As Emmanuel Carrère looks back on the three years in which he surrendered himself to Christianity—humbling himself before his wife, striving to extinguish his ego, and attempting to become genuinely selfless—he reflects on what he calls the modern culture’s “tyranny” of self-esteem. As a novelist, he recognizes that his inflated opinion of himself was never evidence of a flourishing soul. Quite the opposite. His ego had become a pressure cooker, curdling beneath the weight of its own self-absorption.
Reading Carrère, I found myself thinking about a word that has become our generation’s secular sacrament: clout.
For much of my life I confused clout with happiness.
If I built the perfect physique and unfurled a sweeping lat spread without pharmaceutical assistance, I would possess clout. If I became a published author, I would possess clout. If I glided silently through life in a Lexus, sealed inside its premium cocoon like an astronaut piloting a luxury spacecraft, I would possess clout. If I owned a home with a lavish swimming pool, a gazebo, and enough outdoor elegance to make friends feel as if they had wandered into a boutique resort, I could congratulate myself on my generosity while secretly admiring the prestige my generosity purchased. If I renovated my own bathrooms and kitchen after heroic pilgrimages to Home Depot, demonstrating equal parts craftsmanship and architectural genius, surely people would respect me.
Or so the fantasy went.
But was I really chasing clout? Or was I pursuing what my Jewish upbringing called the abundant life?
That vision of abundance was not vulgar materialism. It was a life woven together from education, meaningful work, financial security, family, health, longevity, and a moral existence measured by a long necklace of mitzvahs—good deeds performed not for applause but because they made the world more habitable. Surely there was nothing shameful about wanting such a life.
My mother certainly thought so.
She watched my Christian period—from 1979 to 1982—with increasing alarm. To her, I seemed detached from myself, forcing a smile while surrendering my personality to an austere faith that steadily crushed my spirit.
The breaking point came whenever I asked my Christian friends about my great-grandmother Edna, who had escaped the antisemitic pogroms of Poland. Was she in heaven?
They shrugged.
She had rejected Christ.
She had squandered her opportunity.
That’s the way the cookie crumbles.
The theological indifference stunned me. My great-grandmother’s courage, suffering, and endurance counted for nothing beside a doctrinal formula.
My mother saw all this before I did.
Whenever I announced that I was attending a Christian wedding, she would shake her head and predict a chilly, restrained affair. It would never possess the noisy warmth, laughter, dancing, argument, food, and overflowing affection of a Jewish wedding.
I hated admitting that she was usually right.
She wanted me to become not merely successful but warm, generous, and fully alive. The abundance she envisioned overflowed into family, celebration, hospitality, and community.
Christianity, as I experienced it then, taught me something very different. Everything I had once admired—family success, professional achievement, material comfort, even the simple pleasure of earthly happiness—could become little more than consolation prizes for souls destined to spend eternity in hell.
Carrère arrived at a similar conclusion during his own Christian years. Looking back decades later, he describes his worldly ambitions as a “tiring illusion.” To follow Christ meant relinquishing the will to power rather than decorating it with religious language.
Easy enough to write.
Excruciating to live.
Many are called. Few are chosen.
Yet when Carrère rereads the notebooks from that period, something unexpected happens.
The entries are undeniably sincere. They overflow with religious fervor. But they also strike him as pompous, as though written by someone performing holiness rather than inhabiting it. He scarcely recognizes the man who wrote them.
Even more revealing is a letter from that period. Despite pages of pious reflection, it never mentions the most important fact: he and his wife were miserable.
They were fearful.
They were neurotic.
They drank too much.
Each blamed the other for a shared unhappiness.
Meanwhile Carrère felt powerless. Worst of all, he had lost the ability to write, which he considered his sole reason for existing.
His piety floated serenely above a life that was quietly falling apart.
That realization forces uncomfortable questions.
Was religion functioning as a bandage placed over wounds that required surgery?
Was it an Alka-Seltzer for the soul—a fizzing tablet dropped into a glass of psychic distress that created the comforting illusion of healing while leaving the underlying illness untouched?
When life collapses, do people sometimes reach for religion because it offers certainty when ambiguity becomes unbearable? And when they emerge with a newly religious identity, have they genuinely changed, or have they manufactured a spiritual doppelgänger that reassures them they are finally on the right path?
These questions haunt me because I also possess Christian heroes.
I admire Rufus Jones.
I admire Dale Allison.
What draws me to them is not an obsession with damnation but an unmistakable affection for God. Their Christianity seems animated by love rather than terror.
Allison has even written that he and his wife deliberately refused to teach their children the doctrine of hell. They wanted faith to arise from love, not fear.
I envy that freedom.
I cannot imitate it.
Hell has occupied too much territory in my imagination for too many decades.
Jesus spoke of it often.
As a young man I lived beneath its shadow.
I have awakened from nightmares in which I was crushed beneath the weight of eternal punishment, buried alive beneath the earth, unable to move, unable to breathe, unable to escape.
Some visions, once seen, cannot be unseen.
For me, hell has become inseparable from Christianity itself.
That is why I sometimes feel that Rufus Jones and Dale Allison inhabit a gracious spiritual country whose borders remain closed to me.
I long for the Christianity they describe, yet I cannot silence the old questions.
If Christianity alone possesses the road to heaven, what becomes of my Jewish hero Viktor Frankl? After surviving Auschwitz and teaching the world that meaning can outlive suffering, was he nevertheless condemned to the same fate my Christian friends assigned to my great-grandmother Edna?
That possibility does not merely disturb me.
It breaks my heart.
And every time I try to step toward Christian faith, I hear again the casual shrug that accompanied their verdict:
“That’s the way the cookie crumbles.”
If that is Christianity, I find myself standing once more at its threshold—wanting desperately to enter, yet unable to cross.
Cinemorphosis 
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