From the front of the bus she spoke. “Lord Jesus…wages of sin is death…get to a good church…sin in your life…repent…eternal life…the Word says…”

Sitting in the middle of the bus, I couldn’t quite make it all out. But I knew the script well from my childhood in charismatic churches. Lead with how you’ve been convicted by the Holy Spirit to speak. Something about god having a message for your hearer’s life. A lot about sin. A lot of citations of St. Paul. Something about heaven (or hell). And then close with the “sinner’s prayer.”

Once they figured out what was going on, most people on the bus tuned her out. I tried to listen in without looking at her—I didn’t want to encourage her. Another woman watched her the whole time but with confused fascination, as if to ask, “What are you trying to do?”

When she finished, a brief expression of relief flashed across her face, as though she were acknowledging the delayed completion of a distasteful but necessary chore. Then she grimaced and seemed to steel herself. Was she trying to accept her failure to get anyone to walk down to bus aisle to come to Jesus? Or was she persuading herself that in spite of her failure she had still done god’s will? Was she mad at us for our hard-heartedness? Did she regret what she had just done?

I find it hard to believe that she honestly expected one of us on the bus that day to pray the sinner’s prayer with her. There must be dozens of more practical ways to make that happen than speaking impromptu to a captive audience of strangers in a code only initiates can understand. If one of us had found god that day, she would have received it as an almost magical act, a spontaneous work of the Holy Spirit, not a result of persuasion. It was almost as if she had spoken a difficult incantation, hoping against hope that she would get it right this time so it could work.

The religious need to fail (and fail publicly) is peculiar if recurring. Theatrical, symbolic martyrdom, with no consequences but interior, personal ones, is an act of someone who has rejected the larger culture and needs to feel that the rejection is mutual. The theatrical martyr believes she is in the world but not of it. She only approaches us to get her rejection fix and then retreats to the comfort of the like-minded.

When the current Iraq war was gearing up, I purchased my protest sign and put it in the window of my apartment. Most of my neighbors were Spanish-speaking immigrants, and I was fairly confident the young African-American family across the hall had no strong pro-war sentiments. Perhaps no one but me saw that sign, and then only when I came home from work at night and unlocked the door. I was persuading no one. The sign was there for me. I bought it, and it was going to go up where I could see it.

I thought about going to one of the protests around town. I even drove to one at the mall down the street with my sign in the back seat. I saw the Green Party gubernatorial candidate and maybe a dozen others, some of them children. I wound through the parking lot while trying to make up my mind. Was I a “protest person?”

The protests that season were the largest the planet has ever known, and judging by the successful turnout it’s fair to say the protests were a most spectacular failure. Sure, consciousness was raised, free speech was practiced, and views were expressed. But then the war was started, car bombs were exploded, and prisoners were tortured. If the goal of the protests was to prevent the war, that goal was not accomplished.

I recently heard a participant of the civil rights marches say that all marches since the passage of the Civil Rights Act have been meaningless. Since then, or perhaps some other date, the protest march devolved into a stylized act of political theater. Protests are no longer marches of nonviolent armies hoping to change hearts and minds of their fellow citizens. Now protests are for the protesters. Insofar as the goals of their predecessors are considered, they hope to fail. Anyone trying to accomplish something more than personal expression would find a method more likely to succeed.

“But we can’t stay home,” the protesters will say. “We have to make our voices heard. We have to speak truth to power.” But can you really expect the powers-that-be to hear you when you’ve been cordoned off into a “free speech zone” a mile away?

Or maybe the protesters will say, “But we might make a difference somehow, maybe in the long run.” Or, in another version, “If we change just one heart, it will have been a success.” But there are surely more practical means of changing one heart than assembling hundreds of people on a Saturday afternoon when no one is downtown (and this after making flyers, getting a permit, and securing police protection).

In evangelical circles this practice is called a revival. Almost everyone at a revival is already a part of the group, or else a friend or family member of someone who is. The hidden purpose of revivals—as more honest evangelical pastors will tell you—is to excite the base, fire them up about their faith, and lead them to a recommitment to Jesus. The stated purpose of revivals is to save the lost, but why would a non-initiate ever come to one unbidden? The theatrical testimonies of those saved at a revival usually reveal a prior familiarity with the evangelical subculture: either the new convert is returning to the rejected faith of childhood or the re-convert is renewing his religious commitment after backsliding. Even those who don’t walk up to the altar renew their commitment to the faith by their sacrificing three or four evenings of TV for the express purpose of saving the lost.

I admire the woman for preaching on the bus that day. She had a raw, if misplaced, courage to practice her deepest ideals in public. But if she wants to succeed, she needs to quit planning to fail.