SIX
SALVATION
In the early summer of 2008, Barack Obama—still politically wounded from revelations that his erstwhile pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, was an anti-authoritarian, left-leaning loudmouth—convened a meeting in Chicago with some of the nation’s most important conservative Christian pastors and leaders. It was a diplomatic mission: Obama wanted to convince social conservatives that he was not too radical to be president. Billy Graham’s son Franklin was there. So was Steven Strang, a conservative Christian publishing tycoon, and T. D. Jakes, the wildly popular African American preacher. According to news reports, Graham confronted the presumptive Democratic nominee with the question that separates conservative evangelicals from everyone else: “Do you believe Jesus Christ is the way to God or merely a way?” Obama, who knew that the gun was loaded, answered carefully. “Jesus is the only way for me. I’m not in a position to judge other people.”
When my colleague Richard Wolffe and I interviewed Obama for a Newsweek profile later that summer, we circled back to the subject, and Obama was more expansive. He believes that there is more than one path to heaven, he told us, or else his beloved mother, who was agnostic, would not be there. “I’ve said this before, and I know this raises questions in the minds of some evangelicals. I do not believe that my mother, who never formally embraced Christianity as far as I know…I do not believe she went to hell.” (He was quick to add, again, that for himself Jesus Christ was the only way.) And although he believes in his personal salvation through Jesus, he also believes that it’s what you do on earth that matters in heaven. “I am a big believer,” he told us, “in not just words but deeds and works.” He understands that these views make him unorthodox in the eyes of some. “My particular set of beliefs,” Obama noted, “may not be perfectly consistent with the beliefs of other Christians.”
How do you get to heaven? The question of salvation is the biggest wedge issue among the faithful. It’s really a double-barreled question: First, do you believe that the path you’re on—Christian, Muslim, or Jew—is the only path to heaven? Franklin Graham does—that’s why his query to Obama was so potentially explosive. And second, what kind of Christian, Muslim, or Jew do you have to be to get there? Do Orthodox Jews gain heaven, but not the intermarried? Do Sunni Muslims get to paradise, but not the Shia? Do you believe that “being a good person” will get you into heaven? Or do you believe that you get to heaven through God’s mysterious will, no matter what you’ve done—or not done—in life? Scholars call this the Works versus Grace debate, and all three monotheisms have their versions of it. The answers affect everything from relations between neighbors to the peace of the world; they have motivated crusaders, martyrs, ascetics, and social reformers through the ages; they are at the heart of the culture wars being waged in America today. Claiming to know what God wants can have devastating consequences.
No answer seems fully satisfactory. If you’re in the “deeds” camp, then which deeds (and how many) will do the trick? Is it enough to do unto others as you would have them do unto you, honor your parents, and stay away from your neighbor’s spouse? Or do you also have to go to church, pray in specific ways, give money to charity and time to the poor? And if you satisfy all the aforementioned requirements, can you then jaywalk or drink four glasses of wine at dinner? Versions of such dilemmas triggered the Protestant Reformation, and they persist in American popular culture, often in the form of humor: A man stands before Saint Peter and tells him he never went to church, never gave to charity; he led, in sum, a completely self-centered life. Saint Peter is exasperated. “Have you never done anything good?” he asks.
“Well,” says the man, “I once saw a group of Hell’s Angels steal a purse from an old lady and as they were shoving her around, I intervened, took the meanest Hell’s Angel by the collar, and told him he was despicable. And then I spat in his face.”
“Wow,” says Saint Peter. “When did that happen?”
“About two minutes ago,” says the man.
The shortcoming of the “works” view, of course, is that it places eternal destiny entirely in an individual’s hands, a perspective that anyone with a smidgen of experience of the world can tell you is laughable—and which, as Martin Luther discovered, leads to the most heinous abuses. By the end of the fifteenth century, the Roman Catholic laity was so consumed with assuring for themselves and their loved ones a speedy salvation that they were paying cash to their church authorities in exchange for “indulgences”—the guarantee of a quick, safe passage to heaven. Today, this salvation obsession is evident especially in the Middle East. Martyrs for Islamic terrorist organizations are offered heaven—not just for themselves, but for their parents, brothers, and sisters—in exchange for strapping on a backpack full of dynamite. Meanwhile, in Israel in 2006, a rabbi speaking for the extremely right-wing political party Shas made a television ad in which an angel tells a man that because he voted for Shas, “your place is in heaven.” The ad was banned from television.
But if you’re in the “grace” camp, how do you think about ethics and personal responsibility? Does God’s grace overcome any sin? Can murderers go to heaven if they’ve acknowledged Jesus Christ as their personal savior? (Father Ron Ashmore, who ministered to Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh in the months before his death, believes they can. In an Easter sermon before McVeigh’s execution in 2001, Ashmore said he dreamed of those slain in the bombing welcoming their killer in heaven, saying, “We have been waiting. It is so good to have you home.”) Can you be mean to your parents? Can you have sex with your neighbor’s wife? Can you wage a war that kills innocent children, say, or fight to deprive people of their civil rights? If you believe that grace is attainable only through Jesus, then do you also believe that those who don’t follow Jesus—either by choice or because they were born at the wrong time or in the wrong place—will be barred from a blissful eternity?
Though the story of the Protestant Reformation provides the strongest and most familiar example of the Grace versus Deeds debate, Jews and Muslims have their versions, too. The conflict between Sunni and Shia occurring now in Iraq—which is actually a centuries-long succession struggle—has become an ideological war over the right interpretation of the Islamic tradition, and by extension salvation. Online, Islamic message boards are full of name-calling on both sides, and when a Shiite mosque was bombed in 2009 in sectarian violence in Iraq, a sheikh responded this way: “Let them kill us…. We know what they want, and we’ll just be patient. But they will all go to hell.” On the West Bank, super-religious Jews punish the not-as-religious for violations of modesty codes and capitulations to secular culture. The owner of an electronics store in Beth Shemesh told the Associated Press in 2008 that roving gangs of self-appointed modesty police would regularly invade his shop, smash his MP4 players, and shout, “This store burns souls!”
Among those who are dead-sure that the path they’re on leads to salvation, belief in hell as a real place—a hot and stinking pit full of fire—thrives. In America, belief in hell is highest—80 percent or more—among evangelical Christians, members of African American churches, and Muslims, according to a 2008 poll by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. If there’s a right way to God, this thinking goes, there’s also a wrong way; if heaven is real reward for righteous believers, then hell is real punishment. Among those inclined to see the rules of salvation as unknowable, belief in hell is on the wane. Just 56 percent of mainline Protestants believe in hell. Among Jews, the number is 22 percent.
But as the proponents of irreconcilably opposing dogmas slug it out, another, more benign force is at work. More and more Americans are saying that while they prefer the path they’re on, other paths work as well. In its 2008 poll, Pew asked people whether they believed that those of other faiths would attain heaven and a surprising number—70 percent, including 56 percent of evangelical Christians—said yes. This caused a stir, not surprisingly, since exclusivity has always been a bedrock belief of evangelicals. As the articles of faith of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary put it, “saving faith” rests on Christ alone “for justification and eternal life.”
Pew promptly polled directly on Grace versus Deeds, and the results clearly illustrate that the fundamental conflicts that produced the Protestant Reformation have yet to be resolved. About a third of American Christians believe “being a good person” gets you to heaven, and a third believe that “belief in Jesus” gets you there. About a fifth either don’t believe in heaven or don’t have a clue. In a 2006 interview, even the evangelist Billy Graham, when asked whether heaven would be closed to good Jews, Muslims, Hindus, or Buddhists, gave this surprising reply: “Those are decisions only the Lord will make. It would be foolish for me to speculate on who will be there and who won’t…. I believe the love of God is absolute. He said He gave His Son for the whole world, and I think He loves everybody regardless of what label they have.” Graham’s statement ignited a bonfire online: the most famous Christian evangelist in the world was denounced as an apostate.
In a world that’s unfair, where bad people succeed and good people suffer, the notion that what you do in life has any relation to where you go after death can seem, at the minimum, a setup for cosmic disappointment. This, at least, was the view of the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformers—led by the German monk Martin Luther and the French layman John Calvin. Disgusted with the orgy of works that characterized the centuries leading up to the Reformation, Luther and Calvin wrote that the best thing—indeed the only thing—for a Christian to do was to throw himself on his knees before God and beg for mercy. (When Calvin’s Swiss predecessor Huldrych Zwingli lay ill with the plague, he wrote this devastating prayer-poem: “Do as you will / for I lack nothing. I am your vessel / to be restored or destroyed.”) Calvin and his theological successors took this idea one step further: even begging for mercy was insufficient. All-powerful God had determined before any individual’s birth—even before the creation of the world—who was saved and who was damned. Thus, there was nothing in the world anyone could do about it. This idea, called predestination, continues to live on in American Protestantism, and in certain Jewish and Islamic traditions as well. Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that at the end of the world, only 144,000 souls will ascend to heaven to be with God. Everyone else will exist on the newly established earth. The 144,000 (a number in Revelation) are chosen by God; the chosen have no say over the matter themselves. According to certain Muslim hadiths, an angel from Allah sprinkles soil from the place of a man’s death in his mother’s womb. Even before he is born, God knows where and when he is going to die. During the High Holy Days, Jews chant the U-netanah tokef prayer, in which they cede control of their lives to God—who decides “who shall live and who shall die…who by sword and who by wild beast…who by strangulation and who by stoning.”
Instinctively, though, we hope for a little more say in the matter. We want justice for ourselves and for the people we love; we want our enemies to suffer. Bad things happen to good people, we tell ourselves, but in heaven God will fix that. According to the book of Daniel, the way to get to heaven and live among the stars forever is to “lead many to righteous ness.” The Hebrew word for “rightness” is tzedek and it is related, semantically, to the word justice. In the Hebrew Bible, a “righteous” man is one who behaves ethically and morally according to God’s law. In Daniel’s view, “righteous” Jews were those who retained their Jewish practice and belief amid the pressures of mainstream Hellenistic culture. Similarly, the book of Revelation teaches that “righteous” Christians were those who refused to make sacrifices to Roman emperors or to worship other idols. In the Qur’an, Allah promises that “the earth shall be inherited by my righteous servants.” In all three holy books, heaven is the place of ultimate justice. The fights over “righteous ness,” then, amount to this: What does God want from us?
MARTYRS
In all three monotheisms, the most righteous have always been the martyrs; dying for the faith continues to be viewed as a first-class ticket to heaven, a straight shot to the throne of God. I knew the assassinated American journalist Danny Pearl slightly; we worked together at the Wall Street Journal. The year after Danny’s death at the hands of a group calling itself the National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty, I was interviewing the Lubavitch rabbi Manis Friedman and asked him whether he believed that Danny was in heaven, since in life Danny had not been a very observant Jew. The rabbi’s answer was, unequivocally, yes. In his view, Danny was a martyr: in the moments before his ghastly death, Danny declared (whether voluntarily or by force, we will never know) on videotape, “I am a Jewish American from Encino, California. My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish.” Rabbi Friedman told me, “That’s a ticket to heaven right there.”
When Essenes were being tortured and killed by the Romans for refusing to forsake their dietary laws, the first-century Jewish historian Josephus described the scene: “[Not once] did they cringe to their persecutors or shed a tear. Smiling in their agonies, mildly deriding their tormentors, they cheerfully resigned their souls, confident that they would receive them back again.” They were going straight to heaven.
In Jerusalem, during the centuries before the birth of Christ, Jews showed their devotion to God through blood sacrifice. “Righteous ness” was connected to the ritual slaughter of goats, lambs, and birds at the Temple’s altars; if regularly and properly done, such sacrifices bestowed upon the Jews the assurance of God’s continued favor. (Many passages in Leviticus are devoted to the right and wrong ways to kill animals.) The earliest Christians understood that the execution of Jesus was the ultimate sacrifice: that is why the Gospels refer to him as “the Lamb of God.” With the crucifixion, Christian theology says, God himself—fully human and fully divine—died. He rose again so people could know that death itself was conquered. Going forward, that sacrifice would be the one and eternal symbol of the salvation of all who believe.
Martyrdom, already understood in the Jewish world as a ticket to heaven, became, in the Christian context, a celebrated way to die. Under persecution by Roman authorities, Christians who suffered death rather than deny their faith were martyrs. The Greek word 
(martyr) means “witness.” They were literally witnesses to their faith. Ignatius, the Bishop of Antioch, was sentenced to death around 107 for defending Christianity to the emperor Trajan. As he was being transported to Rome to be fed to the lions, he wrote letters in which he imagined heaven. “Let fire and the cross; let the crowds of wild beasts; let tearings, breaking, and dislocations of bones; let cutting off of members; let shatterings of the whole body; and let all the dreadful torments of the devil come upon me: only let me attain to Jesus Christ.” The lions devoured Ignatius so thoroughly that only the merest scraps were left. In the early centuries of Christianity, the stories of the martyrs were so popular, and such powerful tools of evangelism, that the Church Father Tertullian wrote, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.”
Therefore, when Constantine converted to Christianity—and, in 313, finally gave the religion legal recognition throughout the empire—Christians had to rethink their identity. No longer a persecuted minority, they could not emulate Christ literally by turning themselves into blood sacrifices. Instead, they linked themselves to his martyrdom through liturgy and worship; by partaking of the sacramental wine and bread of Communion, the earliest Christians were connecting themselves to the blood their Lord shed. (Holy Communion refers, of course, to the Last Supper—the Passover meal that Jesus ate with his disciples on the eve of his execution. The Gospels contain the words that every Christian knows by heart: “While they were eating, Jesus took a loaf of bread, and after blessing it he broke it, gave it to the disciples, and said, ‘Take, eat; this is my body.’ Then he took a cup, and after giving thanks he gave it to them, saying, ‘Drink from it, all of you; for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.’” Jesus goes on to say that he will not drink wine again until he reunites with his disciples in paradise.) But some Christian communities also connected themselves to Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection through asceticism, celibacy, poverty, and constant prayer. Monks became the latter-day equivalents of the martyrs.
Around 530, an Italian monk named Benedict wrote down his Rule, a guide still in use by Roman Catholic monasteries all over the world. Benedict’s Rule dictates monastic life down to the tiniest detail—how many times a day to pray, what to wear, how much to eat, when to laugh; it particularly instructs monks in their view of death, God’s judgment, and heaven. “Yearn for everlasting life with holy desire,” Benedict wrote. “Day by day remind yourself that you are going to die. Hour by hour keep careful watch over all you do, aware that God’s gaze is upon you, wherever you may be.” In Benedict’s view, monks must aim to live at all times as if they already inhabited heaven.
Father Dominic Whedbee is not a Benedictine monk—though the order still exists—but a Trappist, a member of the strict Cistercian order, established in eleventh-century France to get back to the basics of Benedict’s Rule. As Father Dominic explains it, monks are ordinary humans attempting to live according to the teachings of Christ, and their job is to pray constantly for the salvation of all the souls of the world. With their communities, their songs, their costumes, the design of their dwellings, they consciously try to create a mirror of heaven. Their prayers lift everybody in the world up to God.
I met Father Dominic on a perfect July day, at St. Joseph’s Abbey, in Spencer, Massachusetts. The monastery is situated on a hilltop, which, when the sky is clear, affords views of Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. The low stone buildings seem to have grown organically up from the ground; on the day I visited, the grass ruffled, the air vibrated with the sound of far-off gas mowers and cicadas, and elderly tourists perambulated hand in hand along winding stone pathways. Fruit trees flowered. Through a window, I saw a white-robed monk playing the harp.
Father Dominic is sixty years old, but—I am reminded of Saint Anthony’s angelic appearance—his face is as unlined as that of a man thirty years younger. His hair is still blond, his eyes clear. He wears a long white robe, a brown leather belt, and sandals. He talks more or less incessantly, which is not surprising since he’s lived at the monastery for twenty-six years among seventy brothers whose vows prohibit them—except on infrequent, prescribed occasions—from speaking. They are not allowed to own any property. They see their families only four days a year. The primary sound they make with their voices, day after day, year after year, is the sound of the Divine Office—psalms they chant seven times a day, until they briefly sleep and wake to chant again. As the public face of the abbey, Father Dominic had permission from his abbot to speak to me.
The Cistercian order was established in reaction to what its founders saw as the corruption and materialism of medieval monasticism. One of its most famous members was Bernard of Clairvaux, who avidly encouraged Christian men to sacrifice themselves—literally, on the battlefield, or figuratively, in monasteries—to attain heaven. “Clothe not yourself in sackcloth,” he preached to the soldiers at the beginning of the Second Crusade in 1146, “but cover yourself in your impenetrable bucklers…. Hasten to expiate your sins by victories over the infidels and let the deliverance of holy places be the reward of your repentance…. Abandon then the things that perish to gather unfading palms and conquer a Kingdom which has no end.” Give the blood in your bodies to Christ, in other words, and you will gain heaven.
The Cistercians were thought to have special favor in heaven, and in the late Middle Ages, people would pay them to say auxiliary prayers for their dead, hoping these incantations would launch the dearly departed more quickly through purgatory to paradise. Although they no longer accept payment for their prayers, the monks of St. Joseph’s still pray for the dead all the time: at the end of every office, at the end of every meal, and during mass.
The rigors of life at St. Joseph’s are relentless, and Father Dominic is full of rueful good humor about them. He and his brothers eat only vegetables. (“I never tasted a rutabaga before I came here.”) They share everything, even their underwear and T-shirts. Every action of every day is prescribed and choreographed. There is a right way to kneel in the chapel, to nod hello to a monk passing in the hall, to pluck a library book off a low shelf. When not in prayer, they work; some make the Trappist jams and jellies they sell nationwide, others manufacture vestments and altar cloths. Dominic speaks exuberantly of the “party” they have the day after Christmas, which most of us would simply call lunch: they haul out their instruments, play chamber music, sing carols, and eat cream cheese sandwiches, potato chips, and pickles. When a member of the group is sick or dying, his brothers do what they can to care for him without outside intervention. The brothers who lie beneath the forty-seven wooden crosses in the graveyard at the center of the monastery are as much a part of the community as the living—and with vocations shrinking, the dead will soon outnumber the living. “Mortality isn’t abstract here,” Dominic tells me.
The object of this radical experiment in communal living is—and has always been—not just for each individual member to assure himself a place in heaven, but through constant prayer to gain heaven for the whole community, and even for all the souls in the world. Dominic, who grew up the son of a Maryland doctor and who dreamed himself of becoming a doctor and a family man, describes the culture shock he first experienced here. “Suddenly, I’m living with these people—and they don’t speak. Getting up at two a.m. gets pretty old.” Like any intimate group, the brothers squabble and condescend to one another; they use their brief chances at conversation to make cutting remarks; they tattle on one another to the abbot. But Dominic, unlike many other religious I’ve met, does not seem broken, or even cracked; he is wry and self-knowing. Even in these circumstances, he seems like a normal guy.
Finally, eventually, Dominic submitted to the task before him: face God, pray to God, constantly, every minute, on behalf of humanity. “I realized, ‘You’re playing for keeps…. What else is there to do here? Make jelly? Please.” When young monks come to him, at the point of giving up, he urges them to “keep working on it and don’t get discouraged—that’s letting eternity crack you open.”
Here is what affects me most about Dominic’s sacrifice. He believes that all of us—me included—are a whole, and that unless we all go to heaven, no one will. Twenty-six years into his peculiar way of life, Dominic still mourns what he’s lost on earth: a profitable career, a family of his own, even the chance to be a doting uncle to his sister’s children. It feels crazy to be saying this, but Dominic’s martyrdom consoles me. I am too distracted with my job, my family, my commute, and my grocery list to pay real attention to the fate of my soul. Dominic’s silent life of prayer gives me comfort and hope. I actually believe that if anyone’s prayers can get me to heaven, Dominic’s can.
GRACE VERSUS DEEDS
But if you couldn’t be a monk or a martyr, then at least you could do the right thing, and as early as the fourth century, Christians were making lists of sins and their correlated remedies. Do this, then do that, and salvation is yours. The fourth-century Hellenistic monk Evagrius of Pontus established eight deadly sins, which, two hundred years later, Pope Gregory the Great edited down to the familiar seven: vainglory, envy, anger, melancholy, avarice, gluttony, and lust. Pride, he said, was the root of them all. In early Christian communities, penance was public: On Ash Wednesday, at the beginning of Lent, people who had committed serious sins, such as idolatry or murder (“mortal” and “venial” were not yet fine-tuned terms of art), would become “penitents.” They wore special clothes, sat together in church, and were barred from taking communion. If single, they were expected to remain unmarried; if married, they were expected to leave their families. So severe were these requirements that many sinners did not become penitents until their lives were nearly over. In the sixth century, Caesarius of Arles complained that too many sinners were also procrastinators: “People say, ‘When I am old I shall undertake penance. When I am grown old or desperately ill, then I shall ask for penance.’”
In the fifth and sixth centuries, certain bishops began to publish “penitentials”—handbooks or ledgers of sins and corresponding punishments. These circulated widely, especially in Europe and the British Isles. The educated clergy assumed that “Christ wants everyone to be saved, he died for all of us,” explains Jeffrey Burton Russell, emeritus professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, who has written three books on heaven. “But is stealing a loaf of bread equal to murdering your mother-in-law?” In their efforts to sort and weigh sins, the authors of the penitentials were detailed and discriminating: a person who murdered a cleric, for instance, had to do more penance than one who murdered a sibling. Incest, sodomy, bestiality, and adultery earned penances, of course, as did priests and nuns who kissed—or worse. Penalties could be levied upon those who ate horsemeat, made amulets, drank magic potions, and raised the dead.
Penance was not for sissies. The most common penalty was prayer and fasting (which sometimes reputedly resulted in death), but other methods of punishment—such as sleeping in water, on nettles, on nutshells, or with a corpse in a grave—were possible as well. Some bishops ordered penitents to assume physically stressful positions: they had to stand with arms outstretched while singing praises to God, or pray with their hands stretched upward but body bent. The mid-seventh-century Irish Penitential of Cummean metes out penance for every kind of bad or rude behavior, including vomiting on your Communion wafer (forty days’ penance), as well as eating scabs, lice, or one’s own “excreta.” The penance for the last: “an entire year on bread and water.”
Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) is credited more than anyone with codifying the idea that specific actions on earth correlate to a specific place in the afterworld. Aquinas made distinctions between mortal sins—which, without confession and absolution, permanently separated people from God and prevented their entry to heaven—and venial sins, which did not. He imagined a stratified and hierarchical heaven: although everyone there is content, some people are seated closer to the Throne than others. “The more love [of God] someone will have [in heaven], the more perfectly one will see God, and the more blessed one will be,” he wrote in his Summa Theologica. “All the blessed see the Highest Truth but they do so in various degrees.” God gave salvation to the world through Jesus, Aquinas taught. But he also gave people free will. It was through the use of that will that individuals would attain salvation—or not.
In the Jewish world, at around the time of Aquinas, the physician and philosopher Moses Maimonides (1135–1204) was also busy sorting and weighing sins. Jewish tradition had long held that God commanded Jews to follow 613 rules, or mitzvoth, which dictate every aspect of Jewish life, from prayer—how often and when—to dietary rules. (In the Jewish mystical tradition, each Hebrew letter has a numerical value. The number 613 thus is derived from adding up the values of the letters in the word Torah—plus two for the commandments that predate the Torah: “I am the Lord your God” and “You shall have no other God before me.”) But what were the rules, exactly? The rabbis disputed and reformulated their lists endlessly. Around 1168, while preparing to write his masterwork, the Mishneh Torah, Maimonides attempted to codify, once and for all, the 613. At the same time, Maimonides also came up with a list of thirteen general principles, which have become so central to Jewish worship that the Orthodox still recite them each morning in a prayer called Yigdal. They include the belief in One God, as well as the belief that God has no body, that the Torah comes from God, that the Messiah will come, and that the human body will be resurrected. Any Jew who disputes these principles will, Maimonides said, forfeit their stake in the hereafter. “He said very sharply, more sharply than others,” says David Berger, a Maimonides scholar at Yeshiva University, “that if you do not believe, you do not have a portion in the world to come.”
Over breakfast at a kosher restaurant in Queens, Berger explains that Maimonides allows for a view of salvation that includes what Christians would call grace and deeds. Jews have always believed that God watches what they do and keeps a tally of their mitzvoth. At death, the sum of a person’s mitzvoth determines how high he or she ascends to God and how long he or she must endure purgatory (more on this soon). But Maimonides also held that a person’s goodness—or righteous ness, if you will—“is measured by the weight of the good deeds, and not by the number,” Berger says. And humans, who have no way of knowing which deeds in the final tally will carry the most weight, must continue to endeavor to please God through charity and good works. Although Berger didn’t put it quite this way, God’s supernatural accounting system is the Jewish version of grace. Modern Jews are pleading for God’s grace when they say this prayer on the High Holy Days: “We have no deeds. Do unto us charity and loving-kindness and save us.” It is perhaps worth noting here that Maimonides lived most of his life in Muslim Spain and, eventually, Egypt—even working as the personal physician to the sultan Saladin. Scholars continue to debate the extent to which Islam influenced his philosophy (and, indirectly, every Christian and Jewish theologian he subsequently influenced), but there is no doubt that it did.
Hadia Mubarak is a young Muslim American activist and a graduate student at Georgetown University. She talks about getting to heaven much the way Maimonides did. In Islam, she explains, attaining paradise “is the motive behind everything you do.” At the same time, “you don’t know which action will take you to heaven. There’s no specific value attached to any act of charity.”
Mubarak decided to put on the hijab, the traditional head covering of religious Muslim women, when she was twelve years old. She attended a Muslim junior high in Panama City, Florida, and like many girls in her circle, started covering her head when she reached puberty. “It was,” she told me, “a natural thing to do.” Her decision evoked no ire from her parents. Both her mother, who was born in Jordan, and her elder sister cover their hair. Not all her friends had such an easy time—casting off the hijab was, among some in her mother’s generation, a sign of Western liberation and freedom. “Some of my really close friends decided to put on the headscarf after they went to college and their parents were really upset,” she said. “They felt like their children were throwing away all the opportunities their parents worked so hard to provide…they felt that people would judge them based on the headscarf and they’d never stand a fair chance in the career world.”
Now twenty-seven years old, Mubarak is married and the mother of a two-year-old son. She was the first female president of the national Muslim Student Association, which has chapters on campuses across the country—many of which are known for their outspoken, anti-Israel positions. I heard her speak once at Georgetown, and was astonished at her rhetorical gifts. She speaks with the clarity and passion of a much older person. Mubarak is outraged over the killing of Palestinians by Israel and infuriated at the way American Muslims were treated by the media and their neighbors in the years after 9/11. She will say—and has said—this bravely to anyone who asks. And yet, her appearance tells a different story. Petite, dark-eyed, shrouded, and smiling, wearing a skirt down to her shoes and a sweater that hides her body, she is the picture of obedience and submission. In Mubarak, conventions of womanhood, religious observance, and cultural and ethnic identity are being radically redefined.
We met at a Georgetown coffee shop to talk about heaven. Mubarak was squeezing me in between classes. The shop was too crowded, we hadn’t much time, but in spite of the bustle, Mubarak appeared calm. We launched into our topic without any small talk, and almost immediately Mubarak was talking about the Grace versus Works debate. “Who’s going to heaven? The man who prays five times a day his whole life? Or the one who helps a lady across the street? This gets repeated a lot in Friday sermons: no matter how good you are, you can’t earn heaven.”
Still, she does everything she can to be heavenbound. She wears the hijab, she prays five times daily, she gives to charity. She does not drink alcohol, as the Qur’an mandates; she does not take out interest-bearing loans. She tells me the story from the hadith of the righteous man who went to heaven. He accrued a mountain of good deeds: he prayed and gave to charity every day of his life. And yet, when the angels weighed his deeds against a single one of God’s gifts to him—his eyesight—the balance tipped overwhelmingly in God’s favor. That is God’s beneficence.
If you can’t earn your place in heaven, I asked her later, then why try so hard? Why not leave your fate up to God? “Works definitely matter and God makes that clear in the Qur’an,” Mubarak responds by e-mail. “The idea of God’s mercy is that in comparison to everything God has given us, nothing we do in this world can measure up or compensate. Hence we hope to enter heaven through God’s mercy, but we hope to receive God’s mercy by our work and faith. Does that make sense?”
In the afterlife, Mubarak believes God will reward her for her piety. “No one enjoys living a restrictive life,” she tells me. “I know I’d look a lot better if I wasn’t wearing any scarf and dressed a certain way. Islam’s modesty requirements are a huge sacrifice for any woman. But it’s to please God. It’s what God wants in the end. In the end he’ll reward us with not having any restrictions.”
PURGATORY
By the twelfth century, the Roman Catholic hierarchy—more than any Muslim or Jewish group—had established the idea that sins could be counted, weighed, discounted, and paid off in life. The first step was baptism. Even the earliest Christians understood baptism as a rite that would remove original sin, the stain of Adam, from their souls and open the door to heaven. Babies were thus to be baptized as soon as possible. The question then almost instantly arose: What about babies who died before baptism? What of their souls?
The early Church Fathers approached the question with finesse. The fourth-century bishop Saint Gregory of Nazianzus argued that unbaptized children “will be neither glorified nor punished by the righteous Judge, as unsealed and yet not wicked, but persons who have suffered rather than done wrong…. For not every one who is not bad enough to be punished is good enough to be honored.” They would go, in other words, to an in-between place, which today we would call “Limbo.” Augustine was harsh in response. Unbaptized babies had original sin. They would go to hell. In 418, he convinced the Council of Carthage to condemn the notion of “an intermediate place, or of anyplace anywhere at all, in which children who pass out of this life unbaptized live in happiness.” This hell for babies would not be so bad, Augustine added, softening the blow. The punishments would be mild; the babies’ souls would barely notice.
Still, condemning newborn babies to hell discomfited many, and in the twelfth century the French philosopher and theologian Peter Abelard argued that the babies in Limbo suffered no physical torment at all, only a spiritual separation from God. It was Thomas Aquinas, finally, who quashed the idea that unbaptized babies merited any kind of punishment. Limbo, he said, was a happy place. It was not heaven, not in God’s actual realm—“a second-class heaven,” as Father Thomas Reese, a research fellow at the Woodstock Theological Seminary, puts it—but no matter. The babies there were so attuned to God’s plan that they didn’t know what they were missing.
This was the idea that so many of my friends who went to Catholic school learned at the hands of the nuns. Limbo was a place for unbaptized babies, apart from God, but contented nonetheless. Cartoon renderings showed winged babies floating around in featureless ether. (I know many a Catholic mother who, having lost a baby through miscarriage or at birth, adamantly refused to accept that teaching. “My baby is in heaven,” a friend told me. “I know she is.”) In 2007, Vatican scholars under the direction of Pope Benedict XVI issued a forty-one-page report in which they encouraged Catholic educators to phase out Limbo. It was a welcome decision. “People felt uncomfortable about babies who weren’t baptized being thrown into this waiting area,” says Reese, “and they felt that people who had lived good lives or hadn’t sinned—there was no reason they should be kept out of heaven.” A similar sentiment led the early Protestant Reformers to edge away from the idea that infant baptism was a prerequisite for salvation. “God declares that he adopts our babies as his own before they are born,” wrote John Calvin, the father of predestination, in 1536. These days, most Protestant denominations teach that unbaptized babies go directly to heaven, obviating the need for Limbo.
Purgatory is different from Limbo. In the Middle Ages, baptism was just the first step on the path to heaven. Public penance had given way in most places to private confession, which was necessary for the expiation of sin. Cleansing the soul to prepare it for heaven became an obsession of lay Catholics, who learned in church that their deeds—and misdeeds—on earth would correlate to their place in heaven. In The Canterbury Tales, written in 1380, Geoffrey Chaucer asks God’s forgiveness for anything in his work that might cause offense, including “many a song and many a lecherous lay.” “Grant me the grace of true penitence, confession and expiation in this present life,” he writes, “through the benign grace of Him who is King of kings.” The scholastics, Catholic intellectuals in the great European universities who, inspired by the Greeks, aimed to develop a rational theology, refined the getting-to-heaven process by renovating a concept that had long existed in monotheistic tradition: purgatory.
By 200 CE, the rabbis had already begun to formulate an idea of an “in between” place, where souls who were neither completely good nor completely bad would abide until they were pure enough to ascend to heaven to be with God. A rabbinic treatise from the late first century CE refers to three kinds of souls: “the truly holy,” “the truly wicked,” and those “in between.” “The third group shall go down to Gehenna [hell] for a time and then come up again, as it is written.” The Kaddish prayer, widely in use as a mourners’ prayer by 1200, helped a soul move through the cleansing process and up to heaven. Jewish tradition teaches that close relatives should say Kaddish for twelve months, but most mourners do it for eleven; only the worst offenders require an entire year of prayer. Afterward, even the most tainted souls are ready for God. Few, if any, are barred from heaven completely. (Through friends I met Aric Press one Sunday morning in Brooklyn. He is a Jew who goes to a Conservative synagogue, and tells the story of the months in 1998 when he said Kaddish for his mother. Never having said Kaddish before, he did not know when to stop. A rabbi advised him to stop a week shy of the designated eleven months, “because,” as Aric remembers it, “if it took the whole eleven months, people would think she was really bad.”)
Islam also talks about an “in between” place (or time) called barzakh—wedged not between heaven and hell, but between death and resurrection. According to Islamic tradition, two inquisitor angels—black with green eyes, in some accounts, and with supernaturally long fangs—enter a person’s grave after death. They are terrifying. They wake the soul and ask it questions to determine its degree of faithfulness. Based on the answers, the angels decide where that soul will abide to await the final Judgment. According to the eleventh-century Persian theologian Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, souls fall into four categories: The best people are shown from the grave a window to paradise. The second-best are shown a window to hell and then reassured—they won’t go there. The third, who fail to answer their questioners with sufficient clarity, are beaten, their graves set on fire. The last group, the profligates, are visited in the grave by their evil deeds come to life as wild animals.
Tradition holds that after this grueling question-and-answer period, Muslims sleep until the Judgment, but here there are variations. Al-Ghazali suggests that the damned wander the earth as restless spirits, while the blessed enter paradise after a short, perhaps months-long, wait. John Voll, a professor of Islamic history at Georgetown, reminds me in a conversation in his office one snowy afternoon that our own folk literature is full of stories about sleeping—and waiting—and awakening to find everything changed—a popular genre in the medieval Middle East among all religious groups. “Rip Van Winkle” and the movie Awakenings—the true story of hospital patients paralyzed by Parkinson’s disease who experience, briefly, the sensuous vitality of normal life—are variations on this theme. In these stories, “heaven” is waking up from a long sleep to find everything more real, more vibrant than it was before.
Clearly, then, the idea of a waiting place—or perhaps it should be called a process—that occupied the space between death and heaven had existed for hundreds of years in monotheistic religion. By the twelfth century, interest and belief in a Christian purgatory had reached a peak. Peter the Chanter, a French theologian, reflected the popular understanding: “the good go either at once to Paradise if they have nothing with them to burn, or they go first to Purgatory and then to Paradise, as in the case of those who bring venial [that is, forgivable] sins with them. No special receptacle is set aside for the wicked who, it is said, go immediately to hell.” Purgatory, according to Peter the Chanter, was a place: the amount of time you spent there—and the horrors you experienced—depended on the severity of your sins, and the degree to which they had been expiated in this life.
The medieval Christian purgatory was vivid and a lot like hell—the only difference being that purgatory’s tortures were finite. Some say the souls in purgatory “are so replete with suffering,” wrote Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologica, “that they know not that they will be set free.” But that’s not the case, he added: the dead in purgatory require the prayers of those on earth. Tales of purgatory, written down and passed around among neighbors and in church congregations, worked as entertainment and as moral deterrents. The tortures described therein were so thoroughly terrifying that they would move any lax Christian to follow a straighter path. One of the most popular in the twelfth century was “The Legend of the Purgatory of St. Patrick.” In it, an Irish knight named Owein sees enough in a vision of purgatory to give his life to God.
According to legend, there was a hole in the ground on Station Island, located in the middle of a large lake in Ireland; when Saint Patrick was converting the Irish, he used it as a conversion tool. He would install a pagan overnight in the hole. There, the unfortunate captive would endure visions of the horrors of purgatory. In the morning, the pagan would either be dead—or a faithful Christian. “The Legend of the Purgatory of St. Patrick” describes poor Owein’s visions of purgatory during his stay underground. He sees people nailed with flaming pegs to the ground, baked in ovens, turned on spits, dunked into molten metal, and strung up on iron hooks. Toads and snakes eat people up. Finally, the knight calls on God and at last finds himself on a bridge over a river of fire. He sees marvels, including the earthly and the celestial paradise. Having survived his vision, Owein makes a penitential pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and helps to found an abbey there. The hole where Owein allegedly spent the night was sealed in 1790, and a chapel was built atop it. Today, St. Patrick’s Purgatory attracts up to thirty thousand visitors a year.
No wonder, then, that Christians would do anything to shorten or evade their tenure in purgatory. By the end of the eleventh century, the popes were granting indulgences—official abridgments of future stays in purgatory—in exchange for cash payments. In 1095, Pope Urban II bestowed indulgences upon men who went on a Crusade to Anatolia, which is modern-day Turkey, and in 1215, at the Fourth Lateran Council, the bishops reaffirmed Urban’s promise: men who went on a Crusade themselves (that is, did not pay someone else to go instead) and at their own expense would have their slates wiped free of all sins and ascend—like the righteous martyrs—immediately to heaven. In 1300, Pope Boniface gave indulgences to anyone who traveled not to Jerusalem but to Rome on a pilgrimage and lived to tell about it; he then extended the benefit to anyone who died on that journey.
Not only did people believe that payments to the Church would hasten their arrival in heaven; they also believed that special prayers—and prayers by special people—would, too. Fifteenth-and sixteenth-century British wills are full of detailed instructions to family members and local clerics: how, where, when, and how often to pray for the soul of the deceased. Say “diriges” (prayers for the dead) “as hastily as possible…after my departing frome this world” instructed one man or “as sone as I am deade w’toute eny tarrying,” wrote another. Offer trentals (a series of masses held on thirty consecutive days) “to be doen for me from the houre of my dethe unto the tyme of my burial,” commanded a third. The prayers of the poor were thought to be more beneficial than the prayers of the rich. At the most ostentatious funerals, the poor—shrouded and holding candles—would encircle the corpse at the mass.
Catholic salvation theology was not so very different then than it is now. Catholics believe that God’s mysterious grace—bestowed upon a sinner through a confession of faith—opens the door to heaven. But salvation comes from that plus a life of faithful action. The Church was—and is—seen as both the conduit for God’s love in the world and a kind of intermediary institution, like a bank, to which sinners make payments in the form of prayers and penance—and receive credit in the afterlife as indulgences. In the centuries preceding the Reformation, the Church’s role as banker clearly outweighed its role as a purveyor of grace. Medieval Catholics endeavored to calculate and control their eternal destiny much the way day traders in the boom economy obsessively hedged their online stock portfolios.
Purgatory, then, can be said to have brought about the Protestant Reformation. It was the abuse of indulgences, as well as the mechanical way in which Catholics imagined they could affect their own salvation, that infuriated Luther and Calvin and moved them to reinvent the idea of what it meant to be a Christian. They threw away the idea of the institutional church as a banker that calculated an individual’s credits and debits in heaven. All a Christian needed to be saved, they said, was a belief in Jesus.
But belief in purgatory endures. The Second Vatican Council of the 1960s supported it, and among Catholics—especially those nostalgic for old-school, Latin-mass, fish-on-Fridays Catholicism—prayers for the souls in purgatory remain vitally important. According to Catholic folk tradition, a certain prayer to Saint Gertrude releases a thousand souls from purgatory at a go, and the Mission to Empty Purgatory, a Georgia-based ministry, is trying to collect enough prayers to release the 106 billion souls it calculates are potentially confined there. A number of American dioceses, including Brooklyn and Jackson, Mississippi, have revived the practice of indulgences in an effort to bring stray Catholics back home to the church. “Indulgences are a way of reminding people of the importance of penance,” said Father Thomas Reese. “The good news is we’re not selling them anymore.”
Mormons tend to say “worthy” rather than “righteous,” but it means the same thing. Are they good enough in the eyes of God to ascend after death to the highest level of heaven? Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—established in America in 1830 by Joseph Smith, after he had a series of visions—believe that all human life is a trial, a test of worthiness. On Judgment Day, they will be able to recall everything they ever did. Should God deem them worthy, they will go to live with Him and become like gods themselves. In LDS theology, all people go to one of three heavens: the Celestial, “whose glory is that of the sun, even the glory of God,” according to the Doctrine and Covenants, part of the Mormon canon; the Terrestrial, which is like the moon; and the Telestial, the lowest level. Those people who are most like God, and whose choices in life reflect their divine spirit, will ascend to the Celestial realm. (Faithful Mormons fall into this category.) “But even if you’re a schmuck who just wants to watch football, or made your life by kicking people to the curb, you still resurrect to some kind of glory,” explains Kathleen Flake, who is a religion professor at Vanderbilt University.
From childhood, Margaret Toscano tried to do everything right. She was born and raised in the LDS church—she is a sixth-generation Mormon. As a little girl, she went to church almost all day on Sunday and to a youth group one night a week. On Monday nights, her father would lead Family Home Evenings, which are traditional in Mormon families. He would read from Scripture (the Latter-day Saints read both the Bible and the Book of Mormon) and ask his eight children to discuss it. Starting around age ten, she, like most Mormon children, would do “proxy baptisms” at the temple. She would fall backward into a big tank of water as an officiator read aloud the name of a dead person, thus allowing the deceased (who was not a Mormon) into the celestial heaven. At twenty-one, Toscano “received her endowments” of the Church—she participated in the secret rites that bind an individual to God. She was anointed with water and oil, and given special undergarments to wear at all times and white robes for special temple ceremonies.
Every two years, Toscano renewed her “Temple Recommend,” an official certificate like a driver’s license, which testified to her worthiness. To obtain this document she, like every other Mormon, had to submit to an interview with the local bishop, in which he asked questions concerning her sexual purity (chastity when unmarried, fidelity when married), tithing, adherence to dietary laws (Mormons don’t smoke, drink alcohol, or drink coffee or tea), honesty, and obedience to church elders.
Toscano passed each test, and she loved her religion, but she felt depressed, hemmed in. She married her first husband at a civil ceremony, and divorced him two years later. As a young woman, she told me, as we sat together on a bench in a public park in Salt Lake City, she was often full of self-loathing, unable to shake the feeling that she was falling short. At twenty-nine, she remarried—this time to a hardworking Mormon lawyer, a convert from Catholicism. The ceremony took place in the temple. Together, she and her husband were “sealed.” They could now expect to live together forever in heaven—and any children they had would be part of that divine family unit, too.
But Toscano and her husband, Paul, began to chafe against the constraints of their religion. They had four daughters, and Margaret put herself through graduate school in classics and began to study feminism. Together with half a dozen other Mormon intellectuals, Paul began to argue against the authoritarianism of the church. He was excommunicated in 1993. Church officials took notice of Margaret around that same time, when she wrote a series of scholarly papers arguing that Joseph Smith never intended Mormon women to be excluded from the priesthood—that they should be allowed to ascend to the highest levels of authority and power in the church.
On November 30, 2000, when she was forty-six years old, the authorities held a hearing and asked Toscano to repudiate her own work. She would not and she was, officially, excommunicated—though for some years already she had been slipping away. She had stopped wearing the sacred undergarments and even drank the occasional glass of wine. “Taking that first glass of wine,” she remembers, “was like being polluted. There was a way in which, as an LDS member, I used to feel purer than other people.”
Heaven still matters to Toscano because it matters so much to her family members within the Church. According to the tradition in which she was raised, families stay together in heaven. But since she was cut off, Toscano is no longer eligible to attain the Celestial Kingdom, which means, according to Mormon doctrine, that she will not be with two of her three sisters—one living and one dead—in the highest level of heaven. (The third, excommunicated as she is, will join her in a lower level.) In her heart, Toscano does not really believe this teaching—“I don’t believe God would separate people who love each other,” she says—but her childhood training is hard to dismiss and together, she and her sisters fret, half-seriously, about their places in eternity. Margaret and her devout sister joke about heaven—because if they don’t, they’ll cry. Perhaps there’s a Plexiglas wall between the levels of heaven, Toscano has said to her sister, like the kind you find in prisons. Perhaps we’ll be able to see each other, and talk on the phone.
“You live all these rules and it forces you to grace, because there’s no way you can ever feel good enough inside,” Toscano says, invoking one of her heroes, Martin Luther. The “maddening legalism” of the LDS church “drove me to grace,” she says. She has not attended any church since she left the Latter-day Saints.
REFORMERS
“If anyone could have gained heaven as a monk then I would indeed have been among them…. I lost hold of Christ the Savior and comforter and made him a stock-master and hangman over my poor soul.” These agonies were written in the 1500s by Martin Luther, about his years as a monk in an order called Observant Augustinians. He tried, he said, to obey the rules. He fasted. He flagellated himself. But nothing in the rules was moving him closer to God; moreover, the widespread abuse of the rules he saw around him disgusted him.
In the fifteenth century, the popes had begun granting indulgences to rich families in exchange for cash payments and other lavish gifts, and in 1517 Pope Leo X held a fund-raiser to rebuild St. Peter’s Basilica. He hired a Dominican monk named Johann Tetzel to tour Europe, offering indulgences for cash. Tetzel, a born marketer, had come up with this slogan: Sobald das Geld im Kasten klingt / Die Seele aus dem Fegfeuer springt! (“As soon as the gold in the casket rings / The rescued soul to heaven springs!”) Tetzel carried with him an inventory of sins and the payment required to expiate them. He reportedly claimed his indulgences could even rescue someone who had raped the Virgin Mary.
Luther preached against Tetzel, and Tetzel, hearing of Luther’s sermons, warned that the monk was a heretic. On October 31, 1517, Luther nailed his ninety-five theses—complaints against the Roman Catholic hierarchy—to the church door in Wittenberg, Germany. The last two items related expressly to heaven: “Christians are to be exhorted that they be diligent in following Christ…and thus be confident of entering into heaven.” All you have to do, said Luther, is believe. Christians no longer needed to count and weigh their sins and pay or pray for absolution. In Luther’s—and his fellow Reformer John Calvin’s—view, heaven was not a stratified, hierarchical place, where some fared better than others, or where any authority existed outside of God. “We will be equal to St. Paul, St. Peter, our beloved Lady, and all the saints in their honor and glory,” wrote Luther.
The Protestant Reformation gave heaven back to all the saved on equal terms, but it also arguably made the place a lot less fun. Its image—each soul communing with God, an eternity of praise and song—pales in comparison to the opulent, glittering, and crowded Catholic version. And though in the years following the Reformation, Puritan ministers did what they could to keep their followers from populating heaven with friendly saints and fellow pilgrims—sometimes even whitewashing the church frescoes that depicted such scenes—it was not too long before, in America at least, people began to want something more.