James’s Blog: Cold-Calling.

I recently had a chat on my doorstep with two Jehovah’s Witnesses (has anyone ever had a chat with a Jehovah’s Witness that wasn’t on a doorstep?). They were two perfectly nice friendly men with smiles that had only the vaguest hint of plasticness. There was a younger fellow (the Trainee) who asked most of the questions, and an older fellow (the Trainer) who interjected to steer the conversation back on track when I wasn’t playing ball. Well, I say it was a ‘conversation’, but…

The list of questions they asked me read like an Alpha Course Greatest Hits compilation (“Does God Care?”, “What About Suffering?”, “What Do You Think About The Devil?”) but it fell short of being an actual conversation. The whole thing quickly took on a surreal quality when I realised that my side of the exchange was totally irrelevant. It was like they were working through a predetermined cold-calling script, and the purpose of the questions was to move through a mental checklist and get on to the next listed query, with the eventual goal of…well, I don’t know what the eventual goal was. I assume that it was the theological equivalent of getting me to admit that yes, I had recently had an accident that wasn’t my fault. I honestly think that I could have responded to the question “Do you believe in God?” with “Squiggily diggily doo” and they wouldn’t have even batted an eyelid, instead just ploughed on to ask me if I thought God cared about me (Spoiler: I said “Yes.”).

Any attempt to divert the conversation into free-form territory was ignored. For example, when I challenged something they’d said, and suggested that the Bible was more concerned with the question of how we should respond to suffering rather than the question of why God allows it (Ask me about suffering will you? A subject I wrote my Master’s thesis on? BIG MISTAKE.) it didn’t even merit a response. The next thing I knew I was being offered a phone to read 1 John 5:19 and asked what I thought about the Devil. What? If I wanted to have my boundless wisdom and insightful commentary ignored I’d volunteer to do more preaching, thank you very much.

What I had wanted to do was ask them a question. Namely, what difference does your faith make to your lives? Not in a “Well, I’m spending my Saturday mornings knocking on people’s doors” way, though that would be a fair response. Rather, how do you experience God in your life on a day-to-day basis? I would have been genuinely interested in their answers to that.

I didn’t get the chance though. The Trainer cut the ‘conversation’ short. They’d just started hinting at some weird things about the Devil, and I guess he realised that he was five seconds away from getting a lecture on the evils of dualism. They did offer to come back sometime for a longer conversation, but I declined because my house is already full of people who ignore everything I say.

After we’d exchanged firm handshakes and goodbyes, I closed the door and began deconstructing what had just happened (honestly, my brain won’t even give me five minutes to myself sometimes). I realised that this was the longest conversation I’d had with religious cold-callers in a while, possibly ever. Usually I’m super quick to dismiss them and send them away. I tell myself it’s because it’s futile to debate with people on the doorstep, a belief kind of borne out by what had just happened, but I also realised that this wasn’t the whole truth. It’s because every time I have an encounter like this I always come away feeling like I did a bad job and failed in some significant way. What do I expect from such events? A miracle conversion right there and then? Literally seeing the scales fall away from someone’s eyes? When I think about it, it seems ridiculous, but if I’m honest there’s a part of me that genuinely believes that anything less is a failure. As a result I’m quick to shut down what I regard as ‘pointless’ debates, mostly to protect myself from feeling that way. It’s a bad habit that I need to keep an eye on.

Sometimes, in my interactions with other people, I learn more about myself than I do about them. I guess I owe those two Jehovah’s Witnesses a debt of gratitude after all.