Are You Trying to Convert Me?

In the Atlantic Monthly Larry Alex Taunton a committed Christian writes of setting out to learn what makes nonbelievers tick by interviewing college students who are active in campus atheist groups. “Slowly ” he writes “a composite sketch of American college-aged atheists began to emerge and it would challenge all that we thought we knew about this demographic.”

Although he writes within a Christian context Taunton’s findings would seem to have considerable application to a Jewish one as well. For example he found that the “mission and message of their churches was vague. These students heard plenty of messages encouraging ‘social justice’ community involvement and ‘being good ’ but they seldom saw the relationship between that message and [religion]…. They felt their churches offered superficial answers to life’s difficult questions…. Serious-minded they often concluded that church services were largely shallow harmless and ultimately irrelevant.” This seems like a fitting description of what often passes for religious life in the Jewish heterodox movements but some of these are concerns that Orthodox Jews would also do well to note.  

Tauntonwrites that given their disdain for tepid platitudinous religiosity it’s no surprise that “[w]ithout fail our former church-attending students expressed [positive] feelings for those Christians who unashamedly embraced biblical teaching.”  It was the failure to find such exemplars of unapologetic religious belief that often played a role in these young people’s disaffection from their faith.

As one student put it “I can’t really consider a Christian a good moral person if he isn’t trying to convert me. Christianity is something that if you really believed it it would change your life and you would want to change [the lives] of others. I haven’t seen too much of that.” And to similar effect is this quote from an atheist illusionist and comedian: “I don’t respect people who don’t proselytize.… How much do you have to hate somebody to believe that everlasting life is possible and not tell them that?”