I’ve speculated through the years that evangelicals aren’t, in fact, interested in ‘saving’ anybody. Perhaps, I’ve wondered, what they really want is affirmation from yet one more person that they aren’t still hopelessly screwed-up, that they’ve finally got it right?
Well, what do you know? Reflecting upon posthumous conversion claims of intellectual luminaries (e.g., Charles Darwin, Christopher Hitchens), the physicist Lawrence Krauss speculates along similar lines.
Evangelicals don’t seem to care what these ordinary Christians think; no one tells stories about their achieving a proper understanding of Christianity on their deathbeds. Attention is focused, instead, on atheists who are also luminaries, like Hitchens.
In a conversation we had a few years ago, Hugh Downs, the television anchor, suggested why this might be so. One of the reasons people go to church, he said, is intellectual validation. People attend church for spiritual and social reasons, of course: to pray and to see friends. But they also want to hear their religious convictions affirmed — convictions that, as the Dawkins survey suggests, may seem a little dubious during the rest of the week. Could it be that evangelicals seek to convert the famous dead because they’re insecure about their own beliefs? If they can claim that people they admire as intellects — Darwin, Wilde, Hitchens — ultimately agreed with them, it validates their own faith.
I think there is something to this. The intensity of the impulse doubtless varies from one person to the next, and I can’t think for the life of me how one might construct a test to investigate it — but I think that desire is probably there and animates a lot of recruiting activity. And when you say “No, thanks,” you’re not rejecting Jesus (and too bad for you) — you’re rejecting them and wounding their already fragile self-esteem.