Last time we met up, I showed you an evangelical who very solidly considered faith and belief as choices people can decide to make. In the end, that evangelical decided that he’d choose faith and belief. As reasoning, he presented a strawman version of life without Christianity. After considering this terrifying potential future, he confidently tells us that he has chosen to believe in Christianity’s claims. This, he further tells us, is a ‘no-brainer’ of a choice.
I find myself intrigued yet again by this presentation of faith and belief as choices. Anyone who’s actually deconverted could tell evangelicals that these aren’t choices at all. There’s not a way to decide to believe in anything in that same way that we decide to visit a particular shop today or tomorrow or never again. But let’s dive deeper into this common evangelical claim. Let’s see how they treat this choice, and why their advice can’t work here any more than it can work anywhere else in the human situation.
(This post first appeared on Patreon on 1/2/2024. Its audio ‘cast is there too!)
The sinister motivation for treating faith and belief as a choice
That one evangelical we met last week never had any serious doubts about his beliefs. If he ever had, he’d already know that there’s nothing voluntary about beliefs of any kind. No, he’s just so frightened of this common evangelical strawman that he’s never allowed his thoughts to stray far from the evangelical party line. Never having strayed too close to his doubts, he can convince himself that yes indeedy, he has made his choice to believe.
There’s a sinister reason for evangelicals’ decision to uphold faith and beliefs as choices.
Officially, they believe that rejecting their religious claims will send someone to Hell. A ghost’s final destination depends entirely on how they believed in life. If they held the right beliefs, then they’re safe. If not, then no matter how wonderfully kind and good they might have been, they face torture forever in Hell. Well, sorta. Most evangelicals cut some slack for someone who simply never ever heard about the so-called “good news,” or who lived before Jesus’ lifetime.
If people can’t possibly help believing or disbelieving Christians’ claims, then it’s not really fair for their god to send those people’s ghosts to eternal and purely vengeance and punishment-based torture after they die, now is it? That’s got to be the epitome of unfairness and injustice!
But if belief and disbelief are just choices people make, like they decide what cereal to buy or what pet to own or what clothes to wear, then suddenly they can be held responsible for those choices. Suddenly, it sounds much more fair to Christians that their god will eternally torture the ghosts of those who rightly rejected Christianity for its complete lack of evidence in their few decades of life.
Whoops, billions of people seem to have picked the wrong brand of religion! Immutable god of love and justice, everyone! Let’s give him a hand! Unfortunately, he’ll be here all week.
It all falls apart if belief isn’t a choice
I can tell you truly, though: There’s no way on Earth I could ever believe again in any Christian claim. I know too much about the religion. More than that, I know too much about how to assess claims. By now, I can spot logical fallacies and emotional manipulation a mile away. I can also spot threats instantly, because I speak Christianese fluently and understand how evangelicals deploy threats of Hell to different target audiences.
So I can no more believe that a magical god-man named Jesus exists than I could believe that the continent of Africa is located in the bread aisle of my local supermarket or that pixies inhabit my garden. Hell scares me about as much as the idea of being trampled by Arnie the Big Invisible Pink Unicorn. Miracle claims and testimonies impress me about as much as claims about Bigfoot, and for the same reasons.
As for the historicity claims, I know for 100% certainty that not a single writer from Rome or Judea who lived between 1-40CE wrote a single word that’s survived about Jesus or his followers. Absolutely no other evidence or records from those crucial years exists to corroborate a single thing Christians say about him, his apostles, or the earliest Christians. I know how the Bible got written and why it cannot possibly be a divinely-inspired book, much less a divinely-(ghost)written one.
And perhaps most of all, I can see from Christians’ own behavior that their relationship and behavioral rules and paradigms, even stripped of false religious claims, simply don’t produce the earthly results claimed.
After we take away all of that knowledge, Christians can offer nothing else to spark belief. So I can’t help not believing.
The only recourse for Hell-believers is for them to decide that my lack of belief is my own fault somehow. That way, they can blame me and not their evil, sadistic god for my supposed fate.
However, this false belief has an interesting fold.
If belief is really a choice, then there’s another way to Heaven for poor widdle heathens like me.
When pretending to believe is just as good as actual belief
The very best Christians could get out of me is a pretense of belief. That’d involve attending church, tithing, studying the Bible as they do with their Jesus goggles firmly in place, following their various behavioral rules, and in all other ways making them think I believed just as fervently as a real believer.
Interestingly, that strategy appears to be A-OK with evangelicals. It is a legit path to Heaven.
You’d think that after a solid near-decade of griping about “cultural Christians” and other such ickie fakers (archive), they’d vehemently reject the idea of someone pretending to believe. But it’s totally okay to do that in this particular situation. (Reminder that they also hate subjective morality despite being its primary propagators.)
So as long as heathens say they want to believe, then they can pretend all they like and go through the motions of Jesusing. To bolster this idea, evangelicals refer to Bible verses like Mark 9:24. This verse comes after a short conversation Jesus has with the father of a boy who appears to be possessed by demons:
Jesus asked the boy’s father, “How long has this been with him?”
“From childhood,” he said. “It [the demon] often throws him into the fire or into the water, trying to kill him. But if You can do anything, have compassion on us and help us.”
“If You can?” echoed Jesus. “All things are possible to him who believes!”
Immediately the boy’s father cried out, “I do believe; help my unbelief!” When Jesus saw that a crowd had come running, He rebuked the unclean spirit.
(And yes, that very last bit, from v25, is one of the reasons why I suspect that the Gospel writers drew the character of Jesus from the high number of hucksters and apocalyptic prophets floating around Jerusalem just a few decades earlier. V25 really stands out. It’s a contradiction to the “good guy Jesus” image that most Christians carry around in their heads. It makes Jesus look exactly like the conjob his inspirations were.)
The possessed boy’s father has no real reason to believe Jesus is who he claims to be. However, he is willing to pretend if it means his son gets the help he needs. He is motivated, to say the least, to at least act like he believes.
That story, of course, is mythic in nature. The boy was far more likely to have been epileptic than possessed. But evangelicals consider it to be a thing that really happened. Therefore, that boy’s father offers them an acceptable suggestion to make to real-world heathens motivated in similar ways to access the benefits of Christian belief.
Almost always, evangelicals suggest this pretense in hopes that the pretender will somehow catch the Jesus bug again. Generally speaking, though, if going through the motions the first time on the Jesus carousel wasn’t enough to maintain faith, doing more of that stuff but harder isn’t going to work either. It already didn’t work the first time! Legions of deconverted people hiding among them could tell evangelicals exactly that, if they didn’t fear the retaliation—er, the Christian love—of their churchmates.
Alas, “do more of that, but harder” is literally all evangelicals can recommend to such stalwart heathens.
In the wild: Pretending in hopes of catching the belief spark again
In 2016, Chakell Wardleigh wrote a post for South Bend Tribune (archive) about how “to revive your relationship with God.” She recommends Christians follow these steps to recover their belief in Jesus:
- Talk to Him
- Obey Him
- Study the scriptures
- Listen for Him
- Show gratitude
- Be mindful
That is the prevailing advice in a nutshell. You can find it everywhere in the Christ-o-sphere.
Here’s a similar listicle (archive) from Fireplace Faith, just with 200% more Christianese.
- Remember the beginning and your “first love” [ie, recall the testimonies you’ve given and heard; remember how fervent you were at conversion]
- Repent [because obviously you’ve done something terribly wrong to have lost faith like this]
- Return [resume the faith-based habits you’ve obviously lost over the years]
- Worship unashamedly [because obviously you stopped doing that to lose faith; also, don’t think about how this is pure emotional manipulation done on yourself to enter a trance state again]
- Pray until you fall in love [no comment needed, I’m sure]
- Live on the front lines [evangelize your heart out, without sharing with your marks that you’ve lost faith of course]
And we see the same advice on Quora, too. These suggestions can all be summed up by what I call Jesusing.
For some Christians, I’ve no doubt this advice works. It gets them back into a religious mindset. In turn, that mindset makes them far more vulnerable to talking points and emotional manipulation. If the target of advice is aware of these forms of persuasion, though, they may backfire.
That’s what happened to me. Naturally, my Evil Ex and religious friends recommended similar strategies to me. Unfortunately for them, they only reminded me that reality simply does not line up with Christian claims. I was nowhere near intellectually sophisticated enough to fully recognize that fact. Nor could I verbalize why their advice had backfired so hard. I just knew that they’d implicitly confirmed that there was nothing behind the green curtain of Christianity but lies and manipulation.
If someone stands between those two extremes, they might only find this strategy ineffective. They can’t talk themselves back into a religious mindset, but they’re not quite aware of just how damning it is that Christians even suggest that they do more of what already hasn’t worked, just harder this time.
When love (and faith) seemed much more like conscious choices
I strongly suspect that evangelicals (and most Christians) are operating in a medieval mindset. Let me show you a passage from a medieval story-poem called “Lanval” by Marie de France from the mid-to-late 1100s:
The knight took a step toward
The maiden; she called him forward;
Near the bed he sat down, near.
“Lanval,” she said, “my friend, my dear,
I left my lands to come where you are;
To find you I have come so far!
Be valiant and courtly in everything,
And no emperor, count or king
Ever had joy or blessings above you;
For, more than any thing, I love you.”
That’s simply how love worked at the time. This maiden in the story didn’t know Lanval at all—except by reputation. They’d never met. As far as I can tell from the story, she’d never even talked to or seen him. But she’d fallen madly in love with him anyway. He, in turn, fell in love with her at first sight, of course.
This happens all the time in medieval stories. In these stories, noble or magical women see men of renown and bravery, and they instantly offer them their love. That word didn’t mean sex; it was confirmed present even if sex didn’t happen between the pair.
So “love” simply meant something a bit different than people mean today in the modern world. We think of it more like Elsa in Frozen, as something that takes time to get established and flower from those first sparks of attraction. Evangelicals, though, think of it more like how her sister Anna does at the movie’s beginning—as something that can sprout up in an instant and still last forever:
Similarly, when medieval couples married, especially if they were from wealthy and powerful families they’d often only barely even met each other (if that). Officially, individuals in these arranged marriages had the power to refuse the match. But unofficially, that didn’t happen often, especially at the higher levels of wealth and power. Even then, wealthy parents tried to make matches that would allow affection and fidelity to grow. They strove for basic compatibility, at least. Often, it seems like most marriages worked out okay—because really, what else could anyone do? Even if the couple fought like two cats in a pillowcase, divorce was an almost unthinkable option and rarely granted.
Back then, married love was something couples could consciously breathe to life. And did, out of necessity.
Case study: Romantic vs married love
In the 1460s, Lorenzo de Medici fell madly in love with a Florentine girl. Oh, sure, she was married to someone else. But that didn’t matter to him. The Medici were the unofficial and de facto rulers of Florence’s short-lived time as a republic. Lorenzo was about to become the city’s crown prince. And he was in love with this vivacious young woman who seemed like the living, breathing essence of Florence itself.
Alas for Lorenzo, his parents arranged a marriage for him with another girl. She hailed from possibly the best noble family in Rome, since the Medici were keen to shore up their own claims to nobility. For her own part, Clarice Orsini had only met Lorenzo briefly once. She didn’t even attend their four-day-long wedding celebration in Florence. Hell, she didn’t even attend their wedding, which occurred by proxy in February 1469. No, she traveled to Florence about four months later.
That’s all probably for the best, since Lorenzo made that Florentine girl he loved, Lucrezia Donati, the formal “Queen” of that long wedding celebration.
The Florentines weren’t thrilled at all to have a Roman girl marrying someone of Lorenzo’s station. Not only that, but this particular Roman girl was super-religious at a time when Florentines explored humanism! But that huge bash helped ease their concerns. Lorenzo was still their hometown boy.
Despite that inauspicious beginning, Clarice proved herself a good wife to Lorenzo. She loved him in that medieval kinda way, bore him a passel of children, and handled his affairs with precision and excellence. He eventually relied heavily on her good, solid judgment. Sure, they never shared that romantic love that he enjoyed with other women—and very possibly other men. But I’ve read their letters to each other. They sounded affectionate at least, as well as solicitous of each other’s well-being. They behaved as partners in marriage should.
I use that term, “partners,” on purpose. Lorenzo considered his home and family as a sort of business. In that light, Clarice functioned as a great manager of it all. If her stupendous spouse’s nonstop affairs bothered her, Clarice didn’t often show it, either. While they weren’t 100% thrilled and happy to be together, the match still worked out. It lasted till Clarice’s death. Afterward, Lorenzo didn’t remarry. (Indeed, he died about four years after his wife. He’d never been the picture of good health.)
Zooming forward to This Current Year
What I’ve described about this one 15th-century couple is simply not how marriage works nowadays. It’s not how modern folks think of love. Nowadays, marriage represents something far deeper than a business partnership. We want to know our partners extremely well—and for them to know us in turn. And we want a lifetime of romantic love, even knowing that the lightning-strike of early infatuation and limerence doesn’t last.
Back in Boomer days, the notion of marrying “our best friend” would have sounded strange. Expecting the bliss of early romantic love to last forever was still considered unrealistic.
Five hundred years ago, though, nobody expected either of those things. Nowadays, they’re the #goalz for most people.
And as such, we’ve evolved some interesting new customs to keep love alive in a marriage.
When belief is just about doing more of that but harder
If their god were real, Christians’ advice about faith and belief might have a chance of working.
When rekindling emotions for a person, after all, their advice is more or less how it’s done. That’s why married couples have “date night.” Most folks need to reconnect often to keep love alive. Christians are just Jesus-ifying that advice—some way more than others, as we’ve already seen!
But there’s no god at the center of Christianity at all. Going through these motions to regain faith in him works about as well as doing it for the character of Prince Lir in The Last Unicorn. Neither can reciprocate in any way. The effort of reconnection is sent into the void. Unless you’re very imaginative as well as very motivated to see something where there’s nothing, you’ll receive no reflections back from those attempts to spark love and faith.
Jesusing already failed to keep deconverted people’s beliefs alive. All the faucets in the faith pool involving Jesusing already turned off. In almost every single case, Jesusing harder won’t turn them back on again.
In fact, Jesusing harder might reveal the truth about Christianity to those trying it.
But as long as heathens are willing to pretend, as long as they obey evangelicals’ commands and bend the knee to their rules, then evangelicals can grudgingly tolerate them. The moment those heathens declare that they’ve played this Happy Pretendy Funtime Game long enough to know that nothing about it is based in reality and its payoff is purely imaginary, they may count on evangelicals to start attacking them again.
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