Beware Those on the Road to Damascus

Saul's Conversion, Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld

I believe that people can change, but I don’t believe they can change overnight. I think it takes sustained effort and consistent attention to your habits and mindset to produce a change that is real and lasting. I think people who do claim a radical and instantaneous change are usually mistaking emotional enrapture for conviction. That’s why I very rarely buy claims of sudden road-to-Damascus-type conversions in belief or behavior. Well, unless you are literally Saint Paul, I suppose.

I mean “conversion” here in a very broad sense, not just religiously. In a time of extreme polarization, political and ideological conversion come to mind. I see many people dropping one set of beliefs and uptaking wholesale the set presented as the opposite. For example, someone leaving the radical political left and jumping straight into the radical right, claiming that now they finally see the real truth.

I think another great example of this is the modern-day conversion known as gender transition. Many people who adopt a trans identity describe a sudden moment where it all just “clicked,” and the idea that they were really trans explained everything about their lives. They may even go further and claim that transitioning resolved all manner of issues, from depression and anxiety to problems with self-confidence. They ride on an emotional high, buoyed by endless lovebombing from the trans community, congratulating them on discovering their “true self” and reinforcing the emotional fervor.

But I would include religious conversion as well, especially today, when more people seem to be going back to religion. And I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing! But I do think that many run the risk of getting wrapped up in the strong emotion of it all and claiming a conviction of belief or a change of behavior that doesn’t align with their thoughts and actions.

Okay, but why is this a problem? So some people get worked up into an emotional frenzy, so what? Well, in the trans example, at any rate, blindly following an emotional high and doing something that “feels” right in the moment without giving any real pause, thought, and consideration to other perspectives could and does lead to irreversible physical changes and damage. While other types of conversions might not cause such physical damage, I still think that if your goal is authenticity and actual change, then mistaking strong emotion for these things is a waste of time and energy and could mean you never actually achieve your goals.

When I encounter claims of rapid and rabid conversions, I think of these words from Thomas Merton:

In any degree of the spiritual life, and even where there is no spiritual life at all, it can happen that a man will feel himself caught up in an emotional religious ferment in which he overflows with sensible, and even sentimental movements of love for God and other people. If he is completely inexperienced he will get the idea that he is very holy because of the holy feelings that are teeming in his heart.

All these things mean very little or nothing at all. They are a kind of sensible intoxication produced by some pleasure or other, and there is only an accidental difference between them and the tears that children sometimes shed when they go to the movies.

I think it is a shame to get caught up in sensible intoxication and to mistake it for something real, authentic, and lasting. I think it’s a shame to chase emotional highs that cause you to be convinced you finally have all the answers, only to have it all come crashing down around you. I think it can turn into a very narcissistic endeavor as well, causing one to become convinced in their own holiness or goodness because, as Merton said, of the holy or good feelings in their heart.

It’s hard to see the mistakes you are making because something just feels so right and because you’ve seen the light, dammit, and such lofty thoughts and feelings must surely signify something real and true.

This is bad enough on a small, interpersonal level, but it’s something I see in cult leaders and mega-influencers (which you might say are pretty much the same thing). I have a morbid fascination with cults. I am always trying to understand how people become cult leaders and how it’s possible for anyone to follow them. What it comes down to for me is everyone getting whipped up in very strong feelings that what they are doing is good, right, and true, and these feelings usually come from some moment of conversion or special revelatory gnosis.

And then I think of words by Thomas Merton again:

The most dangerous man in the world is the contemplative who is guided by nobody. He trusts his own visions. He obeys the attractions of an interior voice but will not listen to other men. He identifies the will of God with anything that makes him feel, within his own heart, a big, warm, sweet interior glow. The sweeter and the warmer the feeling is the more he is convinced of his own infallibility. And if the sheer force of his own self-confidence communicates itself to other people and gives them the impression that he is really a saint, such a man can wreck a whole city or a religious order or even a nation. The world is covered with scars that have been left in its flesh by visionaries like these.

I think people are particularly vulnerable to falling for these types of “visionaries” today because we crave meaning, but many of the usual roads to it have been destabilized. So, it’s tempting to look at the self-confident man (or woman) and seek to follow him in an effort to induce the same big, warm, sweet interior glow that he seems to have. But we need to know that there isn’t necessarily any real substance in that warm, sweet glow. Worse yet, it may be hiding a very profound emptiness. Those who jump from emotional high to emotional high, from one dramatic conversion to the next, are often hiding deep issues of self-worth and identity.

To be clear, it’s not that I think emotions themselves are the problem. We would be lost without them. We wouldn’t be able to make any decisions at all without our feelings to guide us. I think people who are convinced they make perfectly rational decisions without their emotions to guide them are mistaken about their own thought and decision-making processes. Emotions and, especially, intuition, are nothing to knock.

The issue is more about being passionately inflamed by feelings of holiness or some other kind of specialness and importance. These feelings feed the ego, and they can convince people, as Merton said, of their own infallibility. They’ll make wild claims and overconfident pronouncements but have little to show in terms of positive behavior. They often don’t treat others well at all. I’m thinking of everyone from the abusive cult leader who claims to be an incarnation of God to the devout lefties who cut family members out of their lives for voting for Trump.

Just like emotions themselves aren’t the problem, I also don’t think that intense moments of emotional highs are themselves bad either. These moments can absolutely serve as inspiration for change that eventually becomes real and lasting. I’m thinking back to the ordeal I went through to give birth. It wasn’t “positive” in any surface-level sense of the word, but it was incredibly deep, and it had a really big impact on me. And, of course, at the end of it, my daughter was born! But I didn’t suddenly become a new and much wiser person. In fact, the several months after were extremely difficult, and I felt like I lost myself a little bit. Now, looking back and processing it all is helping me in my efforts to become more of who I want to be.

A lot of things in life that are worth doing and that will help you grow aren’t necessarily going to produce a warm, fuzzy glow and fill you with a passionate fervor, at least not all the time or not right away. What “feels right” is a good guide, but it needs to be examined.

So yes, I do believe that people can change, but I think grandiose claims of epiphanies and conversions are nothing but that: claims and emotional bluster. A true marker of conversion would be an actual, sustained change in behavior for the better. This is what happened with at least one person on the road to Damascus—if you believe the story. But for others claiming a similar revelation, I will retain a healthy skepticism unless they actually produce the fruits you would expect of true change.