Most of us believe a myth about how knowledge is acquired, especially about how we ourselves go from ignorance and error to knowledge and truth. We tell ourselves that when evident facts contradict what we believe, then we will change our minds. That has not been my experience. Deeply held beliefs require a lot of evidence and persuasion to produce a change, and often it is not the preponderance of evidence that produces a change but rather suffering the consequences of wrong thinking. Sometimes, even that is not sufficient.

Let me give a personal example.

When I was young, having grown up in a fundamentalist church, I believed that we were living in the last days. Soon Jesus Christ would return and rescue his followers from the world and take them to heaven, an event called the Rapture¹. The world left behind with no godly influence remaining would go to hell in a hand basket. There would be widespread political unrest, natural disasters, war, famine, and pestilence. People would die, but I and my friends would be safely out of it. God would judge the world by sending terrible calamities upon it.

What was the sense, then, of planning for the future? There was not going to be a future. So I did not plan.

I was still young when I began to doubt this whole scenario, but my doubts were not sufficient to alter my behavior. My first doubt arose from considering what Jesus said about the last days. He compared the coming judgment² to the time of Noah³ and the time of Lot⁴. In both cases, I noticed that they escaped with their lives, but they also went through the judgment themselves. Noah was not taken out of the world when the rain began to fall. He was kept safe along with his family and the animals in the ark. Likewise, Lot, although he was led out of Sodom with his wife and daughters, he actually fled to a small town in the plain. That town was spared while destruction rained down all around it. Only after the judgment was passed did Lot leave the town and flee into the hills. I began to see that it was uncharacteristic of God to exempt his people from times of judgment. The same thing happened when God delivered his people from Egypt and brought plagues upon the land. The Israelites who lived in Egypt suffered from the plagues too⁵. In fact, according to the apostle Peter⁶, judgment begins in the house of God. It is not like God to spare his people from suffering whether from judgment or from persecution. What he promises is not exemption but his own dear presence. He will not abandon us no matter how bleak things look. So I began to doubt what I had been taught about the Rapture.

This period of doubt lasted years and included vacillations. I was uncertain. The churches I attended taught the Rapture as settled doctrine, and it was only after many years that I learned about how relatively recent in Christian history the Dispensationalism was from which the doctrine of the pre-millenial Rapture had been derived. During all those years I made little attempt to prepare for the future. I treated my 401K as a savings account and took disbursements from it whenever I grew desperate for cash⁷.

Of course, the doctrine of the Rapture was only one element in an entire ecosystem of beliefs and practices that affected my financial well-being and future. One of the difficulties with being in an insular community of any kind is how easy it is to go along with what everyone else is doing and saying without realizing how irrational it is. Fundamentalist churches like the ones I attended don’t just teach the Rapture. They also teach that wives should submit to their husbands, that tithing is mandatory and will lead to financial blessing, that everyone who does not accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior is going to hell, that homosexuality is a sin, that troubles and suffering in life result from lack of faith. All these beliefs and more form an interwoven tapestry that offers a compelling narrative for why the world is the way it is. It’s not easy to abandon just one thread, nor is it easy to just question everything⁸.

One of the things that has helped me change my mind has been the patience of friends and family. I’m mostly an internal processor—meaning that I do most of the work of understanding inside my own head. Nevertheless, when I find an idea particularly troubling or difficult to express, I often turn to external processing to figure out what I think. For someone who doesn’t know me well, this can be disconcerting because I will express all kinds of doubts and certainties to elicit feedback and help me understand the objections and critiques that others might have. My wife, especially, puts up with a lot of my monologues, occasionally asking sharp questions that help me delimit my thoughts.

Another thing that has helped a lot is that I’ve gotten comfortable with uncertainty. This allows me to contemplate multiple incompatible viewpoints without deciding on any of them absolutely. Rather than picking an orthodox view and defending it no matter what, I consider other views and reflect that the orthodox view may be wrong. If the consequences of being wrong is nothing worse than a little embarrassment, I see no reason for deciding on any particular view. This is not so much a willingness to change my mind as an unwillingness to make up my mind in a way that might later require change.

All this might seem like a pointless excursion into the workings of my own mind, but in fact I think anyone who wants to can learn from it. Changing my mind is an ongoing arduous process. So here’s some advice for those who want to change the minds of others.

1. Don’t expect anyone to change their mind from careful, logical reasoning.
2. Value friendship above agreement.
3. Be patient. Your own beliefs didn’t develop overnight.
4. Stay calm and stay curious. When someone’s views shock you, ask how they came by them. Chances are, they can explain them in a way that makes sense to you even though you continue to disagree.
5. Don’t insist on ideological purity.
6. Don’t extrapolate from your interlocutor’s expressed views to views you think are the logical outcome. Ask them what they think; don’t tell them what they must think.
7. Make room for nuance. Social media and ideological tribalism both encourage and thrive on flattening ideas into rigid systems with no room for nuance.
8. Don’t make agreement your goal. Make rapprochement your goal. Winning an argument almost never wins you a friend or an ally.
9. Be genuinely open to having your own mind changed.
10. Always remember that being loving is better than being right.

1. “Rapture” comes from the Latin Vulgate translation of 1 Thessalonians 4:17, where “rapiemur” is used to translate the Greek for “we will be caught up.” Many evangelical churches teach that this event precedes both the Great Tribulation and the Second Coming of Christ, but the passage in 1 Thessalonians seems to refer to what happens at the Second Coming. ↩︎
2. Whenever I use the word judgment, I have in mind not an arbitrary penalty for sin but rather the natural consequence of sin. All sin leads to death because it leads us away from God who is the source of all life. When God “sends judgment” he allows sin to come to fruition, not because he hates sinners and wants them to suffer but because his efforts to reconcile sinners to himself have been rebuffed and the only course remaining is to let them persist in their sin and suffer its consequences. ↩︎
3. See Matthew 24:36-41 and Luke 17:26-27. Jesus did not spell out exactly how his coming would be like the days of Noah. The gist seems to be that everything was going along as usual when sudden judgment came upon them. Since no one knows when that will happen, we should live as if it is imminent. ↩︎
4. See Luke 17:28-35. Again Jesus emphasized the unexpectedness of judgment in the midst of normal activities. ↩︎
5. Only the first three plagues affected the Israelites. The remaining seven applied only to the Egyptians. Nevertheless, the Israelites were witness to what was happening; they were not taken out of Egypt during the plagues. See Exodus 7-11. ↩︎
6. See 1 Peter 4:12-19. Peter makes no distinction between persecution and judgment. This is because both test the believer’s faith through suffering. Peter makes it clear that when we suffer it should not be as a consequence of our own sins but rather because we continue to do good in a fallen world. So suffering does not represent God’s disapproval. If anything, it represents God’s faith in our ability to persevere. ↩︎
7. This is not a course I recommend to anyone. While I was raiding my own retirement fund, I was also religiously tithing. I made a lot of bad decisions based on faulty theology and pride in my own righteousness. ↩︎
8. It’s actually impossible to question everything and probably foolish to try. In the preface to Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard lambastes students in philosophy in his own time who took Descartes’ achievement of radical doubt as their starting point, as if merely reading his conclusions allowed them to forgo the intellectual and spiritual journey he undertook to arrive at them. ↩︎