IS PROSELYTIZING EVER OKAY? ARE WE ALL PROSELYTIZING ALL THE TIME?

Ill go with the questions found in this article on Religious Dispatches. Key parts are below:

 I brought up Christianity Today columnist Bonnie Kristian arguing in The Week that any objection to the Christian practice of proselytizing must be based in either partisanship or ignorance of Christianity. As her assertion of this clearly false dichotomy demonstrates, if we’re to take her at her word, Kristian is unable to conceive of literally any serious reasons someone might find proselytizing unethical or distasteful, since, after all, it’s an aspect of Christianity that is “extremely old and (within the church) uncontroversial.”

But if Kristian is truly unable to imagine any deeply felt, substantive reasons for anyone to object to Christian proselytizing, she is clearly the one in need of an education. And yet, sadly, Kristian is far from alone in her defensiveness around Christian conversion efforts.

As someone who spends entirely too much time on Twitter, I encounter this defensiveness often when discussing the Christian hegemony that pervades our society and the reasons I personally find proselytizing objectionable. I’ve summarized these reasons in the following infographic, which I repost often:

But my philosophical objections to proselytizing notwithstanding, there are plenty of historical reasons why Christians proselytizing to Jews is a particularly fraught issue, and anyone pretending to be an intellectual should be familiar with them. I mean hell, you could get some sense of it just from watching Fiddler on the Roof. Bonnie Kristian is, to go all Pauline for a second, very much “without excuse” here, and, while I’m not Jewish and certainly don’t claim to speak for Jews, I think it’s worth pausing on this point.

ARTICLE HERE

IS PROSELYTIZING EVER OKAY? ARE WE ALL PROSELYTIZING ALL THE TIME?