As part of considering basic Christian beliefs, I found myself asking why faith is the most reasonable reaction I could come up with to what the world dishes out. I grew up in a non-believing family, so why would I be attracted to Christianity when that wasn’t how I was raised?

I remember a conversation with a coworker of my husband. It was a Saturday night as their shift was ending and she invited us to a party at her house. My husband said “Well, we’d like to come, but we’re teaching tomorrow in Sunday School, so we really need to go home to bed.” He then left me with her to go get something and Alice made a comment about how she didn’t go to church because they were all racist institutions. Although she looked white, she was actually half-black and half-Jewish. We’ve always attended multi-ethnic churches, so I invited her to ours, saying that we weren’t the typical church, that we have more than one race attending. To which, Alice said, “oh, you mean the children and grandchildren of people who were forced by the missionaries to become Christians?”

So the conversation was over, but the comment remains in my mind. I’ve had a lot of opportunity to talk to Christians from other cultures. Our church is about 1/3 Korean, for example. Actually, South Korea is about 1/5 Christian these days. I don’t know anyone who claims the missionaries forced grandpa to become a Christian. Most are themselves first-generation Christians – having been raised as Buddhists, though at least one of my friends was raised in a rich, secular family that disowned her for becoming a Christian. Even those with a traditional Christianity tell stories of grandpa having been curious about music, rituals, culture, wanting to learn English, wanting to learn to farm better, needing food/medicine, etc., that caused him/her to voluntarily interact with the missionaries and voluntarily accept Christ as Savior.

I am not saying there were never any forced conversions, but I think these were far fewer than revisionist historians make out.  You can make someone go to church by providing them incentives to go or simply by proscribing their behavior, but you cannot make them believe. Belief is something that happens inside the human heart. It cannot be coerced. I think the history of Christianity would, if we could really know it, reveal a mass of voluntary conversions with a scattering of forced efforts, which by the way, wouldn’t result in true conversion.

Christianity cannot be forced. It’s about a relationship with Jesus Christ, not about rules and rituals. You can make me performs rules and rituals. That perhaps makes me a Christianist, one who practices the forms and rites of Christendom. This does not, however, make me a Christian because a Christian has a relationship with the Savior and that is something that cannot be forced. It’s the old chestnut “you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.”

So what makes a belief in a personal God preferable to non-belief or some other concept of God? Well, first you need to look at the reasonableness of belief. Sometimes a particularly type of non-believer will insist that a belief in God is irrational. They usually paint their position as open-minded and based upon reason while suggesting that the “religious” person is guided by unproven emotion or “faith assumptions.” Truly, that position is itself a faith assumption. It is true that we can’t fit God into a test tube and analyze Him like we might a microbe. However, mention of that microbe reminds me that there was a time when claiming that diseases were caused by little one-celled organisms that we can’t see would have been viewed as insane. We had no way of proving that microbes exist, so the first scientists to advance the theory of microbial infection were really making a faith assumption based upon their observations of the world. Christians do much the same. Perhaps we see evidence that the non-believer doesn’t see or won’t acknowledge; that doesn’t mean the evidence is false. It simply means the non-believer doesn’t recognize it. Microbes still existed before people knew they did. God can still exist even if my atheist cousin believes He doesn’t. Essentially, you can’t prove or disprove God. A lack of evidence doesn’t disprove Him. A lack of evidence that is acceptable to some people really doesn’t disprove Him. It mostly just proves that some people can’t see the evidence for whatever reason, usually having to do with denial. They don’t want to entertain a supernatural cause for anything, so they simply refuse to accept any supernatural evidence. While they’re off looking for evidence the meets their standards, those of us who are a bit more open-minded are able to enjoy the fruit of accepting the evidence in the first place.

It is really not more rational to refuse to accept that which won’t fit into the scientific model. It is more materialistic, but that doesn’t necessarily speak to reasonableness. A narrow focus risks missing the larger picture.