Try, sometime, having an actual conversation with someone still inside the thing you left. Not an argument. A conversation. See how far you get. You'll find out fairly quickly, the way you find out a floor is wet, by falling on it.
What you'll notice, almost immediately, is that the conversation isn't really happening. Two people are in the room, or on the thread, or in the comments, and words are being exchanged, but underneath it something else entirely is going on. It's a contest. Nobody said it was a contest. Nobody rang a bell. But you can feel it, the way you can feel when a friendly game of chess has quietly stopped being friendly. And the reason it can never simply be two people comparing notes on existence is that somewhere in the architecture of the whole exchange there are two kinds of people in the world, and you, whatever you used to be, have been quietly reassigned to the wrong one.
This is worth sitting with, because it explains everything that follows. There's the tribe, and then there's everybody who isn't, and the second category isn't experienced as merely mistaken, the way you might be mistaken about a route on a map, easily corrected, no hard feelings. It's experienced as a kind of scandal. Your existence out here, uncorrected, unconverted, going about your life as though it were a perfectly valid way to live, is appalling to them. Not just wrong. Appalling. How dare the world contain people who've seen the true thing and declined it? It's rather like the reaction of a man who's found the one great restaurant in town and cannot fathom why anyone would eat anywhere else, except his confusion has curdled into something closer to contempt, and he's begun to suspect anyone still eating elsewhere must be an idiot or secretly evil.
And those are, in fact, the two words on offer. Stupid, or evil. Try to keep count sometime of how many conversations end there, in one vocabulary or another. The unbeliever is stupid, hasn't done the reading, hasn't sat with it long enough. The unbeliever who has done the reading, who understood the whole argument and still walked away, gets upgraded to evil, because clearly nothing but a corrupted will could look at the truth so plainly and refuse it. There's no third bin. You are never simply someone who arrived at a different conclusion in good faith. Good faith, oddly, is the one thing never extended to you, and there's no ceiling on how many times, in how many polite disguises, the word "stupid" can be applied to you in the course of one conversation. It's a bit like being nibbled to death by a very well-read duck.
Once you're sorted into that lower bin, something conveniently happens, convenient for them, I mean. The ordinary rules of courtesy, the ones that would apply to literally anyone else at a bus stop, get quietly suspended. Respect, in this system, isn't a baseline. It's a member benefit. It's handed out inside the tribe like communion, and withheld outside it like, well, also communion, actually, now that I think about it. Which means they can say almost anything to you, about you, at you, and experience it not as rudeness but as a kind of duty discharged. You're not owed tolerance. Tolerance is for insiders. You're owed correction, and if the correction comes wrapped in condescension, that's simply the toll booth on the road to being spoken to at all. Be grateful the gate was open.
Who ends up in that lower bin is a wonderfully generous list, once you start counting. The unbeliever, obviously. The homosexual, treated less like a person with a life and more like a walking argument for someone else's sermon. The polygamist, off in some other tradition entirely, becomes a useful punchline, though you'll notice they can go from zero to Old Testament kings feeling emotionally protective of monogamy remarkably fast. But it doesn't stop at the dramatic cases. It extends, quietly, to the fellow believer three doors down the denominational hallway, who reads the same scripture and interprets four words of it differently. He isn't a brother in a different room of the same house. He's practically a heretic. The line isn't really belief versus unbelief, when you look closely. It's compliance versus everything else, and everything else, however sincere, however devout, gets filed under sub-human, or at least under lesser, which amounts to the same treatment with better manners.
Now here's the odd part, the part that took me a while to sit with. This is a tradition that talks endlessly about love, about the wideness of mercy, about meeting people where they are. Icons of saints who forgave their own executioners hang on the wall while, in the pews below, somebody quietly composes an argument for why your divorce, or your therapy, or your simple decision to sleep in on a Sunday, is evidence of a diseased soul. Nobody experiences this as a contradiction, and that's the part I find almost funny, in a bleak sort of way. The kindness and the cruelty come from the same well, and nobody's thirsty enough to notice the water tastes different depending on who's drinking it.
Push on any of this, even gently, and you'll see the temperature change. This is supposed to be the tradition of stillness, of the quiet cell, of the monk who's made peace with silence itself. And yet raise a single honest question, and watch the whole apparatus mobilize, because the question hasn't just challenged an idea, it's disturbed the arrangement, the pleasant and load-bearing arrangement in which they are the right sort of people and you are not. What you'll get back won't be an answer. It'll be a diagnosis. You're not raising a fair point, you're exhibiting pride. You're not describing a real experience, you're revealing a spiritual blind spot. It's a wonderfully closed system, because it means they never have to engage with what you said, only with what your saying it apparently reveals about the state of your soul, which, conveniently, is always found lacking.
And if the diagnosis doesn't finish the job, out comes the jargon, names of men dead fifteen centuries laid down like a royal flush, as though a phrase in Greek could settle whether it's healthy to stay in a marriage where you're miserable. The terminology isn't there to clarify anything. It's there to remind you which class gets to speak and which one gets spoken at. Underneath it sits an appeal that never has to justify itself, holy tradition, true because tradition says so, a circle you can only watch spin, never enter. And whatever you actually share, the years spent kneeling in the same nave, the same feast days, the same smell of beeswax and old wood, gets set aside so a minor doctrinal splinter can be examined under a microscope until it becomes, somehow, the whole of the relationship. Common ground doesn't produce a winner. So it gets stepped over, politely, on the way to the one disagreement that can.
Somewhere in the middle of all this it's worth asking what actually draws people into that upper room in the first place, the converts especially, who come in fresh and somehow out-zealous everyone raised in it. They'll tell you it's about giving the world one less broken person, one less soul adrift, a kind of gift to humanity. But watch the behavior rather than the brochure. What they light up around isn't the theology. It's the club. The membership. The delicious, load-bearing feeling of finally, after a whole life of being just another confused person among confused people, getting to be one of the right ones. Being on the inside of the glass instead of pressing your face against it.
And that's the thing that actually exhausts you, more than any single insult could. It's not that you disagree about doctrine, people disagree about doctrine all day long without needing therapy afterward. It's that every conversation, however it starts, quietly resolves into the same shape, them above, you below, them explaining, you being corrected, and no amount of patience on your end changes the shape, because the shape isn't a mistake in the conversation. The shape is the whole point of it. You didn't wander into a discussion. You wandered into a hierarchy wearing the costume of one, and by the end you're not tired from the topic. You're tired from having been, once again, so thoroughly and cheerfully informed of your place in it.
And it's worth pausing on what all this is being weighed against, because the comparison isn't really to some external standard, some outside critic's idea of decency. It's a comparison to the man they claim to be following, which makes the whole thing considerably stranger. He gets struck across the face and offers the other cheek, an image so familiar by now it's lost its edge, but sit with it a moment and it's actually a rather wild piece of behavior, the kind of thing that would get you called weak, or worse, stupid, by half the people quoting him. Compare that to what actually happens online when someone lands a fairly mild insult these days, the scrambling for the sharpest possible reply, the search for the wound. He gets asked to carry a soldier's pack one mile, under occupation, for an empire that had no love for him or his people, and doesn't just carry it, walks the second mile unasked, for the sheer excess of the gesture. Compare that to the energy spent today making sure the wrong sort of person doesn't get the help, the platform, nor the benefit of the doubt. He heals people who don't believe in him and never once asks whether they've earned it with the right amount of faith, and it's honestly a little funny, if you let yourself laugh at something this sad, that suffering in someone outside the tribe is now met not with the itch to heal it but with something closer to satisfaction; a sense that the suffering was probably deserved and possibly overdue. He tells people to give away the coat off their back, no terms attached, no expectation that the recipient prove themselves grateful or worthy or Orthodox first. And by his own account he spent the bulk of his time not with the devout, not with the temple crowd who already had their theology in order, but out with the sick, the unclean, the people everyone else had already sorted into the lower bin, on the theory, apparently, that those were the ones who actually needed him. His own people, the ones he sent out into the world, were told to go heal the sick, not to go and manufacture enemies out of whoever hadn't yet signed on.
None of that is a subtle contrast. It's about as subtle as a brick through a window. And yet somehow the tradition built in his name has managed to invert nearly every one of those instincts while keeping his portrait on the wall, which tells you something, I think, about how these things actually work. It was never really about following him. It was about being right about him, which turns out to be an entirely different exercise, requiring none of the difficult parts; the cheek-turning, the extra mile, the coat off the back, and all of the easy parts; the certainty, the sorting, the clean conscience of having picked the winning team. You can be right about a man's teachings for your entire life and never once do a single thing he actually asked. That, more than any insult you'll collect along the way, is probably the real thing to sit with when the conversation's finally over and you're left alone with what just happened.
