Interior States Read online

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  Although the sermons of my childhood were often set against the backdrop of hell, I wasn’t introduced to the theological doctrine of damnation until I enrolled at Moody Bible Institute at the age of eighteen. Known within evangelical circles as the “West Point of Christian Service,” Moody is one of the most conservative Christian colleges in the country. When I was there, students weren’t allowed to dance, watch movies, or be alone in a room with a member of the opposite sex. The campus was downtown, occupying a purgatorial no-man’s-land between the luxurious Gold Coast and the Cabrini-Green housing projects, but most of the students rarely left campus. The buildings were connected by subterranean tunnels, so it was possible to spend months, particularly in the winter, going from class to the dining hall to the dorms without ever stepping outside. We spent our free time quizzing one another on Greek homework, debating predestination over soft-serve ice cream at the student center, and occasionally indulging in some doctrinal humor (Q: What do you call an Arminian whale? A: Free Willy).

  Ideologically, Moody is a peculiar place. Despite the atmosphere of serious scholarship, the institute is theologically conservative, meaning that we studied scripture not as a historic artifact, but as the Word of God. Most of the professors thought the world was created in six days. Nearly all of them believed in a literal hell.*3 One of the most invidious tasks of the conservative theologian is to explain how a loving God can allow people to suffer for all of eternity. God is omnipotent, and Paul claims it is his divine will that all people should be saved—yet hell exists. Although I’d never given this problem much thought before taking freshman systematic theology, it clearly posed a thorny paradox. In layman’s terms, the argument our professors gave us went something like this: God is holy by nature and cannot allow sin into his presence (that is, into heaven). He loves all humans—in fact, he loves them so much that he gave them free will, so that they could choose to refuse salvation. In this way, people essentially condemned themselves to hell. God wasn’t standing over the lake of fire, laughing uproariously while casting souls into the flames. Hell was simply the dark side of the universe, the yin to God’s yang, something that must exist for there to be universal justice.

  There were still a number of problems with this formulation, but for the most part I was willing to suspend my disbelief and trust that God’s ways were higher than my own. What bothered me were the numbers. Freshman year, every student was required to take a seminar called Christian Missions, a history of international evangelism that was taught by Dr. Elizabeth Lightbody, a six-foot-three retired missionary to the Philippines who sported a topiary of grayish-blond curls, dressed in garish wool suits, and smiled so incessantly that she appeared a bit maniacal. During the first week of class, we watched a video that claimed there were currently 2.8 billion people among “the unreached”—that is, people who had never heard the gospel. Dr. Lightbody, like the rest of the faculty, adhered to exclusivism, the belief that only those who professed faith in Jesus Christ can be saved (as opposed to pluralism, the belief that people of all religions will be saved, regardless of the name they use for God). Jesus said that “no man comes to the Father, except through me,” and we had to take this word for word as the truth, meaning it included those who had no idea who Jesus was.*4 Technically, I’d known this since I was a kid (after all, if the unreached could get to heaven some other way, what would be the point of sending missionaries?), but I’d never paused to consider the implications. If you took into consideration all the people who’d ever lived—including those centuries upon centuries when entire continents were cut off from the spread of Christianity—then the vast majority of humanity was going to spend eternity in hell.

  I tried to feel out other students to see if anyone else was having similar thoughts, but it was a dangerous subject. Our communal language was so rigid and coded that there was very little vocabulary with which to express doubt. I had to frame my questions as technical doctrinal queries, or else pretend I was seeking evangelism advice (“Say an unbeliever were to ask you to defend the existence of hell…”). One evening, in the cafeteria, I suggested that it seemed unfair that people were going to suffer for eternity simply because we believers hadn’t managed to bring them the good news. On this point, I got nothing more than a thoughtful nod or a somber “hmm.” A few students gave me knowing smiles and little shoulder squeezes, as though I was in the midst of some revelatory spiritual experience that would lead me to the mission field.

  On Friday nights, I went down to Michigan Avenue with a dozen other students to do street evangelism. Our team leader was Zeb, a lanky, pimpled Missions major who probably would have been into LARPing or vampirism if he weren’t a Christian. Instead, he memorized Luther and Zwingli and made vivid chalk drawings illustrating the plan of salvation, all of which made him kind of popular on campus. We’d set up an easel in front of Banana Republic, and Zeb would draw the abyss that lies between mankind and God, which can be bridged only by the cross, telling the story of redemption as he drew. The rest of us handed out tracts to tourists and businesspeople. We usually drew a small crowd—mostly men who were waiting for their wives to finish shopping and seemed to view us as a zany sideshow. It wasn’t one of those vicious “turn or burn” productions, but Zeb’s chalk narrative referred to sin and repentance, and the tracts, which had the reasonable title “How to Become a Christian,” mentioned hell once or twice. These terms were the water we swam in, but out on the street, against the softly lit backdrop of window displays, they sounded ancient and fierce.

  I knew how ridiculous we looked. These people already knew who Jesus was. They’d grown up watching Jerry Falwell spaz out on TV and sneering at Ned Flanders on The Simpsons. They didn’t know all the theological reasons why God was good, and they would probably never give us the time of day to explain them. We were speaking a foreign language. In a just world, they wouldn’t be held accountable for their refusal of the gospel any more than would an unreached person who followed his culture’s belief in ancestral worship. When Zeb gave the call to come forward and find forgiveness in Jesus Christ, our audience awkwardly glanced at their watches, put their headphones back on, and moved on.

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  While I was attending Moody, the most controversial church in the Chicago area was Willow Creek Community Church, out in the northwest suburbs. I’d heard students raving about it—and others railing against it—ever since orientation week. It was popular among the pastoral, youth ministry, and sports ministry majors. The critics were mostly in the theology department. Willow Creek’s pastor, Bill Hybels, was a well-known author and something of a celebrity in the evangelical world, but the big draw was apparently the size of the church. There was a $73 million “Worship Center,” a food court, and a parking lot worthy of an international airport. Every Sunday morning, a school bus would pull up to the Moody campus and dozens of students would climb on board to be bused out to South Barrington for the 9 A.M. service. I had been attending a fledgling Baptist church in Uptown that year, and when I got back to the school cafeteria on Sunday afternoons I was routinely confronted with students fresh off the Willow Creek bus, all of whom were visibly charged, as though they’d just gotten back from a pep rally. One blustery Sunday morning in February, as I was walking to the “L” station to catch the train to Uptown, faced with the prospect of another sixty-five-minute sermon about gratitude or long-suffering, I found myself suddenly veering across the campus to get on the Willow Creek bus.

  I’d always associated megachurches with televangelists, those bottle-tanned preachers with southern accents who addressed the cameras from palatial churches with fountains out front. Willow Creek was different. The Worship Center seated seven thousand people, but it was sleek and spare, more convention hall than cathedral. Hybels preached in a simple Oxford shirt, and his charisma was muted, reminiscent of the gentle authority assumed by dentists and fam
ily physicians. The sermon was based in scripture. At first, it just seemed like the traditional gospel set to a brighter tempo. According to Hybels, God’s love was not an unearned gift granted to sinners, but proof that we mattered on a cosmic scale. Our primary fault was not our sinful nature, but our tendency to think too little of ourselves. We needed to expand our vision, to stop doubting that we could do amazing things for God. It took me several more visits, over the following few months, before I was able to put my finger on what was off. One Sunday, as I was riding back on the bus, staring out at the mirror-plated corporate headquarters along the freeway, I realized that I couldn’t recall anyone at Willow Creek ever mentioning sin, repentance, or confession. I never once heard a reference to hell.

  I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but Willow Creek was on the front lines of a movement some were already heralding as a “second Reformation,” one that had the potential to remake the Christian faith. Hybels was one of a handful of pastors—including, most notably, Rick Warren of Saddleback Valley Community Church in California (author of The Purpose Driven Life)—who pioneered what would become known as the “seeker-friendly church,” a congregation whose leadership targeted the vast population of Americans who had little to no experience with Christianity (“unchurched Harry and Mary,” in ministry lingo). The goal was to figure out why this demographic was turned off by the gospel, and then to create a worship service that responded to their perceived needs.

  Essentially, this is consumer-based management.*5 During Willow Creek’s inception, Hybels—who studied business before entering the ministry—performed preliminary market research, surveying the unreligious in his community to find out why people weren’t going to church. Unsurprisingly, the most common responses were “church is boring,” “I don’t like being preached down to,” and “it makes me feel guilty.” Harry and Mary were made uncomfortable by overt religious symbolism and archaic language. They didn’t like being bombarded by welcome committees. The solution was a more positive message: upbeat tunes, an emphasis on love and acceptance. There would be respect for anonymity—visitors wouldn’t be required to wear name tags or stand up and introduce themselves. Everything was designed for the visitor’s comfort and leisure.

  It goes without saying that pastors who are trying to “sell” God won’t mention hell any more than a Gap ad will call attention to child labor. Under the new business model, hell became the meatpacking plant, the sweatshop, the behind-the-scenes horror the consumer doesn’t want to know about. Once I became aware of what was missing, it was almost a game to watch the ministers try to maneuver around the elephant in the room. One strategy was to place the focus exclusively on heaven, letting people mentally fill in the blank about the alternative. Another was to use contemporary, watered-down translations of the Bible, like The Message (reviled around Moody’s theology department, where it was better known as “The Mess”).

  Some Moody students accused Hybels of being a Universalist—a charge lodged against Rick Warren as well, based on his refusal to mention the h-word. But away from the pulpit, these ministers were firmly within the conservative orthodoxy. In his book Honest to God? Hybels writes, “I hate thinking about it, teaching about it, and writing about it. But the plain truth is that hell is real and real people go there for eternity.” Warren admitted essentially the same thing when pressed in an interview: “I believe in a literal hell. Jesus believed in a literal hell. And once you’re in, you can’t get out.” This raises the obvious question: How ethical is it to stand up each week before an audience of people who you believe are going to suffer for all of eternity, and not talk about hell because you “hate thinking about it,” or are afraid people will be offended?

  At the same time, I realized that Hybels and Warren were responding to the problem we’d noticed down on Michigan Avenue. Most of my friends at Moody disagreed with their approach, but our only other option was to be the ranting voice in the wilderness. It was a hopeless effort, and we all knew it. People looked at our street evangelism team like we were Jesus freaks. (In fact, a number of passersby felt compelled to say as much.) Every Friday night, we’d ride back to campus on the subway in silence, each of us staring slack faced at the crowd of people hooked up to MP3 players and engrossed in fashion magazines. Many of my friends were planning to leave the States after graduation to become missionaries to the developing world. It was not uncommon during those years to hear believers argue that it was far easier to convince people of the existence of hell and the need for salvation in places like Uganda and Cambodia, where the human capacity for evil was not merely an abstraction. Zeb was planning to go to Albania after graduation to plant churches, though he said he worried this was taking the easy way out, like Jonah jumping the boat to Tarsus to avoid bringing the news to the more affluent Nineveh. He said the United States had become so rich and powerful we’d forgotten our need for divine grace.

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  I started my sophomore year at Moody in September 2001. On the morning of the eleventh, I’d overslept and woke up to my roommate—a soprano in the women’s choir—shrieking that we’d been “bombed.” There was one television in my dorm, on the second floor, and I made it down there to find the entire female student body crowded around it, watching the footage in silence. An hour later, we were filing into the eeriest chapel service of all time. The overhead lights were off and the television footage was projected onto a large screen at the front of the auditorium. The school president announced that instead of the regular session, we were going to hold a prayer hour, so we split off into circles, holding hands and whispering in the dark, beneath the muted apocalyptic footage. Nobody knew what to say. We were Bible school students—the closest thing to professional pray-ers out there—and yet people stumbled over common phrases and veered into awkward anachronisms like “keep us from evil” and “bestow thy grace.” When it was my turn, I squeezed the hand of the girl next to me, signaling for her to go ahead. After the service, they turned the sound back on, but it seemed like the newscasters were just as dumbstruck as we were.

  Once the initial shock wore off, you could sense people groping around the cultural junk drawer for appropriate terminology. Newscasters and witnesses referred to Ground Zero as an “inferno” and “hell on Earth.” In his address to the nation, George W. Bush said, “Today, our nation saw evil.” It was a rhetorical choice designed, as one New York Times writer pointed out, “to seek an antique religious aura.” Biblical prophecy was revived by conspiracy theorists who tried to prove that the disaster was predicted in the book of Daniel, or who claimed that the architect of the Twin Towers resided at 666 Fifth Avenue. Some witnesses said they glimpsed the mien of Satan in the smoke billowing out of the wreckage. Very quickly, a makeshift theology of good and evil was patched together. The terrorists were “evildoers” who, as Colin Powell put it, were “conducting war against civilized people.”

  Evangelicals responded with similar vitriol. Billy Graham called the acts “twisted and diabolical schemes,” and the Church of the Open Door’s David Johnson preached from the book of Revelation, insinuating that the terrorists were a “demonic force in the earth.” Around Moody, our professors and administrators kept talking about how the pilots must have been surprised when they woke up expecting to be welcomed by Allah and instead found themselves face-to-face with Jesus and the prospect of eternal suffering. This was said with a belabored sigh that often concealed, I suspected, a note of vindictive satisfaction.

  That Sunday, Willow Creek was one of many American churches filled to the brim with newcomers. The Moody bus arrived a little late for the morning service, and we ended up sitting in the uppermost balcony, looking down at the crowd of people seeking spiritual comfort. I was eager to see how Bill Hybels would handle the event—whether he would demonize the enemy or invoke safe platitudes about the brevity of life. As it turned out, he did something completely different. One of the biggest le
ssons of the past week, he began by saying, was that “evil is alive and well.” It was the first time I’d heard the word from his pulpit.

  With uncharacteristic gravity, he went on to argue that the evil we’d experienced was not limited to the men who flew the planes. He alluded to the terrorists’ accomplices and the people in other countries who were shown celebrating the tragedy. Those actions were evil as well, he said. He spoke of the gas station owners who’d tripled their prices to capitalize on the hysteria and the people who attacked Arab Americans out of rage, at which point the audience hummed in collective disapproval.

  The pastor paused for a moment, and then said, “Let’s bring it close to home—what about the evil in me? Because boy, I felt it this week.” He described the anger he experienced watching the news footage, his immediate craving for revenge. “What is it in us that makes some of us want others to pay a hundred times over for the wrong done to us?” he asked. “Well, that would be evil, and I felt it in me. Did you feel it in you?” With regard to the military response, he argued that Jesus’s teaching to not repay evil with evil was just as relevant at a national level. Think about the retaliation that happened all over the world, he said: How was that working out for Sudan? How was it working out for Northern Ireland? The vindictive rage we felt watching the attacks from our kitchen televisions was the same emotion that was creating hell all over the world.