Infernal Logic
Belief in hell as a motivator for evangelism, and how it can be at odds with love.
Words: Brian Recker
Oh God, did I hate passing out tracts. Every Thursday, our church would head down into the subway station for tract ministry. Evangelism, baby. I hated it, and I hated myself for hating it. I would stick my arm out, thrusting a gospel tract into someone’s hands while trying to avoid eye contact. The truly zealous and effective “soul winners” did a lot more than that. My dad would attempt to start a conversation, the whole point of which was to lead to the zinger question: “If you die today, do you know for sure where you’re going?”
Believing that someone is going to hell has an unsurprisingly negative effect on how you view that person. “Damned” is a hell of a category to put someone in (pun intended). If I damn someone in my mind, I cannot experience solidarity with them – we are not all in this together. Our fates are drastically different. We are worlds apart.
The spirituality of hell is fear-based, and fear always separates. It is very difficult to be inclusive or accept someone as they are if you believe that who they are will result in eternal damnation. If that’s the case, you are required to change them, to save them. Accepting them would actually mean giving up on them; it would be giving them over to their unthinkably awful fate.
Thomas Merton said, "the beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image.” One of the reasons I have rejected the doctrine of hell is that it makes this almost impossible.
If you interviewed just about any evangelical pastor (and plenty of nonevangelical pastors) in America and asked them what the mission of their church was, they would ultimately admit that it was to get as many people as possible to convert to Christianity. They probably wouldn’t say it so bluntly, at least not at first. They might start by saying they exist “to make Jesus famous” or even something nice like “to spread the love of God.” But if you drilled down to what they meant by that, they would ultimately have to admit that it was all about conversion. It has to be! Hell is too important for it to be otherwise.
Now, there are some evangelical churches and leaders who believe that social justice and good works are an important part of our calling as Christians. However, whenever this viewpoint starts to gain traction, the larger evangelical institution takes pains to shut it down. For example, conservative pastors Kevin DeYoung and Greg Gilbert wrote the popular book What Is the Mission of the Church? precisely in order to quash the creeping popularity of social justice in the Church and insist that the mission of the Church should be primarily focused on saving souls. As long as hell is a part of their gospel story, the danger of hell will always be far greater than the danger of injustice in this world. This is why although many evangelical churches will gesture toward justice-related issues, they will struggle to make it anything more than window dressing.
When I first became an evangelical pastor, one of the most popular buzzwords was missional. Everything we did needed to be missional, and everywhere we went, we were supposed to be “on mission.” Many of these missional churches even conducted training events for how to live on mission. I remember one pastor sharing ideas such as throwing a neighbourhood block party, holding a free yard sale, or paying for a stranger’s gas at the gas station. But the purpose of these acts of kindness was not purely to spread love. The purpose was to convert nonbelievers into believers. Evangelicals learned the holy art of the bait and switch. Our primary job as Christians was conversion. How could it not be?
But if our primary job was to see our neighbours get saved, then they were not really our neighbours; they were our mission field. We were carrying the only message of salvation. They needed us. This was not a mutual relationship, which requires that both parties respect each other and contribute meaningfully to the relationship. If I believe that you’re going to burn for eternity unless you listen to me and agree with me, then you are my project, not my friend. I don’t need to have curiosity or listen to you. I need to save you. This creates a sense of superiority and alienation.
Hell-based theology feeds a coloniser mentality in which we believe the world “out there” is lost and broken but we have the answers to fix it. The others are going to hell for being wrong – they need our system of faith and our way of life. They need to be saved. This perverse logic has justified unimaginable cruelty throughout history, from the genocide of indigenous people to the enslavement of African people. The doctrine of hell provided perfect theological cover for this colonisation and allowed white Christians to baptise their savagery as holy. After all, what was the loss of land, culture, and life compared to the urgency of saving souls from eternal torment?
Hell gave colonisers spiritual justification for white supremacy. White Christians positioned themselves as the gatekeepers of heaven and hell, the arbiters of who was “saved” and who was “lost.” White culture, white interpretation of scripture, and white ways of worship were superior, and everyone else’s spirituality was dismissed as primitive, pagan, and headed for eternal damnation. In this sense, white supremacy has historically been inseparable from Christian supremacy and exclusivism. There may be nothing more damaging to our connectedness with one another than a colonising, supremacist mentality undergirded by hell theology.
Christian supremacy is not just a global problem. Growing up, I experienced this alienation firsthand, in my own family. My dad came to his fundamentalist faith as an adult, and the rest of his family did not believe like we did. This was a constant topic of discussion and prayer. As a child, I was unaware of the way Dad’s brothers and sisters viewed our fundamentalist family. I was only aware of how we viewed them, and that was as unbelievers.
My dad’s older brother was an audio engineer who often hosted holiday parties in his Manhattan apartment. David was his given name, but in high school he started going by Rex, short for Recker, our surname. This seemed eminently cool to me as a child (and later to my son, who at six years old started demanding we call him Rex too). Rex and his wife, Renee, had no kids, but they did have several cats, modern furniture, music that I wasn’t ordinarily allowed to listen to, and wine that they drank from fancy glasses. I looked up to Rex – but I also believed he was a sinner, headed for hell. We would pray for Rex at night before bed, along with our other unsaved family members. We prayed that they would believe in Jesus so that they could go to heaven when they died.
On the way to Christmas parties at Rex’s in our station wagon, my parents would prepare us. “Kids,” my dad would say over his shoulder to my sister and me in his father/pastor voice, “you know my family doesn’t know the Lord, so they’re going to be drinking, probably using the Lord’s name in vain. In fact, Debbie, can you say a prayer right now for God’s peace in our midst this evening?”
Almost every drive began with a prayer. “Yes, Lord!” my mom would begin. “We KNOW that you will be with us tonight as we go visit Matthew’s precious family. Please open their hearts, Lord! Would you help us, Lord, to be LIGHTS, to know how to speak with them, Lord. Give us wisdom! In Jesus’s name, amen.”
On the drive home, we would pray again, recapping the evening’s various sins and asking once more for our family members’ salvation. I still admire my parents’ pure faith in a God who heard our prayers, a God who was always present with us and who would act in love for us. But our faith in God actually became an enemy of love, because we saw other people as separate from us and from God.
My dad had a vivid painting of heaven and hell over his dresser, to remind him of what mattered most.* Every morning as he got ready, he was confronted with eternity. Rescuing people from hell.
Nothing mattered more. I used to feel guilt at how little desire I had to evangelise, compared to my dad. I assumed this made him a more spiritual person than I was.
I can see now that my guilt was misplaced – almost all the characteristics of spirituality that I was taught to admire and emulate were actually negative traits. When hell is at the centre of our spirituality, it creates a malformed version of spiritual maturity. In that view, a mature, spiritual Christian can be abrasive, judgmental, divisive, and pushy.
Thankfully, unlike many conservative Christians I have encountered, my dad has the ability to be kind to people who disagree with him, and for that I am very grateful. And yet, there was a distance in our relationship with our extended family. We believed that they were lost and we were saved. This gave us an alienating false superiority: we were the ones who had the truth. They were objects of our prayer. I could not simply enjoy them as my family – they were a mission field.
I will never forget the last time my Uncle Rex ever visited the fundamentalist church my dad pastored in New York City. Rex lived in midtown Manhattan, just a few neighbourhoods over, but he never came, despite constant invitations. One year, my dad invited Dr Bob Jones III, the president of the fundamentalist school Bob Jones University, as a special guest speaker. He told Rex how much it would mean to him for Rex to show up, and Rex obliged. On the drive to church that morning, there was an extra element of pleading in our prayers.
The title of Dr Bob’s sermon, I will never forget, was “How Hot Is Hell.” I squirmed anxiously in my chair, thinking of how this sermon would hit Rex. It was a familiar feeling. When hell came up in a sermon, I would find myself thinking of how these condemnations were making people feel. I knew that I was supposed to be glad that they were hearing “the truth,” but instead I wanted to disappear.
At the end of the service, Rex left politely but immediately. As far as I am aware, he never came again. On the way home, my dad reflected on how even though it was a hard word, at least Rex got to hear the truth. None of this felt good to me at the time, but I assumed that the deficiency was in myself. If hell was real – and my entire system of belief insisted that it was – then Dr Bob’s sermon was appropriate and necessary. People needed to be warned.
I have a lot of sympathy for the way my dad believes that many of his dearest family members are going to hell. In the moments when his rigid beliefs are hurting our relationship, I try to remember how that must feel. It’s a hell of a thing to believe. When someone who believes in hell says or does something that makes me feel rejected, I try to remind myself that from the vantage point of their beliefs, they’re probably trying to love me.
Unfortunately, nothing fucks up love like hell.
This is an adapted excerpt from the USA today national best seller, Hell Bent: How the Fear of Hell Holds Christians Back from a Spirituality of Love by Brian D Recker
Brian D Recker is a public theologian, speaker, writer, and former evangelical pastor. He now speaks about following Jesus without exclusionary dogma on socials and on his Substack, Beloved. His book, Hell Bent is out now. brianrecker.com
IG: @berecker