Killspeak

I just finished reading Influence: Science and Practice by Robert Cialdini. Yesterday, I discussed evangelism and missionaries with my friend Emt. A few minutes ago, I found this online: How to Persuade an Atheist to Become Christian.

The language used on that wiki page (when I read it, at least) is quite deferential and polite. The overtly zealous or militant remarks many people seem to expect from evangelists aren’t present. This may be because it’s a wiki, edited by a large number of people, evangelists or not.

Beyond this, I’ll leave the ethics and etiquette of evangelism aside. What interested me was how I was able to see Cialdini’s “weapons of influence” in the article. I’ve paraphrased the article’s key strategies below, with short bits from Influence in parentheses (many of which I clipped from Wikipedia):

• Be a likable, good friend.
  (Liking: People are easily persuaded by other people that they like.)

• Be sure to reinforce your Christianity constantly and in a positive manner.
  (Association: People conflate things that occur together.)

• Give help and advice. “Don’t forget to show them the scripture, that way he or she can get the idea that it’s not your own thinking but God’s.”
  (Reciprocation: People tend to return a favor; Authority: People will tend to obey authority figures.)

• Show that Christianity is normal, that other intelligent, friendly people participate in it.
  (Social Proof: People will do things that they see other people are doing.)

• “You may ask them to attend church with you, however, if would be best if they come along partly on their own.”
  (Commitment and Consistency: If people commit to something, they are more likely to honour that commitment—even if the original incentive or motivation is removed after they have agreed.)

• Do not falter. Stay on message; don’t go off-brand or risk driving customers away.

While it may seem damning that these are the same techniques people use to sell cars, I do not mean to say that what’s being sold here is bad, only that the techniques being recommended by the article have been shown to be effective. The approaches it describes are not naïve or overconfident, but practical, proven methods of gaining compliance. Evangelists aren’t so self-righteous that they (all) become asshole literalists. They have practical concerns and methods too, like all other salesmen.

One thing that made me feel strange as I was growing up—I remember feeling it first when I was about five or six—was that much of what I learned was already known by the adults around me. When I realized that all the adults around me knew how to add and subtract and write in cursive, indeed, had known all along, I felt a little more grown up and a little cheated. Now I was operating at the same level that, say, grandma was working on (cursive-wise; I didn’t yet understand why dad used all-caps printing); but why had she kept all this to herself? Why was I so late to the game?

(Does this in any way relate to the ignorance and confidence I sense when reading things written a long time ago? Did the medieval and modern pre-Freudian worlds feel just as capable and cheated when came the Renaissance and the theory of the unconscious?)

I was not conscious of my “inability to grasp… any very large portion of human knowledge.” This I admitted to myself only when I became a teenager. That until I was fifteen I felt excluded from the adult world—of driving and long division—rather than feeling simply unready or uninterested seems, in retrospect, a little odd. At what point should I feel cheated of my childhood naïveté, my lack of responsibility and bills?

Being an adult child (as a child—whatever) was a confusing thing.