08/16/2026
American Christians traveling around the world who think they have an imperative to preach at strangers on trains, airplanes, buses, and other places where people are effectively a captive audience- You Suck.
Doing it here is bad enough, but doing it in someone elseâs country is by far worse. Approaching complete strangers in a foreign place *as an American* and telling them they are evil, selfish, lost, deceived, or spiritually doomed because they don't share your religious beliefs is not convincing anyone to join your cult and makes all Americans look bad, for which we need no more assistance on that front.
The arrogance of Christians who proselytize everywhere they go has become especially unhinged in the age of social media, where performative evangelism has become its own trend.
Itâs not enough to believe you're saving souls, you have to perform the saving of souls. You have to film it. Post it. Demonstrate your courage. Show everyone how boldly you stood up in a room full of strangers and announced that you know the truth about their lives, their morality, and their eternal destiny.
I no longer believe the majority of you even do this in good faith anymore. At some point, the constant insistence that you simply don't understand why people are upset becomes impossible to believe.
I think the goal is to be so obnoxious that people eventually snap. I think the goal is to deliberately push past every clearly stated boundary, pretend you don't understand why anyone is angry, keep escalating until someone finally yells back at you, and then point to their reaction as evidence that you are the victim.
Maybe itâs for the socials, or the outrage, or for the story you can tell afterward about how you bravely stood up for Jesus while an angry mob attacked you.
I think you *want* to feel persecuted. You manufacture a confrontation just so you can prove the persecution exists that you've been taught to expect.
You get to walk away saying, See? They hate us. They don't want us here. They're attacking Christians. They're angry because we're telling them the truth.
You edit and sanitize your role and behavior to the point it stops being attached to reality. The person who repeatedly said âleave me aloneâ becomes the aggressor in your story, and the person who refused to stop, the one who crossed the boundary, becomes the victim and the one being persecuted.
You arenât misunderstanding anything. I think you know full well what youâre doing.
And for those who are convinced you are doing the âLordâs Workâ by trying to convert people to your religion in public spaces, and who feel in your heart you arenât like these obnoxious airplane preachers, let me set you straight. You can sincerely believe you are loving someone and still be violating their boundaries. The question to ask yourself is are you prepared to respect the boundaries of other people? Are you prepared to value their boundaries at least as much as you value your message? Are you prepared to accept âNoâ the first time, rather than treat it like an invitation to keep negotiating, like many are taught to do in the church? Are you prepared to treat consent as the most important part of your interactions with others and commit to never violating it?
Your intentions or sincerity or beliefs or life experiences are not more important than their consent. Your belief that you are saving their eternal soul is not more valid or more important than their consent. Your beliefs, no matter how deeply held they are, no matter how âtrueâ they feel to you, doesnât give you sovereignty over them simply because your religion teaches that you are special or superior. You are not.
When someone says, âStop.â âWe don't want to hear this.â âLeave us alone.â That is your cue to stop.
It is not an invitation for you to interpret their resistance, diagnose their psychology, explain their spiritual condition, or find a theological reason why their ânoâ doesn't actually count.
A boundary is not an invitation to negotiate.
And yet this disturbing pattern in Christian culture persists... when someone rejects your message, the rejection itself becomes evidence that your message *must* be true, and therefore must be pushed harder. Do you even hear yourselves??
âThey don't understand.â âThey've been deceived.â âThey're angry.â âThey're selfish.â âThey're offended.â âThey're desensitized to evil.â âThey're under Satan's influence.â
Thereâs always an explanation for why the other person's ânoâ isn't really a âno.â
If someone accepts the message, you were right. If they reject it, they're deceived. If they're angry, they're hostile to the truth. If they're indifferent, they're desensitized to the evils in the world. If they ask you to leave them alone, they're persecuting you.
A worldview that can reinterpret every possible rejection as confirmation that it is correct has effectively made itself unfalsifiable.
More importantly, it has created a situation where the other person is never actually allowed to speak for themselves. What happened to that supposed belief in the bible that everyone has free will?? Why wonât you respect theirs? Their rejection of your belief is JUST AS valid as your belief.
You walk into a stranger's space believing you know something about them that is infinitely more important than anything they could possibly tell you about themselves.
You believe you know where they're going after they die. You believe you know what they need. You believe you know what they should care about. You believe you know what is wrong with their life. You believe you know what is best for them.
You walk around believing you already know what you need to about the people around you. You already know whatâs going to happen to them when they die, whatâs missing from their life, what is best for them. You've decided all of that before you've even bothered to know them, and that makes their perspective remarkably easy for you to dismiss.
Only *you* know what they need, not them. They don't understand. You do. They can't see the truth. You can.
This is not humility or respect, and it is most definitely not love.
You think your beliefs entitle you to access other people.
Hey, guess what? No it fu***ng does not.
Nobody owes you an audience. Nobody owes you a theological debate. Nobody owes you an opportunity to evangelize them.
If someone wants to hear you talk about Jesus, by all mean, talk about Jesus with them. If someone asks you about your faith, no one will stop you from answering them. If someone wants to have a theological conversation, you are free to have one.
But when a person says, âI don't want this interaction,â the only acceptable response is to stop.
Someone telling you they donât want to hear about your religion or how much you love them (because you are a fu***ng stranger and creepy much??) is NOT persecution or censorship or an attack on Christianity.
Itâs just basic human fu***ng decency to respect a personâs boundaries.
And screeching at strangers in a subway or on a train while using the language of âloveâ to plow through their boundaries is dangerous.
In Christian culture, when you genuinely believe someone's eternal soul is at stake, their feelings, preferences, autonomy, and boundaries can begin to seem insignificant compared to what you believe is âthe truthâ.
You can convince yourself that violating someone's wishes is actually an act of compassion. You can convince yourself that being intrusive is courageous, that being aggressive is loving, that ignoring someone's refusal is morally justified because you believe the stakes are higher.
That particular kind of certainty of language, behavior and reasoning is used by abusers and colonizers.
Colonialism has repeatedly been justified through the assumption that the people being colonized don't know what is best for themselves.
âWe know better.â âWe are bringing civilization.â âWe are bringing salvation.â âWe are bringing something these people desperately need.â âTheir resistance only proves how much they need us.â
Itâs giving borg. Itâs giving resistance is futile.
The underlying entitlement is still: I have something you need, therefore I am entitled to enter your space, define your problems, tell you what is true, and disregard your objections.
When you are standing in a train car, an airplane, or a bus full of people who did not ask for your uppity sermon, that entitlement becomes painfully obvious to literally everyone around you. Itâs its own form of violence.
You are not the victim because people don't want to listen to you. You are not being persecuted because strangers object to being preached at. You are not being oppressed because someone tells you to shut THE F**K up for the eleventeenth time.
Christian evangelicals, yâall need to take a long hard look in the mirror.
Selfishness is making everything about you while the people around you are telling you to stop. Selfishness is bulldozing past a boundary because getting what *you* want matters more than what someone else wants. Selfishness is forcing your opinions and beliefs onto people in a public space where they cannot simply walk away. Desensitization is being unaffected when another human being is begging you to leave them alone. Not understanding is refusing to read the room. Being deceived is blindly accepting a system that tells you everyone has free will while simultaneously teaching you that other people's exercise of that free will is something you must overcome.
Understanding someone's intentions does not mean ignoring their impact.
You may genuinely believe you are acting out of love. You may genuinely believe you are doing God's work. You may genuinely believe you are sacrificing your time, comfort, money, or vacation to save people. Maybe, MAYBE I can be convinced *some* of you actually do believe all of those things.
You are still behaving like an as***le.
Love does not give you unlimited access to another human being.
Love does not override autonomy.
Love does not make ânoâ disappear.
You can believe something would be incredibly beneficial to another person and still recognize that they are allowed to not want it, or not want it from *you*.
You can love someone and leave them alone. You can disagree with someone's beliefs without trying to dominate them. You can believe you possess the ultimate truth and still understand that other people are not obligated to let you impose it on them.
If your concept of love requires you to ignore someone's explicit refusal, you're not demonstrating love, and you need to reevaluate your life.
đ¤Śââď¸ This post inspired by this video of Phillip Blair, an American anti-abortion preacher from Torch of Christ Ministries, confronted by passengers in Australia: https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1Vo3BYaFn8/
