Sans Fig Leaf
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"Double-toothpicks"
29 March, 2007
Back when I was with the evangelical touring teen choir, we would often, on the summer tour, stay at one church for several days in a row (rather than sing one night then move on to the next place). So we'd perform several concerts and help the church with some project. One time the specific church community was a bit disturbing to many members of the choir.
The church people couldn't stop talking about Hell. Every conversation mentioned it several times. Members of the congregation who were converts were particularly prone to going on at great lengths about how this or that sermon about the eternal damnation of hell had been the one that convinced them to become "born again."
It was so prevalent in their church culture that they were obviously worried by the fact that most of us were not as obsessed with Hell as they were. And I do mean obsessed. Some of them kept going on and on about the eternal torment in the lake of fire that unbelievers were doomed to. They were practically drooling over the description-- imagining the unending suffering seemed like porn, to some of them.
Our group was an inter-denominational group from a medium-sized town in the very laid back pacific northwest, where even the most fundamentalist evangelicals talk almost exclusively of transformative love, divine compassion, brotherly love, charity, hope, that sort of thing. They weren't used to hearing a constant, in-depth recitation of the details of eternal damnation.
Having attended churches in a lot of different small towns growing up, I had encountered a similar outlook from time to time. Though none of the churches we'd attended had been quite so fixated.
What we found so disturbing also happened to be why they worried about us. They couldn't conceive that someone would embrace their faith without having been scared nearly to death at the alternative. We couldn't understand how a faith could be real if it was based primarily on terror.
As one of my friends put it while talking about the experience a few weeks later, "Jesus wanted his followers to genuinely love everyone--not pretend to love people out of fear of terrible punishment."
I'm sure they wouldn't agree with our assessment they were pretending out of fear, but it's hard to ignore all the time and energy they spent speculating about and describing the torment of the damned. And it was really difficult to ignore the shock and amazement they expressed each time we failed to guess that a fiery description of the torment of Hell had been the moment that changed someone's life. Time after time they told how explaining to someone the "simple truth" that they would suffer forever if they didn't join their faith had led the person to repent.
That's not faith, that's coercion.
There are people of all creeds who refrain from some activities out of fear of being caught, rather than moral conviction. Just as there are sincerely compassionate people to be found following every belief system imaginable. But good is more than the absence of evil--or in the case of some of these folks, the avoidance of being caught violating a commandment. Doing good is more than just preventing bad things.
Goodness is a positive act. It requires effort as well as intention. It isn't simple. It isn't easy. It can be very rewarding. It can help you avoid certain kinds of trouble. But neither of those is the point.
The good itself is the only point.
--Arthur Schopenhauer
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