My international politics professor once told us a story I have never forgotten. During the Cold War, the CIA ran a quiet program that operated under Harvard’s cover. This program consisted in identifying top university students from countries dangling between the Soviet and the American influence and of course focused on Soviet satellite countries. These students received a generous invitation to spend a summer studying alongside students from all over the world at one of the most prestigious universities—Harvard. It was an offer no intellectually curious young person could resist. The students were bright, ideologically informed (or so they thought), skeptical of the West in the way that serious young people growing up behind the Iron Curtain were trained to be. They knew the arguments for capitalism, for democracy, for the American way of life. They had been taught to refute them and had been convinced that it simply didn’t work.
Here is the detail that mattered: The students were not placed in dormitories; instead, they were placed in American homes. They ate at family tables, walked around Boston’s neighborhoods, watched ordinary people live ordinary lives. There were no lectures on the superiority of democratic or capitalist systems. That wasn’t part of the plan. The plan was to simply spend a summer inside a life that was genuinely different from anything they had experienced in the satellite countries or read about in a pamphlet. Without much fanfare, these students got a big lesson on the American way of life. It’s economic, political, and social models. It must’ve been exciting. After all, this took place during the 50s and 60s—the Kennedy years—and Boston was certainly the place to be.
The program was called the International Seminar and unclassified documents have shown that this was a brain child of Kissinger himself. The goal of this program was to create an impact in the minds of the future world leaders and make an argument for the way of the West that was never spoken, but kindly and generously shown. My professor confidently stated that this was one of the CIA’s most brilliant ideas during the Cold War, and before anyone was able to present any objection or follow up question, he paused and said, “Do you know how I know this program worked? Because it worked on me!”
The class burst out in laughter and the professor continued to tell us about his experience that summer and his conversion from Marxism to Democratic Capitalism.
No one was making a case for anything. They were just living.
I often feel as if I’m living a Cold War in my personal life, and there’s even an argument to be made about the actual Cold War not being over. Many people I love have very different views from mine. Some of those differences are easy to move past; others create a real strain, for both of us. So in said personal Cold War, I’m starting to lose interest in the arguments. It’s not that they aren’t important, it’s that in practice, I’ve seen them drive the divide further apart rather than bridge it. Now I think that the arguments come second and it’s how we live and how we treat others that comes first.
The early Christians did not spread across the Roman Empire through debate. They had no podcasts, no public platforms, no academic journals. Instead, there was a community of people who behaved in ways that the ancient world found genuinely inexplicable. That’s what captivated their minds and hearts. When plague swept through Roman cities and the wealthy fled, Christians stayed and cared for the sick. They also cared for strangers who shared none of their beliefs. When abandoned infants were left to die at the city gates, Christians took them in. Tertullian recorded the pagan reaction with a kind of bewildered admiration: See how they love one another.
That was the argument and greatest legacy.
The Church has never had a shortage of arguments. We have Aquinas and Chesterton and two thousand years of accumulated theological precision. We can build upon it, but there’s no doubt that there are answers to the hard questions about suffering, free will, and the existence of God. We don’t have an argument problem, but I think we have forgotten what the arguments are for.
We live in the most argument-saturated moment in history. Every position has its podcast, its intellectual defenders, its comment section ready to deploy. We are all well-labeled and the lines are drawn; but nonetheless, people are not changing their minds. Maybe some are, as Candace Owens famously shared that it was a comment on one of her YouTube videos that first opened the door to Catholicism for her, but even then, she admits that the example of her husband was what had planted the seed long before she was even open to consider it.
The research on political persuasion is consistent: When presented with arguments that contradict a deeply held identity, most people do not update their beliefs. They dig in. Arguments, however precise, can be rejected by anyone who has decided not to be persuaded. What is far harder to reject is a person who lives with unusual grace, generosity, and joy—someone who does not seem to need you to agree with them in order to treat you well.
I don’t think this is discouraging news. It reminds us that how we live and how we treat others matters more than what we say in a debate. Ultimately, Jesus left us an example on how to live, not a manual on how to argue or debate. Doing this is harder than winning an argument. It requires something more uncomfortable than being right. It asks us to be patient with people who exhaust us, generous with people who dismiss us, and genuinely joyful and at peace in a cultural climate that rewards rage. It asks us to be so different in how we love that the difference requires explanation and a second look.
Think about what it must have been like for those students from behind the Iron Curtain, sitting at American dinner tables, watching a family pray before a meal or simply doing chores and caring for their homes. No one was making a case for anything. They were just living. And that, it turned out, was the most persuasive thing of all.
The Gospel has always traveled this way; not primarily through arguments, but through the irresistible strangeness of people who actually live it. Anyone who has ever met a saint has been impacted by him or her, that impact is the acknowledgment of truth and holiness in that person. It is not a strategy. It is a posture toward the world, and it is what the New Evangelization looks like at the level of the ordinary day.
The invitation, then, is the same one it has always been: dig deeper into your own life. Not to convince anyone but simply because it is what it means to be a Christian; and that truth, lived openly, is what’s so disarming. The arguments will find their place. What he left us was not a position to defend, but a life to inhabit.