The church of Scott Adams

Reactions to the death of Dilbert cartoonist and internet sage Scott Adams have sorted themselves along predictable ideological lines. There have been the obligatory mainstream obituaries trying to immortalize him as a racist deplorable (not just “Dilbert creator,” but “disgraced Dilbert creator”), in contrast with tributes from MAGA heavyweights like Steve Bannon, Elon Musk, and Vice President J. D. Vance. But Adams’ idiosyncratic deathbed conversion announcement has spawned a discourse more spiritual than political, reigniting age-old debates about Pascal’s Wager and the theology of Christian salvation.

Adams first announced his intention to convert to Christianity in his Jan. 4 installment of Coffee With Scott Adams, the daily live show that gathered thousands of lonely fans around a virtual breakfast table. He framed his choice in openly game-theoretic terms, as a “smart” risk-reward calculation that he hoped would please his Christian friends. If they were right, “I win,” and if not, nothing lost. By his understanding of the “dominant Christian theory,” he would wake up in heaven if he’d had a good life, and he felt confident on that score.

This language was echoed in a final message composed on New Year’s Day, read by his first ex-wife at his passing. Paradoxically, Adams still describes himself as “not a believer” while asserting “I accept Jesus Christ as my lord and savior, and I look forward to spending an eternity with him.” Christian responses have ranged from celebratory to concerned to cautiously hopeful. Before his death, many gently tried to correct Adams that “You’ll wake up in heaven if you had a good life” is definitely not “the dominant Christian theory.” He replied facetiously that all the “complaining” had almost talked him out of his decision. He never made a fuller response, saying what happened next would be between him and Jesus. 

There’s no evidence that Adams consulted with a pastor or a priest about his decision. In death, as in life, he modeled spiritual self-sufficiency. The internet phenomenon around him, in some ways not dissimilar to the phenomenon around Jordan Peterson, is perhaps best understood as a Digital Age substitute for institutional religious community—a “church” outside the church.

Speculation has buzzed for years around Peterson’s exact relationship to Christianity, but like Adams, the popular psychologist has hewed to a cryptic agnosticism, instinctively suspicious of organized religion. In his heyday, this drew an intrigued audience that had long tuned out of traditional Christian sermonizing. Amid tangible community breakdown and institutional decline, Peterson served as internet dad, internet prophet, and internet priest all in one. Though less obsessed with the biblical corpus, Adams played a similar role, and his fans looked up to him with a similarly earnest affection.

Organized Christianity faces an uphill battle to win these post-Christians back, for reasons laid out in recent books like Christian Smith’s Why Religion Went Obsolete. When Christianity was reduced to a means to the end of “making people good,” Smith argues, it was inevitable that people would discard Christianity once they decided they could be good without it. After all, they can say, look at Jordan Peterson. Look at Scott Adams. 

And yet, as lonely souls search for meaning outside the walls of a church, they still find comfort in liturgical rituals. Friends and family recorded a tribute episode of Coffee With Scott Adams in which they shared the show’s traditional “simultaneous sip,” along with his soothing companion mantra: "All you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tankard or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind, fill it with your favorite liquid. We like coffee.” The gesture unfolds like a simulacrum of the Communion rite: “Drink this in remembrance of me.” 

Likewise, people are drawn to Christ figures, whether or not they have the language to name the pattern. In his final message, Adams reflects on the day he resolved to “donate myself to the world.” “This is my body, given for you.” There is also in the last words of that message, “Please know I loved you all to the very end,” an echo of how John’s gospel leads us into Christ’s passion: “Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.” 

Christians are right to wish Adams had reached a true understanding of what saving faith really means—not just a string of words repeated like a protective incantation, but an embrace of Christ, the living Word. Whether we “lived a good life or not,” Christ alone saves. But as we leave Adams in God’s hands, the work of tending to other lonely souls still lies before us. May we be all the more motivated to remind the world what our faith uniquely has to offer—the great Story that echoes and reechoes through all our little stories. That is the myth that was actually true and the man who was actually God.