were coming at all. Not a single one of my evangelism attempts worked out like my religious leaders said they would.
It’s worth noting that until I went to college, every person I knew was Christian already—just not Pentecostal. In college, I would only meet more people who didn’t believe a thing I said about Jesus, demons, the Endtimes, you name it. They cared even less, because they weren’t Christian at all.
I was hardly the only Christian who’s ever found herself in that situation. Reams of evangelical webpages share the same concern for unbelieving family members and friends.
Even evangelicals back then thought my extremist beliefs were kinda loony, because at the time they hadn’t yet fused with fundamentalists. They didn’t yet buy into that fundamentalist worldview at all. Eventually, they’d lap fundamentalists and then some. My onetime-extremist beliefs are now boilerplate evangelical fare—except, of course, that today’s fundagelicals are still buying into that corrupted, pagan-flavored Trinitarian heresy. We argued about our doctrines so, so much.
Out of all of that effort, though, I didn’t score a single sale. I’m certain that I only pushed my evangelism targets further away from conversion.
Atheists aren’t the hardest targets for evangelism, just the most appealing to evangelicals
The most difficult targets for evangelism are not atheists. They’re just the most appealing to evangelism-minded fundagelicals. Fed to bursting on rich, frothy tales of persecution and martyrbation, that lot tends to seek out flashy confrontations with their tribe’s biggest enemies.
Even in college, I noticed that atheists tended to stick out as prize quarry for evangelism. But they were a tiny minority of students on campus. We were surrounded by people who were already Christian, but everyone I knew tended to focus on atheists and other small minority groups—like Biff’s fascination with Dianic separatist lesbians.
For most evangelicals, though, they’ll find such folks a minority. They’ll be surrounded by very different people. As evangelical pastor Dean Inserra put it in 2022:
In closing, Inserra alerted the assembly not to be more passionate about convincing “Christians” they are saved than making sure they are saved. “Do not shrink evangelism down to simply skeptics, and strangers, and people of other religions. Realize there is a whole vast majority of unsaved ‘Christians’ all around us.”
Don’t you just love his scare quotes around “Christian” there! There’s nothing fundagelicals like better than gatekeeping that entire label away from other Christians who don’t believe exactly what they do. Jesus is so lucky to have these TRUE CHRISTIANS™!
But if today’s fundagelicals are anything like how I was back in college, they will very quickly realize that they have no real way to persuade those fakey-fake “unsaved ‘Christians'” that they’re wrong. They may easily succeed in winning over some Christians, but others will certainly remain completely out of reach.
Those fakey-fake fake Christians already have a product they think is more than sufficient for their needs. But Dean Inserra knows what they really need. Yep, not creepy at all, is it?
Why the evangelism of Christians can be both extremely easy and extremely difficult
In the past, I’ve noted that most converts to evangelicalism come from other flavors of Christianity—just as I did. Even when the convert pretends to have that oh-so-trendy past background in evil ickie atheism, we find out they grew up in a Christian home and attended church regularly with their parents until they hit college or something. So really, they aren’t new converts at all. They’re just poached sheep.
It can be very easy to poach them, too. I’ve read any number of bitter blog posts about how much evangelicals in tiny churches haaaaaaaaaate megachurches. I can see why. When one arrives in the area, its leaders scoop up all the local sheep and lead them, Pied Piper-like, to a Disneyland/Wal-Mart magical kind of church full of programs, perks, benefits, a parking garage, and a pro-level worship band.
I wouldn’t be in the least surprised to discover some megachurch out there has a full indoor laser-tag arena or bumper cars or an 80s-style video-game arcade. Around the time I left it, that SBC megachurch I first joined at 16 was planning to build a roller-skating rink across the street for its massive youth group. They’ll do whatever they can to recruit people!
(By the way, I asked an AI to make me a picture of this process. It got weird with the angels I specified, but I liked the rest of it. I think I write good prompts:)
In that sense, it’s not hard at all to evangelize other Christians. All they need to hear is a list of what they get for joining, and they’re there.
Evangelizing other Christians may also be easier because if the evangelist’s church isn’t too different from the target’s existing belief system, they may join it to be closer to their friends there, or because it’s closer, or it’s near some post-church spot they like for lunch. Sometimes, poaching works for the most pedestrian and least Jesusy of reasons.
Past those reasons, if the targets are like I was as a teenager, they might respond readily to claims of greater Jesus-osity or a closer adherence to the Bible. Evangelizing Catholics, for example, might work on Catholics who aren’t overly familiar with their faith’s theology—like me as a teen. (We’ll be talking more about that exact situation next time.)
Another route to success involves targeting people who respond strongly to threats of Hell. A surprising number of people are just terrified of Hell, so they might accept a pitch using more gruesome threats than whatever their current flavor uses—or by presenting the targets with an unfamiliar new threat, like missing the Rapture somehow.
Once you get down to it, every evangelism strategy hinges on threats. The lovey-dovey stuff makes an acceptable opening move, but it doesn’t make evangelicals’ product look compelling in the least.
There’s a damned good reason why Inserra and other evangelical leaders hammer so hard at those threats:
They work better than anything else in an evangelist’s toolbox.
The un-evangelizable
There are a couple of reasons why evangelizing other Christians fails, of course.
First and foremost, those pedestrian reasons I mentioned are simply absent.
Once we get past that hurdle, things get much thornier. For targets who understand their faith’s core theology and doctrinal positions, evangelism based on claims of superior Jesusing will backfire. Oh, it will backfire hard. Knowledgeable Christians might even see evangelism attempts as extremely offensive.
And yes, they’ll be able to bat it aside easily. Every flavor of Christianity can easily defend its doctrinal stances against others:
Want to blow molinistic excuses for the problem of evil out of the water? Calvinists have already done the work. Want to undercut Sola Scriptura? Catholics have that covered. Want to illustrate the absurdity of the Trinity? Ask those Jehovah’s Witnesses that come to your door next Saturday. Want to show how evolutionary theory isn’t compatible with Christianity? Look no further than Answers in Genesis. What do all of these groups have in common? They all use the Bible to knock down each other’s theological systems. [. . .] [T]the Bible can be an effective weapon against nearly every form of Christianity.
As that post points out, there’s no need for anyone to reinvent the wheel in rejecting anything one Christian asserts. All someone needs to do is check out what competing flavors’ theologians and apologists have already written about it. Eventually, Christians’ combined efforts blow the entire Bible out of the water.
On the night I converted to evangelicalism, had I talked over that Southern Baptist preacher’s claims with any Catholic priest, I’d have gotten answers that probably would have satisfied me—at the time at least. My intense fears of missing the Rapture and going to Hell might have been calmed, too. Catholic apologetics arguments are considerably more robust than those of evangelicals. On Southern Baptists’ home turf, though, I couldn’t.
The bigger problem here, though, is simply evangelical tribalism.
Evangelical tribalism: Their own worst problem—but perhaps their only strength
When I use terms like “tribalistic,” I mean them in the sociological sense only. Indeed, evangelicals are super-cali-tribalistic-expi-ali-docious. And it is really hard for them to hide their essential, tribe-defining disdain for all other flavors of Christianity.
They were always that way, but I think it’s gotten worse in the past couple decades. So tribalistic evangelists will likely only bag toxic people who need to feel superior to others. It shouldn’t be surprising that tribalistic people respond to tribalistic recruitment techniques. There appear to be a disturbing number of those folks, but anyone else will be offended.
As we’ve discussed for years, the majority of the pew-warmers refuse to evangelize. If a natural-feeling opening for a sales pitch presents itself, they might. But they won’t go out of their way to create those openings. They know how disastrously that tends to go.
So finding good targets for evangelism can be a serious problem for them because they have so few targets at all. Their random encounters table is largely empty.
The evangelical bubble inhibits evangelism
Remember, back when I was young everyone I knew was already Christian. In college, I met people who weren’t Christian, but even the Dianic separatist lesbians generally knew Christianity’s major indoctrination points. Most people I met had even been Christian earlier in life.
Things are very different nowadays. It’s much harder for evangelicals to maintain a fully-insulated bubble around their life that excludes heathens.
But they still manage. In recent years, evangelicals’ own self-reports of their friendships have changed very little (see this 2018 Barna study compared to this 2024 Lifeway one). About 2/3 of them claim to have friends of different religions. But I suspect evangelicals fib about this like they do about church attendance.
When I see actual evangelicals in the wild, or see them interacting with social media, I don’t see any heathen buddies of theirs hanging out or inviting them over to watch ThunderCats. I see a lot more horror stories about getting ghosted by evangelicals than happy ones about them maintaining close connections even in cases like deconversion and evangelism rejection. Evangelicals just don’t make or keep close friendships with heathens. They’re notorious for it. (I think Zoomer and Alpha evangelicals might have more varied friends, but older ones sure don’t.)
So most of the people evangelicals engage with day-to-day are going to be other evangelicals. And that’s who they will evangelize, simply out of convenience—just as my college crowd did.
Dean Inserra may be encouraging the fine SBC tradition of enforcing tribalistic animosity toward those who aren’t in lockstep
Let’s get back to Dean Inserra’s 2022 description (relink) of the fakey-fake fakers he thinks SBC-lings should evangelize:
“Regular people feel their good deeds outweigh their bad deeds and compare themselves to others around them.” He emphasized that many people believe that being a good person, believing in God, going to church, and praying occasionally equates to Christianity.
That describes a large number of evangelicals. It also describes many evangelicals who inhabit the evangelical bubble, and thus will be available for evangelism.
The very Calvinist/Reformed site Ligonier conducts a regular survey of Americans and evangelicals called “The State of Theology.” Their most recent report paints quite a damning and fractured picture of evangelicals. Here’s some of the major points that are relevant to Inserra’s assertion above:
- Does Yahweh protect those of other religions from Hell? 58% of evangelicals think so!
- Was Jesus maybe just a great teacher, not a god/part of Yahweh? 44% of evangelicals think that!
- 18% of evangelicals think the Holy Spirit can order them to do something the Bible explicitly forbids (which we already saw with their rush to judge others, so don’t be surprised).
- 19% further think nonmarital sex is fine.
- 55% of evangelicals think everyone sins, but most people are good by nature.
- 53% of evangelicals disagree about someone deserving eternal torture in Hell for even one tiny little sin. (In fact, only 40% agreed with that idea. Oh my! Ligonier’s survey counters must have fainted dead away at that.)
- 56% of evangelicals think private or family prayer is a fine substitute for attending church.
- Are Christians even obligated to join a church? 44% of evangelicals don’t think so!
- 38% of evangelicals don’t even think religious belief is based on objective truth, but is more a reflection of one’s personal opinions.
Go ahead. Tell me that survey isn’t painting a picture of exactly who Inserra is talking about. The out-of-step evangelicals these numbers reveal are his outgroup: the group most like his own, just differing in small ways. That’s what drives the ingroup craziest, and what they must trample.
Those are Dean Inserra’s fake Christians. Not just Catholics or Lutherans or whatever, but the real outgroup: Evangelicals who don’t buy into the exact same beliefs Inserra does.
Either way, teaching proto-pastors to look down on fake Christians is a winning strategy for evangelical leaders
For Inserra’s 2022 audience, a bunch of young hardliners about to go be pastors, I bet his word pictures both dismayed and energized them. After all, these fakers are the people most likely to join an SBC church: Those who already basically believe what SBC pastors preach, or who can be readily convinced that SBC-style Jesusing is far superior to whatever they’re doing now.
What’s bizarre is that Inserra is implicitly telling these proto-pastors to look down on these evangelicals. They are fakers. They’re not TRUE CHRISTIANS™. They must be brought to heel.
Oh yeah. I’m betting this is part of Dean Inserra’s strategy to “love Tallahassee to Christ.” Evangelicals redefined love many years ago. The word hasn’t recovered its true meaning yet in their parlance. It probably never will. Their definition is only a pale imitation of the explosion of goodwill and compassion that love brings to all those who feel it.
And Inserra’s audience probably accepted his suggestions. Why not? They desperately need the money and butts in pews (BIPs) that those inferior fakers represent. And they know only the redefined, controlling, utterly fake love their leaders teach.
Whatever the outcome of their evangelism attempts, those poseur sheep can never be allowed to feel legitimate until they are fully dancing to their pastors’ tune.
Heck, maybe not even then.
NEXT UP: How to evangelize people who are already Christians. Well, sort of. See you soon! <3
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