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when Jesus returns! It is called “selective perception,” and it is one of our most effective tools.

      But let me not seem to neglect the forest for the trees. In general you will find that Christians like to imagine themselves as open-minded, as indeed they may be when it comes to questions of politics, the claims of advertisers, and personal tastes and preferences. It is a virtue, to be sure. But remember: cultivating virtue is not our business. Our concern is rather to exploit virtue. And that means hiding from our charges how narrow-minded they are in the case of faith. They think nothing (take that phrase however you want to) of simply shutting down whenever a friend ventures a dissenting opinion on religion. They have merely to hear a rival creed stated to know they must reject and refute it. The portcullis slams down, and it is war, albeit with good manners. It is their duty (to us, if they only knew!) not to give ear to such heresy lest “Satan” use it as a seed, a foothold, a camel’s intruding nose. When they behold another behaving in this manner in an exchange over political candidates or issues, they will sadly shake their heads in regret over such bull-headedness, such bigotry—without realizing that they themselves have elevated it to a virtue in religion.

      One of the most effective blinders we have used to steer the poor souls like the blinkers on a horse is a subtle confusion between humility and arrogance, two attitudes one might not think to be easily confused. But, happily, they are quite easily substituted one for the other. The convert, the believer, has been coached to think that, insisting upon his own beliefs, he is not arrogantly bragging on behalf of his own opinions. Heaven forbid! He is merely “humbly” acceding to the opinions of Almighty God. Little does he realize that, in that moment, he is pretending to be Almighty God.

      Wiltwing, if you will bear with my opinion, and I think it is backed by some respectable centuries of expertise, all this glorious hypocrisy stems from a fundamental misstep we long ago taught them to take. In religion, they are quite accustomed to substituting emotion for reason. One of the gems of our propaganda effort is Pascal’s dictum that the heart has its reasons of which the mind remains ignorant. It is so effective an excuse for intellectual abdication because it does ring true, just not in the case for which it is invoked. It would be manifestly absurd for a human to choose another as his mate based on statistical data and the like. That is where “reasons of the heart” properly come into play. But how foolish to choose a brand of automobile because the television advertisement for it gives him an excited feeling! No, the prospective buyer ought to be applying his mind to the reasons appropriate to it: what sort of mileage will this or that brand of automobile get him? Does it offer a smooth ride? But advertisers know they can count on emotional manipulation, as long as no one points out to the gullible customer just what he is doing. If someone does, then the customer will feel like the fool he is and pick up a copy of Consumer Reports for the facts. We have the same interest and the same strategy as that dealer: we want the shopper for a faith to pay no heed whatever to the factual basis or lack of it. We want him listening to his emotions.

      Let us apply this to your man. You say he is embarking on the final year of study in an American university. That does not surprise me. We like to swoop on individuals who are either starting college studies or at the beginning of the end of them, freshmen and seniors, I believe they are called. The freshmen have entered a strange world of new perspectives, new acquaintances, new challenges. It is all quite bewildering to them, and they welcome any port in the storm. Conversion to a campus church group seems to resolve, to simplify, to reassure. The burden of freedom and decision, of choosing one’s life’s way is just too disconcerting for many a student, and we are happy enough to remove that burden from their shoulders. The new religious commitment upon which they are embarking creates a surrogate parental authority, and they are greatly relieved to retreat to the values and beliefs they were taught as young children.

      The senior’s situation is a bit different. He has learned to swim in the ocean of choices that college offered him, with the result that the campus has become a comfortable home, and he is anxious about leaving this cocoon to risk success or failure in the adult world of self-reliance and competing vocational paths. Again, we are there, our representatives offering him solace and direction. It would do the mortal good to endure the struggle and discover what is best for him. That way he will know himself and gain greater confidence. But, Wiltwing, that does you and me no good at all. We feast upon his wretched prayers of self-abnegation, his disavowal of wisdom and of the ability to acquire it. It is a dependent, childlike soul who gives us what we need. Right now, your protégé is no doubt proudly grateful to have what he perceives as the life preserver of his faith securely about him, and he will not easily be willing to surrender it. Bravo: that is just where we want him.

      Your affable uncle,

      Needletoe

      III

      My dear Wiltwing,

      See? I knew you’d catch on; all you needed was the right mentor! Your instinct is sound: the social context of your man’s conversion is all-important if one grasps the dynamics of it. And I do. So shall you, my boy.

      Your description of the process is somewhat cursory, but I feel sure the case conforms to the typical pattern. Tell me if it does not. I gather that a classmate or roommate invited your charge to some lively church congregation on the edge of the campus, or perhaps some on-campus fellowship singing songs on a week night in a barebones meeting room in the student center. He sat through a series of choruses and testimonies, all couched in the same ornamental clichés (and don’t think I mean to complain!). And when some fresh-faced students approached him afterwards, during refreshments, he asked what it was they had “in their lives” that he himself lacked. Their answer: more of those valuable clichés. A sense of purpose, a relationship with Christ, the joy of the Spirit. You know them all. Little did he suspect that the single thing he lacked was membership in a congenial group. And that these formulae merely denote a set of passwords into the group. If he begins to say, and to think (as he soon inevitably will) that he, too, has a relationship with Jesus, and so on, he will belong to the group. It is the secret handshake. Different slogans would admit him to other organizations, and the common use of the shared language would conjure a sense of identity constituted solely by membership in that group. And should a member of one of our other sect groups approach him, he will almost certainly reject the overture because his own group will seem unique to him, and uniquely true. Why? Simply because it is his group. If he were to allow that any member of any such group feels the same way and for the same reason, he would have distanced himself enough, albeit momentarily, that logic would gain an entrance and inform him that his allegiance is in no way unique nor better founded than any other’s.

      The fellowship group will become the atmosphere in which he breathes. While he is among other acquaintances, he may feel tempted to join in their activities (drinking, sex, drugs) in which they participate, and this is why his new group insists he substitute his loyalty to them for any and all of these “sinful” former associations. In class he may feel like a persecuted minority for he is threatened by the simple presence of those whose beliefs do not reinforce his own. Likewise, when surrounded by fellow believers, it is the predominance which makes it impossible for him to take seriously the doubts that so plagued him alone in the dorm the previous evening as he read his philosophy assignment. Here we are talking about (and using) simple peer pressure. The time will come to provide him with arguments to wield against non-believers, but those arguments never convinced him in the first place and would never suffice to keep him in the fold in any case. What cemented him to this group and keeps him there is the emotional identification.

      At all costs, never let him recall the simple fact that he concluded the truth of the conservative Protestant theology not on the basis of examining its logical cogency or its evidence and credentials, but rather only because this group of bright-eyed college students offered him friendship! It is as if a physicist should embrace quantum physics just because he enjoyed going fishing with colleagues who advocated that view! And yet, standing thus in mid-air, your man is cocksure in his ignorance. It is glorious! It is delicious!

      But do the little fleshlings not in fact acknowledge the emotional basis of their bond? You are right, Wiltwing, they do. But this does not mean they have ventured into dangerous territory. Here is one of many cases where we turn

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