The Shocking Reality of Door-to-Door God Sales

Their church wants you to be a dick

I saw a meme that was three check boxes. The first was “Christian.” The second was “Agnostic.” The third—the one that was checked—was “Atheist, and kind of a dick about it.”

I chuckled then thought, Shit, that’s me.

Humans have a penchant for dumbfuckery, and so it should be no surprise that we are primed for belief. There is an evolutionary / genetic propensity in homo sapiens toward believing in the fantastical, and not just for religion. As an example, the health industry is rife with pseudoscientific quackery. Whether it’s bullshit cancer “cures,” an extreme diet that purports to violate the laws of thermodynamics, or Gwyneth Paltrow’s goddamn vagina eggs, some people embrace that shit with religious fervor.

A propensity for believing in the unscientific isn’t a good thing. (Vaccinate your crotch goblins!) But if we turned that off, would we still be human? Everyone has their pet bullshit, and perhaps such a trait is what makes us good at transforming the seemingly impossible into reality.

We humans believed we could fly, and we they did. All the way to the moon.

I figure we’re just a bunch of semi-sentient stardust meat sacks, but I’m also fond of my species. We’ve done some cool stuff. Hell, advanced medical science saved my 55-year-old ass not long ago.

Anyway, with the prevalence of Nazi atheists like that Richard Spencer asswipe, it’s fair to say lack of religious belief isn’t always a rational dividing line as to what qualifies one as a decent person.

I am most skeptical about the existent of any gods and believe the universe to be a naturally occurring phenomenon. Prayer may be meditative, but I don’t think anyone is there to answer them. I expect that when we die, that’s it. Game over, man.

I know atheists who see the religious as weak-minded fools who believe in an invisible sky daddy. Conversely, they view themselves as intellectually superior for their lack of belief. Historically speaking, when one group sees itself as superior to another, it doesn’t turn out too well.

Speaking of history, I’m a history author, and I shit on religion a lot. Like, a whole lot. Because its crimes are legion and in need of exposing. But at the individual level I try not to get in people’s faces about it too much. I mean, unless they’re using their religion as an excuse to be a total cockwagon. Then the gloves come off.

But imagine this scenario. It’s early Saturday morning, you’re hungover as fuck, and someone shows up on your doorstep selling God. You are even less interested in that than you are in joining Amway. How do you treat them? I mean, fuck them, right?

What if, instead, you took a moment to try to understand them?

What if you understood that they’d been programmed to do this since childhood? What if they’re young and impressionable and were never given much choice in the matter? Conversely, they may be later life converts who had an amazing experience that transformed their life, and they wanna share the joy. I mean, please share that joy somewhere else, but that’s not my point.

This is my point. This is the old-lady-from-The-Matrix-bake-your-noodle part: It may well be that the church they belong to actually wants you to treat them like shit.

You-fucking-what-when?

Our species is primed for belief, but that belief is on a spectrum. There is the “Hey these people are pretty chill” end, and also the “You need to get the fuck outta here with that bullshit” end. And everything in between. If your church sends you to my door to preach at me, I suspect it’s one of the less chill / more controlling variety.

Evangelizers canvas neighborhoods even though the conversion rate for door-to-door God sales sucks. No rational company would continue with such a marketing campaign based on those results. Yet they continue to do it, because sending people door to door is less about getting new clients than it is for retaining current ones.

Noodle, meet baking.

A young, impressionable, God-loving person is told by their church to come to your door and do their best to save your soul by bringing you into the fold; they believe they’re doing you a favor. They have a smile on their face as they do the Lord’s work to save you the way a paramedic rescues the victim of a highway crash. Except their efforts are even more valiant, because we’re talking about eternity here.

They come to your door uninvited and you’re all tequila hungover and say, “GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE JESUS FREAK!” Or maybe not but we both know some people do that. Hypothetically, you were an asshole. So what?

You isolated them, that’s what, which is what their church quite likely wanted.

Everyone on the block says no, many of them in less-than-pleasant ways. On the other side is their church saying, “No one will love you like we do,” and you were part of helping prove the church was right by being a dick.

You made it harder for them to see things their church doesn’t want them to see. You helped their church keeps its grip tight.

Unless you’re a kid doing a fundraiser by selling something tasty and high in calories, I’m never thrilled with someone just showing up at my door, but I try to show some extra compassion and kindness for the religious visitors, because I want them to feel like the world isn’t necessarily out to get them, and it’s okay to explore beyond the boundaries of their church.

Because then they can learn some things to be a voice for progress within that church. Or maybe they realize this is bullshit and leave. Both are good.

In case you haven’t noticed, Earth isn’t doing so hot right now. We need allies to stay alive, and with about 85% of humanity being religious in some form or another, we don’t have time to wait for humans to go post-spiritual. Desperate times, desperate measures and all that.

What happens next? Well, you’re gonna die.

Death is coming for you. It’s coming for us all. One day, we’ll all be fertilizer. Cue Elton John: It's the circle of liiiifffffeeee — and it rules us aaaaalllll.

Where was I? Oh, yeah. What happens next?

Maybe nothing, maybe something. I lean hard toward nothing, but we just don’t fucking know.

Regardless of whether an ethereal reward awaits, the best life now is to be found in being decent whenever you can, modeling good behavior for others, and getting as many humans as possible, atheist and believer alike, to move this train forward.

I have faith, faith in the future of humanity. I have high hopes that together, we’re going to do some amazing things, and that hope keeps me going.

Lots of stories of religious fuckery are in my book On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down and I’d really like it if you went to that link and bought a copy or five.

And since we’re talking about bullshit beliefs, I think horoscopes are bullshit, but the Historyscope is real. The fuck is a Historyscope? It’s discovering what cool—or possibly very fucked up—thing happened in history on your birthday. Go here to get yours.

You can also become a paying subscriber: