Student gets ostracized for refusing to pray - Page 45

Since my childhood the belief in hell tormented me. I was terrified of going there. I was scared to death of burning alive forever. Every time I imagined myself being on fire I would get a chill through my body and a gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach. I remember a particular Saturday afternoon when I was riding in the car with my parents and sister and we started talking about heaven and hell. As the conversation progressed, I grew more and more anxious. My mom was talking about asking Jesus into your “heart.” She submitted that those who had done this were “born again” and would go to heaven when they die, while those who died without asking Jesus in would go to hell. It suddenly dawned on me that I could not remember a moment in my life I had done this. What if? What if Jesus wasn’t in my heart? What if I died and went…to Hell?

I burst into tears! I began screaming, “I don’t want to go to hell! I don’t want to go to hell!” My mom tried to reassure me that I had already “prayed the prayer.” I kept insisting I didn’t remember, so when we got home, I prayed with my mom to ask Jesus into my heart. I was overcome with emotion and felt like a burden had been lifted off my shoulders! At that moment I knew that Jesus lived in me and I was going to heaven. I could have never imagined that the fear of hell would soon return to haunt me for most of my life.

When I was getting ready to graduate from 8th grade and prepare for high school, I faced a dissatisfaction for the first time in my relationship with God. I remember feeling grieved that the way I was living was hurting God’s heart. One Sunday morning I was sitting in church and prayed for forgiveness for the way I had been living and treating people. I made a commitment to Jesus that day that I would begin seeking Him out. However, I made a tragic mistake in that I began reading and studying end times/apocalyptic literature; I was fascinated at the time with whether or not we were living near the second coming of Christ. For those of you who have read these books or are familiar with the Left Behind Series, you know that the violence and anger of God is the emphasis here. Basically, he levels the physical earth and kills billions of people who are unwilling to come into relationship with Him (would you want a relationship with someone like that?). I now believe this to be a serious misunderstanding of the book of Revelation – a writing filled with cryptic symbols – but at that time I swallowed whatever those authors wrote. I was obsessed with it. This was the beginning of my fear of God’s wrath and losing my salvation. I was terrified that I would be either “left behind” at the Rapture or cast into Hell at the final judgment. Make no mistake. Much of the confusion about Hell comes from taking this last book of the Bible literally.

Like I said, the stage was set. As I progressed through high school I became a raging fundamentalist. I threatened classmates with Hell if they didn’t turn to Christ, promising them assurance of heaven if they would only repent. The most ridiculous thing about all this was that I was unsure myself as to my own fate! I became very rigid and legalistic. I took everything in the Bible literally and believed that God was angry – very angry. I used to make the “end times” the focus of the discussion in our Bible club. I taught how God was offering America the opportunity to repent and avoid judgment so that a spiritual revival could sweep the nation. I believed that the “foolish” people I went to school with were going to incur the wrath of God for rejecting Christ and laughing at the Christian group I started. The saddest irony was that back when I rededicated my life to God, the thing that upset me most was the way I had been treating my peers, but now, after becoming more “committed to God,” I was actually treating them worse than before, this time excusing my uncaring words in the guise of “Biblical truth” and “faithfulness to God.” Pretty crazy, huh? I developed a vision of God as a monster and became one myself. This is what happens when people have a view of God where He is punitive and willing to subject His creatures to an eternity of torment in the depths of the fiery pit.

My judgmental attitude made me highly critical and judgmental not only of non-Christian people, but of other Christians too. I preached a hell, fire, and brimstone gospel and put down other Christians who weren’t as committed as me (or so I thought), who didn’t have the same theology as me, or didn’t have enough faith to believe the message and share it with others. This continued through most of my early college career. I was a tried and true legalist to the core, but the funny thing about it is the more fervent I became about the Bible and what I thought was God’s holiness, the less assurance of my salvation I had. The truth is that my fundamentalism was ultimately fueled by the uncertainty of my own heart. I felt constantly defeated in my own efforts to live up to what I thought were God’s standards. The strain that I felt from feeling like God was going to send me to hell if I didn’t think, feel, or do X, Y, and Z was beginning to bear its ugly fruit in my life as I grew increasingly depressed.

It would get worse as the months passed. One day I was reading a book by one crazy author in which he said that there was nothing in the Bible that said we needed to be loved. Love is something we desire. Not something we need. What we really need is to be holy! And not only do we need it, but God demands it. It was nice to experience love from God, he contended, but being made into a holy person was what really mattered and you didn’t need to feel loved for that to happen (see the series entitled Our Loving God if this is the kind of nonsense you were brainwashed to believe at any point). After all, it would do you no good to go through your whole life feeling like God loved you if this would lead you to believe the mistaken notion that because He loved you He didn’t still require you to be holy, right? He claimed it was better to live life without love and end up in heaven than to live with it and end up in hell!!! Can you believe that?!?!? Pathetically, this ludicrous statement fit in with my view of God and Hell at the time. I fretted that maybe it was true. Maybe feeling like I wanted God to love me was distracting me from my pursuit of “holiness”. Avoiding hell now became an obsession (and yes, MANY Christians – especially of the most conservative, fundamentalist type – believe this either explicitly or implicitly. Read what they write and you will be shocked)!

Not too long after engaging in such “uplifting devotional reading” I began experiencing panic attacks. I would wake up in the middle of the night clutching my chest, trying to catch my breath. I was terrified that if I died in my sleep I was going to go straight to Hell. One afternoon, in the throes of feeling like a failure that just couldn’t get it right and would never make heaven, I said aloud in complete honesty for the first time something that I had been feeling for months, something to the effect of “I’m so sorry God, I know you really want me to be holy, but I really need you to love me!” I cannot stop myself from getting emotional as I write that statement, because it breaks my heart to look back and think that I felt God could be so unmercifully cruel. I was constantly terrified of going to Hell and in the midst of my fear, I was living in it already.

I want you to be dead honest with me (and yourself) about something. Does it bother you, at any level, that, according to traditional conservative theology, probably somewhere around 90-95% of people ever born on this planet are going to end up in Hell? I mean, even a little bit? If you really can be honest, you would have to admit that it does. If it doesn’t, then either you don’t really believe it deep down, or you are a very cold-hearted person. Think about it. If you meet 100 people in the course of the day, 95 of them are supposed to spend eternity (that’s forever and ever and ever…) in a place devoid of all hope, all love, all grace, and which is the very definition of personal suffering. How could such an idea not bother you?!? Truth is, this teaching bothers most people, even among those who believe it. It bothers conservatives so much that they will hardly ever talk about it, even from the pulpit. You find a traditional evangelical church on any given Sunday and see how many of them preach a sermon on Hell. See how many even mention it in their gospel presentations! That’s right, in the very message that they say people need to believe in order to avoid Hell, they don’t even mention it!! Oh sure, they’ll talk about “being separated from God,” but come on, folks, that’s so vague. But don’t be mistaken – the ambiguity is on purpose. They are afraid to tell you the “truth.” They are afraid to tell you that if you fail to accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior, then, according to their theology, you will go to Hell. That is, unending, conscious torment and suffering with absolutely no hope of escape. Whether the fires are literal or not we’re talking about unimaginable agony that goes on forever and ever and ever and ever…

Ok, you get the point. I mean, seriously, who are they trying to fool besides themselves? These people claim that they love non-Christian people so much and yet they are afraid of giving them the whole story? Why dance around it? We have no problem telling people who smoke that they’re going to die of lung cancer. We have no problem telling people who drink too much that they are going to get cirrhosis of the liver. We have no problem telling people who are really overweight that they are going to die of a heart attack. We do these things because we love them and we don’t want them to suffer these fates. Yet, these are nowhere close to the tragedy of spending an eternity in Hell, right? So, why the hesitancy? Why are they trying to sugarcoat it? The truth is that it is psychologically impossible to live a full, happy life while simultaneously entertaining the thought that most of a person’s loved ones, neighbors, and friends will, should they die today, face a torture that defies the imagination. Oh, and don’t forget about how quickly the pews would empty and the offerings drop off if they started telling people they were going to Hell. You see, it’s no longer popular to threaten people will torment in the afterlife. However, if you really believe this is going to happen and you claim to love people, then it is your responsibility to tell them the whole truth. Am I wrong?

At this point in the article, a fundamentalist may be ready to jump up and shout “Amen! You go T.J!” I hate to bust his bubble, but I’m not writing this article in order to motivate conservatives to start preaching about Hell, but to point to the fact that their lack of preaching on the subject either means that they don’t care or that they don’t really believe it. Or, perhaps, at some level, they’re just keeping their fingers crossed and hoping that it’s not true. You see, they’re suffering from the cognitive dissonance that is caused by believing in a loving God on one hand and yet believing He is capable of sending 95% of the precious people He created to utter destruction and despair without an ounce of mercy. They are haunted by a seemingly unexplainable paradox in their theology: that the God who lovingly nurtures us might send our children into a perpetual, inextinguishable fire. You see, they know this deep down inside, and because they can’t reconcile it, they repress it and avoid it.