CarlZunker.com

I was reading a New York Times article that was trying to deduce why more Americans are now seeking religion. It was framed that religion is “having a moment,” as though faith were a fashion trend cycling back into style. The comments section, normally where people given anonymity go to flex their own genius, did what comments sections do, devolving into mockery. Within a few exchanges, the conversation had moved on from the article’s premise to the familiar verdict: believers are naive, irrational, running from death, clinging to fairy tales.

I’ve seen this enough times that it no longer surprises me. I know I cannot change hearts in the comments section, that environment does not often allow for correction. I also know the Bible teaches “Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you” (Proverbs 9:8, NIV). That does not mean the people making foolish comments while anonymous cannot be wise. I am asking that people come out of the shadows to ask a simpler question than the one they think they’re answering.

Why does other people’s faith bother you?

I spent years living the secular version of what is promised as “the good life.” Money in the bank with a career moving in the right direction. Checking the boxes the culture tells you to check, big house, cars, vacations. My wife and kids wanted for nothing materially, but everything I provided skipped the most important ingredient. I wasn’t raising my own kids or being present for my wife the way I should have been, the way they needed in order for them to be at peace. I was present in body, absent in all the ways that matter. I was operating under the assumption that providing financially was the same thing as being present. It took time to understand that it is not even close to the same thing. Taking care of your family (or even yourself) isn’t primarily about money. The balance sheet I was keeping didn’t have the right columns.

At the age of 18, I wrote a blank check to the United States military for twenty-six years, with a value up to and including my life. Thank God it didn’t get cashed. Along the way, I kept climbing ladders, getting degrees, promotions, getting commissioned, up to leading a 550-person organization, all of whom put their lives in my hands. That kind of commitment changes how you see things. When you’ve already settled the question of what you’re willing to die for, and what you are truly willing to ask other people to die for, the question of what you’re living for gets a lot sharper.

I’m not coming to faith from a position of naivety or shelter. It’s not a lack of education, low IQ, or simply not thinking the problem through. I ran the experiment for many years. I know what secular life looks like from the inside. And I’m telling you it didn’t deliver what it promised. Christianity has.

To be clear about what I mean in the secular promise falling short: I’m not saying people outside of Christianity can’t find happiness, meaning, or joy. They can and they do. That’s not the claim. What I couldn’t find I didn’t even know I was missing until I understood what the Bible was actually saying. I was missing coherence. A framework that holds together under the pressure of real life. Something that could account for suffering and mortality and obligation and love all at once, consistently, without falling apart when things got hard. Happiness was available to me in the secular life. What wasn’t available was the peace underneath it. Something that doesn’t depend on circumstances going well. I may not be able to be joyful when things are at their worst, and I may not even have peace in the moment, but peace returns to set the table for joy. The difference between the two is the difference between weather and climate. Weather changes daily. Climate is what you’re actually living in. I have a before and after to compare. Christianity doesn’t promise you an easier life. It gives you a better one.

The secular version of the good life, honestly examined, looks like this: work hard, accumulate money and things, retire, and finally, die with assets. I’ve watched people reach the end of that road. Making it into their seventies, money in the bank, no chance to enjoy retirement, and then gone. The estate goes to taxes instead of the kids. The life they deferred never got lived. That’s the promise kept. I don’t see the satisfaction we are supposed to aim for.

One commenter in the article thread made the standard move: religion is a response to death anxiety, a coping mechanism for people who can’t accept their own insignificance. That is, honestly, a sophisticated-sounding argument, but beyond sounding intelligent, it is inherently self-defeating. The same logic would dismiss any framework that gives human life meaning, including the secular ones. I cannot speak for everyone everywhere, but most people I have conversed with have a similar experience: the most consistently kind people I’ve known have been people of faith. Not performative or transactional kindness. The kindness that doesn’t burn out, doesn’t require an audience, and doesn’t come with an invoice.

Who in your life, in your own circle of influence, is actually living well? Not who makes the most money or has the most beautiful children. Who are the people who seem genuinely at peace, who give freely, who show up for people without keeping score? In my experience, that subset skews heavily toward people with a grounded faith. We may look at Jeff Bezos and want his money, but if we know about his personal life, we probably do not want his life.

What about the people whose peace exceeds what their material circumstances should produce? There’s a word for what happens when you encounter a life that seems better than the surroundings suggest it should be and it makes you uncomfortable without being able to explain why. The religious vernacular for it is conviction. It’s not an argument or a debate point. It’s the internal recognition that something is operating in a way you don’t fully understand, and that it seems unfairly better than what you have.

I’ll be honest about my own version of this. It is not fair, given the life I’ve lived and the choices I’ve made, for me to have the peace and satisfaction that I do. That’s exactly the point I’m trying to share. I didn’t earn anything. There is no way I can personally justify it, and yet, here it is. The goodness of God has added to my existence in ways I can’t fully explain and wouldn’t have predicted. That experience is available to everybody. I didn’t get a special allocation. But you do have to be able to perceive it.

C.S. Lewis captured this in The Chronicles of Narnia series, in the last book: The Last Battle. There’s a scene where a group of dwarfs are used as a vivid picture of what happens when people close themselves off to truth and goodness. Though Aslan (a representation of Jesus) sets a real feast before them, the dwarfs are convinced they are trapped in a filthy stable. They taste only what they expect to taste: dirty straw, stale water, and barn scraps. The tragedy is that they’ve trained themselves to be unable to perceive it. Lewis’s point is sharp: a hardened heart can turn the best circumstances into a prison. Jeff Bezos couldn’t use all the money in the world to produce a happy marriage. When cynicism becomes a worldview, even grace looks like deception, and even goodness feels like a trick. The dwarfs are not being punished. They have simply locked themselves inside the small, dark world they insist on believing. It’s a warning and an invitation: Reality may be brighter than we think, but we must be willing to see it.

Telling the truth about our own experience with Christianity is an attempt to tell other people that Jesus died so that they don’t have to be stuck with barn scraps. C.S. Lewis’ image is generous, not condescending. It’s not implying the secular person is stupid. It’s saying that the capacity to perceive has to be opened somehow. And that opening is faith at its beginning. One of the article comments said something to the effect of understanding eliminating belief, but St. Anselm of Canterbury said the opposite in 1077: “I do not seek to understand in order that I may believe, but I believe in order that I may understand.” The willingness to believe gives us the understanding that the feast is real.

The claim that secular materialism isn’t a belief system is simply incorrect. Replacing theology with scientific explanations still forms a worldview. If your perspective holds that nothing created everything, that consciousness emerged from non-consciousness, that life came from non-life, that meaning is self-generated, and that death is the end, I have some interesting news for you: those are metaphysical commitments. They are not neutral observations. They are not the absence of belief. They are a belief system with its own cosmology, its own account of human origins, its own eschatology. Calling it the default rational position doesn’t make it so. It just means you haven’t examined your own premises as carefully as you’re demanding others examine theirs.

The Book of Ecclesiastes is the most honest materialist document ever written. The Preacher (traditionally considered to be Solomon) is the wisest and wealthiest man of his age. He tries every secular answer available to him. Pleasure, work, wealth accumulation, achievement, even wisdom itself. And he names, with unflinching clarity, what each one actually delivers. Vanity. Vapor. A chasing after wind. He says: “I hated all the things I had toiled for under the sun, because I must leave them to the one who comes after me” (Ecclesiastes 2:18, NIV). If this is really all there is, here is what it looks like. The Preacher can do nothing but report how depressing the results are.

Most people making the materialist argument in comments sections seem not to have sat with Ecclesiastes honestly. They’ve assumed the conclusion without doing the thinking for themselves. Solomon tested the secular life to its limits and came back unfulfilled. The report is not encouraging.

Lewis makes a different but related argument in Mere Christianity. If we find in ourselves a desire that nothing in this world satisfies, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world. It’s not the proof many non-Christians demand. It’s simply an inference from experience. But it’s a serious observation that deserves serious consideration. The hunger that the secular life can’t fill, the sense that we were made for something more than this, isn’t evidence of delusion. It might be evidence of design.

Now, before I go any further, I want to say something to the people on my side of this conversation, the converted Christians.

The critics in that comments section weren’t entirely wrong about what they were responding to. The combative evangelist, the televangelist, the pastor who gets exposed, the political operative using religious language to consolidate power are all people who exist. I cannot pretend otherwise. But there’s a version of that failure that’s subtler and more common, and it lives inside the church as much as outside it.

There’s a drastic difference between sharing something that genuinely changed your life and performing the version of yourself you think a Christian is supposed to be. People can tell, that’s why there are people in the comment section of the article. The former is a real person with a real story. The latter is a bad sales pitch, and it confirms everything the comments section already believes.

The Bible addresses this directly. New believers aren’t placed in positions of leadership. This is not a judgment, but as a protection. You can’t guide others through territory you haven’t navigated yourself. And Philippians 2 calls all of us to work out our salvation with fear and trembling. This does not only apply at the beginning of our journey, but for the duration. Nobody graduates from that until the day we are called home.

But here’s an honest observation that goes with working out our salvation: if you’ve been a Christian for twenty years and your life is not transformed by it, something is worth examining as a diagnostic. The thing we’re claiming and sharing is transformative. It doesn’t have to transform everything all at once, but if it hasn’t transformed anything, the question of whether we actually have the thing is fair.

I want to be careful here, because this is where an argument can slide into a logical trap. When I say the combative, joyless, unchanged person isn’t representing Christianity well, I’m not claiming that anyone who fails the faith disqualifies it. That would be the no true Scotsman fallacy. That is moving the goalposts to protect a category from any negative example. What I’m saying is different because Christianity has actual requirements to be considered a practitioner. It makes specific claims, demands a specific reorientation, and points toward a specific person (Jesus Christ). You can snap a chalk line. The historic confessions of the church, the things the faith has held across centuries and traditions, they define the boundaries. You can disagree on secondary matters. You cannot subtract the resurrection, or the lordship of Christ, or the reality of sin and redemption, and still be talking about Christianity. You’re talking about something else that borrowed the name without keeping the substance.

The failure mode I’m describing isn’t someone who believes the right things and still struggles and sometimes falls short. That’s all of us. There is another failure mode that leaves us at the mercy of commenters beating on strawmen we cannot defend. It is someone for whom Christianity has become an ambient cultural identity rather than the central organizing principle of their life. Christianity is either your north star, or it is background noise. It cannot be both. If God is not actually the center, the honest thing is to say so. Claiming the label while rejecting the substance doesn’t represent the faith. It misrepresents it in an incredibly damaging way. And the people in those comments sections are often, understandably, responding to the misrepresentation.

You don’t have to be far along the path to share it genuinely, “But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it” (Matthew 7:14, NIV). Someone six months in, still working things out, carrying real doubts, speaking honestly is more compelling than someone projecting an arrival they haven’t reached. What matters is whether the goodness of God has actually added something to your existence, and whether you’re sharing that real thing or a polished version of it. Helping people meet God doesn’t happen through a false image of who you are. It happens through living a Christian life, not by simply saying Christian things.

That’s the incarnation of the gospel. The Word became flesh. It is not a concept or a program, not a set of talking points, but a life lived among people. Your life is the living sacrifice that can show others the path, not your interpretation of what we think that life should look like.

There’s a movie called Shallow Hal where Jack Black’s character is hypnotized to see people’s inner beauty rather than their outer appearance. He falls in love with a woman that everyone else dismisses. Jason Alexander’s character spends the entire film trying to dismantle the perception because he can’t stand it. The movie doesn’t clarify why, but he won’t leave it alone, and he eventually succeeds in breaking the spell. And when he does, Hal already loves the woman anyway.

Why be Jason Alexander? If someone’s framework is making them kinder, more generous, more at peace, more willing to sacrifice for others, then what’s the harm to you? What’s the project, exactly? If you are arguing that Christianity doesn’t positively impact those living in their calling, you are not arguing against the real thing.

The sad fact is you can also be Jason Alexander from inside the faith. Combative, anxious, needing other people to agree with you in order to validate the Jesus you have built in your head. We cannot change the scripture to fit our lives, that’s not witness. We have to let the scripture change our lives. Anything else is idolatry, picking a subset of teachings to fit where we are. That is just as corrosive as the secular version of the same impulse.

Here’s what I know about my own motives: there’s no Christian punch card. I don’t get anything for your conversion. No commission, no pyramid scheme, no reward that accrues to me if you agree with me. Matthew 6:20 talks about storing up treasures in heaven instead of on earth, so a real argument could be made that Christians are trying to do that, but only if you agree that heaven is a real place where treasure can be stored up. The only honest answer I can give for why I share what I believe is that after a significant amount of thinking, research, and personal experience, I believe it’s true. I believe everyone’s lives would be better with Jesus. That’s the same reason you’d recommend a restaurant or call a friend after a great movie. While Jesus is not the same thing as something enjoyable here on earth, the point is the same: you don’t keep something good to yourself.

What I’m not doing is trying to coerce anyone. I’ll share what I believe because that’s what the gospel calls me to do. I do not share my life aggressively, not with condemnation or judgment, but with humility and honesty. It is my data point to add, and what you do with it is between you and God. That’s not the version of Christianity most of us grew up watching on television. But it’s what the Bible actually describes. “Always be prepared to give answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect” (1 Peter 3:15, NIV). If someone comes at you in the name of faith with contempt or pressure, it may be with the best of intentions, but that’s a failure in that moment, in that person. You wouldn’t take marriage advice from someone who’s been divorced twelve times. But you also wouldn’t conclude from that one example that marriage is a bad idea.

I also believe, for what it’s worth, that heaven will be better with every additional person there.

Here’s the question I’d like everyone in the comments section and the church pew alike to consider honestly:

Is your life something you would wish on somebody else, somebody you love?

Not your income or your resume. Not your retirement account or your assets. Your life and the joy it contains. The texture of it, the peace of it, the quality of your relationships, the clarity of your purpose, your readiness for whatever comes at the end.

Before you answer, try two things.

First, describe yourself, but not the resume version. Not the places you’ve been, the experiences you’ve accumulated, the ways you’ve enriched yourself as a human being. Those are things you’ve consumed. Describe the person you are when there’s nothing to perform. When you’re tired, when things aren’t going well, when nobody’s watching. Is that person someone you’d want your kids to become?

Second, consider how the people who actually know you would describe you. Not your curated social media presence or a highlight reel assembled for an audience that only sees what you choose to show. The people who spend real time with you. Who see you on an ordinary Tuesday. Who know the gap between the version you present and the version you actually are. Do they look at your marriage and think, I want that? Do they look at your relationship with your kids and consider it inspirational? Do they look at the way you move through your community and see something worth emulating?

This is where the secular claim gets hard to sustain. People will say, I’m a good parent. I live a good life. And I’m not disputing the sincerity of that perception. But what’s the definition, what is the yardstick you are measuring against? If a good life means experiences collected for yourself, and a good parent means providing materially and staying out of the way, what is the end goal? If this world is genuinely all there is, if we all fade into nothingness at the end, then what does any of it matter? Please understand, this is not intended as a “gotcha” moment. It is an honest question. If the answer is that it matters because it matters to you, right now, in this life, that’s only a feeling. The Bible tells us what happens in times of tribulation if we build on something solid, “…like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock” (Matthew 7:24-25, NIV). Feelings shift like sand. Jesus is the foundation that holds.

The people I’ve known whose lives others did not envy, but wanted, were almost never the ones with the most to show. It was the peace that is most desirable. Those with that lasting peace were the ones whose marriages had something real in them. Whose kids actually wanted to be around them. Whose friends called not when they needed something but because being around these people made their own lives better. That quality doesn’t come from a healthy bank account. It comes from being pointed at something outside yourself consistently enough that it reshapes who you are. Scripture changes us, we cannot change scripture.

If the answer is that genuinely, yes, you are that person, then I have nothing to argue with you about. Live your best life.

But if there’s a gap between the life you’re living and the one you’d wish for someone you love, then the gap is worth examining. Not because I’m right and you’re wrong. But because the question matters more than the argument about whether someone else’s answer is naive.

Why does it bother you that others have a peace that’s available to you as well?