For many nonbelievers and doubters (‘NBDs’), the church’s mulish insistence on the doctrine of the Trinity is one of the major stumbling blocks to faith.*
The orthodox proclaim: If you don’t accept that God is three Persons in One, then you simply cannot be a true Christian. Granted, we can’t point you to any objective reason to believe this, but you still must accept it, purely on our say-so — some of our early founders imagined it to be true, which is good enough for us, and it should be good enough for you.
Many thoughtful NBDs are put off by this approach. They know, from education and experience, that such unsubstantiated appeals to authority are typically bootless.
The orthodox seem not to care. (Nor do they evidence much interest in the most obvious of the questions that can be raised about the Trinity: Why three Persons? Why not two, or four, or four million?)
Instead, they blithely continue doing their evangelism rain dances, oblivious to whether they’re actually making it rain.
(* FOOTNOTE: I use ‘faith’ here in a minimalist sense, namely (i) accepting that a Creator exists and (ii) trusting that, in the end, all will be well. It seems to me that this is precisely the kind of faith that the New Testament shows Jesus as exemplifying and urging others to seek.)
