Compelling, but not coercive

Third, and relatedly, beauty is compelling but not coercive. God, by Christian accounting, does not overwhelm us and crush us with imperatives. God is interested in our genuine love; God woos but does not rape. God stoops to the human level and accommodates human finitude and fallibility, culminating in the cross where God hangs broken and dying to take on human sin and defeat death. In these senses, God “evangelizes” not through implacable propositions, hemming us in with logical arguments, but through participating in our very earthly life and offering costly love. And there is something unsurpassably beautiful about this. Especially in a post-Constantinian, post-Christian world, we can no longer—to our own as well as to others’ benefit—attempt to coerce faith. We can, however, live it in a way that we hope will be beautiful and so draw others to it. The early church, itself literally unable to coerce participation, recognized this as appropriate to the very ways and character of God.— Naming Neoliberalism: Exposing the Spirit of Our Age, 201