By Norris Burkes, Dec 15 2024
If anyone has ever tried to convince you to get religion, change religion, or even lose your religion, then you’ll probably relate to this column.
In the early 1980s I was attending Golden Gate Seminary, just outside San Francisco, when I went to work as an advertising intern for the Marin County Independent Journal.
It was there that I spent every weekday afternoon constructing newspaper ads with a colleague I remember as Jeannette.
Within a few days, I was pleased to learn that Jeannette was a Christian like myself.
Actually – not so much. She was an overly-zealous member of the Church of Christ, who was soon peppering me with daily theological questions.
“Do you believe in the Bible?” she’d ask.
“Yes,” I said, without mentioning I was currently making a C- in my seminary New Testament class.
“If you die tonight, do you know where you will spend eternity?”
“Oh, don’t worry about me. I tried to tell her that she was preaching to the choir. I was born, bred and baptized into the Baptist Church.”
She remained unimpressed, so I tried cajoling her with teambuilding. I suggested that since we are both Christians, we should double-team our four-pack-a-day supervisor, Jerry.
“I’m not sure Jerry is going to hell,” I’d joke, “but he sure smells like he’s been there.”
She remained unamused by my flippancy and unconvinced by my steadfast confessions of faith. She thought that baptism in her church was the only way I could possibly become a Christian.
Apparently, I needed an extra helping of Jesus. “In fact,” she said, “you’d better hurry because Jesus is coming back soon.”
Of course, Jeannette wasn’t looking for answers. Her queries were embarkation points to invade into my faith space.
So, one afternoon, I decided I had enough of Jeannette’s Jesus.
I pulled her aside to tell her that if my faith didn’t pass her saintly litmus test, then I guess I’d be joining Jerry in the smoking section.
But soon, I realized that my witticisms hid a shameful guilt.
The truth was that I recognized her style as the one I’d used as a ministerial student while scouring the minority neighborhoods surrounding Baylor University for new converts.
Jeannette’s approach offended me. I felt I was too smart to have my own techniques redirected on me. That meant that, more than likely, my previous “converts” were also too smart for that.
If my story rings a familiar note with you, perhaps it’s an indication that we should take a spiritual pause as we enter this time of political transition in this country.
Perhaps we might consider how easy it is to employ our holier-than-thou techniques when trying to convert people to our views on everything from religion, guns, abortion, immigration, marriage or war.
Consider the folly of how we often approach people like we are guests on The Dating Game. We hold our political, personal, or religious questionnaires in hand while we gently, or in most cases, not so gently, probe folks for the right answers hoping to get a match.
Or worse, we’re just playing the game to expose their “wrong answers.”
Jesus believed in keeping it simple. If you love God, he said, you have to “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
This means accepting your neighbor without all of our qualifiers such as religion, politics, race, favorite rock bands and boxers or briefs.
I never passed Jeannette’s litmus test of faith, but given the current political climate, people of faith might consider discarding the litmus test and practice a bit more neighborly love.
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