See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love

“That’s when I realized that my best friend believed that I was going to hell. She just didn’t know it yet. I had to be the one to break it to her. ‘Lisa, you know I’m not Christian, right?’”

Kaur challenges the Christian tendency to assume that everyone is Christian. She also challenges the Christian belief system, which promotes the idea that individuals of any other religion are morally wrong and condemned to hell. These are important points to address when trying to appeal to Christian readers, who may have biases like Lisa’s. By describing her own emotional reaction to these events and admitting her decision to end her friendship with Lisa, Kaur provides a new perspective for those who have not experienced religious bias.

“I was not angry with the woman. It was not personal. She believed she was a messenger of the moral universe: I did not belong. She had merely done her duty and tried to defeat the Devil that ensnared me. But the Devil’s voice was my own voice, and so the exorcism was really just an attempt to cast me out of my own body, to make me a stranger to myself.”

Kaur challenges a woman’s attempt to exorcise the devil from her body while she is a child. By providing her personal perspective on these events, Kaur makes an appeal to the Christian audience to not condemn individuals from differing religions. This woman’s behavior makes Kaur feel as if the woman is trying to remove her “self” from her body—religion is linked to ethnic and cultural identities, and forcing someone to convert often means giving up those other identities. This makes Kaur feel foreign in her body, culture, and identity.