Jehovah’s Witless, Part 14

In Scotland, as with everywhere, there are evangelists who go door to door to promote their sects of Christianity. They don’t force their way into people’s homes or anything abusive, but they quickly earn a reputation for being nuisances. This is because they don’t go away or stop knocking until someone answers the door or they are 100% sure that no one is home, and they tend to assume the person answering the door doesn’t know anything about the Bible or Jesus.

Unfortunately, my great uncle’s residence was hit with a plague of them. For reasons unknown, they were allowed past the front desk to solicit people. Fortunately, my great uncle had a solution to get them to stop coming by his house.

Step one was to act amicably, play naive, and follow the evangelists’ script. My great uncle had dealt with so many of these evangelists that he had a solid idea of what the evangelists were expecting from people. They wanted thank-yous, and to be told that they’ve never been asked things before (even if they totally have, several times). Per the script, when they asked to come in to talk about the Bible, he always obliged, directing them to the tiny living room area.

Step two was to whip out one of his own copies of the Bible, which he always kept under his coffee table in the living room area. At first this was enough to get the evangelists to prepare a polite exit. Eventually, however, they started getting crafty and asking if he followed their religion at one point and why he disbelieved. They would tell him how, if he believed once, he could believe again and come back on the right path.

That situation called for step three. He kept note of the pages where he could find what he thought were the most horrific parts of the Bible; prostitutes, gore, genocide, you name it. When the evangelists came around and got into his home, he would ask them to explain one of those parts and how it reflected on their God. If they didn’t respond or gave a dodgy non-answer, he’d actually start reading them, line by line, then ask again and again for explanations. If he got a response that made sense in the context of the line, he’d just move onto the next Biblical atrocity and force the evangelists to either exit his house or keep addressing the atrocities.

There were some persistent ones who came back time and time again, stubbornly acting as though the previous conversations never happened and repeating the same spiel. However, even they came to dwindle in number over time. He had found an effective cure for the plague of evangelists, and it evidently caught on enough that his neighbors reported less and less problems with and sightings of them as time went on.

For the record, my great uncle was a devout Methodist from birth to death. He just thought door-to-door soliciting was annoying and disrespectful. His anti-proselytization method is certainly worth a shot should I ever have to contend with annoyingly persistent and repetitive evangelists!

Related:
Jehovah’s Witless, Part 13
Jehovah’s Witless, Part 12
Jehovah’s Witless, Part 11