Hell, Bell, and Christian Sales Tactics

As most people interested in the Christian universalism-vs-hellism controversy already know, Rob Bell's recent book (and the conservative backlash to it) sparked Time Magazine to do this week's cover article, "Is Hell Dead?", on the topic. As I was reading the article, I was particularly struck by journalist Jon Meacham's account of what lies behind the "traditionalist" resistance to questioning the doctrine of eternal damnation:

If heaven, however defined, is everyone's ultimate destination in any event, then what's the incentive to confess Jesus as Lord in this life? If, in other words, Gandhi is in heaven, then why bother with accepting Christ? If you say the Bible doesn't really say what a lot of people have said it says, then where does that stop? If the verses about hell and judgment aren't literal, what about the ones on adultery, say, or homosexuality? Taken to their logical conclusions, such questions could undermine much of conservative Christianity.

Now the second part of this account covers issues I've discussed before. I've talked quite a bit about biblical inerrancy and literalism on this blog, and my recent RD article about the conservative backlash to Bell focuses mostly on the motivations that spring from a failure to distinguish one's own beliefs about God from the truth about God--a confusion (or deliberate blurring of distinctions) that seems to underlie much of the impetus for treating critical questions as anathema.

But what struck me first when reading this passage was the first part--the part which asks why anyone should bother to accept Christ, to confess Jesus as Lord, if it isn't true that all non-Christians roast for eternity in fiery torment of the most horrific imaginable kind. I mean, why should I bother to tuck my kids in at bedtime if failing to do so doesn't mean eternal anguish in the pits of hell? Why eat breakfast if I could skip breakfast and yet still avoid unremitting agony? Clearly, everything I choose to do would be pointless if the alternative to doing it weren't damnation.

Of course I'm being sarcastic. The point is that we do all kinds of things without being threatened with damnation if we don't do them. I tuck my kids in because I love them and because I enjoy tucking them in, not because I'm trying to avoid some bad result (let alone one of eternal duration and ultimate horror). And while this shows that the rhetorical question Meacham poses is only marginally coherent, it doesn't mean that Meacham is wrong to pose it as part of what lies behind traditionalist resistance to universalism. I've heard rhetorical questions of precisely this sort often enough from Christian conservatives to know that there is something in the vicinity of these questions that truly worries them.

Of course, part of what may really worry them is that Christ is being rendered inessential for salvation--which they think undermines Christ's life and sacrifice, trivializing the Incarnation and Atonement. But this worry is clearly misguided, since Christ is hardly made inessential by supposing that the scope of His success in achieving the salvation of humanity is universal. Christian universalists do not hold that all are saved apart from Christ's saving work, but that all are saved because of it.

Perhaps, then, what is made inessential is our subjective response to Christ--what evangelicals have in mind when they speak about "accepting Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior." But this doesn't follow from universalism either. The universalist could believe (and many Christian universalists do believe) that eventually everyone comes to make this subjective response--if not in this life, then at the moment of death or in a future state when the truth becomes clear to them in all its joyous glory (and the universalist might very well hold that this realization occurs only after a period of denial and rejection, during which they arguably suffer the natural consequences of living in alienation from God--a finite hell--and so come to see the intrinsic undesirability of such a condition).

(I won't pursue the free will arguments for eternal rejection here--if you're interested in why I find them unconvincing, buy John's and my book when it comes out, or look at a briefer version of the argument in my article in Universal Salvation? The Current Debate).

In any event, the point is this: Universalism neither entails that Christ is unnecessary for salvation nor that a subjective response of acceptance is unnecessary. It does, however, seem to entail that conversion to Christianity in this life, participation in Christian life, church attendance, etc., are unnecessary for avoiding eternal hell. If Gandhi--who had nice things to say about Jesus but remained a Hindu all his life--is not in hell, then being a Christian in this life is not necessary for avoiding hell.

But this brings me back to my original sarcastically-expressed point about the rhetorical question, "Why bother becoming a Christian if non-Christians are saved?" This question assumes that the only good reason to convert to Christianity in this life is what happens in the next, and more specifically that becoming a Christian in this life is the only way to avoid damnation in the next. But do Christians really believe that? Do they believe that there is nothing positive to be gained in this life from participation in Church life, nothing worthwhile that is gained during our earthly tenure by being a part of a Christian communion, by living with a sense of God's presence, by meditating on the gospel narrative, etc.?

Do any Christians seriously want to say that? If not, then the rhetorical question collapses on itself--because there are all sorts of reasons why someone might "bother" to embrace a Christian life even if the ultimate destiny of those who embrace a secular life, or a Hindu life, or a Buddhist life, is the same in the end.

For all these reasons, the only sense I can make of the rhetorical question so many conservatives ask is this: What they are really worried about (although they may not be fully conscious of this) is that they will be deprived of a tried-and-true sales gimmick that many Christians have been using for centuries in their efforts to swell the ranks of Christian churches. Specifically, the gimmick of making people scared of the consequences of not participating in Christian communities.

This is not a new conclusion for me--and I think I may have made the same basic point more eloquently in a post from a couple of years back, Selling Christianity. Nevertheless, it is a point worth making again. And if this is what is really going on, then Bell may have realized something that conservative evangelicals like John Piper haven't quite caught onto yet: This sales gimmick isn't working anymore.

Rather than being a selling point for participation in Christian life, the doctrine of eternal damnation is increasingly becoming a liability. In our pluralistic world, to cleave to a religion that says everyone else is going to roast is to cleave to something that is hard to see as anything but ugly. And the old theological arguments that try to paint it as something other than ugly, and that try to represent our uneasiness with the doctrine of hell as nothing more than a suspect side-effect of a demonized "enlightenment philosophy" (as if enlightenment philosophy were entirely divorced from the ethical ideas of the Christian culture in which it was born)--well, those arguments are sounding increasingly implausible.

I'm not suggesting that Rob Bell is just a salesman with a better marketing campaign. Rather, I am suggesting that Bell may better represent the values of the emerging generation of evangelicals--a point that finds support in a great recent essay by Rachel Held Evans. If so, then when the conservative establishment rails against Bell with cries of heresy and excommunications by Tweet, what we may be witnessing is a once-privileged group scrambling desperately to cling to a position of authority that is steadily slipping from their grasp.

I don't know if that is true, but I really think it might be.

Why Would Christian Universalists be Motivated to Evangelize?

The other day I received an e-mail from one of my students. As I finished writing my response, it occurred to me that readers of this blog might be interested in it. And so I’m including the relevant pieces of the exchange in this post.



Here’s the question my student asked:

I started to read Thomas Talbott's book The Inescapable love of God, and wanted to ask you something. Most Christians seek to convert others out of a desire to save them. As a universalist, would you still be concerned with saving and also converting other people? If so, what are you saving them from? Unlike most evangelists who claim to save the potential Christian from hellfire, a universalist would not be worried about eternal damnation. It seems then, the motivation for evangelism is at least partially removed by removing the fear/threat of eternal damnation. Unless you believe in some form of original sin, you wouldn't be saving the person from their depravity either. Perhaps you would be offering them the chance to a better, more fulfilled life. It seems the motivation for a universalist would be positive; trying to make someone’s life better whereas to others it would be more focused on saving them from Hell (removing a negative consequence). What are your thoughts? I know this might be personal, so you don't have to respond to this. But as a Universalist yourself, do you have a motivation and if so, what is your motivation, for “seeking souls” (so to speak)?

Here is my reply:

Speaking for myself, I have very little invested in converting people to Christianity (although I do have a great interest in convincing people who think otherwise that there are versions of Christianity that can be embraced by reasonable and morally decent people). That said, Christian universalists might experience an evangelical calling for several reasons. I can think of four off the top of my head.

(1) The first is the one you touch on in your comment. Specifically, Christian universalists might believe that there are positive life benefits (in terms of subjective life satisfaction or happiness, and in terms of resources for moral improvement) that are possible in this life if and only if one opens oneself up in this life to the kind of relationship with God that Christianity claims has been made available through Christ's life and work. Desiring others to enjoy these benefits here and now, Christian universalists might take on an evangelical mission.

(2) They might believe that, while the salvation of all is inevitable, this is not because they don't think there is a subjective requirement for salvation but because they think it is inevitable that all will eventually come to meet this requirement. So, they may think that enjoying the blessings of union with God is only possible for those who have chosen to open themselves up to those blessings--and while it is certain that all will eventually open themselves up in the relevant way, those who do not do so by the time of their death will exist after death in a state of alienation from God that can only bring increasing misery the longer that it lasts (a finite "hell," if you will). These universalists might believe that the effort of human evangelists is one of God's means for hastening the salvation of all, and so feel it is their calling to be God's agents in this way. In the absence of those efforts, they might think that more people will experience the "hell" of alienation from God for a longer period of time before realizing their error and turning to God.

(3) In its original meaning "evangelist" means "good messenger." To evangelize is to share good news ("gospel" means "good news"). In the Christian context, the good news is typically taken to be that God loves us all with an unwavering love and that, on account of Christ, we have been forgiven all our transgressions. In short, it's not about conversion at all, but about declaring good news as widely as possible. In this sense, the motivation for evangelism is, at least in part, the same sort of motivation that would impel someone to call everyone they know as soon as they learn that their child has been cured of leukemia. They want to share their joy at this wonderful news. But in the case of the Christian gospel, the news also seems to be of a sort with beneficial pragmatic implications for those it is being shared with. If people are hunkering down in their cellars waiting for enemy planes to fly overhead and drop bombs, the news that the enemy has been defeated will mean that people can come out of their hidey-holes. In such a case, running through the streets shouting out the good news is not merely motivated by a desire to share a personal joy but to let people know that they no longer need to burden themselves in a particular set of ways.

(4) Christian universalists might be convinced that the Christian worldview makes the most sense of human experience, that it fits the pieces of our experience together into the most coherent whole, as well as offering pragmatic resources for living better lives. In other words, they might be convinced that by the most plausible ways of measuring the truth of a worldview, some variant of Christianity comes out as the worldview most likely to be true. In this case, what might motivate them is the same kind of thing that presumably motivates Dawkins to preach atheism--a belief that one has the truth (or at least the most rational worldview) combined with the belief that it's just good in itself if more people believe the truth (the most rational thing).

Let me dwell for just a moment on (1). My own thinking with respect to (1) is that what has the pragmatic benefits is not belief in Christian doctrine as such, but rather a certain kind of attitude of openness to being moved and transformed by a good greater than oneself. While the Christian narrative can inspire the relevant kind of openness, it doesn't always do so. In my judgment it depends a great deal on just how the story is told—and versions of the story that emphasize hellfire seem to me to be less effective in this respect. It also depends on the life history of an individual. Some have had such a poisonous relationship with Christianity that even the best versions of the story evoke all the psychological crud laid down by that relationship. In that case it is likely that the greatest pragmatic benefits will come from a different narrative altogether, one which hasn't been poisoned. And my experience (with friends who are Jews, Sikhs, Hindus, agnostics, religious naturalists, etc.) is that many different narratives can be effective in evoking the relevant attitude of openness. Again, it depends on just how the story is told. So, believing Christian teachings is neither necessary nor sufficient for bringing about the kind of openness to being transformed that, I think, has the clearest pragmatic value.

I also think this openness will have to be the primary subjective component to any defensible view of eternal salvation--a fact which has clear implications for my understanding of (2). While I have thoughts on (3) and (4) as well, I suspect my arguments in my book and on my blog make my views on (4) pretty clear, and my thoughts on (3) would probably take awhile to formulate precisely. So I'll leave it at that for now.

Selling Christianity

The other night I was channel-surfing, and I came across an old episode of South Park in which the South Park kids start up a Christian rock band, “Faith + 1,” and try to make it big. The South Park writers clearly took delight in displaying the Christian music industry as exactly like any other big business, driven by the same capitalist impulses. As the episode portrayed it, the only difference between it and the wider music industry was that the “product” being packaged and marketed had Christian content (even if it so happened to be a heavy metal band that was delivering the Christian lyrics in nearly incoherent screams amidst raging guitar riffs).

The episode inspired me to reflect on this business of selling Christianity, of turning the Christian faith into a marketplace commodity. For all of Christian history, of course, Christians have been called to evangelize—to preach the gospel, by which is meant good news. But can evangelism really be reduced to selling a product? Can such salesmanship really be a form of evangelism?

Evangelism and product marketing do bear a superficial resemblance to one another, but at the deepest level I believe they are profoundly opposed. Surface similarity can, however, breed confusion. In the history of Christianity, I think this danger has too often become a reality. The evangelical mission has been confused with the task of selling a product. So-called evangelism has adopted the basic advertising paradigm perfected in recent history on Madison Avenue.

By “the basic advertising paradigm,” I mean the following strategy for selling products: first, ramp up your audience’s insecurities and anxieties, convincing them on an emotional level that they have a terrible problem which fundamentally compromises their prospects for happiness; and then convince them that only if they buy your product will they experience relief from this problem.

Announcing good news is a very different thing. Of course, if we experienced the world as perfect, as free of bad news, there’d be no such thing as good news. There’d be lots of good things to say, but none of it would be news. Good news is news because it tells us that the dangers which worry us needn’t do so, that the losses which grieve us needn’t grieve us anymore. The news is good because it replaces fear and anguish with a message of hope and joy.

The ultimate good news would tell us not merely that this danger has been overcome or that lost treasure restored to us. It would tell us that all sources of anxiety and grief have lost their sting, that the bad news in the world is not and never will be the final word in our lives, that it is not and never will be the deepest truth. The ultimate good news would be the proclamation that the deepest truth is so extraordinary that, despite all the tragedy and cruelty and suffering, every life is redeemed.

There is an enormous difference between announcing good news in the midst of bad news and playing up or fabricating bad news in order to get you to buy a product. But far too often, Christian “evangelists” have followed the latter path, “selling” Christianity the way that the cosmetics industry sells beauty products.

They lead with fear. They identify common human fears--some of them quite natural, others born of ignorance and prejudice--and they heighten those fears. For the sales tactic to work, they have to first assure us that we have reason to be afraid, that everything we fear will become a life-shattering reality...unless we buy their product.

One does not sell a product by announcing that all is right with the world. One does not sell a product by offering words of comfort, by telling consumers that their fears are rooted in unjustified beliefs or prejudices, or by assuring them that they have nothing to worry about because the problem has already been solved for them. One does not, in short, sell a product by proclaiming good news. One sells a product by proclaiming bad news, by highlighting dangers and unpleasant possibilities, by taking advantage of irrational worries, by intensifying rather than alleviating the prejudices and stereotypes that magnify our anxieties. Use their existing fears to put them into a state of heightened dread. And then introduce your product as the cure.

If you want to sell Christianity in this way, of course, you start with hell. You begin with the fear of death and then raise the stakes: death won’t be mere oblivion. If you don’t buy our product, it’ll be hell.

But there are other ways to sell Christianity as a product. One of the great sources of human anxiety is uncertainty. We are often confused, without a clear sense of how we should make decisions, how we should live, what we should believe. Rather than telling us that it's okay to be uncertain, that this is an acceptable and inevitable part of what it means to be a finite human being, Christian salesmen have played up the idea that uncertainty is something awful, because our eternal destinies are decided by the choices we make in the midst of uncertainty. If we make the wrong choice, they tell us, we’re doomed.

Thus, the uncertainty that seems an inevitable concomitant of the human condition is portrayed as a terrible plight, something we need to flee from as fast as we can. And then they hold up Christianity as the product that will eliminate uncertainty as decisively as Arrid Extra Dry will eliminate sweaty armpits. Their brand of Christianity is the simple, no-nonsense fix. The Bible has the answers to all your problems! No more confusion, no more doubt! We’ve got the rulebook that will take away all guessing and make you confident that you are always making the right choice. Just live by the rulebook (as interpreted by Pastor Bob or Pastor Jerry, or by the Church of Recent Schism), and your life will be fixed!

By contrast, if you don’t buy our product, our easy answers, you’ll be lost. You’ll flounder in the dark and end up in a gutter somewhere, homeless and alone, strung out on drugs or dying of AIDS, before ultimately descending into eternal torment. If more people don’t buy our product, our society will fall into chaos, with crime and depravity on every street, before finally falling into apocalypse. And if you don’t buy our product, you’ll endure this Armageddon in all its horrors. It’s coming soon. Any day. And so is your death. This is a limited time offer. Buy now or forever pay the price.

As powerful as these sales gimmicks are, Christian salesmen have recently stumbled into tactics that are even more powerful. It's long been known that one of the best ways to get people to buy into a communal ideology is to identify an enemy, a personification of our fears, and then present allegiance to the communal ideology as essential for the enemy's defeat. Thus, the Nazis had the Jews, and the religious right in America has the homosexuals.

It is stunning how such a small minority can be represented as so deadly. James Dobson, head of the right-wing Christian group, Focus on the Family, accuses “the homosexual activist movement” of having as its aim “the utter destruction of the family.” He sees it as “the greatest threat to your children” (apparently more serious that drugs or poor education systems or environmental degradation).

Once homosexuals are portrayed as this central threat to values we hold dear, solving some of our worst problems becomes easy. It becomes simply a matter of defeating the enemy. But the religious right in America does not generally endorse violence as a means of defeating the “homosexual threat.” Instead, universal conversion to Christianity is their solution. This is a sales pitch, after all.

It is therefore an essential piece of their rhetoric that homosexuals can be “cured,” that (contrary to the best available evidence) homosexuality is a perverse choice and that people can be saved from the “homosexual lifestyle” if only they accept Jesus as Lord. It is no accident that they vehemently insist that it is impossible to be gay or lesbian and a Christian at the same time. These beliefs are crucial to their program of selling Christianity as the solution to the “homosexual threat.” In order to leverage anti-gay prejudice into a reason to embrace their product, Christianity must actually serve as the cure for homosexuality.

And so, piece by piece, a sales campaign for Christianity emerges, one that sees fears as opportunities, and prejudice as something to be used.

But for all of this to work, Christianity must not be represented as unconditioned good news. It cannot be put forward as a joyous proclamation. It must, instead, but put forward in the context of a conditional threat: unless and until you buy our product, you will be mired in devastating problems. Your armpits will stink. Your dry scalp will dust your clothes with off-putting flakes. You’ll be so fat and ugly nobody will ever fall in love with you. The gays will shatter your family. You’ll burn eternally in the unquenchable fires of hell.