That time my violin teacher tried to convert me to Christianity
“Do you believe in the literal truth of the resurrection of Jesus Christ?”
We had just tuned our instruments, the way we did at the beginning of every lesson, when my violin teacher abruptly asked me this question. It was, I realized, Good Friday.
I had come into the lesson already nervous because I hadn’t practiced enough; I was 21, a junior in college, and life was regularly getting in the way.
We ended up spending the entire length of the lesson debating Christianity. Or, more accurately, I spent the entire lesson repeatedly saying “I’m Jewish” and trying to exit the conversation — perhaps I could play that concerto I hadn’t practiced? — while he spent the time lobbing arguments at me.
I majored in religious studies, so you might imagine I was really prepared for this moment, ready to refute each point he made. But academic religious studies is not particularly concerned with debating the factual evidence for biblical miracles. I was taking a course on religious symbolism in children’s literature that semester and had no idea what to respond when he asked me what my parents did — they’re lawyers — and proceeded to tell me that the number of witnesses who saw Jesus rise from the dead meant the case for his resurrection was winnable in any court.
I was thinking about that conversation this week when I saw that the Trump administration had announced new guidance on religious practice in federal workplaces, a document that says “attempting to persuade others of the correctness of their own religious views” is a protected form of religious expression.
To be fair, Christianity sees proselytizing as a core tenet of its practice. So any limits on proselytizing could be seen as impinging on their free exercise of religion. On the other hand, proselytizing often has the effect of ostracizing members of any minority religion; even in the most well-intentioned and accepting community, minorities can feel othered, and that’s without someone telling them to worship differently.
This is particularly tricky because, often, the proselytizing party sees themselves as doing good. As I got increasingly uncomfortable in the conversation with my violin teacher, he proposed a metaphor to try to explain why he was pushing me so hard: If you saw someone standing on train tracks, with the train barrelling toward them, wouldn’t you push them off?
He cared about me, he said, so he was trying to save me. (He didn’t specify what he was saving me from, but I think we can all infer that it was Hell.) I can’t remember what I said back. The conversation is a blur; most of what I remember is feeling claustrophobic and panicky.
It’s almost a religious contradiction to explain to someone who genuinely believes that accepting Jesus is the only way to be saved from hell that actually, their proselytizing is harmful.
https://forward.com/forward-newsletters/...sh-violin/
“Do you believe in the literal truth of the resurrection of Jesus Christ?”
We had just tuned our instruments, the way we did at the beginning of every lesson, when my violin teacher abruptly asked me this question. It was, I realized, Good Friday.
I had come into the lesson already nervous because I hadn’t practiced enough; I was 21, a junior in college, and life was regularly getting in the way.
We ended up spending the entire length of the lesson debating Christianity. Or, more accurately, I spent the entire lesson repeatedly saying “I’m Jewish” and trying to exit the conversation — perhaps I could play that concerto I hadn’t practiced? — while he spent the time lobbing arguments at me.
I majored in religious studies, so you might imagine I was really prepared for this moment, ready to refute each point he made. But academic religious studies is not particularly concerned with debating the factual evidence for biblical miracles. I was taking a course on religious symbolism in children’s literature that semester and had no idea what to respond when he asked me what my parents did — they’re lawyers — and proceeded to tell me that the number of witnesses who saw Jesus rise from the dead meant the case for his resurrection was winnable in any court.
I was thinking about that conversation this week when I saw that the Trump administration had announced new guidance on religious practice in federal workplaces, a document that says “attempting to persuade others of the correctness of their own religious views” is a protected form of religious expression.
To be fair, Christianity sees proselytizing as a core tenet of its practice. So any limits on proselytizing could be seen as impinging on their free exercise of religion. On the other hand, proselytizing often has the effect of ostracizing members of any minority religion; even in the most well-intentioned and accepting community, minorities can feel othered, and that’s without someone telling them to worship differently.
This is particularly tricky because, often, the proselytizing party sees themselves as doing good. As I got increasingly uncomfortable in the conversation with my violin teacher, he proposed a metaphor to try to explain why he was pushing me so hard: If you saw someone standing on train tracks, with the train barrelling toward them, wouldn’t you push them off?
He cared about me, he said, so he was trying to save me. (He didn’t specify what he was saving me from, but I think we can all infer that it was Hell.) I can’t remember what I said back. The conversation is a blur; most of what I remember is feeling claustrophobic and panicky.
It’s almost a religious contradiction to explain to someone who genuinely believes that accepting Jesus is the only way to be saved from hell that actually, their proselytizing is harmful.
https://forward.com/forward-newsletters/...sh-violin/
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
