In Their Own Words: Proof of Faith (New Converts)

People who believe in something—it could be a religion, a political ideal, a desired social condition—will give reasons why they believe if you ask for them. I’ve noticed that people who have more recently dived into their new belief system tend to give similar kinds of answers. Here is a person who recently (a few years ago) became active in the Russian Orthodox religion. When I asked him how he knew that God existed, that his religion was correct, he told this story:

In 1991 my parents lost their jobs, and then we moved to Russia because conditions here were very hard and we didn’t have anything to eat. There was no work, and my parents with their higher educations were very hard workers. It was the first time in my life that I remember my mother crying at night because we didn’t have anything to eat. There was absolutely nothing to eat. All of a sudden they got their hands on some money and we moved to Russia. Life was hard there as well. We lived in a really rural area. After some time we moved back here, but there were still moments…for example, my father was a businessman, he transported gasoline to different places, and his partners set him up and he ended up being brought to trial. I was starting to realize more at that age and I realized there was nothing we could do. People in high-up places in the government were trying to send us to jail. My mother and I went out onto the street and prayed really loudly so everyone could hear. We prayed all night, and at about 4 o’clock in the morning they let my father out of jail. My soul started to take a turn for the better right then.

I saw something similar from my participation in an Evangelical Christian meeting here in Bishkek. The meeting was mostly singing with a few time-outs for prayer and testimonies (short talks on religious topics). One man got up and told a story about how prayer had helped him. He drives a large truck for a living, carrying different loads to different places, depending on who hires him. He was pulling out into the street one morning when a car appears on the cross street, coming right at him. Because of his heavy load, he know he would not be able to stop his truck in time. The words “Oh Lord” came out of his mouth, which he says was a kind of a prayer—he didn’t have time to pray for anything specific, so he just called to God. At that moment, a pigeon flew down from a tree and hit the oncoming car’s windshield, causing the car to swerve and miss him. Therefore, he said, he has proof that prayer works.

Now, the question of whether or not God actually got the first man’s father out of jail or whether or not God actually had that bird fly into that windshield is not a questions for science to try to answer. They aren’t empirical questions—I can’t test to see if the answers are right or wrong. Science is just the wrong tool for that sort of thing. The fact is, there are a whole lot of things that can happen in your life that you can attribute to the power of your beliefs if you want to. People who write horoscopes and fortune cookie messages stay in business because of this. People who are newer converts tend to explain why they believe in terms of those kinds of self-fulfilling prophecies. By newer convert, I don’t just mean someone who hasn’t been a member of the religion or political party or social network for very long. You can be a member your whole life but just not devote a whole lot of time and effort to explaining why you believe what you do. Those people would also qualify as new members. Maybe I could call them shallow members, but that seems a bit judgmental. Whatever the term, this pattern seems to hold true for all of the people of this type that I have interviewed.