Coercion and fear repel more people than it brings in. Societies that attempt this eventually collapse under the weight of constant coercion and fear. The Church failed to produce believers when some of its members used force or fear to gather followers. Short term successes gained by fear result in long term losses. Consider people you know who may have attempted to bully others into belief. How did that work out? Not well, I suspect. This is why someone like St. Francis is still loved today while the Grand Inquisitor of Spanish imperial power is reviled.

The underlying reason someone has faith makes all the difference. Forcing people into faith is like forcing a dog to read. It cannot happen. Even if the dog attentively stares at the page, he is likely only doing so in lieu of a treat for making the effort. If the dog will be beaten for not trying to read, then he is only doing it for self-preservation. If he is only staring at the page for a treat, then the brief sensual pleasure is the motivation making it worth the wait. What I’m getting at is that if faith is solely attempted for the treat of heaven or the fear of hell, then it is not really freely chosen. This is called out very clearly in the Catechism of the Church.

…"man's response to God by faith must be free, and. . . therefore nobody is to be forced to embrace the faith against his will. The act of faith is of its very nature a free act." "God calls men to serve him in spirit and in truth. Consequently they are bound to him in conscience, but not coerced. . . This fact received its fullest manifestation in Christ Jesus." Indeed, Christ invited people to faith and conversion, but never coerced them. "For he bore witness to the truth but refused to use force to impose it on those who spoke against it. His kingdom. . . grows by the love with which Christ, lifted up on the cross, draws men to himself." (CCC 160)

So that is the difficult part for non-believers, to find reasons for faith without fear or force or trick or treat as the driving factor.

Love must be the magnet. A magnet is a perfect metaphor for the experience of those who despise religion, as fear or force is often what repelled them in the first place. Most often it was not God that repelled them but a personal interaction. Someone or something attempted to force the wrong end of the magnet at them. This never works, or not for long, since it takes much effort to hold two opposite poles of a magnet together and they separate as soon as that force is released.

Religious invitations can act exactly like holding a magnet to metal with the wrong poles facing one another. Fear and force repels. But if you turn the magnet around, so that the right magnetic field is displayed, the attraction is immediate. It just feels right. There is no fighting or struggling because the attraction is natural and fitting.

The exterior paint job known as “Good without God” means nothing by itself, and however you try to twist Jesus’ words, the Gospels cannot be interpreted as supporting this idea. I believe this is the biggest hurdle for modern people, as the new commandment of “love thy self” must be conquered and knocked-out to make spiritual progress. I think this is why my favorite self-help book, The Imitation of Christ, doesn’t show up on bestseller lists, since the message of humility and total detachment from material goods is not what retailers and marketers want us to be considering in a consumer society.

The parables that stick to me and re-surface daily in my mind are the one liners, The Treasure in the Field and The Pearl of Great Value. Perhaps I’ve stumbled over the treasure. Maybe I have by some lucky circumstance obtained the Pearl of Great Value. I believe I have, and I hope and pray that this lucky stumble happened by grace.

I marvel at the longevity of this story of Jesus. The same Pearl and treasure that is found by every generation, by people who are born-again, by those who turn back to God. For most of my adult life the term “born again” raised the hair on my neck, as something to dislike and be irritated by. Seeing “Promise Keepers” raising their hands and closing their eyes made me feel awkward, because I felt they were hypocrites and actors. Now I could be standing among them. At the time, I felt that these Christians were the very Pharisees that Jesus had come to depose. Oddly enough, when the “turn” happened for me, I was not even thinking about the phrase “born again” but that is an accurate description of what happened, since there is really no other way to describe the change. The verse of Amazing Grace never made much sense either, until it did: “I once was blind, but now I see.” Suddenly, I was the hackneyed, rehashed, repurposed convert that I formerly loathed. It’s almost comical in its predictability, I suppose, and yet I’m happy that it happened to me, and I wouldn’t have believed it ever could have happened. Except that it did.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a hypocrite. A huge one. You should really find other blogs and podcasts to listen to, from more convincing, holy, and saintly types. Listen to Trent Horn and Father Josh and Father Mike. Read material from Thomas Merton and St. Augustine and Scott Hahn, not my words. Go away, go to them. All of my ideas have been said better, by wiser and more devout people.

One concern I have is that I have turned back but not had a true interior change. While I can see things that have changed, my pride and fear still run rampant. Vices of the flesh may go away, but the underlying flaws of the Fall remain, and just as St. Thomas Aquinas said, I’ve come to know that the first and worst sin of pride leads to all the others. Again, if the Garden of Eden is littered with “metaphorical truth” on how to live, both the literal and metaphorical reading lead to the same conclusion, which is to love God and obey him out of loving duty. This propensity toward pride will remain in me regardless, in all of us, always, but to despair is the wrong answer. It’s this pessimism that killed my faith the first time, and if allowed it will kill it again. Thus to preserve faith, the quelling of pride and kneeling into humility must be a daily effort.

The scandal of hypocrisy among Christians can cause others to loathe people of faith. When those who lack faith see sinners who are trying to be saints, they roll their eyes and find it ludicrous, particularly when the sinner’s past is an open closet of public skeletons. As a result, those who find faith and then pray in public (say through a blog or podcast exactly like this one…ahem) can cause those fallen away to stay away, and worse yet, cause people to leave their faith rather than come toward it. The concept of “scandal” in the Catechism of the Catholic Church is defined as not only those falls from grace that Christians often have, like when a Protestant preacher gets caught cheating on his wife or, worse yet, the sex-abuse scandal of the Church. These public failures or scandals can make Christianity look like a sham. This is the type of scandal we are familiar with. But there is another kind of “scandal” that can be committed, one that is equally revolting to non-Christians. This is the one that turns people off today even more than the fall from grace. This type of scandal comes in several forms: being righteous without humility, acting like a religious nutcase, obsessively discerning demons where rational explanation will do nicely, speaking in tongues for attention, or in general fanaticism that forgets the point of religion. The point of religion, of all the buildings and Sacraments and liturgy and prayer is this: humility before God. The point is to love God, to let his will be done, to be humble, to follow his rules, and to love others. Scandal is not just some religious person getting caught up in debauchery, it is anything that can wedge someone’s chance for faith away from God.

Scandal is an attitude or behavior which leads another to do evil. The person who gives scandal becomes his neighbor's tempter. He damages virtue and integrity; he may even draw his brother into spiritual death. Scandal is a grave offense if by deed or omission another is deliberately led into a grave offense. (CCC 2284)

There are those people who are “Good without God” that are still better citizens and more altruistic than I am. Don’t misinterpret or confuse my ability to jot down words or read from a script with holiness. As Shakespeare said, “The devil can quote scripture for his own purposes.” So even while I feel changed, most of my life is still the same, where I go to work and overeat Frosted Mini Wheats and carry out much of the same activities as I did before. I commit plenty of sins of the heart and I’m nowhere near where I could, should, or would like to be. Pride runs amok. For anyone who would tell you that the change happens, and you never feel blue or downcast again - that person is lying. The difference is that you have a transcendent hope that lifts you up, and that is the one thing the doubter lacks who is good without God. They can prop up work or political views or money or relationships or bedroom conquests or accomplishments or family as a replacement lower-case-G god for a while, but none of these can go the distance because they are the fleeting things of this world.

But the change does happen to people, and the change is real, and the change is undeniable. Many things become easier once the change happens, as there is strength and direction to be drawn constantly whenever I turn back to God for help. God is the continual and endless vine of life that provides, and I realize that I only felt dead inside when I had voluntarily separated myself from that vine. This doesn’t mean there is euphoria, or that enough prayer will make me rich and healthy and grant all my wishes. No, that’s the con game that the Prosperity Gospel plays. Instead, there is a sense of possibility and endurance, best summed up in a John Henry Newman quote: “Ten thousand difficulties make not one doubt.”

As I’ve mentioned before, the day my sleepy faith was wakened, I was suddenly re-connected to the vine of life and jolted into respiration. A fallen branch laying in the grass was somehow taken back up to the tree and revived. I would like to say that I willed this to happen, but I only willed myself to ask, seek, and knock on God’s door in prayer. I know that others had prayed for me, like St. Monica did for her son Augustine. God had been nudging me all along with situations and guidance, and certain people in my path illustrated such faith and goodness that I had to take notice, and still…still somehow I managed to congratulate myself, as if it was me that made all the difference. I could have broke my arm slapping my own back in self-praise.

I had forgotten that I had help. In fact, I recently recalled how when I was fallen away from faith, I used to jokingly say to myself, “Jesus, help me,” and I would sometimes even mockingly say the lyrics of a Carrie Underwood country song and say out loud when struggling, “Jesus, take the wheel.” I found the song’s sentimental chords and verses to be a bit ridiculous. Yet now I can’t help but wonder if whenever I uttered those words, they were like little prayers, and the receiver of those words was taking them quite seriously the whole time, and responding slowly, revealing the path back to faith in my life, and helping me when I most needed it. Somehow, even when I did not believe, I still knew there was power in his name.

(For two good reads on the idea of religious freedom, read The Declaration on Religious Freedom (Dignitatus Humanae), a fascinating document. Spice is up with a reading of On the Development of Peoples (Populorum Progressio) while you’re at it.)

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