True Believers and the Iron Grip of Belief
It never ceases to amaze me how completely a human mind can be taken over by belief. Once someone decides they have the truth, there’s no reaching them with reason, no appealing to evidence, no possibility of honest dialogue. Their belief isn’t a conclusion they’ve come to — it’s the ground they stand on. To question it feels like questioning existence itself.
I see it in my own family. Some of my relatives, though their lives are in varying degrees of disarray, remain absolutely certain that their particular brand of Christianity is the only true faith — and that I, for having rejected it, am destined for hell. Nothing I say, no matter how calm or rational, makes a dent. Their conviction is immune to contradiction; it explains everything and defends itself from all challenges. To them, their faith is reality itself.
One relative in particular has merged religion with politics — a heady mix of MAGA-flavored Christian Nationalism. He quotes Jesus while echoing doctrines that have nothing remotely Christlike about them. He’s blind to the hypocrisy, deaf to the dissonance. When he gets worked up, his eyes blaze with righteous certainty, and his voice takes on the cadence of a man possessed. It’s hard not to notice how closely his fervor resembles the Islamic extremists he claims to despise. Different holy book, same psychology.
But this kind of mental capture doesn’t begin with politics. It begins much earlier — in childhood — and in my family, the roots are deep.
Some of the older generation were raised by an evangelical missionary who today would likely be described as narcissistic, or perhaps maniacally bipolar. He was a self-anointed prophet, utterly convinced that he alone spoke for God. His children have told stories of being shut in a small room for hours while he ranted, voice booming, eyes wild, demanding absolute obedience to his “God-given authority.” His tirades were framed as spiritual lessons. Any hint of dissent was rebellion against the Almighty.
One of his children eventually broke free. She saw that the “faith” she’d been force-fed was not divine truth but psychological abuse, and she walked away from Christianity altogether. The rest — four of them — remain faithful to this day. They still defend the system that warped them, recasting their father’s mania as “misplaced zeal for the Lord” and the fear he instilled as “maybe abuse but also the fear of God.” It’s heartbreaking to watch intelligent adults, decades later, still defending and living inside the mental architecture of their childhood indoctrination.
The magical thinking continues too: faith healing, “name-it-and-claim-it” theology, invisible “warfare in the heavenlies,” and the belief that prayer can literally move armies of angels and demons. How a reasonably intelligent person in this day and age can spend a lifetime defending such fantasies — and call it supernatural truth — is beyond comprehension. Yet that’s the power of belief. It anesthetizes reason. It rewires perception so that delusion becomes devotion, and irrationality feels holy.
And this isn’t limited to religion. The same mechanism fuels political cults, conspiracy movements, and even secular ideologies. Once belief fuses with identity, the mind closes like a fist. Evidence no longer matters; belonging does. The need to be right, to be chosen, to be safe — those are the true gods that are being served.
They’re still serving the ghosts of their childhood, mistaking inherited trauma for divine revelation.The more I observe, the more convinced I become that “true believers” — whether their faith is in a deity, a political figure, or an ideology — share the same blindness. They think they’ve discovered eternal truth when in fact they’ve inherited it. They didn’t find it through reason; they were formed by it through repetition, fear, and accident of birth. But because it feels sacred — because it’s entwined with emotion and community — they’ll defend it with a ferocity that logic can’t touch.
Sometimes I think real freedom isn’t political or economic at all — it’s psychological. It’s the ability to look at one’s own convictions and whisper, “I could be wrong.” That’s a kind of liberation most people never experience, because certainty is so comforting. Doubt, by comparison, feels like standing naked in the wind.
When I look at my relatives now, I don’t feel the degree of anger I once did. Mostly, I feel sadness — and a kind of grim empathy. They’re still serving the ghosts of their childhood, mistaking inherited trauma for divine revelation. They call it faith. I call it captivity.
And though they’re convinced I’ve lost my way, I’ve come to believe that the only path worth walking is the one that leads out of the prison of certainty — into the open, uncertain air of truth, which no one can ever fully possess.
I see it in my own family. Some of my relatives, though their lives are in varying degrees of disarray, remain absolutely certain that their particular brand of Christianity is the only true faith — and that I, for having rejected it, am destined for hell. Nothing I say, no matter how calm or rational, makes a dent. Their conviction is immune to contradiction; it explains everything and defends itself from all challenges. To them, their faith is reality itself.
One relative in particular has merged religion with politics — a heady mix of MAGA-flavored Christian Nationalism. He quotes Jesus while echoing doctrines that have nothing remotely Christlike about them. He’s blind to the hypocrisy, deaf to the dissonance. When he gets worked up, his eyes blaze with righteous certainty, and his voice takes on the cadence of a man possessed. It’s hard not to notice how closely his fervor resembles the Islamic extremists he claims to despise. Different holy book, same psychology.
But this kind of mental capture doesn’t begin with politics. It begins much earlier — in childhood — and in my family, the roots are deep.
One of his children eventually broke free. She saw that the “faith” she’d been force-fed was not divine truth but psychological abuse, and she walked away from Christianity altogether. The rest — four of them — remain faithful to this day. They still defend the system that warped them, recasting their father’s mania as “misplaced zeal for the Lord” and the fear he instilled as “maybe abuse but also the fear of God.” It’s heartbreaking to watch intelligent adults, decades later, still defending and living inside the mental architecture of their childhood indoctrination.
The magical thinking continues too: faith healing, “name-it-and-claim-it” theology, invisible “warfare in the heavenlies,” and the belief that prayer can literally move armies of angels and demons. How a reasonably intelligent person in this day and age can spend a lifetime defending such fantasies — and call it supernatural truth — is beyond comprehension. Yet that’s the power of belief. It anesthetizes reason. It rewires perception so that delusion becomes devotion, and irrationality feels holy.
And this isn’t limited to religion. The same mechanism fuels political cults, conspiracy movements, and even secular ideologies. Once belief fuses with identity, the mind closes like a fist. Evidence no longer matters; belonging does. The need to be right, to be chosen, to be safe — those are the true gods that are being served.
They’re still serving the ghosts of their childhood, mistaking inherited trauma for divine revelation.The more I observe, the more convinced I become that “true believers” — whether their faith is in a deity, a political figure, or an ideology — share the same blindness. They think they’ve discovered eternal truth when in fact they’ve inherited it. They didn’t find it through reason; they were formed by it through repetition, fear, and accident of birth. But because it feels sacred — because it’s entwined with emotion and community — they’ll defend it with a ferocity that logic can’t touch.
Sometimes I think real freedom isn’t political or economic at all — it’s psychological. It’s the ability to look at one’s own convictions and whisper, “I could be wrong.” That’s a kind of liberation most people never experience, because certainty is so comforting. Doubt, by comparison, feels like standing naked in the wind.
When I look at my relatives now, I don’t feel the degree of anger I once did. Mostly, I feel sadness — and a kind of grim empathy. They’re still serving the ghosts of their childhood, mistaking inherited trauma for divine revelation. They call it faith. I call it captivity.
And though they’re convinced I’ve lost my way, I’ve come to believe that the only path worth walking is the one that leads out of the prison of certainty — into the open, uncertain air of truth, which no one can ever fully possess.