My old crowd, Pentecostals, took testimonies very seriously. We all put huge store by these carefully-crafted narratives and thought they were the key to our personal evangelism attempts. However, I discovered just how untrustworthy these stories were. Perhaps that’s why testimonies have stopped scoring sales like they used to. We’ll happily invest ourselves in stories about wizard-children, talking ponies, and houses that fly, but only if the stories speak to the truth of the human experience. When salespeople’s testimonies ring false to that experience, they lose far more than just a sale. They lose their essential credibility — and their invitation to continue seeking our buy-in.
(Quick Christianese lesson: “personal evangelism” is just amateur person-to-person sales, usually done by a layperson on an impromptu basis. “Witnessing” indicates the sales attempt itself. “Win” is a reference to “soulwinning,” which is the process of seeking sales. I’ve never heard it in any other form except “soulwinner,” which means someone known for engaging in soulwinning. And I talk about evangelism as a sales process a lot because that’s exactly what it is. The product being sold isn’t any particular belief package, nor even any feelings toward Jesus himself. It is active membership in the soulwinner’s own Christian group. In fact, that is the soulwinner’s only product. The only reason they use apologetics to induce belief is that it’s hard to sell membership to non-believers.)
Performance art in the McDonald’s
My then-boyfriend Biff (not his real name, and yes, it refers to the bully from the Back to the Future movies) had a system for sharing his testimony in public.
Back when I was Pentecostal, most of my peers claimed to pray about where they should eat lunch (on those days when they ate outside of their homes). See, maybe Jesus wanted us to eat at this one specific place so we could witness to some poor lost soul there and win their souls for Jesus. If somehow we failed to be where Jesus wanted us to be, that person would be doomed to Hell. And if that happened, then obviously their eternal torture would be all our fault.
I bet you never even imagined that the choice between Taco Bell and McDonald’s could ever be so fraught with tension!
So Biff would habitually decide that Jesus really wanted him to eat at, say, McDonald’s on a particular day. He was certain that he was absolutely fated to meet someone Jesus wanted to save from Hell.
Like most Christians, Biff never voluntarily read or studied the Bible. He also never prayed at home, nor fasted, nor anything else Christians usually categorize as devotions. (Devotions are daily religious habits. They are to Christianity what listening to Amway tapes is to Ambots.)
On these occasions, once we sat down with our food Biff would yank out his Bible. He’d open it with big, attention-getting body language. He would always hunch over, squint meaningfully, and read from the book with an air of studious concentration.
Every so often, someone noticed this performance. Every time, Biff noticed being noticed. His response reminded me even back then of a bird’s mating dance.
Whenever someone took his bait like this, Biff always lit up like a Christmas tree.
The power of testimonies
Such moments should have led into a grand example of the power of testimonies. And Biff had a good one, even that early in his walk with Jesus.
Christians’ testimonies evolve just like any other form of storytelling. Their crafters emphasize or add bits that seem like they’ll be more impressive. They discard bits that don’t seem to work. Over time, Christians who make a habit of sharing their testimonies figure out what seems to get the most traction with listeners.
Biff hadn’t quite evolved his own testimony to its final Super Saiyan form. At the time, it just involved his very sinful past life complete with a totes-for-realsies demon possession, his exorcism and subsequent conversion, and his super-happy new shiny Jesus life. He hadn’t yet added in all the titillating Satanic Panic details that would so shock me in church.
In this way, Biff’s testimony resembled most of his peers’ own testimonies. It featured a three-act form: a first act of sinfulness, a second act of sudden shocking awareness, and a third act reversing the first.
The testimony format wasn’t just a sales pitch. It was also a model reflecting how we thought conversion should impact Christians’ lives.
Yet another way our beliefs didn’t match reality
In our folklore, my tribe considered testimonies the most important sales tool any Christian could possibly ever have. We thought they were enormously effective and powerful in persuading others to join us.
However, nobody ever actually made a purchase from Biff in these situations. Instead, they politely declined Biff’s earnest invitation to church, and then scooted back to rejoin their friends wherever we were. He actually only converted a few people, all of whom were close friends of his.
Of course, when his sales efforts failed, Biff always consoled himself the same way. He’d tell himself that he’d planted a seed. In Christianese, that means subconsciously influencing someone to buy the product later. Jesus would make the seed grow. Biff might not ever even know how. But it would totally happen. Yes yes. For a seed to grow, someone first had to plant it. Right? Right?
Over time, I’d come to recognize why Biff’s testimony so rarely resulted in actual sales. It failed no matter how carefully he honed its details or how well he executed it.
Existing Christians love these wild stories. But outsiders have learned that they’re simply not true to the human experience.
Living on Team Boring Testimony
With the base cunning of a narcissist, Biff recognized — probably very quickly — that boring testimonies don’t exactly open doors in evangelicalism. Indeed, my own testimony (like those of most Christians) ran about like this:
- I grew up fervently Christian. Maybe I kinda drifted away from fervor at one point, but overall I was always firmly Christian.
- Then, an evangelical preacher scared me to death. Using hard-sales techniques, he convinced me that I was Jesus-ing incorrectly. So I switched to this other flavor of Christianity.
- I’m still Christian and very fervent. But now I Jesus correctly, so I’m safe from Hell too!
- Oh god please buy my product…
It wasn’t exactly compelling.
Nor did it titillate other Christians nearly enough. It wasn’t exciting to them. So when a pastor asked someone to come up and give their testimony, he never asked me or anyone else with one like mine.
Raise your hand if you were (or are) on Team Boring Testimony! Mine’s already up.
Why dishonest testimonies exist
Starting around the late 1950s and 1960s, it suddenly became very important for Christians to impress people with testimonies. Evangelical pastors began seeing their flocks drifting away. Being Christian at all became slightly more voluntary — so salesmanship began to matter.
(See also: Our review of a personal evangelism guide originally printed in 1959.)
This necessity combined with the flocks’ trained-in gullibility. Evangelicals simply accepted whatever testimony-tellers had to say. No matter how wild the claim, nobody ever publicly challenged it. And even if someone knew for 100% sure that a testimony was made up, a liar-for-Jesus knew nobody would ever expose the truth. For reasons I’ll elaborate in a moment here, sales mattered far more than truthfulness.
Among Christian audiences, as well, the same Christians who denied themselves worldly entertainment could thrill to these made-up accounts. Often, over-the-top testimonies contained huge doses of illicit sex, drugs, rock-n-roll, and other such debauchery in their first act. Then, by the end, the testimony-bearer could slam down on all that naughtiness and tell the tribe that their lives were actually way better.
So the risks of lying were nonexistent, while the rewards were exponential. The real surprise here just might be how few over-the-top liars there were in evangelicalism.
How hucksters swooped in on this new opportunity
Very quickly, opportunists like Mike Warnke saw potential in how the tribe engaged with testimonies. They soon began wowing audiences everywhere nonstop with their completely made-up Satanic Panic testimonies. The tribe ate this stuff up with a spoon.
The risks of lying were nonexistent, while the rewards were exponential.
It didn’t take long for other opportunists to adjust their testimonies likewise. By the late 1970s, it was rare indeed for a popular young evangelist not to have a Warnke-style Satanic Panic-flavored testimony.
The problem was that normies knew these testimonies were complete fabrications. Really, the only people who responded to these fish stories were people who already believed in the various claims that informed them.
Not much has changed. I still regularly see evangelists bearing obviously fake testimonies.
The night I heard Biff’s full testimony
Much later, unfortunately after I’d married him, I finally heard Biff’s full testimony at a church revival one night. I was absolutely gobsmacked and horrified by what I heard. It was completely and totally separated from reality. He left out some things he’d actually done and included a slew of other depravities that he’d never committed in his entire life.
In truth, Biff had grown up a spoiled, privileged upper-middle-class kid. I’d known him since he was 19 years old. In fact, I had spent almost all of my spare time with him since then. So I knew he’d never done anything really awful. He’d simply never had time to be, say, the full-time High Priest of a Cabal of Satanic Wiccans (or Wiccan Satanists, Whatevs) (CSWWSW). But that was the very mildest element of his testimony. At least one other element was something he could have done serious prison time for, had he really done it.
I’d known he was a habitual liar whose testimony already played fast-and-loose with reality. But here, he was flat-out lying. And nobody in that church, not even its pastors, not even the denomination’s biggest names, seemed to realize it.
That night, on the way home, I told him that if I ever heard him lie again from the pulpit, I’d expose him as a liar right then and there. He got really petulant about it — and the friends he triangulated into the fight got mad at me for muzzling the oxen (which we thought meant interfering with someone working for Jesus) and covering his light. Yes, I got yelled at for potentially costing Biff some sales! People would convert because of his testimony, they all felt, so it was okay if it was doctored-up and prettified. What wasn’t okay was destroying Biff’s credibility.
Years later, I think the ship had already sailed on that point.
At the time, I refused to back down — and Biff capitulated. At least, he never released that testimony around me again.
Testimonies usually begin with a grain of truth
Even if a Christian resists the urge to insert ludicrous elements into their testimony, it still contains elements that we can recognize as untrue. But they usually begin with a grain of truth.
A testimony’s first act is supposed to sell the idea of an unfulfilling, meaningless life that just isn’t making the salesperson happy. Even if the salesperson was enormously wealthy and surrounded by friends, they’re supposed to tell us they were secretly completely miserable and felt life was meaningless.
That part isn’t usually too objectionable, as long as it contains nothing obviously made-up like real magic spells, levitation, interaction with literal demons, or grotesque crimes. Lots of people can feel sad. As long as someone in the audience doesn’t personally know that this tale of woe is unmitigated bullshit, people can generally believe the first act of a testimony.
The second act is supposed to depict that Christian’s conversion. As long as it doesn’t depict real miracles or imaginary beings, it, too, isn’t usually objectionable. It might not be in the slightest compelling and its teller might accidentally reveal the disturbing emotional manipulation that led to the conversion, but overall it’s usually okay too.
The third act is usually the one that veers into unbelievable, surreal territory.
Unworking a testimony’s potential power
The third act is usually the problematic element in non-dramatic testimonies. It’s supposed to depict the Christian’s life as desirable and fulfilling after conversion. In this way, it’s a reversal of the first act. A Christian testimony is supposed to sell listeners the idea that they can gain its teller’s joy through buying their product: active membership in the teller’s own group.
However, most of us know at least a few testimony-peddling Christians. Their lives don’t look at all desirable. In general, most people don’t want to join Christian groups on the basis of their wonderful lives and harmonious group dynamics. (One of my biggest reliefs after deconversion was never again having to share a label with the vast majority of evangelicals.)
And I know exactly how tempting it can be to present a best-case scenario in Act III. I was 100% on Team Boring Testimony, remember?
Back then, I knew that if I were completely honest about what my life was like post-conversion, nobody would ever, ever, ever want to buy my product.
Turning even honest people dishonest through hard sales
Heck, my own life looked absolutely nothing like I’d been promised. I’d never even seen a Christian group of any flavor that actually operated like its own members believed their own claims, for that matter. With only a few exceptions, I still haven’t.
All I could do was hope that if I portrayed my life in a particular way, maybe Jesus would take pity on me and make it actually like that one day.
I’m glad I never actually made any sales. If someone had ever actually bought my product, then figured out that reality didn’t deliver on any of my promises about it, chances are that my tribe would have told them the same thing they told me any time I timidly brought up my own unhappiness:
Safety from Hell was actually the only thing that mattered all along. How dare someone ask for more? Don’t let the devil steal your joy! Don’t let “bad apples” make you lose your salvation! You need to Jesus harder! That’ll fix everything! You still hafta SELL SELL SELL WITHOUT MERCY!
This kind of hard-sales mentality can be as hard on the sellers as it is on their targets. While I recognized Biff’s testimony as untrue, I had more trouble recognizing other Christians’ testimonies as untrue — especially if they avoided the worst tropes. For some time, I thought my experience in Christianity was unique—and somehow, of course, my fault.
It would have blown my li’l mind to know that to some extent, we were actually all lying.
For some time, I thought my experience in Christianity was unique—and somehow, of course, my fault.
Little Lie, Big Lie
Once we find one false element in a story, one thing that absolutely doesn’t ring true to the human experience, it’s hard to take any other part of that story seriously.
The salesperson whose testimony doesn’t ring true loses a lot more than just a sale right then. They also lose credibility itself. In the future, their target will know to be really careful with anything they say.
Back when I lived in the Deep South, folks had a saying:
Little lie, big lie.
It means that someone willing to tell little lies will also be willing to tell big ones. Biff and his pals insisted that it was okay for them to lie in testimonies because they were still dealing in capital-T Truth™ with the rest. But being willing to lie to score a sale destroyed people’s trust in their ability to be truthful anywhere else.
Had they ever really seen divine miracles? (No. Nobody ever has.) Had they ever really received a Word from the Lord? (Ditto.) Or had they ever really spoken in divine languages? (LOL NO.) Heck, were their marriages really that much happier than those of heathens? (Absolutely not.) Or were the children in their groups really safer than those in secular groups? (Nooooope.) Were their men really so much better at managing their anger and showing basic respect toward women? (HAHA.)
Dishonesty is written all through the sales-minded flavors of Christianity. Little lies, big lies — from the bottom to the top. It turns out that opening the door to one lie allows lots of others in with it. They’re like mosquitos that way.
Stories that don’t ring true
In the end, I strongly suspect that many non-Christians reject Christian testimonies because they know nobody has to be Christian to be happy or good, nor to find meaning in their lives. As responses go, “I’m glad you found something that works for you” might enrage testimony-tellers, but it’s the truest thing anyone could ever say about the matter.
Even more non-Christians may reject these stories because they know that testimonies function as a sales pitch. Anyone who trusts strongly-motivated sellers to be honest about their product is fated to spend a lot of money and time on unwise purchases.
In the end, it’s important to remember that Christians don’t share their testimonies out of the goodness of their hearts. When told to fellow Christians, their goal is virtue-signaling or gaining esteem from listeners. When told to outsiders, the goal is scoring sales.
Depicting reality interferes with either goal.
And as long as Christians refuse to challenge their fellow Christians’ testimonies—or to reward the Christians telling lies in their testimonies—nothing will change.
0 Comments