It didn’t feel like a faith crisis right away — more like a faith malfunction, a little glitch in the system that made a few critical functions start to misfire. It began one November afternoon as I hurried through the lobby of my dorm at Bryan on my way to a meeting with the newspaper staff. I noticed a group of ten or twelve girls standing around the TV.
“Did something happen?” I asked, my stomach dropping, as I remembered a similar scene from the morning of September 11.
“You’ve got to see this,” one of the girls said.
It was just before the US invaded Afghanistan in 2001, and the press had been airing a series of crude home videos depicting the human rights abuses of the Taliban. The most recent footage came from Behind the Veil, an undercover documentary that highlights the oppression of women in that country.
My classmates and I watched as a woman enshrouded in a heavy blue burqa arrived at a soccer stadium in Kabul in the back of a pickup truck. Accused of murdering her husband, she was flanked by Kalishnikov-toting Taliban officers who, according to the narrator, intended to make an example of her before the nearly thirty thousand spectators. The documentary suddenly jumped to the next clip, in which the woman was forced to kneel on the dusty soccer pitch. She turned to the left and right, as if disoriented. The camera’s zoom was so tight that everything trembled.
Then, from the left-hand corner of the screen, an executioner approached the woman, methodically lifted his gun to the back of her head, and fired. Several of the girls in the lobby gasped. The documentary suddenly cut to the next image, in which another veiled woman rushed to the body to make sure it was still properly hidden by the burqa. The woman’s lifeless form lay face up, and I noticed that she wore tennis shoes.
I later learned that her name was Zarmina. She was a thirty-five-year-old mother of five whose husband had a reputation for abuse. She had married him when she was just sixteen. The Taliban never found a murder weapon, but locals report that they got a confession after beating Zarmina for two days with steel cables. Convicted in a secret trial, Zarmina spent three years in an Afghan prison, while her oldest daughters were sold into sex slavery by relatives. Friends say she came to the soccer stadium expecting a series of lashes, not death.
CNN repeatedly aired the tape, perhaps to make us feel better about going to war against the Taliban. But it wasn’t the Taliban I was angry with. Each time I watched Zarmina’s execution, I got angrier and angrier with God. God was the one who claimed to have formed Zarmina in her mother’s womb. It was God who ordained that she be born in a third-world country under an oppressive regime. God had all the power and resources at his disposal to stop this from happening, and yet he did nothing. Worst of all, twenty years of Christian education assured me that because Zarmina was a Muslim, she would suffer unending torment in hell for the rest of eternity. How the Taliban punished Zarmina in this life was nothing compared with how God would punish her in the next.
Suddenly abstract concepts about heaven and hell, election and free will, religious pluralism and exclusivism had a name: Zarmina. I felt like I could come to terms with Zarmina’s suffering if it were restricted to this lifetime, if I knew that God would grant her some sort of justice after death. But the idea that this woman passed from agony to agony, from torture to torture, from a lifetime of pain and sadness to an eternity of pain and sadness, all because she had less information about the gospel than I did, seemed cruel, even sadistic. God knew long before Zarmina was born — before her first giggle, before her first steps, before her first words — that this was her fate. He knew it from the beginning and yet created her anyway. I wondered how many millions of people like Zarmina died every day in similar circumstances. I thought about the Killing Fields of Cambodia, the gassing of Iraqi Kurds, and those terrible, haunting images of warehouses full of eyeglasses and shoes and prayer shawls left behind by victims of the Holocaust. Was I supposed to believe that all of these people went to hell because they weren’t Christians?
It wasn’t as if the concept of hell had never bothered me before. Even as a child, I had a strange habit of thinking about people in terms of their eternal destiny. Whenever I caught a news story about the death of a movie star or politician, I asked my parents if he or she was a Christian. When I learned about Pizarro’s slaughter of the Incas in history class, I asked my teacher if there was any chance that more benevolent missionaries might have reached the natives first. I cried through the end of Life Is Beautiful because I believed that if Guido had been a real person, he would have gone to hell.
After we finished the last pages of The Diary of Anne Frank in middle school, Mrs. Kelly informed the class that Anne and her sister died of typhus in a prison camp, thanks to Adolf Hitler. I was horrified, not just because of the prison camp but because everything I’d been taught as a girl told me that because Anne was Jewish, because she had not accepted Jesus Christ as her Savior, she and the rest of her family were burning in hell. I remember staring at the black-and-white picture of Anne on the cover of my paperback, privately begging God to let her out of the lake of fire. For weeks, I prayed diligently for her departed soul, even though I’d heard that only Catholics and Mormons ever did such a thing. I was a pretty intense kid, actually.
In Sunday school, they always make hell out to be a place for people like Hitler, not a place for his victims. But if my Sunday school teachers and college professors were right, then hell will be populated not only by people like Hitler and Stalin, Hussein and Milosevic but by the people that they persecuted. If only born-again Christians go to heaven, then the piles of suitcases and bags of human hair displayed at the Holocaust Museum represent thousands upon thousands of men, women, and children suffering eternal agony at the hands of an angry God. If salvation is available only to Christians, then the gospel isn’t good news at all. For most of the human race, it is terrible news.
I thought about all of this the night after I saw Zarmina’s execution. A heavy rain clawed at my dorm room window like a frantic cat, and the wind rattled the power lines so that the lamplight flickered on and off. Sarah sat in the opposite corner of the room on the floor, working feverishly on some kind of poster project for her elementary education class, scraps of construction paper and little plastic eyeballs spread all around her. I couldn’t concentrate on my King Lear assignment.
“Do you think that there is rape in hell?” I asked Sarah.
“What?” She looked understandably startled.
“Rape. Do you think there is rape in hell?”
“I don’t know, Rachel. I don’t think the Bible says anything about that. What on earth makes you ask?”
“People say that hell is a place of eternal torture, right? Well, the most horrible thing I can imagine happening to anybody is getting raped over and over again for eternity, so I suppose it’s fathomable that people get raped in hell, right?”
“I guess it’s fathomable, but — ”
“Did you see that thing on the news about that woman who got shot at the soccer field in Afghanistan?”
“Yeah, I did.”
“What do you think happened to her after that?”
“After she got shot? I don’t think we can know for sure, Rachel. We don’t really know her heart.”
“That’s what people say when they don’t want to say that someone went to hell,” I said flatly. “The lady on CNN said she prayed the traditional Muslim prayers just before they brought her out. She was definitely a Muslim, Sarah.”
Sarah paused. “Well, you know Jesus said, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life . . .’ ”
“But that’s not fair. How was she supposed to know any different? All her life she was taught that Islam is the only true religion, just like we were taught all our lives that Christianity is the only true religion. God didn’t really give her a chance.”
“Isn’t that why missionaries are so important?” Sarah asked.
“Yes, but missionaries can’t get to everybody in time. There are millions of people, past and present, who have had no exposure to Christianity at all. Are we supposed to believe that five seconds after Jesus rose from the dead, everyone on earth was responsible for that information? How is a guy living in, I don’t know, Outer Mongolia in 15 AD supposed to figure out that Jesus died on the cross for his sins, was buried, and rose again on the third day? It’s impossible.”
I had absolutely no idea where Outer Mongolia was or what sort of people lived there in 15 AD, but I was pretty certain they didn’t go to Sunday school.
“We just assume that little kids and mentally disabled people go to heaven,” I said. “The Bible doesn’t come right out and say that. So why can’t we believe that people without the gospel go to heaven? What’s the difference? Why won’t anyone give me a straight answer on this?”
Poor Sarah looked stricken, and I realized I may have pushed a little too hard.
“Why don’t you ask your dad?” she asked tentatively.
That night I took a long shower before going to bed, where I lay awake for hours listening to the rain and trying to pray. When I finally fell asleep, I dreamed about Zarmina.
The next morning, chapel opened with worship. Onstage a guy wearing jeans, a gray T-shirt, and Birkenstocks played the guitar, the lyrics of the worship song projected on the screen behind him. We sang a song in which the lyrics said of God, “You’re altogether lovely, altogether worthy, altogether wonderful to me.”
As my friends and classmates sang together, some with raised hands and closed eyes, all I could think about was Zarmina’s tennis shoes peeking out from under her burqa. I didn’t see anything lovely or wonderful about that. My throat tightened, and I stopped singing. A thick and intense sadness rushed over my body, and I didn’t want to worship anymore.
All my life, I had imagined God as a warm, faceless light, a sort of benevolent and eternal sunshine. That morning in chapel, a shadow passed over him like an eclipse, and for the next few years, all I could see was a faint glow around its edges.
It was as if I had discovered a giant crack in the biblical worldview wall, and the more I studied that crack, the more fractures and fissures I noticed growing out of it. I began to worry that this thing with Zarmina might be a foundational problem, that there might be something seriously wrong with Christianity, something that can’t be fixed.
What makes a faith crisis so scary is that once you allow yourself to ask one or two questions, more inevitably follow. Before you know it, everything looks suspicious. Doubts I’d been shoving to the back of my mind for years came rushing forward in an avalanche of questions: If God is really good and merciful, then why did he command Joshua to kill every man, woman, and child in Jericho? Wouldn’t we call that genocide today? How can God be fair and just if he preordains our eternal destiny, if most people have no choice but to face eternal damnation? When we say that God is sovereign, that no good or evil is done outside of his will, does that mean that he presides over every rape of a child? If we are born depraved and we have no control over our sin nature, why does God punish us for it? If all truth is God’s truth, then why are we so afraid to confront the mountain of scientific evidence in support of evolution? Isn’t it a little suspicious that the only true religion is the one with which we happened to grow up?
The space between doubting God’s goodness and doubting his existence is not as wide as you might think. I found myself crossing it often, as it didn’t require much of a leap. I suppose it’s similar to what happens to a person when she is betrayed by a loved one. At first, the betrayed is angry because the betrayer has violated some sacred bond between them, some official or unofficial commitment to love, friendship, or loyalty. But over time, the betrayed begins to wonder if that bond ever existed in the first place, if it was real or just in her imagination. That’s how I felt about God. First I doubted that he is good; then I doubted that he is real. It seemed the teleological argument in support of his existence was a lot less effective when I was unsure of his benevolence. I never realized how important hope is to belief.
I began collecting evidence for the little trial I was conducting in my head. I looked into the science behind evolution. I checked out books from the school library about world religions. I confronted the unflattering parts of church history. I studied troubling biblical texts that seemed to support slavery, misogyny, violence, and ethnic cleansing. I grew more and more suspicious of people who claimed that God supported certain political positions or theological systems or lifestyle decisions.
Big questions have a sort of domino effect. Concerns about certain biblical texts led to questions about the Bible’s accuracy; questions about the Bible’s accuracy led to questions about how the canon was assembled; questions about how the canon was assembled led to questions about church authority; questions about church authority led to questions about the Holy Spirit; questions about the Holy Spirit led to questions about the Trinity; questions about the Trinity led to questions about how on earth I’d gone from worrying about the garden of Eden to worrying about three-leaf clover analogies.
Only this time, I wasn’t asking these questions rhetorically or in preparation for an imaginary debate with a skeptic. I was asking them because I didn’t know. This time, I was the skeptic.
When I was a little girl, if someone asked me why I was a Christian, I said it was because Jesus lived in my heart. In high school, I said it was because I accepted the atonement of Jesus Christ on the cross for my sins. My sophomore year of college, during a short-lived Reformed phase, I said it was because of the irresistible grace of God. But after watching Zarmina’s execution on television, I decided that the most truthful answer to that question was this: I was a Christian because I was born in the United States of America in the year 1981 to Peter and Robin Held. Arminians call it free will; Calvinists call it predestination. I call it “the cosmic lottery.”
It doesn’t take an expert in anthropology to figure out that the most important factor in determining the nature of one’s existence, including one’s religion, is the place and time in which one is born, a factor completely out of one’s control. I happened to be born in the United States of America in the twentieth century to Christian parents whose religion I embraced. Had I lived in this very spot in the Appalachian mountains just two thousand years earlier, I know for a fact I would not have accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior, mainly because I would have never heard of the guy. Or let’s say I got the century right but the location wrong. There’s little doubt in my mind that if I had grown up in a modern Muslim household in, say, Afghanistan or Turkey, I would have faithfully honored the teachings of my parents and followed Islam like everyone else. We don’t choose our worldviews; they are chosen for us.
That’s what I told my father in his office one Friday afternoon, sometime between seeing Zarmina’s execution and graduating from Bryan a year later.
I loved my father’s office. Dense with books and heavy, dark furniture, it was decorated with miniature gargoyles and interesting rocks and framed photographs from my father’s travels: a black bear among the wildflowers at Yellowstone, driftwood on a Bahamian beach, a perfect, sunlit shot of the Colosseum at Rome. An ornate wooden chess set waited on a corner table for impromptu games with students. Embarrassing pictures of me and Amanda in braces sat on his cluttered desk. I felt safe there.
“It’s like God runs some kind of universal sweepstakes with humanity in which all of our names get thrown into a big hat at the beginning of time,” I said, sitting cross-legged in the chair across from his desk. “Some of us are randomly selected for famine, war, disease, and paganism, while others end up with fifteen-thousand-square-foot houses, expensive Christian educations, and Double Stuf Oreos. It’s a cosmic lottery, luck of the draw.”
My father listened attentively, asking questions here and there and letting me go on for at least an hour before saying, “Rachel, we don’t get to pick and choose which parts of the Bible we believe based on how we feel. Just because you don’t understand God’s ways doesn’t mean he is not good. You’re right. A lot of people die without the gospel, and I can see why that would upset you. But don’t be ungrateful for your own salvation.”
“Dad, how can I be grateful?” I asked incredulously, tears collecting in my eyes. “It’s like God is a Nazi prison-camp guard, randomly weeding out prisoners as part of selection. If someone shot and killed Mom and Amanda but spared my life, maybe I’d feel a fleeting sense of gratitude toward him, but I could never bring myself to worship and adore him. How is God any different? Why should I worship a God who shows mercy to me but not my neighbor? Why should we be outraged by things like the Holocaust or human trafficking when our own God is just as cruel to his creation as we are to each other?”
I think my irreverence startled him a little, because something that looked like fear cast a shadow over his face. His voice sounded strained. “Rachel,” he said gently, “be careful of what you say.”
I think you officially grow up the moment you realize you are capable of causing your parents pain. All the rebellion of adolescence, all the slammed doors and temper tantrums and thoughtless words of youth — those are signs that you still think your parents are invincible, that you still imagine yourself as powerless against them. As my father and I talked in his office that afternoon, I imagined how devastated he would be if I ever left the faith, and I realized for the first time that I could break his heart. I realized for the first time that we were made out of the same stuff. Fear and insecurity felt the same to him as they felt to me. He had no special immunity against disappointment or guilt, no built-in armor to protect himself from the pain I might cause him. For the first time in my life, I knew what it was like to relate to my father as a peer.
It was scary.