Is Proselytizing a Sin? (Part 1)

I imagine now there's someone out there thinking: how can something that preaches about God be a sin?

Well... "Sin", to me, includes anything that harms other people, a word that can be used both within religious discussion and apart from it.

Now in the context of religion, it's generally defined as an offense against God. Well, while Jesus was more to the point about harming people being Bad, God himself had a few words to say on the matter, too. Most of the Ten Commandments are about one's treatment of other people, after all. So while "sin" may encompass things other than "harming other people", it definitely includes it even in that context.

With me so far? Good. Let me tell you a story about my past, then. This is gonna get a little long, so I hope you like reading.


Like a lot of people, when I was a teen, I picked up extra money by babysitting. For a brief time, I babysat for a couple with three kids. The couple were born-again Christians, and had a couple of rules for the kids they made sure I knew: no TV (though I could watch it once they were asleep) lest they see non-approved things^[1], and no music except for the tapes of Christian kids' music the kids owned. I mention this to give you an idea of what their beliefs were like.

The kids were pretty young... I think the eldest was 6 or 7, and the youngest (the only girl) was still in diapers, with the middle kid roughly splitting the difference. The boys weren't bad kids, but the younger of the two was inclined to cut up a bit and disobey, especially when it came around to bedtime. Not exactly an unfamiliar story to anyone who has been around young kids, I imagine. So one of the times I babysat for them, the younger boy was being a real handful: jumping on the couch, running around, throwing things, and when it came to bedtime, refusing to wash up, brush his teeth, or get in bed at all. Around the time I told him for the third or fourth time to get his teeth brushed and get into bed, the baby needed a diaper change.

Here I am, this teenage girl, changing a diaper on a fussy baby, and the middle kid's still not listening and now is bugging me to tell him a story before bed—which I told him I'd do if he'd get into bed—and, well, I lost my temper and yelled at him. Nothing more than to get ready for bed and go there, mind, but still, I did raise my voice.

A little while later after I got the baby put back to sleep I went into the boys' room, and found the kid crying. I figured he was crying because I yelled at him, and I felt bad about it, and was trying to tell him it'd be okay when he came out with this: "I don't want to go to Hell."

Now, despite being a Christian, I couldn't imagine why a little boy like this could think he had done something that'd make him go to Hell, but eventually I got out of him that he really, truly believed he'd go to Hell for not listening to me. I was aghast. How on earth could a little kid, a rambunctious but still innocent kid, believe something like this? I did my best to calm him down, and left him to go to bed with his little tape player playing kids' Christian music, and when the parents came back, I told them everything had gone fine, because I didn't know what to say.

But I never babysat for them again.

Now, you might be wondering at this point what this ancient piece of my history has to do with proselytizing... sad though the story is, it doesn't seem to have much to do with the topic, right?

Well, for me it has everything to do with it. I'm going to give the short version of why this story comes to mind for me when I talk about the topic, and I'll do a followup post that gets into the meat of it:

Scaring people to try to get them to believe what you believe harms them, emotionally and psychologically. In my books, that's a sin.

[1] Yes, this is really more or less the reason they gave.