Overbearing Christians, and Why I Wish They Would Go Away

“We don’t want to sound preachy or pushy. We’re afraid of offending. But we are also obligated as Christians to spread the word of God.”

These are the comments I find most startling of all. Afraid of offending? Are they so completely unaware of themselves? Do they not hear the smugness in their own voices? The condescension in their attitudes? The unspoken monopoly on the truth underlying their every pronouncement?

I find few people more offensive than those who assume the role of uninvited teacher. Worst of this group are the uninvited preachers, those privileged holders of wisdom who can’t mail a birthday card, send an email, or record an outgoing voicemail message without quoting scripture. Who can’t keep themselves from shoving their recipe for forgiveness and eternal love down my unwilling throat.

For me, the most telling trait of these word-spreaders is the fact that they never, ever ask sincere questions. If they want to get into a real discussion about beliefs, ideas, opinions, and theories, then shouldn’t they do some listening? Some? Why don’t they ever ask me what I think? How I get through the day? How I’ve managed to survive the crises and burdens of my life? I’m still here and I’m functioning fairly well, so I must have figured out something by now. But apparently my knowledge and experience hold no value, because they were not derived from religious dogma.

I understand the role religion plays in the world. I really do. Before scientific insight, people were terrified. Scary things happened and most people didn’t know what was going on. Religious stories and rituals gave them something to latch onto, some sliver of control, real or not. And over the centuries, our collective need for religion has apparently held steady. But we should have outgrown this total surrender of the mind by now. If there is a creator, he gave us brains, and I assume he expected us to actually use them. True, we all arrive in a state of helplessness, innocence, and confusion. But gradually we learn how to organize some of our experiences into patterns. We examine and compare what our senses are telling us, and what we remember from the past. We sift through the words of our parents, teachers, colleagues, and clergy, and if we work at it with enough diligence, we arrive at a basic set of beliefs that help us get through most of what life throws back at us. Not to say that we stop growing, or thinking. I’m fifty-one and I seem to know less all the time. Which, I suppose, makes me a prime target for those around me who know everything.

The religious fanatic knows there is a personal God. The atheist knows there isn’t. I am not somewhere in between. I am outside of the spectrum. I can feel that my mind is too small and flat and feeble to ever arrive at the answer. I can no more be sure about the existence and nature of a creator than I can be sure about the texture, color, and taste of the rocks on a moon orbiting an unseen planet in another star system. You can put a gun to my head and demand that I decide one way or the other, but you’ll have to shoot. I just don’t know. I’d like to know. I’ve read dozens of books on why there has to be a God, or why I must accept Jesus as my savior. I’ve read dozens more on evolution, religious skepticism, big bang cosmology, and godless physics. I’ve hit the wall. Any new article or book I read immediately seems familiar. There are no more fresh arguments, and I still don’t have an answer. To me, all possible explanations are incomprehensible. I plead ignorance – and agnosticism.

Now that’s today. I don’t know what I’ll think next year or even next Tuesday. My beliefs shape my behavior, and my experiences shape my beliefs. But nobody decides what to believe. It arrives unannounced, maybe through the subtle application of thin layers over time, or maybe like a bolt of lightning. In either case, belief isn’t a willful decision. And so the word-spreaders can talk to me from now until the imagined rapture, and well into the next day, and I don’t think I’ll ever get it.

That’s troubling for them, I know, because they need to be surrounded by others who share their beliefs. That’s one of the reasons they attend church, where everyone walks around parroting the same ideas. It helps them hide from their own inner doubts. If they had any guts, it seems to me, they would go to a synagogue or mosque or shrine and preach to the people in those places of worship. They’d have a much larger audience, thereby increasing their chances of effecting some result (although maybe not the one they were looking for).

A few of the preachers do travel to other parts of the world to save the souls of those living in “less developed” cultures. Typically, they reach out to these people with food, medicine, and clean water in one hand, and a Bible in the other. And when their help is accepted, they think they have saved souls. In fact, they’ve saved bodies, at least for a little while. This is a law of nature: life will do almost anything to keep living. Had the preacher been born on the other side of some political boundary, he would be the one taking the supplies along with the preaching, and maybe equating the goodness of the help with the goodness of the scripture. Or maybe not. But that isn’t the situation. He was lucky to be born and raised in relative affluence. Most North Americans live in a society of abundance. That doesn’t make us better, by the way, just better off.

Equally troubling for the word-spreaders is the ethical nature of my life. I make a lot of mistakes, of course, but I try to be the best person I can be. Not out of fear of eternal punishment, but because it feels like the right way to live. My wife and I have raised three children. We’ve often used threats and bribery to change their behavior. It’s not the correct method according to the experts, but it seems to be the only one that works. A one-year-old wants to create chaos. The parents know that chaos is intolerable for any length of time, and so they teach, using a variety of methods. (“Just wait until your father gets home,” my mother frequently warned.) Sooner or later, the child comes around, and the methods can be discarded, replaced by reason and rational adult interaction. If our grown children obey us out of fear, they haven’t grown up. If we obey the supposed word of God for the same reason, I’m afraid we also have not yet grown up. Which is one of so many reasons I find it unbearable to have to listen to another word about any Christian’s beliefs concerning the future of the world, the human race, or my eternal soul.

Sorry. I don’t mean to sound preachy or pushy, and I certainly don’t want to offend. I’d just like to get a word in myself once in a while.