RELIGIOUS QUESTIONS
I thought for sure Hugh Hewitt, among others, would be up in arms over Nicholas Kristof's latest venture in Christian eschatology. Here's a bit from Saturday's NYT:
If the latest in the "Left Behind" series of evangelical thrillers is to be believed, Jesus will return to Earth, gather non-Christians to his left and toss them into everlasting fire:
"Jesus merely raised one hand a few inches and a yawning chasm opened in the earth, stretching far and wide enough to swallow all of them. They tumbled in, howling and screeching, but their wailing was soon quashed and all was silent when the earth closed itself again."
These are the best-selling novels for adults in the United States, and they have sold more than 60 million copies worldwide. The latest is "Glorious Appearing," which has Jesus returning to Earth to wipe all non-Christians from the planet. It's disconcerting to find ethnic cleansing celebrated as the height of piety.
If a Muslim were to write an Islamic version of "Glorious Appearing" and publish it in Saudi Arabia, jubilantly describing a massacre of millions of non-Muslims by God, we would have a fit. We have quite properly linked the fundamentalist religious tracts of Islam with the intolerance they nurture, and it's time to remove the motes from our own eyes.
In "Glorious Appearing," Jesus merely speaks and the bodies of the enemy are ripped open. Christians have to drive carefully to avoid "hitting splayed and filleted bodies of men and women and horses."...
This matters in the real world, in the same way that fundamentalist Islamic tracts in Saudi Arabia do. Each form of fundamentalism creates a stark moral division between decent, pious types like oneself--and infidels headed for hell.
No, I don't think the readers of "Glorious Appearing" will ram planes into buildings. But we did imprison thousands of Muslims here and abroad after 9/11, and ordinary Americans joined in the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in part because of a lack of empathy for the prisoners. It's harder to feel empathy for such people if we regard them as infidels and expect Jesus to dissolve their tongues and eyes any day now.
Evangelicals, many of whom do not subscribe to Tim LaHaye's particular eschatology even if they read his books, will no doubt respond that Kristof's rhetoric is unfair. Evangelical Christianity does not encourage terrorism or ethnic cleansing. To the contrary, evangelism is persuasion, not coercion; conversion must be sincere and voluntary; the only evangelical crusades involve not blood but Billy Graham's preaching; there's no history of evangelical pograms. For all its militant visions of Christ, which did not start with 9/11, evangelical Christianity is a peaceful (though not pacifist) religion.
In all these ways, Kristof is indeed unfair. But his outsider's eye does raise a serious question that evangelicals seem never to ask themselves: Why would you worship such a God? What makes you think a deity who would consign righteous unbelievers (or even bad guys) to never-ending torture--a bully who makes the most vicious dictator look like a nice guy--deserves adoration and praise? Do you really believe this stuff? Would you believe it if you hadn't heard it all your life?
The Christianity preached in the Left Behind books may make for rolicking, high-stakes fiction, but it's morally repulsive. And I suspect few American evangelicals truly believe it. The "salvation inflation" noted by Alan Wolfe isn't a soft-headed play for popularity. It's a deeply moral response to living among good people who don't share one's theology.