Interior States Read online

  I hadn’t felt that rage myself—not because of virtue or self-discipline, but because I was too immature to grasp the full scope of what had happened. It seemed removed and vaguely cinematic. But I did know the feeling he was talking about. It was the same thing I felt when our evangelism team got called Bible-thumpers and Jesus freaks.

  I don’t know what prompted Hybels to diverge from the market-tested optimism that day, but it was a powerful sermon—people at Moody were talking about it all week. In fact, in a study on the evangelical response to 9/11, this sermon was cited as the only one that questioned the compatibility of military action with Jesus’s command to love one’s neighbor. The pacifism of the political Left seemed inert and self-flagellating by comparison. Their hesitance to condemn the terrorists, the insistence on the passive voice when describing what had happened, often made it seem as though the attacks had been an act of God, divine punishment for Western imperialism. That Sunday was the only time that someone had asked me to examine myself and my response to the attacks without dismissing their severity or the reality of the human intention behind them. The next Sunday, Hybels preached a message entitled “Religion Gone Awry,” about how the backlash against American Muslims ran counter to Christian principles. The following week, he invited Imam Faisal Hammouda to speak at the Sunday service, giving the congregation the opportunity to exercise “discernment” in understanding Islam.

  In retrospect, one of the most perplexing things about 9/11 was how swiftly the event congealed and then dissipated from the national consciousness. Half a century ago, when Roosevelt addressed the country after Pearl Harbor, he underscored the severity of the offense by declaring that the nation would not forget it: “Always will we remember the character of the onslaught against us….There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory and our interests are in grave danger.” Since then, it seems we’ve come to see prolonged meditation on this kind of horror as a sign of weakness—or perhaps merely a threat to the market. Less than two months after the attacks, Bush noted with pride, “People are going about their daily lives, working and shopping and playing, worshipping at churches and synagogues and mosques, going to movies and to baseball games.”

  Willow Creek soon got back to business as usual as well, mostly due to the huge backlash against Hybels’s decision to “share his pulpit” (as his critics phrased it) with an imam. Apparently the honeymoon was over. People began to find tolerance tedious. Although Hybels didn’t apologize for his decision to bring in the imam, he seemed, like any good CEO, to take note of the negative response. In the first sermon of 2002, he encouraged us to put the past year’s events behind us and adopt, instead, “an optimistic hope-filled attitude for the year.” It was the first message of a sermon series that included titles such as “Wellness,” “Family,” and “Surviving a Financial Storm.” In the end, his radical sermons about collective evil turned out to be aberrational—like many noble acts inspired by the tragedy and then quickly forgotten.

  * * *

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  At the time, I didn’t appreciate how radical Hybels’s 9/11 sermon was. In speaking about his own capacity for revenge and hatred, he had opened up a possibility, a way of talking about evil that was socially and spiritually transformative. It wasn’t fire and brimstone; it didn’t involve condemning the sinner as some degenerate Other. Rather, he was challenging his congregation to exercise empathy in a way that Jesus might have, suggesting that he among us without sin should cast the first stone.

  If I failed to fully consider the possibilities of this theology, it was because I was already in the throes of a spiritual crisis. By the end of that semester, the problem of hell had given way to more serious doubts about Christianity itself, and had so drastically unsettled my faith that I found myself unable to perform the basic rites. When I stood in chapel with my classmates, I was unable to sing along to the hymns in praise of God’s goodness; when we bowed our heads to pray, I resorted to pantomime. I left Moody the summer after my sophomore year and took a volunteer position with some missionaries in Ecuador, which was merely an elaborate escape plan—a way to get away from Moody and my parents. Three months into the commitment, I moved to a town in the south of the country where I didn’t know anyone, got a job teaching ESL, and stopped going to church entirely.

  But people who’ve gotten that far into the faith never totally shake it. To be a former believer is to perpetually return to the scene of the crime. It’s been ten years since I left Moody, and I still find myself stalling on the Christian radio station to hear a call-in debate, or lurking around the religion section of chain bookstores, perusing the titles on the Christianity shelves like a porn addict sneaking a glance at a Victoria’s Secret catalog.

  In the spring of 2011, I was browsing through an airport newsstand when I glimpsed an issue of Time with the headline “What If There’s No Hell?” The subhead elaborated, “A popular pastor’s bestselling book has stirred fierce debate about sin, salvation and judgment.” The book in question was the modestly titled Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived, and the pastor, it turned out, was Rob Bell. Back when I was at Moody, Bell was known primarily as the pastor of Mars Hill Bible Church in Grandville, Michigan—one of the more groundbreaking “seeker churches” in the Midwest. If Hybels was the entrepreneur of the seeker movement, Bell was its rock star. At the time, he favored rectangular glasses and black skinny jeans and looked strikingly like Bono, if you could imagine the laconic machismo replaced with a kind of nerdy alacrity. Most of Bell’s congregants were Gen Xers who had difficulty with the Bible’s passages about absolute truth, certainty, and judgment. His first book, Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith (2005), was purportedly aimed at people who are “fascinated with Jesus, but can’t do the standard Christian package.”

  I found a copy of Bell’s new book at that same airport and blew through it during my three-hour flight to Michigan. It was a light read. Bell lineates his prose like a free-verse poem, and roughly half the sentences are interrogative, a rhetorical style that seems designed to dampen the incendiary nature of his actual argument. He does not, as the Time headline suggests, make a case against the existence of hell. Rather, he argues that hell is a refining process by which all the sins of the world, but not the sinners, are burned away. Those who are in hell are given endless chances throughout eternity to accept God’s free gift of salvation and, because this gift is so irresistibly good, hell will eventually be emptied and collapse. Essentially, this is universal reconciliation—the idea that all people will be saved regardless of what they believe or how they conduct themselves on Earth.

  Love Wins created an uproar in the evangelical community. Zondervan, a behemoth of Christian publishing that had put out Bell’s previous books, dropped him upon reading the proposal, stating that the project didn’t fit with their mission. After it was published, Albert Mohler Jr., a prominent reformed pastor, called the book “theologically disastrous,” and conservative John Piper tweeted, “Farewell Rob Bell,” as if to excommunicate him from the fold. Closer to home, Bell watched as thousands of his congregants left Mars Hill in protest. At the same time, many evangelicals who seemed to have been harboring a private faith in universal reconciliation came out of the woodwork and defended the book. In the secular media, the theology of Love Wins was lauded as the radical conception of a visionary. Bell was the subject of a long profile in The New Yorker, and Time named him one of the most influential people in the world. “Wielding music, videos and a Starbucks sensibility,” the magazine wrote, “Bell is at the forefront of a rethinking of Christianity in America.”

  “Rethinking” is not as accurate as “rebranding.” Throughout Love Wins, it’s obvious that Bell is less interested in theological inquiry than he is in PR. At one point in the book, in order to demonstrate the marketing problems many congregations unwittingly create, he gives a sampling of “stat
ements of faith” from various church websites, all of which depict a traditional Christian understanding of damnation (for example, “The unsaved will be separated forever from God in hell”). Instead of responding to these statements on a theological basis, he remarks, sarcastically, “Welcome to our church.” Later on, he reiterates his warning that even the most sophisticated seeker churches won’t succeed in attracting unbelievers unless they revamp their theology: “If your God is loving one second and cruel the next, if your God will punish people for all eternity for sins committed in a few short years, no amount of clever marketing or compelling language or good music or great coffee will be able to disguise that one, true, glaring, untenable, unacceptable, awful reality.”

  Despite Bell’s weak hermeneutics, there was one moment when it seemed as though he might initiate a much-needed conversation about the meaning of hell. Toward the end of the book, he begins to mobilize a more radical argument—that heaven and hell are not realms of the afterlife but metaphors for life here on Earth. “Heaven and hell [are] here, now, around us, upon us, within us,” he writes. He recalls traveling to Rwanda in the early 2000s and seeing boys whose limbs had been cut off during the genocide. “Do I believe in a literal hell?” he asks. “Of course. Those aren’t metaphorical missing arms and legs.” For a moment, it seemed as though Bell was going to make a statement as bold and daring as Hybels’s 9/11 sermon, using hell as a way to talk about the human capacity for evil.

  But soon after he introduces the possibility of a metaphorical hell, he glosses over its significance by suggesting that the “hells” of this Earth are slowly being winnowed away as humans work to remedy social problems like injustice and inequality. He suggests that the Kingdom of God of which Jesus spoke referred not to an eternal paradise, but rather to an earthly golden age (a claim with which few—if any—evangelicals would agree, even if it is commonly accepted among mainline scholars). In his discussion of Revelation, Bell skims over most of the apocalyptic horrors to note that the book ends with a description of “a new city, a new creation, a new world that God makes, right here in the midst of this one. It is a buoyant, hopeful vision of a future in which the nations are healed and there is peace on earth and there are no more tears.” Traditionally, evangelicals have interpreted the “new city” as heaven, but Bell’s insistence that this new creation is “right here in the midst of this one” defers to a Hegelian understanding of history, one in which humanity improves itself until we’ve engineered a terrestrial utopia. While this idea is not outside the tradition of Christian eschatology, Bell’s version echoes, more than any theological strain, the contemporary gospel of human perfectibility that is routinely hyped in TED talks and preached from the Lucite podiums of tech conferences across the country.

  Love Wins succeeded in breaking the silence about hell, and its popularity suggests that a number of evangelicals may be ready to move beyond a literalist notion of damnation, reimagining hell just as God-fearing people across the centuries have done to reckon with the evils of their own age. At the same time, the book demonstrates the potential pitfalls of the church’s desire to distance itself too quickly from fire and brimstone. Bell claims to address the exact theological problem that motivated me to leave the faith, but rather than offer a new understanding of the doctrine, he offers up a Disneyesque vision of humanity, one that is wholly incompatible with the language biblical authors use to speak about good and evil. Along with hell, the new evangelical leaders threaten to jettison the very notion of human depravity—a fundamental Christian truth upon which the entire salvation narrative hinges.

  Part of what made church such a powerful experience for me as a child and a young adult was that it was the one place where my own faults and failings were recognized and accepted, where people referred to themselves affectionately as “sinners,” where it was taken as a given that the person standing in the pews beside you was morally fallible, a fact that did not prevent you from taking her hand in prayer or regarding her as a sister in Christ. This camaraderie came from a collective understanding of evil—a belief that each person harbored within them a potential for sin and deserved, despite it, divine grace. It’s this notion of shared fallibility that lent Hybels’s 9/11 sermon its power, as he suggested that his own longing for revenge was only a difference of degree—not of kind—from the acts of the terrorists. And it’s precisely this acknowledgment of collective guilt that makes it possible for a community to observe the core virtues of the faith: mercy, forgiveness, grace.

  The irony is that, at a time when we are in need of potent metaphors to help us make sense of our darkest impulses, Protestant churches have chosen to remain silent on the problem of evil, for fear of becoming obsolete. The short-term advantages of such a strategy are as obvious as its ultimate futility. Like so many formerly oppositional institutions, the church is now becoming a symptom of the culture rather than an antidote to it, giving us one less place to turn for a sober counter-narrative to the simplistic story of moral progress that stretches from Silicon Valley to Madison Avenue. Hell may be an elastic concept, as varied as the thousands of malevolencies it has described throughout history, but it remains our most resilient metaphor for the evil both around and within us. True compassion is possible not because we are ignorant that life can be hell, but because we know that it can be.

  2014, The Point

  *1 I think evangelicals are under the impression that any scriptural passage with an animal reference is kid-friendly. In fact, this verse once inspired my Christian camp counselors to have our second-grade class sing a version of the doo-wop classic “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” as “The Devil Sleeps Tonight,” which we performed for our parents, cheerily snapping our fingers and chanting “awimbawe, awimbawe,” etc.

  *2 At one point during my early teens, before I understood the concept of eternal security, it occurred to me that if I could ask Jesus into my heart, I could just as easily ask him to leave. Once this fear lodged itself in my brain, it became impossible not to think the prayer “Jesus, go out of my heart,” the way it’s impossible not to visualize a purple hippopotamus once someone tells you not to. For weeks, I found myself mentally replaying this heresy, then immediately correcting it with the proper salvation prayer, all the while terrified that something would happen to me (a car accident, a brain aneurysm) in the seconds in between, while I was technically unsaved.

  *3 There’s a widespread misconception that biblical literalism is facile and mindless, but the doctrine I was introduced to at Moody was every bit as complicated and arcane as Marxist theory or post-structuralism. There were students at the institute who got in fierce debates about infralapsarianism versus supralapsarianism (don’t ask) and considered devoting their lives to pneumatology (the study of the Holy Spirit). In many ways, Christian literalism is even more complicated than liberal brands of theology because it involves the sticky task of reconciling the overlay myth—the story of redemption—with a wildly inconsistent body of scripture. This requires consummate parsing of Old Testament commands, distinguishing the universal (e.g., thou shalt not kill) from those particular to the Mosaic law that are no longer relevant after the death of Christ (e.g., a sexually violated woman must marry her rapist). It requires making the elaborate case that the Song of Solomon, a book of Hebrew erotica that managed to wangle its way into the canon, is a metaphor about Christ’s love for the church, and that the starkly nihilistic book of Ecclesiastes is a representation of the hopelessness of life without God.

  *4 One day, a student asked about children who died without being saved. Dr. Lightbody gave an answer so tortured and evasive that I had no clue what she was implying until she closed with the caveat “Now, don’t ever say that to a mother who’s lost a baby.” I later found out that Augustine also believed unbaptized infants were sent to hell.

  *5 Hybels keeps a poster in his office that reads: “What is our business? Who is our customer? What does the customer consider val
ue?” Rick Warren’s Saddleback motto is “Let the target audience determine the approach.”

  ON READING UPDIKE

  Like so many women who came of age after the turn of the millennium, I was warned about John Updike almost as soon as I became aware of him. There was David Foster Wallace, who, in a 1997 review, popularized the epithet (attributed to a female friend) “Just a penis with a thesaurus.” Then there was the writer Emily Gould, who placed him among the “midcentury misogynists”—a pantheon that also included Roth, Mailer, and Bellow. Perhaps most memorably, there was novelist and essayist Anna Shapiro, who claimed that Updike’s novels left the female reader “hoping that the men in your own life weren’t, secretly, seeing you that way—as a collection of compelling sexual organs the possession of which doomed you to ridicule-worthy tastes and concerns.”

  Such complaints were pervasive enough by the time I began reading that it was easy for me to dismiss his oeuvre entirely. I would love to concoct some sororal ceremony in which I laid my right hand on Sexual Politics and solemnly swore him off, but, in truth, the decision was more incremental, and my reasons more trivial. The criticism I’d read made his writing sound dull. There were too many good books in the world to waste time on a writer whose work was vitiated by ego and roundly despised by writers I admired, and so each time I had the opportunity to read a new author, I chose something else.

  In an earlier era, I suppose I would have been made to feel guilty for failing to read an author who is widely considered one of the greatest prose writers of all time. But ignoring him was surprisingly easy. In college, his name had been expurgated from syllabi, replaced with Paula Fox, Joan Didion, and James Baldwin. His true fans, whatever pockets still existed, seemed closeted, hesitant to offer recommendations. Once, in graduate school, I’d griped to a male professor that there were too few novels in the world with believable dialogue. He recommended a few authors, and I dutifully wrote down their names. Then he paused, as though deliberating, and added with a wince, “Also, I hate to say it, but—Updike.” It wasn’t until later that day, browsing the public library for a copy of Rabbit, Run (it was checked out), that I realized it was the same sheepish look assumed by boys at my high school when conceding that Hooters did, actually, have excellent wings.