It’s hard to maintain a consistent worldview when the world itself is always changing, and in the months and years following my junior year of college, the world changed dramatically.
Evangelicals helped elect George W. Bush to office in 2000 in hopes that he might win a few culture wars, but by the time he reached his second term, the country was embroiled in two actual wars that had changed the cultural landscape of the US and the world in ways never before imagined.
The religious nationalism that characterized the months after September 11, 2001, gave way to concern and doubt as a war-weary and economically struggling public grappled with the country’s diminishing influence abroad. Pledges to “rid the world of evildoers,” once unifying reveilles, rang with arrogance and naiveté in hindsight. Months turned into years, death tolls crept higher and higher, and talk of torture and wiretaps and collateral damage rose from nervous whispers to shouts. Things stopped fitting into the neat and tidy categories of right and wrong, good and evil. Black and white slowly bled into gray.
My friends and I watched it all unfold on our laptops and cell phones. Images of conflict and disaster arrived instantly and ran perpetually through the twenty-four-hour news cycle. No previous generation enjoyed such easy access to information or experienced such a profound sense of connectedness to the rest of the world. Because of this, I think we were less inclined than our parents to think of America as the center of the universe and the people of other countries and cultures as mere statistics. Shifts in immigration patterns meant we knew more Muslims and Hindus by name. The accessibility of international travel broadened our exposure to languages and cultures outside of the Western world. Our fondness for technology led us to read blogs from Ireland and tweets from Iran. We played poker with Australians and lost first-person shooter games to ten-year-old Korean kids. People like Zarmina seemed a lot less like “them” and a lot more like “us.”
When Baghdad is virtually no farther away than New York, you begin to realize that what happens over there is just as real as what happens in your hometown. After seeing Zarmina’s execution on TV, I began to grapple with the reality that kids who died in wars in the Middle East were no different from kids who died in terrorist attacks here in the US. Women raped in Darfur are no different from my mother or my sister or my roommate. Babies killed by bad water or lack of nutrition have no less value than babies killed in abortions. Afghan and Pakistani mothers don’t love their children any less than American mothers love theirs.
I’m not sure if there was more bad news or if I was just paying more attention, but it seemed like the years following my graduation from Bryan in 2003 were turbulent ones for a lot of people around the world. Images of tsunami waves, earthquake rubble, and refugee camps filled newspapers and magazines. With each new report, I worked out the numbers in my head. The Asian tsunami of 2004, for example, killed two hundred thousand people living in coastal communities around Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, and Thailand. That was nearly seventy times the death toll from the 9/11 attacks. Most of the victims were either Buddhist or Hindu. The conflict in Sudan that began in 2003 has claimed more than three hundred thousand men, women, and children, most of them Muslim. By the time the Kashmir earthquake of 2005 killed seventy thousand Pakistanis, just two months after Hurricane Katrina, the media claimed that the American public was suffering from what they called “disaster fatigue.” I found this a little ironic, seeing as most Americans are well fed, perfectly safe, and wealthy by global standards.
While Iraqis were dodging car bombs and Pakistanis were pulling their children out of rubble, I was going to the movies with my friends, earning a decent living as a freelance writer, and splurging on name-brand cereal. While millions of people lived without access to the Bible, we had three different versions on our bookshelf. While Sudanese mothers worried about how to feed their children, we worried about beating the crowds to Olive Garden on Sunday. While some went a lifetime without hearing the gospel, we took it for granted.
“I’m not suffering from disaster fatigue,” I told the television one day. “I’m suffering from survivor’s guilt.”
My generation tends to be suspicious of absolutism. Speakers at apologetics camp like to say that we’re getting so open-minded our brains are falling out. A few go so far as to blame it all on Madonna and Lady Gaga. If they make it cool to be tolerant of other religions or give to charity or oppose war, they say, my generation will naively obey, buying Kabbalah bracelets, learning yoga, and joining the Free Tibet movement.
But I think most folks are beginning to realize that this assessment mischaracterizes my generation and underestimates how profoundly the world has changed for us. Nathan questioned religious exclusivism not because some celebrity told him to but because he spent time in Iraq, learned Arabic, and befriended a Muslim. I reexamined my positions on heaven and hell not because I wanted to be like Britney but because I was forever changed after watching Zarmina’s execution. My friend Wendee, a biology student, opened her mind to the science behind evolutionary theory not because she was intellectually lazy but because she was curious and smart and committed to her field. My sister, Amanda, got behind AIDS-awareness campaigns not because she’s a Bono fan but because she held a dying Indian girl in her arms.
My dad likes to explain it this way: “When I was growing up, my parents told me to finish my dinner because kids in Africa were dying of hunger. Now my children know those kids by name.”
The open-mindedness of young adults reflects something more profound and important than a fad. I’m not exactly sure what it is yet or what it should be called, but I think it has something to do with adapting to a new environment, evolving in order to survive. After all, we grew up believing that the US was invincible, free-market capitalism was infallible, and Pluto was a planet. We’ve gotten used to changing our minds.
Some Christians are more offended by the idea of everyone going to heaven than by the idea of everyone going to hell. I learned this the hard way, as reports about my faith crisis spread around town and rumors that I’d become a universalist found their way back to me in a wave of concerned emails and phone calls. Once news of your backsliding makes it to the prayer chain, it’s best just to resign yourself to your fate. I knew that my chances for winning another Best Christian Attitude Award were all but extinct when a former professor asked me when I’d started studying Buddhism.
Privately, I felt frightened and lost. I cried out to God night after night, begging him to “help me in my unbelief.” I pressed my face into my pillow, trying to will myself out of doubt and back to faith, only to wake up the next morning with puffy red eyes and a spiritual numbness that left me absent and disconnected from the world. I hated going to church because silly little things like communion cups or kids’ choirs or fundraising announcements triggered paranoia about brainwashing and pyramid schemes. I couldn’t seem to read the Bible without bumping into something I didn’t like or didn’t understand. Praying grew harder and harder, and I felt myself starting to give up.
Publicly, I grew obstinate and incorrigible, ready to debate family and friends whose easy confidence baffled and frustrated me and gave me an excuse to be angry at someone besides God. It bothered me that other people weren’t bothered. I couldn’t understand why no one else was stressed out about the existence of hell or angered by all the suffering in the world. I feigned surprise when my friends got annoyed that I raised such topics at bridal showers and poker games. Wherever I sensed a calm sea, I sought to rock the boat; I wanted others to share in my storm.
There’s a chance this may have alienated me from some people.
Sarah seemed especially troubled. “Don’t you think it’s a little dangerous to be questioning God?” she asked one cold Saturday afternoon at Harmony House, the same coffee shop where I met with Nathan.
“Maybe it is,” I said, warming my hands on my mug, “but I can’t just snap my fingers and make these questions go away, Sarah. I’m really struggling with this idea that our eternal destiny is determined by luck of the draw, that most people go to hell simply for being born in the wrong place at the wrong time. Any way you look at it, that’s unfair.”
“People aren’t damned because they don’t know about Jesus,” Sarah said. “They are damned because they are sinners. We are all enemies of God, Rachel. We all deserve hell.”
“Yes, but if God is sovereign, then the fall was just a part of his plan. We’re stuck with this sin nature that we can’t control, and God punishes us for it. It’s like we’re just puppets on a string, and God is mad at us for doing what he makes us do.”
Sarah looked ready to give up. “God’s ways are higher than our ways, Rachel. At some point you have to accept the fact that you cannot understand everything he does. He is the potter. You are the clay. The clay can’t tell the potter what to do.”
“You know what, Sarah? I’m starting to wonder if maybe we made this potter up.”
It was one of the last conversations she and I ever had about God. Even now, when we get together to catch up, we tend to talk around him the way people talk around a shared secret or a dead friend. I think we’re both afraid of saying something wrong.
While some friends declared my faith dead on arrival, others insisted on defibrillation via systematic theology. Most insistent was my friend Andy,8 who sent me an email with the subject line “just checking in” after hearing from someone (who heard from someone else) that I’d become a universalist, or a Buddhist, or something really terrible, like an Anglican. At the conclusion of the email, he wrote:
I’m sorry to hear that a smart girl like you has become another cotton-candy Christian. I understand why you feel compassion for the damned, Rachel, but you can’t let emotion and sentimentality determine your theology. Feelings cannot be trusted because feelings are perverted by our sin nature. Only God’s Word can be trusted on matters like this.
The truth is, God is utterly disgusted by our sin, and it is a miracle that he chooses to save any of us to begin with. Without him, we are vile and disgusting and worthy only of damnation. This notion that everyone is entitled to salvation is a dangerous one, more reflective of culture’s emphasis on individual rights than scriptural truths. None of us are worthy of God’s grace, Rachel. I know that I am not. I encourage you to stop challenging God’s sovereignty and consider taking a position of humility and thankfulness.
I’d heard this response many times before and had affectionately dubbed it “pond-scum theology.” At the heart of pond-scum theology is the premise that human beings have no intrinsic value or claim to salvation because their sin nature makes them so thoroughly disgusting and offensive to God that he is under no obligation to pay them any mind. It’s the view that inspired Jonathan Edwards’ famed “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” sermon, in which Edwards told his trembling congregation, “The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.”9
It’s a view recently resurrected by outspoken Reformed pastors who have argued that God can’t even look at us because he is so disgusted by our sin nature, one even suggesting that God sent the tsunami to wash some of this pond scum from his sight. Pond-scum theology effectively shifts the question from How could a loving God send anyone to hell? to How could an angry God allow anyone into heaven?
While pond-scum theology provides an intellectually satisfying response to the problem of the unevangelized, it looks a lot better on paper than it does in real life, with real people who have real lives and real names. Pond-scum theology made sense in my head, but it never made sense in my heart. I knew that I was broken, that I was capable of great evil and tragically prone to sin, but deep down, at the very center of my being, I felt as though I still mattered to God. And I needed to know that Zarmina and Anne Frank mattered to him too. I needed to know that every person behind every pair of shoes recovered from every concentration camp mattered, that God had not forgotten them, that he loved them, and that he knew each of their names. I needed to know that God does not make disposable people.
Pond-scum theology makes even less sense in the context of the Gospels. To believe that people are inherently worthless to God strips the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of all their meaning and power. It makes Jesus look like a fool for dying for us, and it leaves his followers with little incentive to seek out and celebrate the good in one another.
When it came down to it, to believe that the reprobate are created for hell without any hope of salvation required that I ignore my most instinctive and visceral conceptions of right and wrong, good and evil, justice and love. I just couldn’t stomach the idea that some people are beyond hope, that God has no intention of ever loving them, and that my compassion for them represented a weakness of faith. What Andy considered mere sentimentality and emotion, I considered the very essence of who I am. I can’t just shut those instincts off. I don’t want to.
I emailed Andy and told him I didn’t like this version of God in which his wrath overwhelms his mercy, in which he has less compassion for people than I do.
“It’s not my version of God,” Andy wrote back. “It’s God’s version of God. Take it up with him.”
Dan always says that as soon as you think you’ve got God figured out, you can bet on the fact that you’re wrong. That’s what he told me the following Sunday morning, as I lay curled up in a little ball in our bed, crying about how I’d rather that God just didn’t exist than that he be so angry and vengeful and cruel.
He sat down next to me and ran his fingers through my hair. “Well, have you considered the possibility that maybe you’re wrong?” he asked.
“You mean that God’s ways are higher than our ways?”
“Well, sort of. What I mean is maybe you should look into the possibility that your issue isn’t actually with God himself but with certain beliefs about him — you know, flawed ways of explaining him. Maybe you have misjudged God. Maybe he isn’t this way at all.”
“But the Bible says that God hates us and is going to send most of us to hell,” I said, swallowing down tears.
“Does it?”
In the first few lines of Traveling Mercies, author Anne Lamott writes, “My coming to faith did not start with a leap but rather a series of staggers from what seemed like one safe place to another. Like lily pads, round and green, these places summoned and then held me up while I grew. Each prepared me for the next leaf on which I would land, and in this way I moved across the swamp of doubt and fear.”10
My return to faith happened in much the same way, and this conversation with Dan represented the first little lily pad in my own journey across the swamp of doubt and fear. In the end, the same question that frightened and intimidated me as a child provided the clearest way out: What if I’m wrong? It was a question loaded with uncertainty, possibility, and hope, and it was a question to which I often would return. To be wrong about God is the condition of humanity, for better or for worse. Sometimes it lures us into questioning God; sometimes it summons us to give him another chance. After I’d thought for so many years that good Christians are always ready with an answer, it was a question that eventually drew me back to belief.
In the end, it was doubt that saved my faith.