Letter #33: All the Company of Heaven

Whose conversion counts?

OnlyDad,

I would tell you to stop lurking on strippers’ social media accounts, but you’re right: the people who really exposed themselves in that whole affair were the ones tallying up the sincerity metrics on her conversion. And in public for some reason—figuring I guess that they were storing up for themselves retweets in heaven. I think that’s what they call a scandal in the original Greek sense, which is when you set out to score a sick dunk in Pietyball but end up tripping over your own self-regard, Larry and Curly style. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

The whole thing put me in mind of when Russell Brand, who mercifully is not a porn star but only a sort of oily Englishman, announced that he had started wearing a cross as part of his previously de-personalized meditation practice. Or when the regally courageous Ayaan Hirsi Ali announced she had converted from atheism to Christianity, and some of her reasons had to do with the power of Christianity as a civilization-building force. Suddenly the skies were loud with the tweets of overnight theologians, informing us that no, that’s not Christian enough—you have to pray to Jesus for the right reasons, on the right terms, or it’s not a real conversion.

And I get it: faith is so precious, its whispering voice so thin against the foghorns of the world, that you want to shore up its essential principles. You have to keep reminding yourself what you’ve received, and sometimes it feels like you have to draw the dividing line for everyone else, too: this, and not that, is true religion.

But I also think there’s another way to look at it. “I tell you this: there is joy among the angels of God over one sinner who repents.” Do we imagine the angels at the throne exult because they think, “at last! Derek from Slough now has the exact same understanding of God as I do, and has found his way to precisely the denomination that we practice up here?” I sort of doubt it. For one thing it would probably be hard to spare one of your thousand tongues of flame to say all that while you’re supposed to be holding down the tenor part in an unending hymn of praise whose tones resound through the very foundations of time.

But for another thing, it looks to me like the delight of the angels is less about the particular milestone reached than about the direction of travel. Repentance: metanoia, a turning of the mind from death toward life. At their best, the rituals of the church fix our eyes on a north star. This is my body. You could spend eternity moving further, higher, deeper in that direction—I bet the angels do. At their infinite remove, they’re probably not too fussed about whether it’s Derek from Slough, or Russell Brand, or the ex-OnlyFans girl that’s further down the road. Perhaps we should behave likewise.

Love,
Spencer