Politics
Woman Converts To Christianity After Coworker Reads Romans 8:38 Out Loud At Desk
By Sean Vanity, . BSN Network. Satire.
CEDAR RAPIDS, IA. Haley Furst had assembled what she describes as a comprehensive ideological identity over the course of roughly a decade, including atheism, transgender identification, and a sincere belief in communism, which she supported, according to her own account, with the commitment of someone who had never actually visited a communist country.
All of it, she says, began to collapse when a coworker at her then-employer quietly read aloud from Romans 8:38 while eating lunch near the shared printer.
The verse, for readers who skipped Sunday school, reads in part: "For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God."
Furst has described this as a "radical perspective change." Theologians have described it as a Tuesday.
In interviews, Furst said she had previously considered herself beyond the reach of religious conversion, a claim that approximately one hundred percent of people who later get converted also make beforehand. She was, by her own description, deeply committed to a materialist worldview, which did not survive contact with a laminated bookmark.
The coworker in question, identified only as a woman named Brenda in several retellings, has not commented publicly. Brenda almost certainly did not expect to dismantle a decade of ideological infrastructure. She was, by all available evidence, just eating her lunch.
Furst's story was subsequently published under the headline "Deprogrammed," a word choice that does considerable work in several directions at once. The outlet that ran the piece appeared to believe the word applied exclusively to the atheism and communism. Readers are invited to form their own view.
The article describes Furst's journey back to the Christian faith of her upbringing, complete with the vocabulary that these pieces always deploy: "radical," "transformation," "chains," and at least one metaphor involving light. The communism is mentioned as though it were a phase roughly equivalent to a misguided haircut, which, to be fair, it often is.
Religious conversion narratives follow a structure so reliable it could be filed as a patent. There is the Period of Darkness, during which the subject held beliefs the outlet finds alarming. There is the Inciting Moment, usually embarrassingly small relative to what it supposedly caused. There is the Transformation, described in terms suggesting the subject has been physically rebuilt. And there is the Current Peace, photographed in soft focus near a window.
Furst's piece hits every mark. The Period of Darkness lasted roughly ten years and involved Reddit. The Inciting Moment was a printer-adjacent scripture reading. The Transformation reportedly took several weeks. The window photograph has not been confirmed but must be assumed.
What the piece does not fully reckon with is the implied indictment of every other atheist who has walked past a coworker reading the Bible and simply continued to the bathroom. Millions of people have been in proximity to Romans 8:38 and emerged with their worldviews intact. Furst would presumably describe this as their loss. The atheists would presumably describe it as having a sandwich.
The coworker Brenda, meanwhile, has become an unlikely figure in the minor genre of accidental evangelism, ranking somewhere between the guy whose near-death experience was technically just a fender-bender and the woman who found God during a Cracker Barrel wait.
Furst says she is at peace.
Brenda, presumably, has moved on to a different lunch spot.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.foxnews.com/media/deprogrammed-radical-perspective-change-led-transgender-atheist-jesus