About once a year or so, I’ll have a chat with somebody about religion, to which his or her response is an enthusiastic outburst about how, surely, his or her pastor and I would get along just great.
It’s an interesting phenomenon to behold―that sudden shift in a conversation between when the person, who seemed up until then to have been genuinely engaged in the topic, suddenly switches over to asserting the supposition that I’d be sure to enjoy talking with his or her pastor. I note that It always seems to mark the close of the previous engagement in the topic.
That is to say, it’s never, “Wow, you and I should get together with my pastor to discuss this further; you’d really like him.” Instead, it seems to be a passing off―a supplanting of the one thing for the other. And who can say what lies behind this? Was the person simply faking interest in the previous discussion, and is now seizing the opportunity to change the subject? Or is this the person demonstrating a psychology that says, “Oh, deep religious discussions are for pastors, and not for me”? Or are many of them simply flighty conversants, distracted from the conversation by noticing that I remind them of the pastor (from which flows the ready assumption that the pastor and I would get along well)?
Interestingly, when I have met their pastors (so far), we generally end up not having nearly as much in common, and not becoming the ready friends, as the person had seemed to assume. I think it’s likely that people of this sort are not apt to consider much data before they initiate their assumptions about the likelihood of friendships between their pastors and me; they simply assume that two people who remind them of each other ought to get along well. I suppose it might be interesting to ask in the future what particular things about me remind them of their pastors.
