Chapter 5: Owning Our Stories

When we see someone carrying a number of fragile and brittle things stacked one upon the other, we are not surprised that he walks unsteadily and continually tries to maintain balance. If we do not see the stack, we smile, just as many smiled at Johannes Climacus, not suspecting that his soul was carrying a stack far taller than is usually enough to cause astonishment, that his soul was anxious lest one single coherent thought slip out, for then the whole thing would collapse. ( Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments/ Johannes Climacus. pg. 119)


It was just a week ago; a typical Saturday spent with my husband while the kids visited their father. We had gone out for breakfast to the country style restaurant at the truck stop down the road. I had stepped into the restroom to wash my hands when IT assaulted my perception. Lying innocently on the back of the toilet, there it was.

I hadn’t expected to see it there; in fact, I hadn’t thought about it for years. So when my eyes fell on the small rectangular booklet, black and white with simplistic cartoon figures on the front, I was immediately and jarringly jerked back into an earlier, darker period of my life. I was a child again, encountering one of the most frightening concepts to ever be launched at the world from the mind of humanity; the Chick tract.

Everyone who has come into contact with at least the perimeter of fundamental Christianity has at one time or another confronted the Chick tract. My mother gave me the first one. I still remember the deceivingly "comic" picture on the front, and the word "CHICKEN!" sprawled across the cover of the small booklet. I opened it with a curious excitement, and read the comic strip frame by frame, page by page. It was a story about two teenagers, drag racing and playing the infamous game of "Chicken." As it always happens in moralistic fables, the main character did not fare well; he won the game of chicken, but lost his life, and went from 0 to sixty in an instant; from being a cool teenager to fuel for hell’s eternal fire. Shock, fear, and awe coursed through me, body and mind. I literally had the "hell" scared out of me; but, like the after glow of a Stephen King film, it left me horrified and a bit thrilled all at the same time.

There were many more after that first time. "A Demons Nightmare," "The Beast", "This is your life,". . . I soon lost count of how many I had consumed. Because they were written as comic strips, and because they were based on the teachings of my rural fundamental church, the adults thought them the perfect reading material for pre-adolescent children. When you live in the forest, it’s been said you’re often oblivious to the trees. I’m sure no one even considered what these stories were doing to my young mind; these dark, depressing, soul crushing colors being used to paint the backdrop of my world view.

These booklets were the favorite witnessing tool of a whole generation. In the 1970’s and 80’s, you could find them at any truckstop or state fair bathroom in the Bible belt, offering up a serving of fear and prejudice to anyone innocently lured into the comic web of horror. Besides stating in no uncertain terms that Catholics and homosexuals were going to hell, they also made it clear that your college professor, your favorite aunt and uncle who supported the rotary club, and Ghandi himself will be roasting forever.

Here’s how the Chick tract in the bathroom last Saturday put it:

Guy: George, because of sin, we are all born spiritually dead. . . and headed for damnation in hell! . He [the devil] works hard to stop people from learning the way of escape. One of his favorite weapons is religion. He also uses education. . .

George: Then it’s like I said, we have to choose God or the Devil.

Guy: No George, you don’t have to choose the devil; you already belong to him!


George: This is terrifying news. It REALLY scares me. What about my poor family? They’re great people! They couldn’t ALL be going to hell!

Guy: I’m sorry, George, but without Christ, they are doomed!

George: What about the BILLIONS of devout religious people who don’t believe this? God couldn’t possibly send them ALL to hell!

Guy: Yes, George. He’s the only one who can rescue you from eternal damnation in the lake of fire.

Wow. Everyone needs a little eternal damnation with their eggs on Saturday morning.

My son had his own experience with “Chick tract theology” when he was just ten years old. It was October, and his father thought it would be fun to take the kids to the haunted house downtown. I’m sure he was working from his own experience, and expected to find a few ghosts, vampires, black lights and bowls of “eyeballs” made out of skinned grapes. Unfortunately, he took the children into something that he never expected, and that would haunt my son for years to come.

The haunted house was not the traditional entertainment of blacklights and grape eyeballs. It was, in fact, a “ministry” of the local charismatic, non-denominational church. This was not advertised in any explicit way; the crusaders choosing rather to lure unsuspecting sinners into the experience. My ex-husband asked if there was anything that might not be appropriate for young children, but the woman at the door assured him that it was all just good fun.

Since the 1970’s and the widespread popularity of the Chick tracts, “hell houses” have become a popular fundraising and ministry event with youth groups in fundamentalist churches across the country. Halloween is a perfect season to dramatize the dark, violent images presented in the tracts, and there is no lack of horrific themes. This house had dramatized a tract that dealt with demon possession.” Later, my son recounted to me in quiet, sober tones – like someone who had just discovered a devastating secret – the scene he had witnessed in the hell house.

There was a teenager, he said, who had been at a party where his friends had played with an ouija board. This activity, according to some fundamentalist teachings, opens the door for an onslaught of terror from another world. In the scene, a “demon” attached himself to the young boy, and followed him home. Later in his room, the demon began to assault his mind from the inside out, creating voices in his head that told him to get his father’s gun and blow his brains out. Helpless against the agent from the underworld, the young boy followed directions. With the use of props and stage blood, the creators of the hell house had replicated this experience exactly, ending with a splatter of blood on the wall in front of my son.

For weeks after, he seemed to go to a dark place at times. When I would talk to him, he would speak of the hell house experience. A universe that had once been full of hope and “a friendly place,” in the words of Einstein, was becoming for my son a place of brooding darkness where innocent children were unsuspecting victims of blood-thirsty demons. We had many conversations about God. I talked to him about the God I know; a force that is, if it is anything, a force of love and compassion. We talked about how people create stories to make sense out of their world, but how those stories may not reflect the reality that others experience. We talked about symbolism as a way of making the abstract more concrete; but a child cannot grasp the abstract. To a child, there are only the concrete images; and the feeling of vulnerability and soul shattering fear.

I wondered if I was alone in my dark recollections; if the Chick tract was just a Midwestern oddity, so I did a google search. The results were startling. There are literally thousands of sites, and the Chick tract has quite a cult following. It has been translated into over 100 languages, and has been distributed all over the world. By looking at the web pages, I concluded that the Chick tract enthusiasts are a polarized audience, with most fans being either 1) those who collect them as kitchy-macabre American culture artifacts, or 2) radical fundamentalists who swear by them and buy them by the bushel to send overseas, hand out on the street, or put in unsuspecting children’s Halloween bags. Between those two extremes, there seems to be a lot of mainstream, rational, fundamentalists who embrace them like you embrace your loud-mouthed, bigoted uncle; the one who you wish would move far away and live a quiet life. One minister says on his site that, although he embraces the “truth” they contain, he doesn’t allow them to be used in his witnessing endeavors because they are so very frightening.

These booklets can be purchased online, as well. The Chick Publications website offers not only these tracts, but testimonies, a “statement of faith,” and a biography of the author. These scary little morsels are the creation of a guy named Jack Chick, who began drawing and printing them more than 40 years ago. Jack is revered by many people for his work, and maligned by many others. While I am not a fan of Chick tracts, I don’t hold any ill will toward Jack Chick; all he did was take the doctrines of his fundamental church and carry them out to the absurd conclusions in concrete, black and white cartoon images. When you think about it, these cartoon demons, devils, and hell-bent lascivious sinners are the perfect medium for the literal, apocalyptic message he learned in his fundamentalist experience.

So what did I think about those Chick tracts when I was a fundamentalist minister? Honestly, I probably tried not to think about them. Maybe it was just easier to block out the sticky issues inherent in a literal hell scenario than it was to address them. . . you know, like the hanging thread on your old sweater that, if you pull it, the whole thing might unravel. Maybe it just seemed easier not to think about the disturbing uncle than it would be to leave the family.

I have a number of friends who are fundamentalists. They are smart, thoughtful, compassionate, and anything but bigoted. I am always a bit baffled by their continued membership in a culture created by a belief system that seems inconsistent with who they are. I think sometimes they must find themselves deeply ambivalent toward some of the implications of fundamentalist teachings. At least they are uncomfortable when asked about Chick tract theology.

And perhaps, herein lies the paradoxical beauty of something as ugly as a Chick tract. . . it forces a face to face encounter with the uncomfortable truth of what it means, at the core, to espouse a fundamentalist world view. The black and white images make it impossible to slip quietly behind the ambiguity of abstraction. Like an accidental psychologist, Jack Chick paraphrases our theology in operational terms and confronts us, point blank, with the concrete message behind the theology.

Looking for Hell

In Chick tract theology, and the fundamentalist theology into which I was born and was nurtured, hell is a central theme. In literal fundamentalist understanding, hell is a lake of fire into which all those who have not accepted Jesus will be cast after the great judgment of all people who have ever lived on the face of the earth. This imagery comes straight from – and only from—the book of Revelation. “. . .But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death (Revelation 21:7-9).

This passage was the reverberating mantra of revival preachers and youth camp speakers looking for a guaranteed show stopping, heart-pounding, fear-inducing sermon; a sermon that would bring impressive results during the altar service and “bragging rights” to the speaker. From a more sinister perspective, this “lake of fire” theology has proven to be highly effective as a means of controlling the fundamentalist laity. The threat of impending hell is constantly used to keep folks from reading the wrong books, drinking the wrong beverages, going to the wrong places, and even listening to the wrong preachers. In my own experience, breaking free from the fear and daring to think on my own took no less than the courage to dance on the rim of the abyss.

I found the courage to begin to question what I had been taught because there had always been nagging doubts. In this day and age, where scientific data is at the fingertips of everyone and critical thinking is the goal of schools and colleges, it takes much vigilance to keep folks in the grip of fear and superstition. Most reasonable individuals have these doubts at one time or another, but the threat of “what if this is true?” is enough to keep these doubts buried deep into the psyche. Yet, if a child is able to escape into the halls of higher education and to find trusted and kind intellectual mentors there, they often dare to step to the rim and peer over. . . putting the lake of fire story under the microscope of reason.

One of the most glaring flaws to this story is the physical impossibility of the scenario of folks burning forever in the lake of fire. To feel physical pain, one must possess a physical body. If it is a physical body that is thrown into the fire, then it would not be able to continue to exist, and would burn up. There are two responses to this objection: 1) it is not a physical body, but a spiritual body that will be cast into the lake of fire, thus not limited by physical laws, or 2) God in his omnipotence will “keep” the physical body alive, experiencing the pain and torment of the fire for eternity. Let’s follow each answer to it’s logical conclusion.

If it is a spiritual body, and not a physical body that is thrown into the lake of fire, then it does not have physical sensation, which is necessary to experience the physical pain of burning by fire. Therefore the fire becomes a moot point, and eternal torment cannot be supported. Here, those fundamentalists I have talked to usually resolve this by taking a metaphorical view (ironic, since fundamentalists claim to hold an uncompromising literal view of scripture). The “fire” symbolizes eternal separation from God in total darkness; a situation that would be spiritually unbearable and eternally tormenting.

Being the creation of God, it is impossible for us to exist apart from his sustaining presence, so we would simply cease to be, and we would face annihilation rather than some kind tormented existence. Here, again, the fundamentalist story of eternal hell is debunked. But what if we are spiritual beings such that we would be able to exist forever totally separated from God ? That would mean that we are autonomous, eternal beings. . . and isn’t that basically the nature of God? If we can exist forever without the sustaining power of God, then we are equal with God. This will never do in the mind of the fundamentalist, and at this point I am usually dismissed in a huff. If the conversation continues, the answer usually reverts back to the second answer to the original question, only now God continues to “keep” the spiritual body alive to be tormented for eternity by separation.

What if God will, in fact, spend eternity stoking the fires of hell and magically sustaining physical bodies in order to maintain eternal torment of his wayward children? Or what if God will indeed spend eternity hiding in the pitch black shadows, extending eternal consiciousness to hopelessly lost and tormented spirits? This is even a more troubling scenario, for such a God is not a God at all, but a force of evil unrivaled in the mind of Stephen King. Interestingly, the fundamentalists I talk to don’t see it this way. They tell me that God is not acting maliciously; it’s just the law of universal justice. Hey, it’s not personal, they say.

I was listening to an interview on NPR the other day with a journalist who had spent time imprisoned in Iraq. He talked about his fear during those dark days in the prison block, and about watching other prisoners being flogged and tortured just feet away. He said that the thing that struck him was the intense intimacy that existed between a prisoner and his torturer. He suggested that the act of torture is an immediate, intense, and deeply personal symbiotic act that can only be described as intimate. In the fundamentalist story, God loved the world so much that he sent his son to earth and let him die a painful death in order to save us; but this “act of love” becomes the justification for the personal, active, eternal torture of the majority of humanity who fail to accept the sacrifice on his terms, or who may have never heard the Christian story in the first place. This story ends in absurdity. This is not the picture of a God who is, according to all faiths, including fundamentalism, a God of love and compassion. To accept this story as truth is to blaspheme the very image of God that has been the foundation of Christianity since Jesus appeared. This image of God makes a mockery of the single most important scripture to Christendom, John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” Where did this idea of eternal torment come from, in the first place?

First of all, the word “hell” is not in the earliest texts at all. “Hell” is an old English word that was used in translation in some instances for the Hebrew word Sheol and the Greek words Hades and Gehenna. The conception of hell as we know it today has no counterpart in that part of the world at the time of Christ. In fact, the hell as we know it is a creation of Dante and the Medieval church rather than a teaching developed by Jesus or the early church.

Sheol is a term in the Hebrew that refers to the afterworld – that unknown place where souls go upon physical death. Rather than denoting a place of fire, torment, and eternal punishment, Sheol seems to refer to a place of silence and darkness, the world beyond the living where consciousness may cease to exist altogether.

In the New Testament, the Greek word Hades was translated as hell by the King James crew. Hades is the same idea of Sheol; an unchartered place where the soul goes after death. It is Hades that appears in the parable of Lazarus, when the rich man called out to him from Hades. But this is a parable; a metaphorical story created to illustrate a spiritual concept in concrete, physical terms. Jesus described the act of spreading the good news in a story about sowing seeds; but just as we don’t assume that Jesus believed his disciples should become 1st century Johnny appleseeds, sowing literal seeds across the country, we can’t assume that he believed that people experienced fiery torment in the afterlife. This assumption would be out of line with everything we know about the conceptions of Hades at that time.

The word Gehenna is also translated as hell, and it is perhaps this word upon which literalists build their case for hell. Again, this word is always used metaphorically in the New Testament. Gehenna refers to a dump outside the walls of Jerusalem; a place of rejection and destruction outside the holy city. This word was familiar to and intricately entwined with the nation of Isreal at that time, and would have readily been understood as a metaphor for national judgment or destruction. To take a culturally specific metaphor and turn it into a literal and universal place of individual judgment violates the laws of responsible hermeneutics. There is just no evidence that Jesus, or the nation of Isreal, or the larger culture at the time, had any well-defined and widely held notion of a literal place of eternal torment that was the ultimate destination of humanity. In fact, such an idea stands in direct contradiction to the spirit of Jesus’ teachings, which we will examine in chapter 8.

But hell is not the only fear-inducing teaching of fundamentalism used to maintain psychological control over believers. While hell is one of the central teachings in the fundamentalist culture, it is the concept of the Rapture that keeps the fear of hell ever present in the mind.

A Blessed Hope?

When the trump of the great archangel
Its mighty tones shall sound,
And, the end of the age proclaiming,
Shall pierce the depths profound;
When the Son of Man shall come in His glory
To take the saints on high,
What a shouting in the skies from the multitudes that rise,
Changed in the twinkling of an eye.
-- Fanny Crosby

The words are from a familiar revival song that we sang often in our small country church, and it celebrates the rapture; the doctrine of the immanent return of Christ to catch away the saints before the horrors of the tribulation. The tune is upbeat and bright; and I can remember the exuberance with which the congregation sang it, hands clapping and waving, eyes closed in ecstasy. This joyful expectation of the "blessed hope" of the rapture sometimes seemed odd to me, since the "blessed hope" presented a terrifying prospect.

Sometimes on Sunday night as we drove the seven miles home, I'd lay above the back seat, wedged underneath the back window. I'd stare up into the dark night at the stars, and try to imagine the sky splitting open and Jesus floating down. That was hard to visualize, but even more odd was the thought of graves bursting open and dead people floating upward. While it was a bit easier to visualize living people being pulled into the sky, one of the big questions in my mind was whether clothes would go to heaven, too. Would there be naked people floating through the sky and little piles of clothes lying everywhere? Another good reason to change your underwear everyday. . . ..

I was a clingy child; didn't want my mom out of my sight for very long. Losing her at the grocery store could send me into a panic. Later, as a teenager, I'd still get freaked out if I came home and mom was gone. I suppose it all had something to do with believing that at some unexpected moment, people were going to disappear from the face of the earth while the rest of us were left to face the anti-Christ, death squads, giant stinging scorpions, and the wrath of a very angry God.

I once heard about a study that was done in which monkeys were paired up and strapped to chairs for eight hours each day. One of the monkeys in each pair had the job of turning off a light once every hour in order to prevent both monkeys from receiving a shock; the other monkey just sat, not knowing when or if the shock would come. At the end of the prolonged experiment, the monkeys with the task of turning off the light were suffering from stress, but alive. The unexpected outcome was that five of the six who waited for a shock they couldn't control were dead from irregular heart action (Karen, haffen, et. al. pg. 540). It's a traumatic experience to live subject to an immanent shock over which one has no control; an expectation that, at least for me, was anything but “blessed.”

Again, like many of the accepted fundamentalist doctrines, the rapture is pretty hard to back-up. The word is never used in the Bible, and it was not a teaching that comes from the words of Jesus. There is one passage, where he is speaking of the coming of the kingdom of God, in which he alludes to the idea of some people being taken, and some left. Fundamentalists point to this scripture as evidence; but the “kingdom of God” was seen by Christ as being a present reality, not necessarily a specific external occurance removed in time from the culture in which he spoke. It was Paul who came up with the "twinkling of an eye," catching away idea, and the horrors of the post-rapture world are lifted straight out of the apocalyptic literature.
It was Darby in the late 19th century who would popularize the rapture idea. Darby lived during the hey day of the scientific revolution, a time when materialism was the favored ontological view. The rapture idea is, in fact, a doctrine grounded in materialism, a view that defines human life and consciousness as a by-product of the material body. Included in the doctrine is the belief that 1) bodies dead and decayed for centuries will magically reconstitute themselves (pretty unlikely, since our ancestor's atoms have already become part of the landscape and probably incorporated into another person or animal), and 2) We will take our physical bodies with us into the next life, and that 3) Jesus has maintained his physical body for two thousand years (so how then, does he live in our hearts?). A primary theme stressed throughout Christ's teachings, that of reality being spiritual rather than physical, seems to fly in the face of this whole "rapture" idea. God is Spirit; and so are we, at the core of our being. Once again, a literal interpretation just doesn't work.

The doctrine of the “rapture” is a new phenomenon in the larger picture of historical Christianity. While it was first popularized in the last part of the 19th century, the current popular appeal of this concept can be traced to a book published in 1970 by a California campus pastor, Hal Lindsey. The book, “The Late, Great, Planet Earth” was John Darby apocalyptic dispensationalism repackaged in contemporary terminology and sensational imagery. Lindsey may not have been highly educated or even well versed in historical Christianity, but he was a magnificent storyteller. His journey into fantasy took the real fears of the cold war and an unstable world political scene and married them with the apocalyptic vision of the book of Revelation. By chaining out the ‘possibilities,” Lindsey speculated on an impending rapture, followed by world domination by the anti-Christ, persecution and genocide, starvation, disease, and giant, stinging scorpions that roamed the earth tormenting humanity.

Lindsey’s book became a phenomenon. From it would spin off an entire movie series that dramatized this sensationalized interpretation of Revelation. I can remember these movies, with titles like “A Thief in the Night” and “A Distant Thunder,” being shown in the high school gym on consecutive Saturday nights in the summertime, a community sponsored event. Darby’s apocalyptic vision had become big business for fundamentalists, and the 1970’s saw charismatic and fundamentalist organizations raking in big profits from these fearful images.

One might argue that not all fundamentalist groups embrace the idea of the rapture. While this maybe true, the doctrine is still a major force in American society today. Both the Christian Post and Beliefnet reported results of a poll conducted by an international polling in the last days of 2006. The poll found that 25% of the American public thought that it was at least somewhat likely that Jesus would return to earth in 2007. Among white Evangelical Christians, the number rose to 42%. (Barrick, 2007; Banks, 2007). “Rapture mania” is still very much alive, and is still big business for fundamentalist Christians who can tell a good story. Jenkins and LaHaye have recycled the themes of the 1970’s “Thief in the Night” series with their own “Left Behind” series. Again playing on the contemporary political fears of our generation and updating the rule of the anti-Christ with high-tech tools of domination, Jenkins and LaHaye have, in many ways, become the Jack Chick of our generation. Apocalyptic fantasy has become a uniquely modern entertainment; a deliciously frightful, and gloriously lucrative, fiction;
A fiction that has very little to say about mature faith, and nothing to say about the heart of Jesus’ teachings.

Deciphering Revelation

It is not just Lindsey, Jenkins and LaHaye who have made a career out of apocalyptic fantasy. A quick scan of internet resources reveals hundreds of thousands of pages that deal with the book of Revelation; an endless smorgasboard of lectures, books, study guides, and sermons that delve into the mysteries of this enigmatic book of the Bible.

For fundamentalists, this sensational and wildly symbolic text is seen as a literal outline of events happening in the world today, and a road map of things to come in the near future. It is accepted without question in most fundamental circles that John, writing almost two thousand years ago, was writing for our time and place. There are a couple of big problems with this view. First, it is extremely egocentric and smacks of the pre-operational developmental level seen in small children who have not yet developed the ability to decenter. Second, it violates all we know about the nature of apocalyptic literature in general.

Apocalyptic literature is a specific genre of literature that was popularized a couple of hundred years before Jesus came on the scene and continued for a hundred years or so after his death. We know a bit about this type of writing, because there are a number of apocalyptic books that have come down to us from that time period. This type of writing was a highly stylized form, more akin to poetry than to literal narrative, and the purpose was to inspire more than to inform. At a time when Judaism was going through a period of persecution and change, the apocalyptic writer cast the events of the day in fantastic symbols and images, and reminded the people that in the end, God the superhero would win and the nasty villains will be destroyed. It was prophetic in that it inspired the people to persevere, to “keep the faith,” and wait for the ultimate good to prevail.

There is absolutely no evidence to indicate that the Biblical writers or the early church fathers saw this book as a long-term prophecy of literal, chronological events. Somewhere around 160 B.C. a believer named Montanus read the book of Revelation and determined that the end of the world was coming, and Jesus would soon return to a mountaintop near him. It did not happen, but the teaching continued to exist in isolated pockets for many years. The church considered Montanism a heresy, and attempted to stamp it out on more than one occasion.
Only one of these apocalyptic accounts from that turbulent period found its way into the canon of scripture, and there have been many debates over the centuries as to whether or not it should be there. Martin Luther, the father of Protestantism, didn’t know what to make of the book and for the most part, ignored it. It would be Darby and the rise of dispensational theology at the end of the nineteenth century that would pull this obscure book into the forefront of Christian theology, and fundamentalism that would resurrect the heresy of the rapture, throw in the great tribulation, and give birth to a 20th century religious culture dominated and defined by fantasy and fear.

Fundamentalism and Religious Intolerance

There’s one more story that has come to characterize fundamental Christianity in the modern era; and it is a story that is not only out of touch with the Spirit of Jesus’ teachings, but out of touch with the social conscience of the 21st century. This story smacks of religious intolerance and militant radicalism. This is the story of “Jesus only”, and it goes like this: There is only one true God, and all of mankind comes into the world alienated from Him. Although many cultures in the world have produced men of great spiritual sensitivity, compassion and wisdom who have reached out to experience the divine and led others to do the same, God has rejected these. No matter how one has lived his or her life, no matter what level of love or compassion they may have demonstrated, it means nothing to God unless they have accepted that Jesus is God incarnate, the only son of God, and the only way to be united with God. Yet, for those who have been fortunate enough to be born in a country where the Jesus story is the prevailing myth for relating to the divine, finding God and being saved from eternal damnation is relatively simple. No matter how unconsciously, selfishly, or maliciously one has lived, if he or she only accepts Jesus as the son of God, the unmerited gift of salvation is given freely.

According to this story, the prophets of God who have taught many of the same principles that Jesus taught are all seen as false prophets, and rejected outright. Buddha, Muhammed, Ghandi, and other spiritually evolved men and women who have lived lives dedicated to the search for truth are seen as damned to hell; except that they have “believed” on the name of Jesus.

It is this story that makes Christianity, in the eyes of 21st century world consciousness, appear to be prejudiced, militant, and unenlightened. This exclusionary stance is nowhere to be found in the spirit of Jesus’ teachings, which are marked by an attitude of deliberate inclusion and acceptance of folks from all levels of society. It was only the religious folk for whom he had words of warning; the spiritual elite of the day who exemplified the very attitude that fundamentalism conveys today.

Where does this teaching come from? Again, this radical, exclusionary stance can only be justified when one takes a modern fundamentalist view of scripture as “factually” inerrant, with every single word inspired. This view of scripture allows one to take a single passage from the text, interpret the meaning of the words apart from the historical or biblical context, and create a doctrine; a doctrine that in this case, has become a story that defines who they are and how they relate to the broader culture of the day.

In the book of John 14:6, the latest gospel account to be written and one that most mainline Biblical scholars accept as being highly editorialized by the early church, we find this these words attributed to Jesus: "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” This statement seems odd when one considers the entire body of Jesus’ teachings. While it is possible to make an argument that the gospel accounts present a Jesus who saw himself as a Jewish national Messiah, there is no evidence whatsoever that he perceived himself to be the saviour of the world for all times and places. These concerns would seem to require at least a suspension of judgment concerning the text. To use this passage as the foundation for a doctrine of religious intolerance is beyond the scope of reasonable hermeneutic practice.

And so here we are. American fundamentalism has become a religious expression that is recognized by an obsessive preoccupation with the afterlife. We live constantly under the threat of impending destruction, and cling fearfully to the teachings of the church in order to avoid hell fire or to achieve a heavenly reward. Knowing that our apocalyptic stories seem unintelligible to the world, we separate our existence into two spheres, the world of believers, and the “world” out there; a world that is lost, disillusioned, and blind to the truth that we alone possess. We know that the world is ruled by Satan and headed for destruction, so we venture out only to share our message with the lost souls, looking over our shoulder constantly, because at any moment, we may be yanked off the face of the earth. We carry these collected stories through our lives, struggling beneath the weight; trying to balance the unmanageable burden. We look neither to the left or the right, knowing that by doing so, we could lose our footing and all would come tumbling down.

Is this really what we mean? Do we really believe that this is the singular path to higher consciousness, to spiritual enlightenment? Does this picture even remotely resemble the “kingdom of God” that was the heart and soul of Jesus message? These are the questions that I faced; and the answers were obvious and disturbing. I concluded that something has gone terribly wrong. Somewhere, somehow, we had lost our way.