If you believe in the Christian God, it would be evil of you not to evangelize. The alternative is to allow someone you know (and should love) to go to the hell you believe in.

But what should you avoid? This article lists some of the things Christians often do, which will always fail to reach the hearts of unbelievers.

Trivializing

Avoid saying the following: “All you have to do is…”

Those of us who do not believe there is a God do not have an easy way to “just” believe or give our hearts to what we see as an imaginary being.

If I tell you to read The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, and believe it is true, you will have a hard time believing in a magic talking lion, fawn, and who knows what else. The same with any other story of known fiction.

The same is true of the bible. I find it hard to believe that all of humanity was killed in a flood and that the animals that remain on Earth are the ones that a single man managed to squeeze onto a small boat for forty days.

I find it hard to believe that a woman was turned into salt, or that the town she was running from was full of only evil people.

I find it hard to believe that a Jewish carpenter living 2,000 years ago in modern Israel was not just a charismatic philosopher, but was actually capable of real magic.

And I especially find it hard to know why I should believe John and Paul/Saul, but not Muhammad, Joseph Smith, Ron L Hubbard, or Isaac Asimov.

Belief, despite the evidence – and let’s be clear, the evidence against is great, and the evidence for is zero, so that faith is required – is beyond tricky. That is why the vast majority of Muslims, and the vast majority of Christians are people born to Muslim or Christian parents, respectively.

Condescending

You believe in something hard to believe, as I pointed out above. So believing that atheists are dumb is a bad place to try to convert them. Do not patronize them, do not assume they do not understand what love is, what grace is, what peace is, what joy is. Be humble.

Calling me evil

Yours is a job of persuasion. Just as being condescending will turn people off, so will calling atheists evil.

When I say I do not believe in magic, God, or ghosts, I am not saying “I prefer Satan to your God” – I don’t believe in Satan. I am not in thrall to anything, good or evil. If you want me to be on your side, give me a chance by talking to me as an equal. Do not be “holier than thou”.

Don’t assume we’re angry at God

If you are called to be an evangelist, or a pastor, then your job is one of communication. Atheists are not a single group, but they can be fairly categorized as:

• People who have never heard about your God;
• People who have heard a little about your God, and dismissed him as meaningless or untrue;
• People who have heard a lot about your God, and rejected him as imaginary.

Some who claim to be atheists might be angry at God, but if they are angry at God, they believe he exists, and therefore are not atheists. They may be slipping away from your religion (or another religion) but they are not unbelievers.

I wrote more about this in a recent post.

Have some answers

Noah’s Ark was tiny. Most calculate it to be 540 feet long, 37.5 feet high, and 75 feet wide (source), but even a more generous version of the cubit makes it a pretty small boat. This is about half the length of the world’s largest cruise ship sailing today. This small ship had to carry not only every species we know about today from the Middle East, but also every animal on far flung continents including emus, kangaroos, moose, sloths, etc. Australia was not known to Middle Eastern scholars at the time and nor were the Americas, so there were also some significant transport issues.

When this question is asked, some dismiss the Old Testament as unimportant. You can dismiss the Old Testament in your proselytizing, but then you need to be consistent, and don’t quote the Old Testament to support anti-abortion, or homophobic political positions which no thinking person accepts without religious justification.

And if you reject the Old Testament, which makes you among the minority of Christians, then you still need to have answers to at least the common questions asked about a man who could make water into wine. For example, why are so many evangelical churches so anti-alcohol? Why doesn’t the church listen to scientific advice about alcohol which shows that drug abuse only happens when people’s lives are terrible, and that a truly loving community would be able to help people without demonizing them? For that matter, why does the church continually have opinions out of line with the evidence?

If you want to reach atheists it is your moral responsibility to have these answers prepared. If you don’t, all you are going to do when preaching is reach the uneducated, the mentally ill, or poach believers from other denominations.

Stop preaching doom and gloom / know the truth

The world is not heaven on Earth, but it is getting better. It has gotten better over the medium-term for all of modern history, and there is no reason to believe it will reverse. Many Christian sermons talk of how dark the world is, and how it’s getting worse, but this is false.

Again, do the work, and don’t rely on scaring people into the pews. You can’t scare people into the pews. Don’t keep trying. Bring them in with messages of love, and mean them.

Do the research, read The Better Angels of Our Nature (source), or any books at all not written about your God or your religion. The world is getting better and if you do not believe that, then you have already lost the atheist you are talking to.

Knowing about the true nature of the world requires acknowledging that some people know what they are talking about, and that most of us have no chance of knowing much of anything in any depth. See my recent article about knowledge: Embrace the knowledge that you know nothing.

Conclusion

As an atheist, people talk to me about their God at regular intervals. They often trivialize belief, they rarely have any cogent answers to the obvious falsehoods of the Old Testament, and they do not really know how the world is getting better or talk about how the end times must be approaching as the world worsens.

If you want to reach non-Christians, and you should, then you need to do the research. Know some of what they know. Empathize with the difficulty of believing in something so incredibly fantastical, and don’t badger them. If you have given it a fair crack, if you have done the work I mention above, then it’s no longer on your conscience. Treat atheists you have failed to “save” as people to interact with while you remain on Earth with them.

Example

I heard this attempt, recently. It assumes that belief is a conscious choice. It assumes that we can understand why the torture of a Roman-era Jew helps me today. It attempts to use a fear of evil treatment by God as a reason to love him, which is suspect. In other words, it doesn’t reach anyone who does not already believe, so who was it for?