Kick Convert 'Em While They're Down

In church today, the pastor offered as a model for proselytizing a man whose approach consisted in befriending people, waiting until the day they appeared distraught, offering to pray for them, gaining their confidence, convincing them to confide their difficult circumstances and corresponding emotions, and then employing the consequent moment of cathartic weakness and trust to make a conversion attempt.

Perhaps we are not far from the day when you will be able to walk into your local Christian bookstore and purchase a pill designed to convert people to Christianity (a "Conversion Capsule," perhaps, or "Messiah Medicine"? Better yet, "Evangelism Elixer" or even "Salvation Serum"?). This pill would not cause conversion directly; instead, the pill would induce a condition of psychological anguish. Churchgoers could then seize the opportunity provided by such anguish to share the Gospel.

Lest you think this absurd, recall that it already happens. I once attended a drama entitled Heaven's Gates, Hell's Flames that functioned precisely to induce in the viewer an experience of psychological trauma; Christianity was then presented as an antidote.

The man who befriends those in trouble differs from the pill and the drama in a significant respect: in the latter two cases, suffering is inflicted upon the victim by the proselytizer, whereas in the former case the proselytizer simply takes advantage of suffering inflicted by some outside cause. Nevertheless, the structure is the same.

There can be no doubt that people are more pliable when suffering duress (as all those who employ techniques of sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, etc. in their attempts to produce cooperative prisoners can amply attest). When we lose our jobs, experience the deaths of those close to us, become depressed, or are simply frightened by morbid theatrical performances we are less able to resist suggestion, process and evaluate information clearly, etc.

To me, however, this is an argument why such situations should never be employed for evangelistic purposes. My father once told me never to make a major life decision when tired or hungry, and I take this to be excellent advice: in such circumstances our ability to make good decisions is compromised. How much more careful, then, should we be of introducing major life decisions to those whose capacities are far more compromised.

The reason is simple, and it is clearly exhibited in Christianity's rejection using the "convert or die" dilemma, in which a person makes a confession of faith at the point of a sword, despite how effective such an approach might be at obtaining conversions. A central tenet of Christianity is that all people are made in the image of God, endowed with a rational soul. To place a person in a position of choosing between Christ and execution is to do violence to that person's faculty of free, rational decision and is therefore prohibited as an assault upon the dignity of that person -- indeed, it is an assault upon the Imago Dei itself.

In the same way, the strategy of proselytizing in circumstances of suffering and tragedy -- or, worse, deliberately inducing such experiences -- does similar violence to the dignity of the person and is similarly reprehensible. This approach takes advantage of a person at his weakest and constitutes an assault upon his freedom and rationality as creatures made in the image of God.