A Secular Person’s Advice on How to Convert Secular People

We discuss the most effective arguments for converting non-religious people to religion, focusing especially on kids who were raised religious but became secular. We talk about what doesn't work, like Bible passages or hell threats, and what does work, like pointing to poor outcomes in secular culture and providing community amenities. We also cover topics like targeting people in vulnerable states, logic vs. emotion in arguments, dating markets, and more.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] I hope that people are able to use this to convert people more effectively. And to hopefully do a better job at evangelizing to your kids. You know, as we say, the first 18 years of a kid's life are your chance to pitch your culture to them.

And if you don't do a good job, they're going to leave. Exactly. And then your culture will die, your traditions will die,

Simone Collins: and your people will die. Everyone you've ever loved will disappear to history. Everything that every ancestor before you has worked to do will be for nothing

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. So this video is going to be an interesting topic, but it's what I've been thinking about when I've been looking at, so people who don't know me Simone, like my favorite radio station, then you'll point this out. They are. Always like Christian talk radio. I really like listening to like long Christian apologetics.

I, despite being a secular person, I really culturally identify with these groups. I really just like listening to them. I find the, the, the lessons [00:01:00] that they're teaching are often broadly applicable to my life. Totally. We as a society like if we're talking about like the structures, like the core enemy.

Right now in society and now there's another enemy that we're gonna have to deal with eventually. So we sort of have the two enemies of Tism. Steep enemy. Yes. The core, the core enemy right now is sort of woke in the mind virus, the cult, whatever you wanna call it, that's taking over society right now and.

Religious traditions act as a very good structural protection against that for many individuals minds. Now, the second enemy is the religious extremists who want everyone on earth dead except people who think like them, or converted, which, from my perspective, you know, if you've... If you completely erase my kid's culture, then, you know, they might as well, not might as well.

I mean, I would appreciate them updating the culture on their own based on their ideology, rather than just like whole class accepting what somebody else is telling them. Right. But anyway so, so that's the future enemy. And, and groups like that, you know, these low [00:02:00] technology, extremely aggressive groups that they want everyone who doesn't think like them dead they are growing and when.

The, the woke castle falls that that will be the next. Multiple populations because there's many groups like this. You know, they exist across religious traditions. That will be the next group that we're that we're fighting. But even to fight them, we need to preserve an alliance and a large population of mentally healthy religious individuals who still have traditions, who still have some sense of culture.

And one of the ways that we have done this with our family is essentially take the scraps of our ancestral traditions and rebuild a sort of secular religious framework, which we often talk about. That is not what we're going to talk about on this video, because I would also like not just people to do what we're doing, but also succeed.

in evangelism. And when I [00:03:00] say succeed in evangelism, I think the single most important person that you will evangelize to in your entire life is your children. 100%. And, and so when people think about evangelism, they do not often think about their own kids. They think about going out and trying to convert other people.

But if you look at statistics, there was a set of statistics that we were sharing in a recent video. The game is just completely different now. And I'm going to put this statistic here again, because it's just so like, it's not like things are a little different. You know, if you look at belief in

gen X right now, people who, who share believing in God without a doubt.

So these are people who believe in God, without a doubt within Gen X, you're looking at like 65 percent with engine Z. You're looking at like 33%. This is actually 2018. It appears to still be dropping. So you're dealing with something entirely different now. And as I pointed out in previous generations, as we pointed out in the previous episode on this, you could have just like peer [00:04:00] pressured them.

Right. Or you could have assumed that they wouldn't be getting outside ideas constantly, but now it's possible for your kids to deconvert and not tell you that they've deconverted and you never find out. And we've seen that a decent, we've seen this persistently with very conservative, wholesome families.

Like, like the epitome of wholesomeness, you know, I'd say like the most good old boy type families you could imagine.

These are the families where I see this happening the most. And it happens the most within these families because these kids are often raised with manners and to care about their parents feelings and like are emotionally mature and they don't want to hurt their parents. You know, they're just like, look, I have no.

And, and that's the thing that leads to the most dangerous type of deconversion. People think that the type of deconversion that you need to be afraid of is the type of deconversion in which your kid ends up

Simone Collins: hating you. Like the obvious rebellious teen who's like, My hatin mom, and like... You know, like actively talks about,

Malcolm Collins: I hate my religion and that was why a lot of people deconverted [00:05:00] before these kids do not hate their religion.

They do not hate their traditions. They just weren't convinced by them and that is infinitely more dangerous because they're not going to tell you, they are not going to notify you that their traditions have dropped. And so let's talk about evangelism, right? So as people, like when I was younger, I was in.

You know, I, I didn't like the new atheists. I thought that they were always kind of pussies. But I would have been considered on the outside of that movement and

stuff like the subgenius movement and stuff like that. Right. And you were in, I mean, you were raised like Buddhist slash Mormon, but we're always sort of like atheistic growing up.

Like, what was your faith like in middle school and high school?

Simone Collins: If someone asked me, I probably would have said it was a mixture of Buddhism and Shinto, to be honest

Malcolm Collins: with you. Did you actually believe this stuff or was it just like an aesthetic choice?

Simone Collins: I felt most moved when at Shinto shrines. And like that felt the most natural to me from a faith perspective.

So in terms of like having [00:06:00] moving religious experiences, the most I'd ever experienced that was at Shinto shrines in Japan. So that's why I told people that it, it just felt right to me and that's it. There was no like thought behind it. And my, my parents had sent me to Dharma school and, and sort of tried to raise me Buddhist after at Mormon preschool, I started asking them about Jesus and God and they freaked out.

So yeah, I wouldn't say it was organized, but I, so I'm not a good example of like a religious kid who's lost their religion. I'm the perfect example of someone who was raised in soft culture, with soft culture, and was just broadly spiritual, but n