There are many ways to alienate people from a social cause that one has or a belief that one holds, no matter how benign they may be. One way is not to even practice what you preach. For example, a Christian man, spreading the Gospel in words, but hoards vast amounts of wealth for himself, hardly giving any to those in need. Or a free speech advocate attempting to silence someone because they disagree with his opinions. Hypocrisy will always alienate people from beliefs or causes. Everyone’s aware of this and it infuriates most of us.

In this post, however, I’ll discuss the detrimental effects of pushing one’s views, beliefs and causes too hard that it is of no benefit to anyone. Shoving opinions down people’s throats, in colloquial terms. Many passionate advocates of particular political causes, religious beliefs, or even lifestyle choices are often guilty of this, and I struggle to understand what good it actually brings to the ideas that are being preached.

When thinking of heavy handed preaching, what comes to mind among many secular people are certain fundamentalist Christians who go around telling people that they’ll burn forever in hell if they don’t repent and accept Jesus. Or Christians who go around shouting at people that their ways are sinful, evil and the like. Most aren’t like this, but the vocal minority gets the most press, so that’s what often shapes people’s perspectives on Christianity. As a result, fewer potential followers of Christ join the flock, instead opting for something less dogmatic and judgmental.

Many atheists are no different. I’ve spent time looking at atheist channels on YouTube and reading their books and memes, and I’ve noticed there is the same heavy handed preaching. Examples include lines such as: “you’re a brainwashed idiot if you believe in God”, “you don’t live life to the fullest if you’re religious”, “only atheists are rational, intelligent people” and so on and so on. This is incredibly insulting and will only serve to entrench certain religious folk deeper into their views. This kind of thinking has helped establish the rather misperceived idea that there is a fundamental clash between faith and science, leading many Christians to abandon science altogether, instead opting to accept young earth interpretations of scripture and the world.

In politics, those who adamantly pursue social justice causes are just as worrisome than “fire and brimstone preachers”. Quite a lot of these causes are actually quite benign, many just advocating acceptance of groups of people who may experience difficulties in society. But the problem is again that the level of judgmental, condemning preaching is simply putting people off from joining their cause. Calling people racists, bigots, homophobes, transphobes, facscists, Nazis or whatever on the growing list of insults just because they don’t agree with the same policy prescriptions, simply does no good. It waters down these terms rendering them virtually meaningless, and perhaps even harms the people they’re trying to aid.

I’d like to briefly mention veganism. I actually quite sympathise with the ideas, reducing as much suffering in the world as possible. My brother and his wife are vegans and I’ve attended a few events with them in the past, and overall I’ve had a very positive experience with vegans, the events were great and more about spreading information. But despite these more moderate activists, there is quite a self-righteous, judgmental, condemning attitude coming from within the community that leads me to completely understand why many people, who otherwise may be interested in becoming at least a vegetarian, would stick to meat as a way of retaliating against vegan methods of spreading their beliefs.

So why doesn’t overbearing preaching work? In many cases the motives of people that cram their views down others’ throats may be quite benign. In the case of fundamentalist Christians, many are trying to save them from hell by revealing a hard truth about their lives. Atheists just want society to embrace science and rationality. Many social justice types really just want disadvantaged people to have a better life. And vegans just want more people to stop eating meat and dairy, so animals can suffer less.

But despite this, the preacher of any given cause or belief will frequently be labelled as false in some way. They might hold ulterior motives, be it financial or to gain more power. It might be a sign of virtue signalling, the act of showing the world how good a person they are, and how much better they are than those who haven’t accepted their way of thinking. To me, it’s not the traditional preachers who are perhaps the most guilty of this, but rather more secular ones. Hollywood celebrities appear to be big culprits. Going around acting like moral compasses for the rest of us, telling us how to behave and think, in a way of showing how virtuous they and their industry is. Perhaps it’s a method to compensate for the exorbitant amount of wealth they have. Many of the causes are benign, but the way they go about it is perhaps why people increasingly dislike Hollywood figures.

Being too preachy also has the problem of distorting and oversimplifying the message. Yelling at people that they’re bad because they eat meat, turns focus away from the animals, and just sounds self-righteous. Telling people about the threat of hellfire and condemning their sins distracts many from focusing on the love, beauty and forgiveness found within Christianity. It creates a very narrow and problematic view of the issue or belief, which simply sends more and more people away.

At the end of the day, people have enough problems and don’t need the added baggage of being labelled evil, bad, racist, if they don’t accept the preacher’s perspective of the world. And for those of us who do feel that we want to spread our beliefs, we need to understand this. Don’t judge people if they think differently to us, haven’t accepted what we think. I used to get into big arguments with my father over various issues, spiritual and political – I was a little preachy and judgmental of him because he often vehemently disagreed. I learnt to stop this and just accept his views and instead attempt to genuinely engage with him (or simply not talk about it!). Just about every single person on this planet sees their truth as the absolute truth of the world. Even those who claim there is no absolute truth, hold that very claim as absolute truth! At the end of the day, no matter how strongly our perspective may be backed up by evidence and experience, we still need to take a leap of faith to regard this as the truth. So with recognising this, perhaps we can be more open to understanding why others won’t believe what we believe.

Instead, discussing with someone who you want to convince is perhaps the best way, rather than going around demanding people to believe what you believe. Try and understand their perspective, find out why they believe the way they do, and then kindly tell them the reasons for why you might be correct. This was the way of the Buddha, when he spent decades debating with people about the truths of the world. The Buddha wouldn’t attack people wasn’t cramming his ways down others throats. He engaged peacefully and calmly with people and perhaps this is a reason as to why it’s one of the biggest religions/philosophies in the world and has survived for well over two thousand years.

No major thinkers or spiritual figures of today’s longstanding philosophies got the way they are today by heavy handed preaching. Instead they engaged with detractors meaningfully and intellectually, and they showed by example, practiced what they preached. Ideas that were forced don’t seem to last long in comparison (fascism and communism are examples). In today’s world, which is becoming increasingly polarised, filled with those who love to push their particular agendas and beliefs on others, perhaps we need to take a moment and reflect on our methods, and then look to those, be they Jesus, the Buddha, Socrates or others, and see how their ideas have managed to have such an enduring legacy on the world of thought.

Images taken from:

https://biblicaltruthresources.wordpress.com/2014/07/10/old-fashion-soap-box-preaching-street-preaching-with-jesse-morrell-in-dallas-tx/

http://www.returnofkings.com/101439/whats-the-difference-between-a-modern-sjw-protest-and-a-1963-pro-segregation-rally