Toward Ecosophy

I have been thinking about this quite a bit. Having been brought into this world and reared by evangelical Christian missionaries, evangelism is "in my blood" so to say, or at least it has been a big feature of my upbringing. The closest descriptions of the mindset of an evangeliser that I have ever read are contained in Eric Hoffer's "True Believer: Anatomy of a Mass Movement". What he outlined was that the evangelist is missing is not so much lack of belief in their message, but lack of belief in their SELF. Any message could then become the focal "filling" resorted to to fill up the sensed deficiency in the self. Especially if the message connected the person to a greater sense of belonging. Now I know that Christian evangelism relies on a simple heuristic "we got to get them lost, before we can get them saved" (this is a quote from an autobiographical book "Don't Sleep, there are Snakes" (which highlights one man's journey away from "evangelising" after encountering the people he had thought he'd be "saving"). But, in any case, evangelism never makes any headway among those who are content with their lives and with their vocations and with their relationships and ultimately with themselves. On the other hand, when there is a whole society full of people who feel "damaged" or "ruined" as Hoffer points out, mass movements can easily coalesce around any message that offers itself to become the "good news". My two cents. Scotlyn