Reason and God’s love can lead anyone out of darkness

The power of the love and reason that God uses to transform the hearts and minds of those who seem to hate him is boundless.

No one is beyond that power to turn souls to love of him who is perfect love and reason itself — the fullness of beauty, truth, and goodness in person — “ ... king of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God ... .” (1 Tim 1:17).

This truth struck me again as I read the story of Joseph Pearce’s conversion “from racial hatred to rational love” in his book, “Race with the Devil” (RWTD). Pearce recounts his early years as a leading member of the National Front in Britain and prolific author in its journals. His goal was to incite racial war as a prelude to ridding the country of all non-whites. He describes with obvious shame the depths of hatred and darkness into which he had fallen.

Fortunately, his appetite for books and politics led him from National Front party-line readings, used to justify the group’s hatred, to writers like the poet and novelist G. K. Chesterton and the poet and historian Hilaire Belloc. It was they who led him to treasures of rational thought behind the Christian faith that he had long ago rejected. Separately, surprising expressions of love from those he considered enemies chipped away at his hatred of them.

Together, reason and love gradually led him to repudiate his former white supremacist life and to take up a new life writing about the good, the true, and the beautiful: “Whereas my previous writing had led people astray, I hoped that my gifts as a writer could now help to lead people to the truth.” (RWTD, p. 221).

From a seemingly irredeemable life, a new life was being formed.

Before it happens, however, it can be all too easy to doubt that such a life can be redeemed.

A few years ago, when a song that blatantly mocked the Church became popular, I entertained the thought that the songwriter had done something irredeemable. I had spent many years of my life rejecting any concept of God, decades in which I was all but violently anti-Christian. I thought, even so, I would never have so offensively ridiculed Christianity as he had.

And then I remembered.

Oh, yes I did. With great disdain.

Two years in a row, during the Halloween Mall Crawl in Boulder, Colo., in the 1980s, I dressed up like Jesus, with a crown of thorns, fake blood streaming onto my face, stigmata, and a cardboard cross hanging on my back. Among various responses, a well-deserved scolding came from a woman who drew back in shock. I told her that I wasn’t trying to be funny, but I was, and worse.

The memory revealed the hypocrisy in my thought about the songwriter.

If love and reason had eventually turned me away from the darkness that had led me to mock Christians, and Joseph Pearce away from the darkness that fueled his hatred, it could lead anyone away from that darkness.

Conversion stories can remind us that no soul is beyond the reach of him who “ ... is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine.” (Eph 3:20).

It isn’t an easy road, and it isn’t accomplished in an instant.

Pearce’s own “embryonic faith” battled against the old life that kept coming back at him after he had gained freedom from prison for inciting racial hatred. Finally, Christ in him, the new life, is winning out.

And so, I believe, is Christ in me, in spite of my continued missteps and bad choices, proving again that “God can indeed mold the most unpromising of clay” (RWTD, p. 199).

Do not doubt that he can do this for any of his wayward fool children.

This story was originally published August 16, 2018 at 5:25 PM.