Having a background in born-again Christian circles, I immediately recognized Ben Carson’s story of his conversion from alleged violent ne’er-do-well to meek and mild man of God as almost certainly a product of exaggeration. Hyperbole is the order of the day with such “testimonies” because the worse you claim to have been before, the more powerful the conversion must have been. CNN Religion Editor Daniel Burke nails it:



There’s a strange resemblance between religious conversion stories and weight-loss ads: both rely on astutely edited “before” and “after” images. To sell slimming products, the camera first shows a man facing forward, flaunting his flabby gut and lumpy love handles. In the “after” shots, the camera is angled to the side, highlighting a newly narrowed midriff. The goal of the illusion isn’t to just make the man look better, of course; it’s to make viewers believe that a product has the miraculous power to turn blubber into brawn. As anyone who has spent time in a church, synagogue, mosque, temple, sangha, AA meeting or prison knows, a similar effect can arise in religious conversion stories. The “before” pictures, in particular, tend to darken. The snares of sin sharpen, the descent into depravity deepens. Often enough, eye-roll-worthy embellishments are accepted, even expected. What’s a little stretch when you’re winning souls for Christ, or escaping bad karma? But sometimes converts’ zeal can get the better of them.

He mentions Mike Warnke, the textbook example of this. He wrote an entire book called The Satan Seller, claiming to have been a “high priest” of Satanism and having participated in all manner of perverted, disgusting and deadly rituals. Turns out it was all fiction and he was caught in the lie by a Christian magazine. But that story was hardly an anomaly. Just as the stories of our exploits get exaggerated — the football game you lost becomes the game you won, with you scoring the winning touchdown as time expired — so do the tales of their crimes when they want to convince you that only the power of God could have turned them around.

Thus the evangelist who became a Christian in college after growing up with no religious training or even much interest in the matter claims to have been a “devout atheist” before he was saved. The modestly troubled kid who got kicked out of school a few times claims to have been a violent gang member before being washed by the blood of the lamb. The worse you claim to have been before you converted, the more powerful your testimony of being saved becomes.

And the mild-mannered neurosurgeon that everyone remembers as a textbook good kid, with perfect grades and success in the ROTC, is transformed into a hammer-wielding attempted murderer with a knife in his hand. Those stories served Carson well for decades as he worked the Christian rubber chicken circuit, dazzling audiences with the divine nature of his transformation. As a presidential candidate, it doesn’t work quite so well.