Shoot-the-Bull
While working as a docent at my local civil war museum, a visitor spent half an hour walking the gallery with me. We spoke about the regiments raised in Jasper County, about supply routes and the families who stayed behind. He was attentive and kind, the sort of patron who reminds me why I enjoy public history. As he left, he thanked me for my time, said I was doing good work preserving the past, and then pressed a small booklet into my hand. “You might need this,” he said as he puttered away.
The booklet was a gospel tract—one of the thin, folded leaflets printed by the thousands and distributed wherever sincerity and certainty intersect. It asked, Where will you spend eternity? I have seen that question for most of my life. It operates less as inquiry than as strategy, a prompt designed to create existential discomfort in the reader and to offer immediate relief in the form of belief.
I set the tract aside, but the gesture stayed with me. It was familiar not only because I have received many such pamphlets, but because I once handed them out. At sixteen I attended an evangelism workshop before a World Changers mission trip in Birmingham, Alabama. We were taught conversational methods for “sharing the gospel,” one of which was informally called the “shoot-the-bull” approach. The premise was simple: begin with small talk, identify a point of connection, and then redirect the exchange toward salvation. We paired up and practiced the transition as if it were a kind of moral sales pitch. I remember the mixture of fear and excitement that came with the belief that someone’s eternity might hinge on my ability to pivot from casual conversation to conversion.
To a convinced believer, that urgency makes sense. Within that theological framework, love and warning are inseparable. If hell is real, silence becomes cruelty; persuasion becomes compassion. Paul’s question in Romans 10:14—“How shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard?”—was treated not as metaphor but as mandate. The gospel tract and the door-to-door conversation both arise from this conviction: that eternity depends upon communication, and that believers bear personal responsibility for the outcome.
With distance, I recognize both the sincerity and the coercion built into that logic. The evangelistic act is presented as generosity, yet it begins with an assumption of deficiency in the other person. It imagines every encounter as an opportunity for rescue and measures success by assent rather than understanding. At sixteen I did not see the tension between care and control. I only felt the exhilaration of believing I had participated in the Lord’s work. Now, when a visitor hands me a tract, I see a mirror image of my younger self—a person acting out of conviction, extending what he perceives as love, unaware of how the gesture presumes authority over another’s meaning.
Working in a museum devoted to conflict gives this experience additional resonance. The exhibits around me testify to a century and a half of people fighting for principles they considered non-negotiable. The tract functions on the same spectrum of certainty, though its weapon is persuasion rather than cannon fire. Both arise from the human need to fix truth in place and to enlist others in its defense.
The Evangelist’s Burden
The logic of evangelism rests on a familiar moral structure: those who possess the truth must share it, whatever the cost. Within that framework, silence becomes cruelty. To refrain from witnessing is to risk another’s damnation. The Great Commission—“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19)—transforms compassion into obligation. Faith becomes not only personal conviction but public duty, a mission that defines worth through success in persuasion.
This structure echoes what Rudyard Kipling, at the height of British imperial confidence, called “The White Man’s Burden.” In that poem, empire is imagined as self-sacrifice: the “noble” labor of bringing civilization to “new-caught, sullen peoples.” The colonizer bears the moral weight of conquest, consoling himself with the belief that domination is service. Evangelism operates through a similar logic of benevolent hierarchy. The believer assumes responsibility for the unbeliever, not through violence but through persuasion, confident that conversion equals care. The vocabulary changes—souls instead of nations, salvation instead of civilization—but the hierarchy remains.
Both forms of burden are framed as love and function as control. They divide the world into enlightened and lost, mature and childlike, saved and unsaved. In both, the subject of rescue has no agency; the act of “saving” defines and justifies itself. Kipling’s imperialist and the door-to-door evangelist share a single psychology: each must believe that the other’s well-being depends upon submission to their truth. Without that conviction, their own identity begins to unravel.
As a young Baptist, I felt that moral pressure acutely. To care for a friend or neighbor was to carry their eternity in my hands. Their unbelief became my failure. The responsibility was intoxicating and unbearable in equal measure. When I prayed with a homeless man outside a gas station, I felt both pity and triumph—pity for his condition, triumph for my role in redeeming it. That mixture of charity and superiority is the emotional grammar of both empire and evangelism. The missionary and the colonizer alike see themselves as burdened by compassion, justified by love.
Scholars of religion and postcolonial theory have long noted this overlap. The language of “taking the gospel to the nations” accompanied Western expansion for centuries, transforming cultural dominance into divine mandate. Conversion was not merely spiritual; it was civilizational. In that sense, evangelism is empire writ small—its territory the conscience rather than the continent. Even in domestic contexts, the same paternalism persists. Every tract handed across a counter carries the quiet presumption that the recipient’s world is incomplete without the giver’s faith.
With distance, I recognize how deeply that narrative shaped my own moral development. Evangelism taught me that goodness required intrusion, that love justified offense. It sanctified disregard for boundaries by naming it courage. To remain silent in the face of unbelief was not humility but neglect. The believer’s duty was to rescue others, even from their contentment. Like Kipling’s “half-devil and half-child,” the unbeliever could be pitied but never fully respected.
And yet, as with imperialism, the burden reassures the bearer more than it benefits the recipient. Kipling’s colonizer conquers to prove his virtue; the evangelist witnesses to preserve his certainty. Each converts anxiety into vocation. The fear that one’s world might be unstable finds relief in the act of extending it. Every tract distributed, every conversation steered toward salvation, functions as ritual maintenance of the self. The soul ostensibly rescued is incidental; the true object of salvation is the believer’s own conviction.
I no longer view the man who handed me the tract at the museum as an aggressor. He was performing the same moral script I once rehearsed: the drama of compassion that demands compliance. His gesture was not unique; it was the latest iteration of a long human story in which love and power intertwine. Kipling’s poem ends with the colonizer’s plea for recognition—“The blame of those ye better, / The hate of those ye guard.” Evangelism shares that lament. It imagines itself misunderstood, burdened by the ingratitude of those it tries to save. Both fail to see that the very premise of salvation—the assumption that others must be remade—is what perpetuates the cycle.
Friends for Christ
If evangelism, viewed broadly, mirrors empire, its most common expression appears in miniature through relationships. What colonization attempted on continents, I was taught to attempt in conversation. “Make friends to make Christians,” we were told—a slogan meant to humanize the task, to replace confrontation with connection. The method presumed that trust could be engineered, that rapport itself could function as a tool of conversion. We learned to initiate small talk, discover shared interests, and then guide the conversation toward faith. Friendship was the prelude; salvation the goal.
At the time, I accepted this logic without question. It sounded benign, even noble. After all, the process began with friendliness. Only later did I understand the distortion it introduced. Friendship presumes mutuality—each person valued for who they are, not for what outcome they might produce. Evangelistic friendship, by contrast, was instrumental. It was built on affection, but it required an agenda. Every genuine moment of connection carried the invisible weight of purpose: would this person pray the sinner’s prayer? Could this conversation be the one? What appeared as intimacy was, in practice, strategy.
This instrumentalization of relationship is what made so many of my early encounters feel simultaneously earnest and hollow. I recall leading a homeless man through a prayer of repentance outside a Birmingham gas station. At sixteen, I was thrilled; the experience confirmed my usefulness to God. Yet when I shared the story later that evening and received applause for “saving” him, a faint unease lingered. The applause was not for him—it was for me. His hunger and instability, his need for food and shelter, were not part of the story’s moral. They were scenery for my success. Only years later did I recognize how that dynamic reproduces itself wherever evangelism measures faith in numbers rather than relationships.
Sociologists of religion have noted this pattern in modern evangelical movements. Conversion statistics function as evidence of vitality; they assure communities that the gospel remains effective. Friendship becomes data collection, a way to generate testimonies that can be reported and celebrated in the quarterly newsletter. The human complexity of each encounter—its ambiguities, motives, and failures—is simplified into binary categories: saved or lost, reached or unreached. The theological language of “personal relationship with Jesus” obscures the fact that actual relationships are often subordinated to this accounting.
Apologetics provided the intellectual counterpart to this dynamic. While friendship evangelism sought emotional access, apologetics sought cognitive leverage. I read C.S. Lewis, Josh McDowell, and Ravi Zacharias with the same confidence that I once carried tracts. Their arguments promised to make belief reasonable—to translate faith into logic. But the method mirrored evangelism’s transactional nature. The aim was not to explore but to persuade, to move a skeptic from one column to another on a mental spreadsheet of salvation. What passed for conversation was often monologue: a rehearsed sequence of proofs awaiting the other person’s surrender.
These practices—friendship as tactic, argument as defense—shared an underlying assumption: that truth is a possession to be transferred rather than a mystery to be encountered. They left little room for mutual discovery. Even in apparently dialogical settings, the structure was closed. The believer already knew the conclusion and simply awaited the other’s consent. This is why, when I eventually began to question the faith itself, I found the tools I had been given inadequate. They were designed for persuasion, not for understanding.
The emotional toll of this system is subtle but enduring. When every friendship carries an evangelical charge, authenticity becomes difficult to sustain. The believer learns to perform warmth as invitation, sincerity as means. When belief fades, the performance becomes impossible. Deconstruction, in that sense, is not only intellectual; it is interpersonal. It requires unlearning habits of strategic affection and learning to value others without the promise of conversion.
I sometimes think of the museum patron who handed me the tract as an echo of that earlier self. His gesture was kind, yet beneath it lay the same asymmetry: a conversation that could never be between equals, because one side presumed to know the other’s ultimate need. The distance between care and condescension is often measured only by motive, and motives, however pure, cannot erase the imbalance of power that evangelism introduces.
_-_(MeisterDrucke-1487563).jpg)
Conjectures & Refutations
For me, deconstruction did not arrive as a single revelation but as accumulation—small fractures that eventually joined into a fault line. Each question that went unanswered, each contradiction ignored, widened the gap between what I was told to believe and what I could honestly affirm. I did not abandon faith lightly; I tested it until it collapsed under its own weight.
Science was an early point of strain. In church, I had been taught a version of creationism that borrowed the language of science but not its method. It presented itself as evidence-based, yet its conclusions were predetermined: the earth must be young, evolution must be false, the flood must explain geology. This was not science but apologetic mimicry—what philosophers of knowledge would call pseudoscience. It adopted the posture of inquiry without accepting its discipline. Karl Popper described genuine science as a method of “conjectures and refutations,” a willingness to expose hypotheses to falsification. The creationist material I absorbed as a teenager practiced the opposite: conjectures and defenses. Evidence that threatened the conclusion was reinterpreted or dismissed.
When I began to study the natural sciences formally, the contrast was immediate. Hard science welcomed uncertainty; it advanced by admitting ignorance. To encounter that intellectual humility was disorienting. The more I understood about cosmology, biology, and evolution, the more I saw that these disciplines were not enemies of wonder but its most trustworthy allies. The universe revealed by physics and biology was not smaller than the one described in Genesis; it was larger, older, and far more intricate. To cling to literalism in the face of such beauty began to feel like ingratitude.
The intellectual dissonance spread quickly to theology. The biblical narrative that had once seemed seamless began to unravel under closer reading. I encountered the historical-critical approach and realized that the Bible was less a monolithic revelation than a library of evolving traditions. Scholars such as Bart Ehrman, Amy-Jill Levine, and John Collins demonstrated that these texts were written, edited, and reinterpreted across centuries by communities negotiating their own histories and hopes. Once I accepted that the Bible was a human document, inspired by human longing rather than dictated by divine hand, the claim of inerrancy became untenable.
The tension between science and scripture eventually crystallized around one question: if Adam was not a historical figure, what became of the theology built upon him? Paul’s assertion that “as in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Corinthians 15:22) depends upon the literal existence of the first man. If humanity did not fall in a moment of primordial disobedience, then the logic of substitutionary redemption falters. To reduce Adam to metaphor while insisting that Jesus remains literal seemed inconsistent. The structure no longer held.
My pastors responded to such questions with the advice to read “faith-affirming” material—books by C.S. Lewis, Josh McDowell, or Lee Strobel. I had already read them. Their arguments comfort those predisposed to belief but collapse under critical examination. Each begins from the conclusion that Christianity is true and then arranges evidence accordingly. Apologetics, I discovered, is not a search for truth but an architecture of reassurance. It provides believers with intellectual permission to stop asking.
When I did not stop, discomfort followed. In one Sunday-school discussion, I mentioned the possibility of life on other planets. The teacher replied, “If we find them, they’ll need Jesus, too.” Similar to what I had heard at another church at another time, the remark was meant as humor, but it exposed the brittleness of our theology. We claimed universality yet could not imagine a cosmos that did not revolve around us. The insistence that every discovery must confirm doctrine betrayed the insecurity beneath our certainty. The same impulse that justified evangelism as rescue now reappeared as an intellectual colonization of reality itself: every idea, every fact, every star had to be annexed for God.
Education did not destroy my faith as many of my fellow church-goers believed; the text itself did. The more I studied scripture historically, the more human it became conflicted, beautiful, self-contradictory. Its power lay not in divine consistency but in its record of people struggling toward meaning. To call it perfect was to diminish it. Once I saw that, belief could no longer be sustained by intellectual pretense. The foundation had cracked from within.
Leaving that structure was painful. Faith had organized not only my worldview but my community and identity. Yet I could not continue to defend what I knew to be indefensible. The theologian Paul Tillich once wrote that “doubt is not the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith.” In my experience, doubt was not an element but the solvent. It dissolved the certainties I had mistaken for conviction and revealed what remained: the desire to live honestly, even if that honesty left me without a creed.
There it Must be Unmade
What followed the collapse of belief was not liberation but grief. The language of “losing faith” understates the experience; it was more akin to bereavement. The framework that had once given coherence to everything—morality, purpose, community, even vocabulary—was gone. What remained was silence that felt at once honest and unbearable.
In the early months after leaving church, I caught myself continuing to pray. Old reflexes persisted: the whispered thanks before meals, the mental plea for safety when driving at night, the involuntary Lord help me in moments of worry. Each prayer dissolved halfway through, suspended between habit and disbelief. To stop praying entirely felt like betrayal; to continue felt like pretending. This is the peculiar torment of deconstruction. It is not a decisive rejection but an unmaking that unfolds slowly, layer by layer, until the words that once anchored meaning lose their weight.
The emotional cost is compounded by isolation. Doubt rarely occurs in public. Within evangelical culture, questioning is treated as contagion—something to be quarantined lest it spread. I learned to disguise uncertainty in the language of “wrestling with God,” a phrase that reassured others I was still safely within the fold. But genuine deconstruction cannot be managed as performance. Once the questions become unanswerable, community often withdraws. Friendships built on shared conviction begin to fray. Invitations fade. The sense of belonging that once seemed unconditional reveals itself as conditional after all.
Psychologists who study religious disaffiliation describe this stage as “identity disorientation.” Marlene Winell, in Leaving the Fold, calls it “religious trauma syndrome”—a loss of meaning structure accompanied by guilt and fear. Her language is clinical, but it captures the lived experience. Even when belief has intellectually evaporated, its emotional architecture remains. Heaven and hell persist as echoes. When a loved one dies, I still catch myself imagining reunion before remembering that, for me, no such reunion awaits. The grief doubles back on itself—mourning not only the person but the worldview that once promised comfort.
Part of the pain was recognizing how deeply the language of burden had shaped me—not only as a believer but as a participant in a tradition that sanctified intervention. It is one thing to lose doctrine; it is another to unlearn the habits of certainty that accompanied it. The colonizing impulse of faith survives its theology.
My own process was slow. For a long period I oscillated between anger and nostalgia. Anger at the intellectual dishonesty I had been taught to defend; nostalgia for the communal warmth that dishonesty had sustained. It was easier to critique doctrine than to replicate belonging. The social bonds of faith are woven from shared repetition—singing, praying, volunteering, mourning. Without those rhythms, weeks began to feel formless. What I missed most was not God but the calendar of devotion, the sense that time itself carried liturgical meaning.
Gradually, fragments of that structure returned in secular form. Teaching became a kind of ministry; the classroom, a place where I could still participate in formation without pretense of conversion. Museums and city councils offered their own liturgies—agendas, minutes, votes—rituals that affirmed continuity amid change. The sacred, I found, was not gone; it had migrated. But that recognition came only after the ache subsided, after the silence ceased to feel like loss and began to feel like space.
Even now, I remain aware that the pain of deconstruction never disappears entirely. It leaves scar tissue—sensitivity to manipulation, impatience with certainty, skepticism toward consolation. Yet these marks are not only wounds; they are warnings. They remind me of the cost of dishonest comfort and the value of integrity.
The psalmist wrote, “Deep calls to deep at the noise of thy waters” (Psalm 42:7). I no longer hear that verse as testimony to divine encounter but as description of the self speaking into its own depths. To deconstruct is to listen for that echo and to accept that it may be the only answer one receives.
The Intercession of Mary
Among those who remain in the faith, deconstruction is rarely taken at face value. For many believers, it can only be understood as a stage on the way back. When I describe myself as non-believing yet still religious, friends often assume that I am somewhere in the middle of a spiritual journey, not at its destination. “God is still working on you,” one evangelical friend told me with affection, as if disbelief were a temporary fever from which recovery was expected. The remark was kind, but it revealed how differently we now understand what has happened.
Catholic friends interpret the same facts through a different lens. They are less alarmed by ritual without belief. Where evangelicalism treats faith as a moment of personal decision, Catholicism treats it as a continuum of practice. For them, the sacraments and devotions carry power even when faith wavers. When I mention the rosary on my desk or describe visiting a cathedral, they smile knowingly. “Mary is working on you,” one said, half in jest but wholly sincere. My curiosity about ritual is, to them, not evidence of unbelief but of prevenient grace—a sign that the Mother of God is gently drawing me back toward Her Son.
Both readings miss the point in opposite ways. My evangelical friends assume that without belief ritual is meaningless; my Catholic friends assume that ritual will eventually reignite belief. I occupy a middle ground neither tradition quite recognizes: practice without confession, reverence without creed. What I value in liturgy is not its supernatural efficacy but its human wisdom—the way repetition steadies life, the way beauty can teach attention. When I light a candle or trace the sign of the cross, I do not imagine unseen intercession; I acknowledge continuity with generations who found meaning in these same gestures. The act is historical before it is theological.
These misunderstandings create a quiet distance. I have learned to accept it. My friends’ compassion is genuine, and I no longer feel the need to correct their interpretations. To explain would require dismantling the frameworks that give their lives coherence. Their conviction that I will one day “come home” comforts them, and I no longer take offense at it. In truth, their hope is a mirror of my own past self. I once prayed similar prayers for others, confident that God’s patience would outlast their resistance. That memory tempers irritation with empathy.
Over time, I have found a way to remain near without pretending to belong. I attend concerts in cathedrals, volunteer at community events hosted by churches, and join friends for Christmas Eve services without reciting the Creed. These are acts of participation, not conversion. They allow me to inhabit the cultural body of religion without submitting to its authority. In those spaces, I see what shared life might look like when faith and disbelief coexist—when ritual is treated as a common inheritance rather than a boundary.
Paul’s words come to mind: “When I was a child, I spoke as a child… but when I became a man, I put away childish things” (1 Corinthians 13:11). My friends read that verse as an exhortation to mature faith; I read it as permission to live truthfully beyond it. Their hope for my return and my acceptance of their hope can coexist without resolution. Between us lies a kind of peace—not agreement, but mutual patience.
Choosing Religion Anyway
To speak of being religious but not believing still invites confusion. In a culture that equates religion with doctrine, the idea of remaining within its forms after abandoning its claims seems contradictory. Yet this is precisely where I have chosen to live. After deconstruction, I faced a decision familiar to many former believers: whether to reject religion entirely or to reinterpret it as a human inheritance rather than a divine command. I chose the latter, not out of nostalgia but from conviction that religion, once disentangled from supernaturalism, still holds practices worth preserving.
Honesty was the first demand of this choice. I could no longer defend propositions I knew to be untenable, nor pretend that mystery required metaphysical explanation. To remain honest meant admitting that the gods of my childhood were human creations—artifacts of language and longing. Yet honesty alone was insufficient. Stripped of structure, life risks drifting into arbitrariness. What drew me back toward religion was not belief but the recognition that ritual and community provide a grammar for meaning. They organize time, mark transitions, and transform repetition into care. The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre once described tradition as “an argument extended through time.” To live religiously without belief is to remain within that argument, aware of its human authorship but unwilling to abandon its wisdom.
In practice, this means treating religious forms as cultural disciplines. Morning and evening still carry the rhythm of prayer, though my petitions are addressed to no one in particular. The psalms I once recited as divine speech I now read as early poetry of endurance. Their cadences still steady the day. Cathedrals and temples function for me as museums of devotion—evidence of what human beings can imagine when they take beauty seriously. Bread and wine at a table, light filtered through stained glass, the repetition of familiar phrases: these remain sacramental, not because they mediate grace but because they reveal care. To call them sacred is simply to acknowledge their capacity to shape attention.
This reframing also redefines morality. Without the certainty of divine command, ethics becomes a matter of collective responsibility. The absence of cosmic judgment does not weaken obligation; it intensifies it. If justice will not descend from heaven, it must be built on earth. The sociologist Émile Durkheim argued that religion functions as society worshiping itself—its values, its cohesion, its memory. Accepting that analysis does not empty religion of meaning; it clarifies the task. To live religiously now is to participate consciously in that human project: to preserve what binds communities together without pretending that those bonds were woven by invisible hands.
Honesty also requires acknowledging the harm religion can inflict. The same institutions that preserve art and charity have sanctioned cruelty and exclusion. My continued engagement with religion is therefore selective and critical. I attend services as an observer, not as an adherent. I participate in rituals that cultivate compassion and reject those that demand assent. This discernment is not cynicism; it is stewardship. Traditions, like gardens, must be tended if they are to bear fruit. Left unattended, they become monuments to authority rather than invitations to reverence.
The Catholic imagination, with its sacramental vision of the world, has helped me understand this stance more fully. I no longer share its theology, but I recognize its insight: that matter itself can be a vessel of meaning. Incense, vestments, processions—these dramatize what all human life enacts in miniature, the transformation of the ordinary into the significant. To call that transformation “grace” is a theological choice; to call it “art” is enough for me. In both cases the impulse is the same: to honor humanity by attending to it.
In the end, what I have chosen is not belief but fidelity—to practice, to community, to the hard work of making meaning. John 8:32 declares, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” Freedom, in my experience, came not from discovering absolute truth but from relinquishing the demand for it. To live religiously without belief is to accept that meaning is provisional yet still sacred. It is to act as if reverence matters, even when revelation does not.
Where Will You Spend Eternity?
The tract now rests on a bookshelf at home, slipped between volumes of history and theology. I could have thrown it away, but I didn’t. Something in me resists discarding these small tokens of belief. They are reminders of where I have been, and of how deeply conviction shapes ordinary life. Every so often, when I am dusting or rearranging the shelves, the gold lettering catches the light—THIS WAS YOUR LIFE—and I pause long enough to feel both gratitude and distance. I no longer share the certainty behind the question, yet I recognize its sincerity.
Working in the Civil War museum has made me attentive to the material traces of conviction. The relics that surround me—letters written from battlefields, tattered flags, family Bibles carried through campaigns—are all fragments of belief. They testify to the lengths people will go to defend what they hold sacred. The tract belongs to that same lineage, though its warfare is spiritual rather than political. It is a small artifact of persuasion, designed to reassure the one who gives it as much as the one who receives it. When the visitor pressed it into my hand, I saw the gesture for what it was: a kindness animated by fear, an attempt to rescue both of us from uncertainty.
In another life, I would have read it eagerly, searching for affirmation or insight. Now I leave it unopened. Its arguments are familiar; I once delivered them myself. What interests me instead is the persistence of the impulse—to comfort others by offering certainty. Faith and history are alike in this way: both seek to impose coherence on the unknowable. The tract promises a world made whole by belief. The museum’s exhibits promise a world made legible through memory. Neither promise can be fully kept, yet both reveal a longing I still understand.
Bringing the tract home was, in a sense, an act of recognition. It stands among other artifacts of my own evolution: a Baptist hymnal, a King James Bible, a Book of Common Prayer, a rosary given by a Catholic friend who is convinced that Mary has not finished her work on me. These objects have ceased to function as instruments of faith, but they remain instruments of memory. They remind me that religion, even when untrue, can still be beautiful and instructive. To discard that would feel like discarding part of myself.
When I look at the tract now, I see less of the theology it proclaims and more of the humanity it reveals. Someone printed it, folded it, and carried it in a pocket waiting for a suitable moment to give it away. That chain of actions—printing, carrying, offering—is its own quiet liturgy. It mirrors the same impulse that drives teachers to share knowledge or historians to preserve the past: the conviction that what we have found meaningful might matter to someone else. The difference lies only in the scope of the claim. The believer promises salvation; I am content with understanding.
I do not keep the tract as a souvenir of conflict but as a reminder of continuity. The man who gave it to me was doing, in his own way, what I still try to do—passing along a fragment of meaning, hoping it will take root. His certainty and my doubt are opposite responses to the same human condition: the need to find coherence in impermanence. That shared need is what prevents me from dismissing his gesture. I may no longer believe what he believes, but I understand why he needed to believe it and why he needed to share it.