Public Theology is based on the work of Zach W. Lambert, Pastor of Restore, an inclusive church in Austin, Texas. He and his wife, Amy Lambert, contribute to and moderate this account. Zach’s first book, Better Ways to Read the Bible, is now available wherever books are sold.
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One of the hallmarks of toxic theology is that it causes you to reason yourself out of doing obviously good things for people in the name of your theology.
Every once in a while, someone comes into your life who embodies the kind of faith you hope is possible—faith that’s thoughtful, humble, courageous, and deeply good. For me, one of those people has been Brian Recker.
Brian and I met years ago in the middle of both of us asking hard questions about God, church, and what it means to follow Jesus in a way that actually looks like Jesus. Over time, our conversations have ranged from theology and justice to parenting and pop culture, and they’ve shaped me more than he probably knows. He’s one of those rare people who listens deeply, speaks honestly, and lives with integrity even when it costs him something.
Brian left his job as an evangelical church pastor in order to better follow Jesus, and he’s written a great book about how we can leave eternal conscious torment behind for the exact same reason. I hope y’all enjoy this excerpt and then buy the book!
A SPIRITUALITY OF HELL
An excerpt from Hell Bent by
Hell, being the worst possible thing that could ever happen to anybody, has a way of crowding out other spiritual priorities. It sucks the air out of the room when it comes to any positive vision for spirituality. It shapes Christian spirituality in its punishing image.
For example, evangelicals often speak of good deeds like caring for the poor as a distraction from the “main thing.” After all, no earthly justice is as important as keeping people out of hell. What good is feeding the hungry if we don’t save their souls? Alleviating worldly suffering means nothing if we don’t save people from the eternal suffering that is waiting for them.
This focus on hell doesn’t just make conservative evangelicals ignore social welfare— it frequently causes them to actively oppose it. When I was a pastor, I once had an argument with another pastor who believed that the government shouldn’t provide welfare programs because that took the opportunity away from the church. “If the church was providing for the poor instead of the government,” he said, “then it would open up an opportunity to give them the gospel, which is what they really need. The government might lift people out of poverty, but it won’t save them from hell!” His view was not unique; in fact, it is incredibly common in evangelicalism. One of the hallmarks of toxic theology is that it causes you to reason yourself out of doing obviously good things for people in the name of your theology.
I argued with him, saying, “We should be serving and loving people for love’s own sake! If we’re only doing works of love to save people from hell, then our love isn’t pure— it has an agenda!” I don’t know why I was surprised by his line of thinking, though. Of course our loving deeds had an agenda. How could they not? If you believe hell is real, then hell will always set the agenda.
Because it was such a severe and all- encompassing reality, hell had a way of shaping all our spiritual priorities. Being a good neighbor didn’t have to mean caring for the vulnerable in our communities or learning to embrace and center marginalized people; it could just mean that you tried to keep your neighbor out of hell. This made hell a trump card. The most unloving beliefs could be called loving when they were done in the name of saving people from hell. Even the very definition of what it meant to love was poisoned by hell.
Here is a true and common story to show you what I mean. My friend June came out as a lesbian in her forties, after deconstructing her evangelical Christianity. She was the daughter of an evangelical pastor, and her family had already had a difficult time with the fact that she’d left the church. When she told them that she was gay and planned on bringing her partner to Thanksgiving that year, the pot of fear boiled over. They drew the line there. She was not welcome to come with her partner. June sobbed to me on the phone about this, asking me how they could uninvite their own daughter from Thanksgiving. “How could they say they loved me on the same phone call where they rejected me?” she asked me. I told her that I wasn’t sure if it helped to hear, but they almost certainly did love her— it’s just that, unfortunately, a spirituality of hell twists and corrupts love into something that feels a lot more like hate.
This story is familiar to many queer children of evangelical parents. In the name of saving their children from hell, these parents have excluded, condemned, disowned, and otherwise traumatized their own kids. And I’m sure that just about every time this has happened, those parents assured their children (and themselves) that they were doing these things out of love. June’s parents probably felt that they were doing the hard thing that needed to be done. In their mind, her sexual orientation was “unrepentant sin,” which meant she was going to hell. They felt they were being good Christians by prioritizing their daughter’s soul over her momentary happiness. They likely felt at their most spiritual, even as they wounded their daughter’s spirit. This is the spirituality we’re living out when hell is in the foundation.
Based on the way many Christians speak about hell and punishment, it would be easy to think that hell was Jesus’s central message. I will explain in depth in later chapters how that couldn’t be further from the truth, but I think it’s also helpful to look at the point Jesus was making when he did speak about something like hell. It is almost always the exact opposite of the point that evangelicals are making, and reveals almost the exact opposite priorities.
For example, one of the most commonly cited sayings of Jesus on hell is Matthew 25:46, where the wicked “go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.” But if we zoom out and look at what Jesus was talking about in these verses, we see that it has nothing to do with “becoming a Christian,” believing the right doctrines, or Jesus being punished in our place so we could be forgiven. This passage is about our behavior in this world, and specifically our behavior toward “the least of these” (Matthew 25:45). Jesus is warning us that when we neglect vulnerable, marginalized people, we create hell for ourselves and for other people.
You don’t need to die to see that this is true. You only have to open your eyes to a world on fire with climate change, where the gap between rich and poor continues to increase, and the wealthiest country in the history of the world spends its riches on bombs instead of health care. Going by Jesus’s priorities, the most sobering reality in the world today isn’t a hell that waits for us when we die. It is the poor being neglected, the hungry going without food, the immigrants being refused at the border, and the incarcerated being ignored. It is a hell of our own making, right here and now. Jesus was not “hell bent” on saving souls for the afterlife but on bringing the wholeness and love of God into this world, on this side of eternity.
But the evangelical doctrine of hell makes it very difficult to have the priorities of Jesus. Hell has the gravitational pull of a black hole, sucking in and crushing every other priority under its weight. It leaves us with a spirituality of fear instead of love, one that is focused on the afterlife at the expense of this life.
As I have begun to unpack the impacts this doctrine has had on my spiritual development, I see that fear and disconnection were cemented into the foundation of my faith from the very beginning, damaging my relationships with God, with other people, and even with myself. And I see that the same is true for many other people coming from a variety of different Christian backgrounds, who are on a variety of different deconstruction journeys.
For those of us who were raised with this kind of spirituality, evangelical or otherwise, there is work to do. If we want to reclaim a healthy, connected relationship with God, ourselves, and other people, we will first have to deconstruct the fear-based spirituality that has so damaged us.
Hell Bent is available all over. Please support Brian by buying his book, requesting it from the library, sharing this post, or following him on socials. We hope you enjoyed this excerpt!
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Zach, I loved your book and am now excited to read Brian's. If it looks and feels like fruitfulness and thriving, but a theology tells me that it is actually sin (or worse), that is toxic theology. It's disturbing how effectively the twistedness that Brian describes so vividly distorts reality and robs people of their intuition. When I don't trust what my eyes and heart are telling me out of fear that I'm being led astray by the devil, I will cling to the strong and clear voice in the room so that there is at least some holdfast to cling to. That's why people who are consciously (or unconsciously) seeking power over others find that fanning the flames of fear is the best strategy. Saving people's souls is then the perfect cover for greed, hubris, hate, etc.
Jesus is reduced to a powerful symbol - a means to an ends. It is heartbreaking.
Oh my goodness! I can't wait to read the book! I'm going to look for it in my library, or try to buy it, maybe as a Christmas gift for myself