Cinemorphosis

Tag: jesus

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • True Believers Are Not Exotic Specimens

    True Believers Are Not Exotic Specimens

    In The Kingdom, Emmanuel Carrère describes himself as a former Christian and now an agnostic who remains irresistibly drawn to the mystery of belief. He wants to know what committed Christians actually experience from the inside. Not what they claim in theological treatises or apologetics, but what they believe in the marrow of their bones. To satisfy that curiosity, he considers joining a Catholic cruise that retraces the missionary journeys of Saint Paul.

    Then he recoils.

    He realizes that he would be boarding the ship under false pretenses. He would not be a pilgrim but an observer, a skeptical journalist pretending to be a fellow traveler. Worse, he fears he would begin treating believers as specimens in a religious safari, peering at them through the bars of an intellectual zoo.

    He cannot bring himself to do it.

    The reason is revealing. Carrère respects Christianity too much. More importantly, he recognizes too much of himself in the people he hopes to observe. He has not escaped the longing that once made him a fervent believer. Somewhere inside him survives a hunger for Kierkegaard’s leap of faith, for the intoxicating certainty that dissolves ambiguity and ends the exhausting labor of perpetual self-interrogation.

    That is the danger of writing about conversion.

    The temptation is to reduce the convert to a caricature—a fanatic, a zealot, a punch line. Once that happens, the writer has stopped investigating and started congratulating himself.

    Carrère refuses that temptation.

    One of the novel’s greatest strengths is that he approaches even the forms of faith that unsettle him with remarkable humility. He writes without condescension, without superiority, and without the lazy satisfaction of explaining away religious passion as psychological pathology. His tone is one of curiosity, sympathy, self-reproach, and, perhaps most surprisingly, envy. He cannot help wondering whether absolute conviction, however irrational, might be preferable to a lifetime spent wandering the fog of uncertainty.

    He cancels the cruise.

    He calls doing so “a bad deed.”

    That confession stopped me in my tracks because it exposed the weakness in my own writing.

    Over the years I have written roughly a dozen shabby, half-baked novels about my teenage years as a bodybuilder. I always blamed the structure, the pacing, the dialogue, or the plot.

    Now I think I know the real reason they failed.

    I was the man boarding the bodybuilding cruise.

    I looked back at my younger self and my gym companions the way a tourist looks at a curious tribe. They were amusing. They were excessive. They spoke in absurd dialects about protein, carb loading, and biceps pumps with the solemnity of medieval theologians debating the nature of grace.

    I was clever.

    I was also a hack.

    Mockery is the refuge of writers who fear understanding.

    I never asked the questions that mattered. What terror drove boys to devote themselves so completely to muscle? What loneliness hid beneath the bravado? What private wounds demanded redemption through iron? What aching sense of inadequacy transformed barbells into sacraments?

    The bodybuilding was never the story.

    The hunger was.

    If I ever return to that world, I hope to do so as Carrère approached Christianity: not with detached amusement but with humility, caution, and the uncomfortable recognition that the fanatic I wish to understand is not someone else.

    It is a former version of myself.

  • Everyone Is Waiting to Be Converted

    Everyone Is Waiting to Be Converted

    In his autobiographical novel The Kingdom, Emmanuel Carrère describes a television series he once helped develop. The premise is quietly unsettling. In a small rural town, the dead return to life. There are no zombies, no horror tropes, no supernatural spectacle. The dead simply resume their ordinary lives. Your husband comes home from work. Your daughter asks what’s for dinner. Your father sits in his favorite chair. None of them remembers dying. The burden falls not on the resurrected but on the living, who must reconcile themselves to the impossible.

    Carrère uses this premise as a metaphor for religious conversion.

    A genuine conversion does not merely alter a person’s opinions. It kills one self and replaces it with another. The converted person still wears the same face, but something essential has vanished. The old personality has become a ghost.

    Carrère knows this from experience. For three years in the early 1990s he was consumed by Christian faith. Looking back, he regards that intensely devout version of himself almost as one regards a deceased relative: familiar, unforgettable, and yet strangely unrecognizable.

    The same paradox appears in Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus. Saul the persecutor would have despised Paul the apostle. Paul the apostle would have regarded Saul as spiritually blind. They occupy the same body while inhabiting entirely different moral universes.

    Carrère calls Christianity’s astonishing expansion the Great Mutation. Within a few centuries, roughly a quarter of the known world accepted the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, miracles, eternal life, and the conviction that earthly existence was merely the waiting room for a greater kingdom. Whether one believes those claims is almost beside the point. The historical achievement is staggering. Few ideas have ever transformed so many human beings so thoroughly.

    Reading Carrère made me realize that religious conversion is only one species of a much larger phenomenon.

    Human beings are conversion machines.

    A politically indifferent commuter begins listening to Rush Limbaugh during long drives to work. Months later he is no longer merely listening; he is quoting, arguing, and eventually thinking in Limbaugh’s cadences. The broadcaster has not simply gained an audience. He has acquired disciples.

    Sometimes I amused myself by imagining an absurd sequel.

    Suppose Rush Limbaugh had awakened one morning as a granola-eating vegan who had embraced Buddhism, practiced yoga at sunrise, and urged his listeners to forgive their political enemies because resentment disrupts the universe’s healing vibrations.

    His audience would have experienced something close to theological collapse.

    The prophet had abandoned the faith.

    Followers who had built their identities around his certainties would suddenly find themselves spiritually homeless. Many would scramble toward new authorities with the desperation of refugees. Some might discover John Bradshaw and begin healing their Inner Child. Others would embrace Deepak Chopra and begin assuring bewildered relatives that “the universe has no fixed agenda,” thereby ensuring they would never again be invited to host Thanksgiving dinner.

    The point is that conversion is not confined to religion.

    As Eric Hoffer argues in The True Believer, people burdened by inadequacy rarely seek modest improvement. They crave wholesale transformation. If religion fails to satisfy that hunger, they will seek redemption elsewhere—in politics, psychology, nutrition, fitness, investing, or hobbies.

    As a teenage bodybuilder in the 1970s, my friends and I didn’t merely admire Arnold Schwarzenegger.

    We wanted to become Arnold.

    Protein shakes were our communion wine. Carb loading was liturgy. The biceps pump bordered on mystical experience. We weren’t building muscle nearly as much as we were pursuing salvation.

    This morning I stumbled across a Reddit post from a G-Shock enthusiast celebrating his GW-6900. According to him, the watch had changed his life. He no longer wanted another watch. He had conquered watch addiction. He was cured.

    I smiled because I recognized the language immediately.

    He wasn’t describing a purchase.

    He was describing a conversion.

    His watch had become Damascus on the wrist.

    Carrère observes that most of us live comfortably in two parallel worlds. One contains our practical routines: paying bills, driving to work, buying groceries. The other houses our transcendent convictions, the stories that persuade us our lives are moving toward redemption rather than mere survival.

    That second world is never empty for long.

    If we lose one faith, another waits patiently around the corner. It may arrive dressed as a political movement, a diet, a fitness program, a philosopher, or even a watch. We flatter ourselves that we are rational creatures who occasionally become believers.

    The evidence suggests the opposite.

    We are believers searching for the next conversion.

  • The Great Mutation

    The Great Mutation

    Emmanuel Carrère has become my literary patron saint because he asks the questions I cannot stop asking myself. Of all his books, The Kingdom has lodged itself deepest inside me because it dramatizes the same conflict that has haunted my life: the impossible task of separating myself from Christianity without ever quite escaping its gravitational pull.

    In The Kingdom, Carrère intertwines autobiography with the story of Luke, imagining the evangelist as a writer following the missionary adventures of his hero, Paul. Luke becomes more than a biblical figure. He becomes Carrère’s alter ego, a fellow writer trying to make sense of extraordinary events while simultaneously making sense of himself.

    That double inquiry is what captivates me.

    Carrère interrogates not merely Christianity but his own soul.

    One of the most striking subjects of that interrogation is success.

    By any worldly standard, Carrère has won the lottery. He is one of France’s most celebrated writers. His opinions carry cultural weight. He serves on prestigious literary juries. Filmmakers seek his advice. Publishers court him. His books travel farther than most people ever will. He stays in elegant hotels, dines with influential people, and inhabits the rarefied atmosphere reserved for intellectual celebrities.

    Yet success has not quieted him.

    If anything, it has sharpened his discomfort.

    Part of him believes that his accomplishments have carried him farther from Jesus than closer to him. Although he long ago emerged from what he calls his “Christian period,” the desire to follow Jesus never entirely disappeared. It lingers like an old melody that refuses to leave his mind.

    That desire creates an almost unbearable tension because Jesus demands a way of life that appears to mock nearly every modern definition of success.

    Love your enemies.

    Bless those who persecute you.

    Do not exalt yourself.

    Sell your possessions.

    Take up your cross.

    Act as though this world is passing away.

    Measured against that standard, literary fame begins to resemble an embarrassing distraction.

    Carrère is fascinated by Christianity’s vision of salvation, yet he recoils from its radicalism. The Gospel asks us to hold our earthly attachments lightly. Marriage, children, wealth, reputation, and ambition all become secondary to membership in the family of Christ. Love itself is transformed. Instead of reserving our deepest affection for spouses, children, and friends, Jesus seems to demand an indiscriminate love that embraces everyone equally.

    Carrère pauses here.

    Can love that is equally distributed still be called love?

    Or has it become something so abstract that it evaporates into an ideal rather than a human experience?

    He contrasts this vision with what he sees as the Jewish ideal of the good life. There, holiness unfolds not by fleeing the world but by inhabiting it fully. One marries. One raises children. One prospers through honest work. One celebrates weddings, feasts, and holy days. One delights in family, longevity, generosity, and community. Earth itself becomes the stage upon which covenant is lived.

    Christianity, by contrast, often seems suspicious of precisely those satisfactions. Earthly success is fleeting. Family loyalties yield to discipleship. Riches become spiritual liabilities. This life is preparation for another kingdom.

    Carrère never completely chooses between these competing visions.

    My sense is that he is temperamentally drawn toward the Jewish embrace of earthly life. Yet he cannot stop returning to Jesus.

    Because no one ever spoke like Jesus.

    For Carrère, the singularity of Christ lies not primarily in miracles or doctrine but in language itself. Borrowing the linguistic term hapax legomenon—a word that appears only once in a body of literature—he suggests that Jesus himself is a kind of hapax: an unrepeatable event in human speech.

    He recalls the temple guards in John’s Gospel who return empty-handed after being sent to arrest Jesus.

    Their explanation is breathtakingly simple:

    “No one ever spoke like this man.”

    Carrère believes that even if one stripped away the miracle stories, even if one doubted the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, and every supernatural claim, the sayings of Jesus would still stand beside those of Buddha, Laozi, Confucius, and history’s greatest spiritual teachers.

    Something unprecedented happened in those words.

    The New Testament captivates him for another reason as well.

    Some scenes possess the awkward unpredictability of eyewitness memory.

    Who invents the young man who flees naked from Gethsemane after slipping out of his linen cloth? Carrère suspects the embarrassed youth may even have been Mark himself, accidentally preserving his own humiliation in the Gospel.

    Or consider the paralyzed man whose friends dismantle a roof simply to lower him into a crowded room before Jesus.

    These episodes feel too strange, too specific, too gloriously unnecessary to be manufactured.

    By contrast, the Virgin Birth, the bodily Resurrection, and other overtly miraculous episodes leave Carrère unconvinced. They strike him as theological architecture erected after the fact.

    Yet disbelief has never extinguished fascination.

    Quite the opposite.

    Carrère remains mesmerized by what he calls “the Great Mutation.”

    Within only a few generations, an obscure Jewish movement transformed the imagination of the Western world. Millions—and eventually billions—came to believe in the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, the Eucharist, eternal life, and the astonishing claim that God had entered history as a poor Jewish carpenter.

    When I encounter Carrère’s phrase, “the Great Mutation,” my own imagination travels somewhere entirely different.

    It returns to Saturday evenings in 1978.

    I am alone in the living room watching The Incredible Hulk.

    Dr. David Banner is gentle, decent, almost saintly. He suffers injustice with Job-like patience until one humiliation too many unleashes something volcanic inside him. Suddenly the transformation begins. Muscles swell. Clothes tear. Humanity gives way to myth.

    The catharsis overwhelms me.

    I begin to cry.

    I don’t merely want to become stronger.

    I want to mutate.

    I want my own body to erupt into something so magnificent that every weakness, every humiliation, every fear disappears forever.

    Then the rage subsides.

    The green giant vanishes.

    David Banner returns.

    And finally comes the sequence that broke my heart every single week.

    Banner walks alone down a lonely highway while Joe Harnell’s mournful piano theme, “The Lonely Man,” drifts over the closing credits.

    That was the image I carried inside myself.

    Not the Hulk.

    David Banner.

    The solitary wanderer searching for redemption.

    As a child, I mistook that identification for purity.

    What I could not yet see was the narcissism quietly hiding inside the fantasy. I imagined myself not merely misunderstood but uniquely chosen, destined for some dramatic transformation that would finally justify my existence.

    Looking back, I realize I was already rehearsing the emotional architecture of the religious conversion that awaited me only a year later.

    Long before I met Jesus, I was already waiting for a Great Mutation.

  • Wrestling with the Good News

    Wrestling with the Good News

    Three nights ago I dreamed I was alone in a hotel room. Spread across the bed were towering stacks of books and magazines about Christianity. They represented nearly fifty years of reading, questioning, underlining, highlighting, and hoping. I stood over them with the terrible realization that they had brought me no closer to certainty than when I began.

    The dream carried me back to the age of seventeen, when Christianity first overturned my life. What seized me was not the promise of heaven but the terror of hell. I found myself unable to escape the thought that the universe might be governed by a God who had already consigned billions of people to eternal punishment. I never reconciled myself to the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement, the idea that divine wrath could be satisfied only through the sacrificial death of God’s Son. Yet I was irresistibly drawn to Jesus himself. I wanted to imitate his humility, his freedom from ego, and his radical love for others.

    For most Christians, the phrase “the Good News” evokes joy. For me, it always carried a shadow.

    If the good news was that some of us could escape hell, then the corollary was that most of humanity would not.

    That realization settled over me like a permanent winter.

    I remember working at Jackson’s Wine and Spirits in Berkeley during college. One afternoon a familiar customer, a French immigrant, entered the store with his young son. The boy accidentally dropped a box of puzzle pieces near the register. His father patiently knelt beside him, gathered every piece, smiled gently, and placed them back into the box.

    I watched them and felt an almost unbearable sadness.

    Is this kind father destined for hell? Is his little boy? Is this really the central drama of existence—to rescue people from eternal punishment before it is too late?

    I slipped into the walk-in beer cooler and stocked shelves because I needed somewhere to hide from my thoughts.

    The strangest part of that season was the reaction of my Christian friends. They congratulated me on my conversion. They shook my hand and welcomed me into the family of God.

    One afternoon my high school friend Kevin looked at my face after congratulating me.

    “Aren’t you happy?” he asked.

    I lied.

    “Yes,” I said.

    The truth was exactly the opposite. Even if I somehow managed to be saved, how could I rejoice while imagining that countless others—including decent, loving people like the French father and his son—were marching toward eternal torment? Salvation, as I understood it then, seemed to require emotional compartmentalization of a kind I simply could not achieve.

    So I spent the next several decades reading.

    Believers. Skeptics. Historians. Theologians. Agnostics. Biblical scholars.

    I hoped that somewhere, hidden among thousands of pages, certainty awaited me.

    It never arrived.

    That is what the dream exposed.

    I stood beside the hotel bed and realized those books represented an entire lifetime spent chasing certainty without catching it. My reading suddenly appeared fruitless, almost absurd.

    Then I picked up one magazine.

    Across the cover were the words:

    The Good News.

    I felt rage.

    Those words mocked me.

    The phrase marked the moment my childhood intuition of God as the source of boundless love gave way to a theological universe in which humanity stood beneath an infinite sentence, offered mercy only because divine justice demanded the execution of an innocent substitute.

    And yet another voice interrupts my protest.

    What if I have misunderstood the struggle?

    What if my resistance has less to do with theology than with myself?

    Perhaps I resist Jesus not because his demands are too cruel but because they are too demanding. Perhaps I prefer comfort to sacrifice, autonomy to obedience, self-interest to discipleship.

    Jesus offers no comfortable religion. He tells his followers to surrender wealth, deny themselves, carry their cross, and lose their lives in order to find them.

    His words continue to accuse me.

    Many are called; few are chosen.

    The gate is narrow.

    Why do you call me Lord and not do what I say?

    I want to answer him.

    You told us your yoke is easy and your burden is light. Yet the doctrine of hell has never felt easy or light. It has filled me with sorrow. If my life’s mission is to save as many people as possible from eternal punishment, then existence itself becomes unbearably heavy.

    And yet I cannot imagine a life entirely without you.

    A purely secular existence devoted to comfort, consumption, and personal fulfillment strikes me as equally impoverished. Nietzsche’s Last Man, blinking contentedly amid endless entertainment and consumer pleasures, offers no compelling vision of human flourishing.

    So I remain suspended between two worlds.

    I cannot wholly embrace the traditional theology that first converted me.

    Neither can I embrace a secular life emptied of transcendence.

    Perhaps that is why my favorite biblical image has never been David slaying Goliath or Moses parting the Red Sea.

    It is Jacob wrestling through the night with the mysterious stranger.

    Jacob survives, but he limps for the rest of his life.

    That limp has become the defining metaphor of my own existence.

    For nearly fifty years I have wrestled with God.

    The pain in my hip is the pain of never quite letting go.

  • The Artist and the Fundamentalist

    The Artist and the Fundamentalist

    In The War of Art, Stephen Pressfield argues that the artist flourishes only within a civilization wealthy and stable enough to afford “the luxury of self-examination.” Such a culture gives artists the freedom to create because it believes in human progress. It assumes that, however flawed humanity may be, those flaws can gradually be overcome. Art and humanism therefore become inseparable. The artist is sustained by the conviction that mankind is moving forward, and art is both evidence of that progress and one of its engines.

    I grew up dimly aware that my family and their friends subscribed to this liberal humanist vision. I found it comforting. I accepted its assumptions without much reflection because they made the world seem orderly and hopeful. Yet I cannot honestly say I embraced its ideals. My ambitions were narrower. The world’s problems belonged to someone else. My concern was building a pleasant kingdom for myself. Beyond the walls of that kingdom, humanity would simply have to fend for itself.

    Only later did I recognize what Pressfield sees as the shadow cast by humanism. Opposing it is not merely pessimism but fundamentalism.

    Fundamentalism begins with the conviction that human beings are too fallen, too corrupt, and too powerless to redeem themselves. Salvation cannot come through gradual human improvement; it must arrive through divine revelation or absolute doctrine. That revelation may come through Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, Karl Marx, or any other figure invested with unquestionable authority. If Pressfield were writing today, he might extend the list to include secular gurus whose followers seek not merely advice but complete personal transformation.

    Regardless of the prophet, the psychology remains the same. Fundamentalism grows from humiliation, alienation, and the longing for certainty, belonging, purpose, and power. The believer attaches himself to a leader whose doctrine promises nothing less than total metamorphosis. On this point, Pressfield’s analysis closely parallels that of Eric Hoffer in The True Believer, who argued that mass movements flourish among people desperate to escape the burdens of individual identity.

    History provides familiar examples. Pressfield notes that Hebrew fundamentalism intensified during the Babylonian captivity. White Christian fundamentalism expanded in the American South after Reconstruction. Germans embraced the mythology of the Master Race following the national humiliation of World War I. The particulars differ, but the emotional architecture remains remarkably consistent.

    At the heart of every fundamentalism lies a fear of freedom.

    Freedom sounds exhilarating until one remembers what it demands. To be free is to risk failure. It is to lose the comforting structures of tribe, clan, village, and inherited identity. As Pressfield writes, freedom often produces “the dislocation and emasculation experienced by the individual cut free from the familiar and comforting structures of the tribe and the clan, the village and the family.”

    The fundamentalist recoils from this uncertainty. He does not want the open horizon of modernity. He wants the closed gate of certainty. He retreats into an imagined golden age where moral boundaries are fixed, identities are unquestioned, and every problem has already been solved. As Pressfield puts it, he “gets back to basics. To fundamentals.”

    In this sense, modernism and humanism become close allies. Both assume that humanity can shape its future, define itself, and allow individuals to flourish according to their own talents and choices. Fundamentalism, by contrast, turns its face toward the past. Its paradise always lies behind it.

    This explains why Pressfield concludes that fundamentalism and art are fundamentally incompatible. “Fundamentalism and art are mutually exclusive. There is no such thing as fundamentalist art.”

    Art thrives on ambiguity, exploration, imagination, and discovery. Fundamentalism demands certainty, conformity, and obedience. The artist creates. The fundamentalist polices. Where the artist opens possibilities, the fundamentalist narrows them. His creative energies are redirected toward destruction—not necessarily of buildings alone, but of ideas, books, institutions, and people perceived as threats to the sacred order.

    No figure occupies the fundamentalist imagination more completely than Satan.

    His greatest creative act is the continual reinvention of evil itself. Satan may appear as rock music, fantasy novels, Hillary Clinton, Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Hollywood, secret cabals, lizard people, transgender ideology, vaccines, or universal healthcare. The names change with the generation, but the psychological function remains constant. Evil must always have a face. The fundamentalist spends so much time imagining Satan that he develops an almost obsessive fascination with the very force he claims to despise.

    Pressfield’s concept of Resistance appears in both worlds, but it assumes opposite meanings.

    For the artist, Resistance is the inner force that tempts one toward laziness, distraction, and fear instead of disciplined creation. For the fundamentalist, Resistance becomes temptation toward sin. His response is not artistic labor but deeper immersion in sacred texts, ritual, and ideological action. His mission is not to create a better future but to restore a purified past in which everyone submits to the same moral code.

    Humanists may believe in God, but they see themselves as collaborators rather than passive subjects. They become, in Pressfield’s phrase, “co-creators,” working alongside the divine to improve the world while allowing individuals to flourish according to their unique gifts. The fundamentalist regards that very freedom as rebellion. Individual autonomy becomes apostasy.

    Humanism flourishes where societies enjoy prosperity, stability, and hope. Fundamentalism flourishes where humiliation, scarcity, and inequality convince people that freedom has failed them. Under those conditions, many become willing to exchange liberty for certainty, even if certainty demands submission to an oppressive vision of the past.

    For Pressfield, the struggle to produce art therefore becomes more than a personal discipline. It becomes a civilizational duty. Art enlarges human freedom. It nourishes the forces that move civilization forward while starving those that would drag it backward into fear and absolutism.

    Yet the deepest battle is never merely political. It is internal.

    Pressfield concludes with an observation that echoes across philosophy and theology alike: “The paradox seems to be, as Socrates demonstrated long ago, that the truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self-mastery. While those who will not govern themselves are condemned to find masters to govern over them.”

    These final lines remind me of Paul. In Romans, Paul confesses that he cannot master himself. He longs to do what is right, yet repeatedly finds himself doing the very thing he hates. His will is divided. His moral resources are exhausted. Left to himself, he cannot overcome his own depravity and must therefore throw himself upon the mercy of Christ.

    At first glance, Paul’s confession resembles the psychology Pressfield attributes to the fundamentalist. Both begin with an acknowledgment of human brokenness and the inadequacy of individual willpower. But the resemblance may end there.

    Pressfield’s fundamentalist flees freedom because it terrifies him. Unable to bear uncertainty, he surrenders his judgment to an authoritarian doctrine that promises absolute certainty, rigid purity, and the restoration of a mythical golden age. His faith expresses itself through conformity, ideological warfare, and the relentless identification of enemies. He seeks salvation by submitting to external authority and demanding that others do the same.

    Paul’s theology points in another direction. His surrender is not to an ideology but to grace. Rather than claiming moral superiority, Paul begins by confessing his own moral bankruptcy. Rather than condemning outsiders, he first indicts himself. The transformation he seeks is not the recovery of a glorious past but the creation of a new heart. His dependence on God is meant to produce humility rather than triumphalism, compassion rather than self-righteousness, and freedom from sin rather than domination over other people.

    Yet the distinction remains difficult to untangle.

    Does Paul’s doctrine of grace ultimately liberate the individual, or does it still require the surrender of autonomy that Pressfield warns against? Can genuine freedom ever arise from admitting one’s inability to save oneself? Or does every appeal to divine authority contain the seeds of authoritarianism? Is Pressfield correct that self-mastery is the highest form of freedom, or is Paul correct that true freedom begins only when we acknowledge the limits of self-mastery and accept grace?

    These questions haunt me during both my waking and sleeping hours. I have not resolved them. I suspect I may never fully resolve them. But the struggle itself—the struggle to understand freedom, discipline, grace, and human flourishing—has become one of the defining pursuits of my life.