Evangelistic Arrogance

You’ve met them before: that super eager zealous evangelist who tries to take advantage of your civility and lay into you with a manipulative sales pitch message they call “the gospel”. You gotta get saved or you’re going to Hell! It is harassment and quickly becomes intolerable. They are out to get another notch on the soul-winning gun.

When I was a young preacher boy, several pastors did their best to teach me that stuff. They got angry because I declined. I knew it was wrong, but I could not at that point articulate why. So I was marginalized and never invited into some circles. Yes, it affected my career in the ministry, and it’s part of what I don’t miss when I left behind the religious mainstream.

Here’s the pitch behind that crap: “The best thing you can do for people is to tell them about Jesus, no matter how they react. Don’t fail, because you may be responsible for sending them to Hell if you pull back.” How many times were people on the fence pushed away from the gospel because of the insufferable arrogance behind that approach?

The guys pushing this crap never understood how much damage they did to the Lord’s reputation.

Now, it’s bad enough they did this to people they identified as “sinners”, but they then kept judging anyone who wasn’t part of their religious tribe as a sinner. Even when they don’t say it this way, you get the message: “What I got is better than what you have, so listen to me!” They assume anyone who isn’t in their tribe is inherently evil, even satanic.

I’ve actually come very close to punching them out a couple of times, but I knew they would simply count that as somehow equivalent to persecution for their “faith”.

It’s even worse online. How many times has an online conversation been spoiled by such arrogance? You see, in our online communities, it’s well nigh impossible to demonstrate faith. All we have are the words we type on a computer. We don’t have the ability to create a context of walking in faith before the world. In real life, if a goofy zealot at least walks the talk, it’s more tolerable. But when there’s no supporting evidence of any kind of faith, it’s even more exceptionally rude when the messages they post shout at you from that arrogance.

I’m glad to see that sales-pitch behavior has been suppressed some in recent years. The problem is that we still have a more subtle form of it. Try going to a forum of mixed Christians trying to have a conversation without stepping on each other’s faith, and then one or more idiot barges in and starts castigating everyone who doesn’t agree with them.

They don’t have the decency to say, “Well, I’m from this background, and we look at it like this…” No, they have to act as if a different conviction cannot be genuine. To them, it’s blasphemous to suggest God might not be leading us all on the same path. You would think it was an insult to God that He isn’t limited to whatever is in their heads.

This is the sin of the Pharisees, by the way. They had the Messiah all mapped out before Jesus was born, and if anyone claiming to be the Messiah differed from their preconceived notions, he must be some kind of satanic liar. God could only be what their logic dreamed up, and it justified killing someone who could perform miracles outside of the intellectual boundaries they set for God.

Well, that kind of aggressive disputation in online forums is just a step or two from nailing someone to a cross. It’s a sin to harass someone for having different convictions.

I realize there’s nothing we can do to help those people. When it’s up to me, I ban them from the forum. There’s no place for that crap. We have enough trouble helping each other find a better way without having to deal with that kind of arrogance. Sadly, there are still a few of them hanging around. They will destroy any community you might have built.