Cinemorphosis

Tag: faith

  • What’s a Guy Like Paul to Do?

    What’s a Guy Like Paul to Do?

    Revisiting The Kingdom, I’m struck once again by how Carrère dives into Maccoby’s The Mythmaker and finds himself, as usual, both stimulated and somewhat convinced. Maccoby’s portrait of Paul is a scathing one: a man whose letters reveal a wannabe Pharisee who never quite had the intellectual chops to measure up to the great Gamaliel’s rigorous logic. Instead, Paul, the ultimate malcontent, resents his way to the top by any means necessary. He’s a Pharisee reject, a man in need of a new ladder to climb. Enter the Sadducees, Paul’s new benefactors. Maccoby gleefully paints him as a “mercenary” and a “hatchet man” for the Sadducees—a hired thug for the enemies of the Pharisees. 

    In Paul’s self-serving retelling of his story, he demonizes Judaism and aggrandizes himself, projecting all the worst qualities of the Sadducees (and himself) onto the Pharisees, making them the convenient scapegoat. Naturally, the New Testament follows suit, reworking history with reckless abandon, making the Pharisees the Big Bad while carefully crafting a narrative that the Romans—those kindly, civilized overlords—might find palatable. No one, apparently, worried about the minor detail of two millennia of anti-Semitism that would follow. The idea of Christian love and kindness? Well, that got lost somewhere between rewriting history and needing Rome’s approval.

    Paul’s stint as a Sadducee’s henchman ends at Damascus, where he’s allegedly compelled by his vision to stop tormenting the Jesus followers and instead join them. But of course, Paul being Paul, even his conversion manages to be another way to torment the original Jesus-followers by hijacking their Torah-based teachings and replacing them with his mystical mishmash of mystery cults. Suddenly, Paul’s version of Jesus requires no Torah and offers a much more user-friendly religion for the gentiles. And in this religious battle for supremacy, as Carrère grimly notes, “it’s Paul who wins out, because, as we’ll soon see, the Temple is destroyed, Israel as a nation is annihilated, and the church of Jerusalem dispersed.”

    Maccoby, never one to hold back, sees all of this as a colossal fraud—a case of the victors rewriting history to suit themselves. He argues that Christianity is “nothing more than history written by the victors, the result of a huge falsification aimed at having people believe that Paul and his new religion are the inheritors of Judaism and not its detractors.”

    Paul didn’t just invent a religion—he gave Jesus a full makeover, complete with a brand-new mission statement. Suddenly, this Jesus wasn’t keen on the Pharisees anymore, despite the fact they were practically swapping parables like trading cards. Paul’s freshly-minted Christ had no interest in leading a political uprising like the Pharisees might have hoped. Paul’s Jesus had moved on to loftier things—”a nebulous identification with God,” or, as Paul might say, a VIP pass to the divine without the hassle of earthly concerns. 

    In Paul’s revisionist masterstroke, he conveniently positions himself as the only guy who really gets Jesus, surpassing the original apostles because, let’s face it, who wouldn’t trust a man who only met Jesus in a blinding light show? Paul’s newfound authority becomes so overwhelming that he practically files the Old Testament under “Miscellaneous”—a dusty collection of angelic telegrams leading up to the Jesus Show. And for anyone who dared to question his creative liberties? Let’s just say, there was no room for constructive criticism when your Yelp review could end in a good old-fashioned burning at the stake.

    Fast-forward two thousand years, and enter Maccoby—the intrepid Talmudic scholar—swinging a wrecking ball at the Pauline edifice. In The Mythmaker, Maccoby takes it upon himself to do what no one else apparently could: drag humanity out of two millennia of theological fog and into the light. In a move that rivals Paul’s own grandiosity, Maccoby essentially declares, “Don’t worry, folks. I’ll handle this.” And with that, he positions himself as the savior of our two-thousand years of confusion.

    Carrère, ever the skeptic, makes it clear that while Maccoby’s arguments are compelling, he doesn’t buy them hook, line, and sinker. “Passing off two thousand years of Church history as complete revisionism strikes me as the height of revisionism.” He points out that Jesus may have clashed with the Pharisees not out of sheer opposition, but because they were wise—and, like all wise people, they probably questioned the company Jesus kept. Carrère also acknowledges that, while anti-Semitism runs rampant through Christian history, we don’t have to deny that the Jews clashed with Jesus in a way that resulted in his death. His personality likely clashed with both the Jews and the Romans, so there’s no need to twist the historical narrative into an anti-Jewish screed.

    Then, of course, there’s Paul. To portray him “as a goy informer to the secret police” is to reduce his complexity to a cartoonish level. Carrère insists we don’t deny the “Dostoyevskian” depth in Paul’s letters, with all their contradictions, spiritual torment, and raw humanity. Paul may have been maddening, but he wasn’t a mere caricature.

    And in rereading Carrère’s analysis, I’m jolted by a moment of almost tragic comedy: Luke, the starry-eyed biographer, grappling with the same unflattering caricatures of Paul that Maccoby gleefully tears into. Luke had heard these damning whispers circulating about his golden boy—rumors painting Paul as something far less glorious than the saintly hero Luke immortalized in his breathless chronicle. It clearly rattled him to the core, probably like finding out your idolized childhood superhero moonlights as a mall Santa. 

    Maybe, just maybe, there’s more to Paul than the hatchet-wielding mercenary we love to despise. He’s a complicated man, a genius even—capable of crafting words so achingly beautiful they could make angels weep, and other times spewing rants so unhinged you’d think he was a madman scribbling manifestos in his lonely, dimly-lit cave. Paul, the poetic prophet of human frailty one minute, and the rabid, impoverished soul screaming into the void the next. 

  • Beyond Reciprocal Claim-Making

    Beyond Reciprocal Claim-Making

    Once you see yourself as having a religious mind, there’s no crawling back out of that rabbit hole. A religious view isn’t the same as joining a cult where some bearded leader hoards Kool-Aid and controls your mind. No, the religious mind is about recognizing that life’s stakes are sky-high—you either spiritually flourish or rot. Your actions matter. You’re not just competing in some zero-sum, Darwinian cage match, battling your fellow humans for scraps of survival. No, you’re building something deeper: a soul. And, lucky you, you’re accountable for that construction.

    I’ve fantasized plenty of times about being free from this religious wiring. In my fantasy, I’m a “free thinker,” sipping espresso while smugly dismissing religion as man-made fluff—imperfect, tribalistic, derivative, and, let’s not forget, violent. Religion in this dream isn’t the root of morality; it’s an obstacle to reality. Enter Elizabeth Anderson, the philosophy professor who drops a truth bomb in her essay, “If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?” Anderson argues that morality doesn’t come from God but from people learning how to cooperate. Morality, she says, is baked into our DNA, so religion is at best redundant and, more often than not, a corrupting force.

    I’ve seen Anderson’s point play out with some of my most moral students, both professed atheists. One was a Hungarian transfer student who swore her father, also an atheist, had stronger morals than any theist she knew—and I believed her. She was one of the hardest-working, most decent students I’d ever taught. Then there was my Vietnamese student, the lone atheist among her five Christian siblings, who let it slip that when their mother was dying of cancer, she was the only one who flew back to Vietnam to care for her. Her devout Christian brothers and sisters? Nowhere to be found. Her hatred for religion as hypocrisy was as strong as her love for her mother.

    Students like these could easily be poster children for Anderson’s argument that we don’t need theism to have morality. In fact, she’d argue, it might be better if we ditched religion altogether. Anderson kicks off her essay with a field trip to the Institute for Creation Research Museum in Santee, California, where creationists divide the world into two paths: “Creationism” and “Evolutionism.” Creationism, naturally, is the road to moral purity, while Evolutionism is the fast track to fornication, nihilism, addiction, humanism, Communism, and every other horror under the sun.

    Anderson doesn’t hold back: she writes that creationists’ beef with evolution isn’t scientific—it’s moral. Evolution leads to immorality, they argue, because it denies the existence of God. And, as theists have been shouting for centuries, without God, morality’s got nothing to stand on. As Dostoyevsky famously didn’t say, “If God is dead, then everything is permitted.” In other words, belief in God is the cork keeping the sinful champagne from exploding all over the place.

    But Anderson asks the obvious question: Can we know right from wrong without God? Do we really need the Ten Commandments to figure out that murdering your neighbor for his fancy new donkey might be a bad look? Of course not, she says. Every society—whether it’s religious, atheist, or somewhere in between—figures out basic moral rules: don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t bear false witness. These rules existed long before monotheism waltzed onto the scene, suggesting that moral knowledge comes not from divine revelation but from the messy experience of living together and figuring out how not to kill each other.

    Anderson’s takedown of theistic morality doesn’t stop there. She argues that the belief in God doesn’t just supply unnecessary rules; it’s often a crutch, relying on the carrot of heaven and the stick of hell to goad people into behaving decently. Her rebuttal is simple: people are motivated by love, honor, and respect, not divine bribery. In her view, these attributes can flourish just fine without a belief in God.

    Next, she dismantles the idea that we need God to give moral rules authority. If you need a deity to tell you murder, rape, and genocide are wrong, Anderson suggests, you’ve got bigger problems. We know these things are wrong without divine intervention—and, if your reasoning leads you to think everything is permitted, that’s a pretty solid clue you’ve gone off the rails.

    But here’s where Anderson flips the script. She argues that the moralistic “everything is permitted” problem applies more forcefully to theism than to atheism. If God’s laws are based on authority and not inherent goodness, then “in principle, anything is permitted.” Take Calvinism, for example. Predestination’s divine lottery, where God saves a few lucky souls and damns the rest to eternal hellfire, isn’t based on any moral reasoning—it’s just God’s will, and you better deal with it.

    Anderson’s critique of fundamentalist religion is merciless. She argues that if you take the evidence for theism seriously, you end up committed to the idea that even the most heinous acts are permitted. Since we know these acts aren’t morally permitted, she says, we should doubt the evidence for theism.

    By “theism,” Anderson isn’t just talking about some vague belief in a higher power. She’s talking about the God of Scripture—Old Testament, New Testament, and the Koran. And if you take the Bible as inerrant, Anderson argues, you’re forced to reckon with a God who’s often cruel and unjust, punishing people for the sins of others, hardening hearts, ordering genocides, and permitting slavery and rape.

    Of course, Christian apologists love to claim that the Old Testament God is the angry one, and the New Testament God is all love and forgiveness. Anderson’s having none of it. She points out that Jesus’ so-called “family values” include hating your relatives if they get in the way of your loyalty to him. And then there’s the doctrine of eternal damnation—a New Testament specialty—which, in Anderson’s view, is both cruel and incoherent.

    In the end, Anderson concludes that the God of the Bible is a moral disaster. But she’s sympathetic to thoughtful believers, the ones who struggle with the Bible’s moral atrocities. Their options, she says, are pretty grim. You can “bite the bullet” and accept the Bible’s horrors, bitter seeds and all, like a true believer. Or you can try a stopgap measure, arguing that God’s commands were appropriate in biblical times but don’t apply now—a strategy that doesn’t really hold water if you believe in a timeless God.

    Anderson’s conclusion is blunt: we’re better off abandoning theological claims as a foundation for morality. She draws on Hobbes to argue that worshiping God out of fear of his raw power isn’t love—it’s survival instinct, and that’s no basis for morality. Instead, Anderson suggests, morality is a system of reciprocal claim-making, where we hold each other accountable, no gods required.

    As compelling as Anderson’s essay is, I’m still not convinced. The world isn’t some rational, orderly place. There are shadows, mysteries, omens, and prophecies—strange phenomena that transcend the cold logic of reciprocal claim-making. Religion, in all its messiness, is the story of a fallen people trying to reconnect with their Maker. And as much truth as I see in Anderson’s rejection of theistic morality, I can’t shake the religious mind. I see myself as someone who’s fallen and in need of a path, a true path, to becoming the person I’m meant to be. Anderson’s talk of reciprocal claim-making? It doesn’t even come close to satisfying that deeper, spiritual hunger.

  • The Theology of Loose Ends

    The Theology of Loose Ends

    Ironically, the book that comes closest to expressing my own questions about Christianity—Emmanuel Carrère’s autobiographical novel The Kingdom—barely touches the one theological obsession that dominated my adolescence: hell.

    As a high school senior, I wasn’t driven toward Christianity by the promise of heaven nearly as much as I was terrified by the prospect of eternal damnation. My Christian classmates casually informed me that my Jewish relatives were burning in hell. It wasn’t merely the outrageousness of the claim that unsettled me. It was the manner in which they delivered it. Their verdict came with the breezy confidence of teenagers discussing last Friday night’s football game. They spoke of infinite punishment with astonishing emotional indifference. The certainty chilled me more than the doctrine itself.

    Yet even that wasn’t the most disturbing thing I encountered.

    The church we attended used The Living Bible, a popular paraphrase whose study notes included the astonishing suggestion that the Holocaust represented God’s punishment for the Jewish rejection of Christ. I remember reading those words in disbelief. To reduce one of history’s greatest atrocities to divine retribution felt not merely offensive but morally grotesque. If this was Christian theology, I wanted to wash my hands of it altogether. I longed for a world in which hell—and every conversation orbiting around it—would simply disappear.

    But what if it did?

    Suppose I abandoned infernalism entirely. Would I become one of those Christian Universalists—the thoughtful believers who reject eternal conscious torment and insist that love, rather than fear, should be the foundation of faith? I find myself instinctively drawn to them. They argue that the threat of hell cheapens our relationship with God, reducing love to coercion. Their vision of the afterlife resembles less a cosmic torture chamber than an infinitely patient schoolroom. No one is abandoned forever. Every soul is eventually healed, even if that healing requires painful correction.

    There is something deeply attractive about that picture.

    There is also something that makes me uneasy.

    If the worst imaginable outcome is temporary purification, what becomes of moral urgency? Human nature being what it is, wouldn’t many of us quietly conclude that we can indulge our appetites now and settle our spiritual debts later? Universalism can begin to resemble the theological equivalent of Universal Basic Income: everyone eventually receives the same eternal inheritance regardless of how recklessly they spent their earthly lives. Why struggle against the gravitational pull of selfishness if, in the end, the bill is always paid?

    Then again, infernalism carries its own unbearable cost. A universe in which billions suffer endlessly is hardly a satisfying resolution either.

    Neither vision leaves me entirely at peace.

    Paul, interestingly enough, occupies both sides of this debate. Depending on the interpreter, he becomes either the great defender of eternal punishment or the great herald of universal reconciliation. What virtually everyone agrees upon, however, is that Paul’s own life embodies Christianity’s defining redemption story. The persecutor becomes the apostle. The anxious, self-divided voice of Romans discovers liberation through surrender to Christ. His life unfolds with remarkable narrative coherence: chaos gives way to grace, alienation to reconciliation, death to resurrection.

    It is a magnificent story.

    But must every true story end that way?

    Dara Horn raises a question that has lingered with me ever since I read People Love Dead Jews. She recalls a reader complaining that her novel The World to Come, centered on the survivor of a pogrom, wasn’t “uplifting” enough. The complaint revealed something curious. Even sophisticated readers seem to hunger for stories that gather their loose threads into a satisfying knot. We crave endings that reassure us the universe is fundamentally coherent.

    Horn is suspicious of that craving.

    Drawing upon Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending, she argues that our expectation of tidy resolutions owes much to Christianity itself. Christian history moves toward fulfillment. Its central drama is redemption. The scattered fragments of existence are ultimately gathered into a meaningful whole. Jewish storytelling, by contrast, often refuses such closure. The Hebrew Bible concludes not with final resolution but with an unfinished journey. Questions remain unanswered. Promises remain unfulfilled. The story continues beyond the final page.

    That difference fascinates me.

    Christianity often invites us to see history as one grand redemption arc. Jewish literature is more willing to leave us standing inside the mystery. Rather than explaining suffering, it teaches us how to endure it. Rather than dissolving ambiguity, it learns to inhabit ambiguity with patience and humility. These stories do not pretend that chaos can always be conquered. They suggest that wisdom may consist in remaining faithful while chaos refuses to yield.

    Perhaps that is the more mature vision.

    Or perhaps I tell myself this because it allows me to avoid the far more demanding claims of Christianity. Perhaps my admiration for ambiguity is simply an elegant rationalization—a way of escaping the moral revolution that Carrère identifies at Christianity’s heart. If N. T. Wright and other defenders of Paul’s theology are correct, then Paul’s redemption story is not sentimental optimism but the astonishing claim that God has actually invaded history, overcome chaos, and begun dismantling what I have elsewhere called the Default Kingdom.

    I still do not know which story is true.

    I only know that I am no longer satisfied with easy answers, whether they arrive wrapped in eternal flames or universal embraces.

  • The Default Kingdom

    The Default Kingdom

    One of the central questions the self-described agnostic—or perhaps more accurately, currently agnostic, since Emmanuel Carrère never entirely closes the door on belief—explores in The Kingdom is this: What, if anything, makes Christianity fundamentally different from the world’s other religions and moral philosophies?

    Carrère readily acknowledges that the great religious traditions share a common ethical grammar. Nearly all contain some version of the Golden Rule. A contemporary of Jesus, the rabbi Hillel, famously taught, “Do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you.” Do not lie. Do not boast. Do not humiliate. Do not bully. Compassion, honesty, and restraint are hardly unique to Christianity. They are the moral glue that binds much of humanity’s spiritual inheritance together.

    Where Christianity tears away from the others, Carrère argues, is in its astonishing redefinition of power.

    For Paul and Jesus, the path upward begins by descending. Better to be poor than rich, weak than strong, last than first, servant rather than master. Blessed are the meek, the persecuted, the hungry, and the broken, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. This was not merely unconventional wisdom. To the Greeks, whose highest ideals celebrated strength, excellence, beauty, and glory, it sounded like madness. Christianity did not merely revise the ancient world’s understanding of greatness; it turned it upside down.

    To illustrate this moral inversion, Carrère turns to Henryk Sienkiewicz’s historical novel Quo Vadis. A sophisticated Roman officer, accustomed to luxury, power, and the refined pleasures of imperial life, is captured by Christians whom he has persecuted. Certain that revenge awaits him, he braces himself for torture or execution. Instead, his captors quietly set him free.

    The gesture is so alien to his imagination that he cannot process it. Surely this is some elaborate mockery, he tells himself, a cruel joke whose punchline has yet to arrive. Mercy, in his world, is incomprehensible because mercy possesses no strategic value. It gains no territory, wins no battles, and intimidates no enemies.

    Yet that very mercy becomes an ambush. Slowly, the Christians’ refusal to answer violence with violence dissolves the officer’s moral certainties. Their forgiveness reveals a form of strength that eclipses the imperial virtues he had spent his life admiring. He comes to see that domination is not the highest expression of power after all. Love is. So profoundly is he transformed that he embraces the Christian faith, becomes one of its fearless defenders, and ultimately accepts martyrdom, facing the lions with the same courage he once believed could exist only on the battlefield.

    For Carrère, this inversion of values constitutes Christianity’s greatest “force of persuasion.” It challenges what we might call the Default Kingdom: humanity’s instinctive moral operating system, in which strength, wealth, beauty, status, and dominance appear to be self-evident proofs of success and virtue. As Carrère observes, most people naturally “prefer to be strong rather than weak, rich rather than poor, big rather than small, dominant rather than dominated.” Such preferences seem so obvious that they rarely require justification.

    Christianity refuses to grant them that obviousness.

    In Carrère’s reading, neither Greek philosophy nor Jewish tradition overturns the Default Kingdom in quite this radical way. Christianity alone proclaims that the first shall be last, that the poor are blessed, that enemies should be loved, and that the victorious are often the defeated. Its revolution is persuasive not because its teachings are clever, but because its earliest followers embody them. The Christians of the Acts of the Apostles do not merely preach this impossible ethic—they live it. Their willingness to forgive, to suffer, and even to die rather than imitate the world’s pursuit of domination sends a shock wave through the Roman Empire. With every act of inexplicable mercy, the Default Kingdom loses a little more of its authority, and history itself begins to bend toward a radically different vision of what it means to be powerful.

  • The Authenticity Paradox

    The Authenticity Paradox

    Damascus is the mother of all superhero origin stories. Before Peter Parker is bitten by a spider or Bruce Wayne enters the Batcave, there is Saul of Tarsus riding toward Damascus with murder in his heart. He is not searching for truth. He believes he already possesses it. He is intent on hunting down followers of “The Way” and dragging them to their deaths. His path is one of certainty, violence, and righteous darkness.

    Then, against every instinct and every intention, his story is hijacked.

    A blinding light crashes into his world. The risen Christ—the very Savior whose followers Saul has dedicated himself to destroying—confronts him directly. “Why do you keep goading the ox?” the voice asks. Then comes the devastating revelation: “I am your Lord.”

    The encounter leaves Saul shattered. Blind. Disoriented. Helpless. For three days he sits in darkness while a far greater darkness collapses inside him. His old identity has suffered an internal earthquake. The architecture of his soul has cracked beyond repair.

    Then a stranger arrives.

    The man claims to have been sent by the Lord. More unsettling still, he addresses him not as the man Saul understands himself to be but as the man history will remember: Paul.

    The new identity feels like an insult.

    Saul wants nothing to do with this strange future. He wants his old certainties, his old mission, his old enemies. Like nearly every great hero, he is reluctant. He does not answer a call to adventure with enthusiasm but with resistance. He loves the familiar darkness more than the terrifying demands of the light.

    But the light proves stronger than his will.

    He can no longer goad the ox. He can no longer wage war against the truth that has invaded him. At last he surrenders, becoming Paul the evangelist, whose letters would shape Western civilization more profoundly than those of any emperor, philosopher, or statesman.

    Paul’s conversion reminds me of one of the strangest moments in Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” After exhausting himself trying to remove Bartleby from his office, the narrator presses money into Bartleby’s hand in hopes that he will finally leave. Bartleby lets the money fall to the floor. Then the narrator confesses:

    “But it dropped to the floor, and then strange to say, I tore myself from him whom I had so longed to be rid of.”

    It is one of literature’s finest descriptions of divided desire.

    Like Paul, Melville’s narrator longs for change while simultaneously resisting it. He wants liberation, but only on terms that preserve the person he already is. He discovers that the obstacle standing in his way is not Bartleby but himself.

    Perhaps this is the hidden struggle behind every genuine transformation.

    Each of us carries within us a pillar of salt—a hardened identity built from habit, fear, pride, resentment, and old certainties. We mistake this calcified self for our true self because it has been with us for so long. Yet the longer we cling to it, the heavier it becomes. Eventually it drags us beneath the surface, where it is no longer an anchor but a tomb.

    Most of us never let go.

    The pillar of salt sinks us.

    But for the rare few who are not merely called but chosen, another possibility emerges. Their lives reveal what novelist Emmanuel Carrère sees at the heart of Paul’s Damascus encounter. Reflecting on Paul’s conversion, Carrère writes:

    “Paul was no longer himself; he was finally himself.”

    It is one of the deepest paradoxes of the spiritual life.

    We usually imagine authenticity as self-expression, the freedom to become more completely the person we already believe ourselves to be. Damascus turns that comforting assumption upside down. It suggests that our deepest self may be buried beneath the very identity we defend most fiercely. Before we can become who we truly are, we must relinquish the person we cannot imagine living without.

    Paul’s conversion thus reveals what might be called the Authenticity Paradox: the condition in which becoming one’s truest self first requires ceasing to be the person one believes oneself to be. Authenticity is not achieved by polishing the old self until it shines. It is achieved by surrendering the old self altogether, trusting that what feels like annihilation is, in fact, the beginning of a more truthful life.

  • Where Are You Coming From?

    Where Are You Coming From?

    The best-selling author Emmanuel Carrère is obsessed with what might be called narrative authority. He refuses to write in the third person. In fact, he claims he is incapable of it. He is drawn, as both writer and reader, to the intimate gravity of I. A first-person narrator does not merely present ideas; he presents the life that forged those ideas. Carrère follows such voices more willingly because they answer the question every audience silently asks before deciding whether to believe someone: Where are you coming from?

    That preference draws him to the Gospel writer Luke. What captivates Carrère is not that Luke throws open the gates of the New Testament with fanfare. Rather, Luke slips inside “through a small, hidden side door.” Through Luke’s quiet, observant voice, the New Testament becomes not a monument demanding reverence but a human story inviting investigation.

    Luke’s subject is Paul—the man who, more than any emperor, philosopher, or conqueror, shaped the moral and intellectual landscape of the West. Whether one reveres him or resents him is almost beside the point. In the marketplace of ideas, Paul won. His letters became the architecture upon which two millennia of Western Christianity would be built.

    Unlike the Gospels, Paul’s epistles expose an astonishing amount of their author’s interior life. Their pages read less like polished theological treatises than like relentless self-interrogations. The most influential missionary in history repeatedly drags his own soul into the light, subjects it to examination, and then offers the resulting X-ray to the world in the hope that others might recognize themselves within it.

    Paul’s physical appearance only heightens the paradox. Unlike Jesus, whose appearance remains a mystery, Paul emerges from early tradition with surprising clarity. He is short, stooped from chronic pain, prematurely bald, heavily bearded, and distinctly unimpressive. Carrère notes that painters often portray him with “a bulging forehead and eyebrows meeting above the nose,” giving him less the appearance of a saint than that of an exhausted scholar worn down by relentless suffering.

    His personality proves no less complicated. One moment he is magnanimous and disarmingly humble. The next he is blisteringly sarcastic, combative, or consumed by righteous indignation. At times he advances startlingly egalitarian ideas about spiritual equality; elsewhere he appears censorious toward women and eager to silence them. He can be generous, insecure, tender, arrogant, self-effacing, and overbearing—sometimes within the span of a single letter. If sanctity requires flawless likability, Paul fails spectacularly.

    Luke, by contrast, remains almost invisible. We are told nothing of his appearance. He leaves behind no psychological self-portrait. Yet Carrère finds him irresistible precisely because of this restraint. Luke was an educated physician steeped in Greek philosophy, a man who seems less interested in religious ecstasy than in understanding the human condition.

    Carrère imagines Luke arriving at the synagogue not as a pilgrim seeking salvation but as an intellectual searching for wisdom. He was fascinated by what Carrère calls “the long domestic quarrel between Israel and the God of Israel,” seeing in that struggle a metaphor for humanity itself: creatures perpetually sabotaging their own flourishing through laziness, vanity, impulsiveness, and moral confusion. Perhaps, Luke wondered, people trapped in this cycle could be redirected toward a life of discipline, aspiration, and virtue.

    For Luke, religion initially resembled philosophy more than faith. Carrère writes, “For Luke, going to the synagogue was less like embracing a religion than attending a philosophy class—just as when we practice yoga or meditation we become interested in Buddhist texts without feeling obliged to believe in Tibetan divinities or turn a prayer wheel.”

    Then Paul stood up to speak.

    At first, nothing sounded remarkable. Another preacher announcing another Messiah hardly deserved attention. Messianic claimants appeared with enough frequency to become almost routine.

    Then Luke noticed something extraordinary.

    Paul was not proclaiming that the Messiah would come.

    He insisted the Messiah had already come.

    Carrère imagines Paul declaring to the synagogue:

    “Jesus was the Christ. The inhabitants of Jerusalem and their leaders failed to recognize him, and by condemning him they fulfilled the prophets they claimed to honor. They mocked him. They condemned him without cause. They crucified him. But three days later God raised him from the dead.”

    The effect was electric.

    Every sermon seemed to split the audience into two irreconcilable camps. Some dismissed Paul as delusional or blasphemous. Others embraced his message with overwhelming enthusiasm, convinced they had witnessed history’s decisive turning point.

    Luke belonged to neither camp—not at first.

    Carrère imagines him lingering in the uncomfortable territory between skepticism and fascination. Paul’s claims offended his reason, yet they refused to leave his mind. Curiosity led to another conversation, then another journey, then another question, until skepticism slowly dissolved into conviction.

    Carrère imagines the physician tending to Paul’s battered body after beatings and imprisonments, dressing wounds while their conversations stretched late into the evening like long discussions in a quiet café. Paul became less a patient than a mentor. Luke listened. Questioned. Objected. Returned the next day. Gradually he found himself inhabiting Paul’s vision of reality.

    Whether any of these conversations occurred exactly as Carrère imagines is almost irrelevant. They reveal something equally important about Carrère himself.

    The Kingdom is as much an autobiography as it is historical reconstruction. Beneath its investigation of Luke and Paul lies Carrère’s own confession. He envies Luke. What writer would not? Luke enjoyed what every biographer dreams of: direct access to one of history’s most consequential figures. He could watch Paul think, question him face to face, observe his contradictions, and transform those encounters into a narrative that would outlive empires.

    Carrère recognizes another truth hidden inside Luke’s achievement.

    Persuasion makes us significant.

    Ideas alone rarely persuade. Before listeners evaluate our conclusions, they instinctively ask: Where are you coming from?

    Every opinion emerges from somewhere—from childhood wounds, intellectual struggles, humiliations, triumphs, conversions, failures, and the slow accumulation of experience. Without that story, convictions float weightlessly above the speaker, untethered from any recognizable human life.

    Paul understood this instinctively. He never merely announced doctrines. He told the story that produced them. He confessed his former persecution of Christians. He described his blindness on the road to Damascus. He recounted his imprisonments, failures, doubts, physical suffering, and relentless calling. His theology carried weight because it had been earned. Every argument arrived attached to a life.

    He hid nothing.

    He laid every card on the table.

    That, Carrère concludes, is the essence of Narrative Authority: the persuasive force that emerges when ideas grow organically from a coherent life story rather than appearing as detached abstractions. We trust those whose beliefs seem purchased through experience instead of assembled from borrowed opinions. Long before we judge what they believe, we judge whether they have honestly shown us the life that made belief inevitable.

  • The Conversion We Never Finish

    The Conversion We Never Finish

    Afflicted by depression, anxiety, and relentless religious doubt, Emmanuel Carrère wrote The Kingdom partly as an act of remembrance—a way of revisiting the years when belief and unbelief tore him apart with equal ferocity. He could summon every argument against faith. Years of therapy had supplied him with a formidable psychological vocabulary, while Nietzsche, Freud, and other skeptics stood ready to dismantle every religious impulse that arose within him.

    Yet every skeptical argument seemed to awaken an equally persuasive rebuttal.

    Nietzsche argued that religion is an escape from reality, a consoling fantasy that allows frightened creatures to imagine a God who knows their names and treasures their souls. Carrère’s reply is disarmingly simple: perhaps anxiety is not evidence against God but one of His instruments. Perhaps our restlessness exists precisely to drive us toward Him.

    The skeptic objects that religious conversion is merely a psychological escape hatch from despair.

    Carrère counters that despair itself may be God’s invitation to conversion.

    The debate becomes impossible to resolve because every objection is absorbed into the very faith it seeks to destroy.

    Yet Carrère eventually discovers that the greatest threat to his belief is not Nietzsche.

    It is Emmanuel Carrère.

    He confesses that he wants to believe too desperately. His longing for faith becomes evidence against the authenticity of that very faith. Like someone compulsively insisting that he is happy, the insistence itself begins to sound suspicious. The more urgently Carrère reaches for God, the more he wonders whether the reaching itself proves that God has already slipped away.

    That dilemma belongs to far more people than religious believers.

    It may describe the human condition itself.

    Our hunger for conversion explains, in part, why we go to the movies.

    For two hours we borrow another person’s destiny. We watch an ordinary soul undergo extraordinary transformation and momentarily imagine the same miracle awaiting us. We feel our throats tighten as Jor-El tells his son that he must become not merely Superman but a light to the world. For one luminous moment we are convinced that greatness, sacrifice, and moral courage are the only things that matter.

    Then the credits roll.

    The spell evaporates somewhere between the parking lot and the nearest café, where we resume discussing office gossip over coffee and cake. The desire for transformation was genuine.

    Its duration was not.

    New Year’s resolutions repeat the same ritual.

    Each January we announce that this year will be different. We join the gym. We buy immaculate workout clothes. We embrace a revolutionary diet and enthusiastically explain to friends how astonishingly “simple” the whole thing is. Six weeks later the gym card has migrated to the back of the wallet, the diet books have become decorative objects, and the only weight we’ve successfully lost is our enthusiasm.

    Social media has industrialized this cycle.

    Every week a new influencer appears bearing the latest gospel of self-reinvention. Follow this morning routine. Buy this supplement. Build this side hustle. Practice this mindset. Soon you will possess wealth, influence, discipline, admiration, and a jawline sharp enough to cut glass.

    Millions eagerly enroll in these digital revival meetings.

    Almost none experience resurrection.

    What they experience instead is rebranding.

    Life increasingly resembles a succession of false conversions.

    We repeatedly announce the beginning of a new chapter, only to abandon the manuscript after the novelty fades. We restart our lives the way aspiring novelists restart first drafts—full of magnificent intentions, derailed by boredom, distraction, or the irresistible glitter of the next shiny object.

    The modern self has become a serial convert without a church.

    We are forever renouncing one identity in favor of another, mistaking novelty for transformation and enthusiasm for character.

  • The Things We Cannot Live Without

    The Things We Cannot Live Without

    As an adolescent, Emmanuel Carrère was unhappy, but he remained buoyant because he believed in the two assets he trusted above all others: his intellect and his identity as a writer. Intelligence served as his life raft. Irony gave him distance from despair. Even misery becomes manageable when you can narrate it with style.

    That strategy collapsed when he turned thirty.

    The faculties that had once sustained him simply stopped working. He could no longer marshal his intelligence against himself. Reflecting on that period, he writes, “I could no longer write, I didn’t know how to love, I knew I wasn’t particularly likable. Just being me became literally unbearable.”

    He had reached what might be called a collapse of competence: the moment when the qualities that once anchored your identity—talent, discipline, intelligence, status, creativity, charm—suddenly fail to hold your weight. The scaffolding of the self buckles. You are forced to search for an entirely different foundation because the old one has become a condemned building.

    When Carrère confessed his misery to his godmother Jacqueline, he expected sympathy. Instead, she was delighted.

    As a devout Catholic, she believed despair was not a catastrophe but a prerequisite. Only when a person finally recognizes that his life has become an uninhabitable ruin is he prepared to hear the Gospel. Pride must first exhaust itself.

    She placed a New Testament in his hands and instructed him to read it without trying to be “too intelligent.”

    That advice carries a sly paradox. Intelligence, the very faculty Carrère had relied upon for survival, had become the obstacle. Jacqueline was asking him to stop treating the Bible as a puzzle to master and instead allow it to master him.

    During that same summer of 1990, Jacqueline introduced Emmanuel to her other godson, Hervé. The two men gradually became close friends.

    Hervé was, by temperament, a philosopher disguised as a journalist. Though professionally successful, he was perpetually haunted by questions that most people manage to outrun. Why are we here? What is life for? Is there some purpose behind our existence, or are we simply decorating a cosmic waiting room until the lights go out?

    Watching Hervé, Carrère concludes that humanity divides rather neatly into two camps.

    The first group rarely loses sleep over metaphysical questions. They pursue promotions, vacations, romance, gossip, consumer pleasures, status games, and the endless sport of comparing themselves to everyone else. Their calendars stay full enough to prevent existential reflection from getting a word in edgewise.

    The second group cannot escape those questions. They are pursued by them like debt collectors. They read philosophy and religion not because such books are fashionable but because they are desperate. They are trying to determine whether existence contains an author or merely an audience.

    Looking back years later, Carrère recognizes that Hervé’s spiritual curiosity had been quietly cultivated by Jacqueline, who gently nudged him toward Christianity. Their religious journeys eventually diverged, but their friendship endured.

    For decades they have gathered regularly in the Swiss village of Le Levron, spending time together in a chalet that Carrère calls his querencia.

    The Spanish word comes from bullfighting. A querencia is the part of the arena where the bull instinctively retreats because it feels secure there. It is the place from which the animal regains its strength before reentering the fight.

    For Carrère, the metaphor is perfect. He arrives troubled and leaves restored.

    Everyone should have a reliable querencia.

    Mine, during the 1970s, was Walt’s Gym, a converted chicken coop perfumed with ancient sweat, rust, and enough menthol muscle ointment to fumigate a county. Men joyfully abused their bodies in pursuit of impossible physiques while punctuating every set with gossip, insults, bad jokes, and elaborate storytelling. It was less a fitness center than a monastery dedicated to testosterone and nonsense. The barbells built muscle. The banter built men.

    Then the corporate gyms arrived.

    The chicken coop gave way to chrome, televisions, smoothie bars, biometric scanners, and motivational slogans printed by people who had clearly never deadlifted anything heavier than a marketing proposal. By 2005 I had had enough. I quit.

    For the past twenty years my querencia has been my garage.

    There I swing kettlebells, flood my brain with an hour’s worth of endorphins, keep company with favorite podcasters, and temporarily escape the increasingly exhausting experience of being myself. I enter carrying the accumulated static of the world. I leave feeling that someone has quietly reset my nervous system.

    I envy Carrère because his querencia involves another human being.

    Mine is solitary.

    There was a time when it wasn’t.

    During the late 1980s a group of us played basketball at a Berkeley community center before heading out for dinner. Those evenings stitched together a sense of belonging that no amount of solitary reflection could duplicate.

    Later, after moving from the Bay Area to the California desert for my first teaching job, loneliness became my regular companion. Once each week I would spend two-hour marathons on the telephone with old friends. By the end my ear literally hurt from holding the receiver.

    Those conversations nourished me in ways I didn’t fully appreciate at the time. Someone had willingly given me two hours of his life. That simple fact quietly testified that I mattered.

    Then phone conversations disappeared in the early 2000s.

    Texting replaced talking. Social media replaced lingering conversation. We became experts at remaining connected while carefully avoiding communion.

    So today my querencia is almost entirely solitary.

    Yet I continue to experience what I think of as the Querencia Effect: the restorative power of a place, ritual, or recurring practice that allows someone to arrive emotionally depleted and leave psychologically renewed. It is the sanctuary where a fractured self is quietly reassembled before returning to the arena.

    Still, I worry.

    As I approach sixty-five, my refuge depends almost entirely upon a body that grows older every year. One day it may no longer tolerate sixty-minute kettlebell sessions or long rides that leave me happily awash in endorphins.

    I think of a bodybuilder I once read in a muscle magazine. His ambition was beautifully uncomplicated. He wanted only one thing from God: the privilege of lifting weights for as long as he remained alive.

    Then I think of Ronnie Coleman.

    No professional bodybuilder punished himself more ferociously. His reward has been dozens of back surgeries and chronic pain that would persuade most people never to enter another gym.

    Yet there he is, sometimes maneuvering through the weight room in a wheelchair because, pain or no pain, he still needs to touch the iron.

    Some dependencies are pathological.

    Others are redemptive.

    The difficulty is that the line between them often becomes visible only after it has been crossed.

    Years ago I had a colleague who was, in his own eccentric way, a genius. He ignored lesson plans, dismissed required evaluations with cheerful contempt, wore the same uniform of white T-shirt and blue jeans, and simply walked into class and talked. Students adored him. Passing me on campus, he would grin and greet me with a sarcastic profanity, as though the world’s absurdity deserved nothing more sophisticated.

    I attended his retirement party in 2004.

    A few years later I learned he had taken his own life.

    Cannabis had become his querencia. When a medical diagnosis made it impossible for him to continue using it, the refuge disappeared. Without it, life became intolerable. His wife found him dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

    That story has haunted me for years because it exposes an uncomfortable truth.

    We eventually become dependent upon the very things that rescue us.

    If tomorrow my body informed me that I could never exercise again, I don’t believe I would follow my colleague’s path.

    The first reason is simple: I love my wife and daughters more than I love my own comfort. The collateral damage would be unforgivable.

    The second reason is considerably less noble.

    I am a coward.

    Cowardice, on occasion, has surprising moral utility. It keeps a person from making irreversible decisions during temporary despair.

    Besides, the last thing I want is to arrive before God having chosen the emergency exit, only to be asked why I abandoned the arena before the fight was over. There are many questions I would like to avoid on Judgment Day.

    That is certainly one of them.

  • Once You Have Seen Hell, You Cannot Unsee It

    Once You Have Seen Hell, You Cannot Unsee It

    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.

  • My First Apocalypse

    My First Apocalypse

    Struggling with a persistent and indefinable mental malaise, Emmanuel Carrère eventually found relief when his psychiatrist prescribed an antipsychotic medication advertised as a treatment for “erroneous beliefs.” The phrase amused him. It sounded less like a pharmaceutical claim than a diagnosis of the human condition. If his life had been governed by erroneous beliefs, perhaps the drug was aimed less at his brain than at his philosophy.

    As a hormone-soaked adolescent, I suffered from my own spectacular assortment of erroneous beliefs.

    One of the most consequential arrived courtesy of Paul Ehrlich’s bestselling The Population Bomb. The book convinced me that civilization stood on the brink of collapse. Humanity would soon drown beneath its own numbers. Famine, drought, and social chaos were not distant possibilities but tomorrow’s weather forecast.

    Under those circumstances, dating struck me as a curious misuse of time.

    Why cultivate romance when the planet was preparing for its own obituary?

    Why ask a girl to the movies when we would soon be rationing freeze-dried food aboard lunar colonies, assuming we survived long enough to board the shuttle?

    My imagination raced well beyond Ehrlich’s predictions. In my private apocalypse there would be no health clubs, no squat racks, no barbells, and, worst of all, no gravity worthy of serious resistance training. Without a gym and a steady supply of protein, my hard-earned physique would evaporate. I pictured myself shrinking into the shape of a tomato balanced precariously atop four toothpicks. The image horrified me with an intensity wildly disproportionate to the fate of civilization itself.

    Most teenagers worry about acne.

    I worried about post-apocalyptic muscle atrophy.

    Love became a luxury for people foolish enough to believe there would still be a future. Courtship seemed almost irresponsible. Civilization was ending, and I had more pressing concerns than holding hands at the mall.

    Looking back, I marvel not at how mistaken I was but at how eagerly the adolescent mind embraces catastrophe. Young people are naturally drawn to grand narratives. Some expect salvation. Others anticipate doom. Both stories offer the same seductive promise: that ordinary life is about to be interrupted by something world-altering.

    In my case, the world never ended.

    The apocalypse quietly expired.

    My erroneous beliefs, however, proved far more resilient than Paul Ehrlich’s predictions.