A Problem with the "Good" News

Nothing I will say here is novel, but some things that have been said many times before need to be said again and again. And unfortunately, I am too much of a coward to say them to the people nearest to me.

After I left my parents' church, my mom asked me if I'm saved. The easiest answer is yes, when I was four I asked Jesus into my heart, and thanks to eternal security I'm under the Blood no matter what I do. But that answer is misleading. If I really wanted to state my beliefs about salvation, I would have explained why I think the Evangelical view of salvation is - to put it politely - problematic, and - to put it bluntly - morally bankrupt.

In a nutshell, the Evangelical view of salvation is: (1) all humans inevitably commit sin, (2) the just penalty for any sin is eternity in hell fire, (3) Jesus paid the price for all sin by dying on the cross, but (4) no one is covered by that payment unless they somehow ask for that coverage.

I have no problem with (1). I am a firm believer in sin nature - not only of human beings, but of the biological order in general. My problem is with (2). It implies we can be owned by someone (or somethree?) else.

When you own something, you have the morally justifiable right to do with it as you please. Unless of course, you're renting or borrowing, in which case your ownership exists by the permission of the proprietor, who really owns it and has the ultimate right to do with it as he pleases (though the government likes to pretend that it is the ultimate owner of everything).

According to Evangelicalism, the pre-mortem individual is renting or borrowing himself from God, who ultimately and rightfully owns everything and everyone. Upon your death, immediate jurisdiction over you returns to God, who - according to Evangelicalism - may rightfully do to you whatever pleases Him. If it were God's pleasure that all the dead be sent to a holding facility where they have to recompense for their misdeeds as a condition for being released into paradise, then God could have designed things that way. But according to the Evangelical, He didn't. And He didn't need to.

The kind of justice that God chose is the condemnation of everyone who committed any sin to an eternity in hell fire. If you are under the Blood, or too young to talk, you are an exception. By default, everyone who is old enough to talk is condemned. Everyone who lives a completely normal and wholesome life without praying the Sinner's Prayer is condemned to an eternity in hell fire. Their completely normal and wholesome life included white lies, lustful thoughts, some unwarranted anger, etc., which were not covered by the Blood and which earn damnation. Even the boy whose only sin was to glance down his teacher's blouse when she bent over his desk is damned. If he dies before asking Jesus into his heart, he goes to hell - for looking down his teacher's blouse. According to the Evangelical, this is the policy that God chose to enact. And He has the right to choose this policy rather than another.

If God has a right to do to a soul one thing and not another, then He owns it. This amounts to property in humans. It's more extreme than a plantation owner deciding whether you'll pick cotton in the field or dust furniture in the house.

I've heard some people use Lockean slavery/punishment theory to justify God's right to damn souls. The Lockean theory is this: if A aggresses against B, then B has a degree of rights over A. If A makes an attempt on B's life, B has complete property rights over A, and may confine him indefinitely, put him through forced labor, or kill him. According to "Lockean Evangelicalism" (sorry I don't have a better term for it yet), God has rightful jurisdiction over human souls because humans aggress against God by sinning against Him. There are two big problems with this.

For one thing, the victim's rights over the aggressor are proportional to the severity of the aggression. You only have the right to do something drastic to somebody if they did or were going to do something drastic to you. It's very hard for my fallible human mind to imagine how an infinitely powerful, beautiful, majestic, everlasting and unchanging God can be harmed at all, much less be so drastically harmed by someone that He has the right to retaliate as drastically as damning them to an eternity in hell fire.

For another, what is and isn't aggression is completely up to God to decide, since Evangelicalism defines sin exactly as whatever offends God. If God commands that everyone's heads be covered with tea cozies while in church, and a guy's tea cozy falls off, then that man displeased God, and thereby aggressed against Him. At the moment the man's kippah fell off his head, the title to his soul transferred from him to God (if it wasn't already transferred). If God gains complete and ultimate ownership over people's souls by merely being offended by them, then this isn't any different from God completely and ultimately owning everybody in the first place.

There's no beating around the bush. Evangelical soteriology assumes a justification of slavery. It claims that God has a right to treat souls in the severest way imaginable, and that it is only by God's Grace (that is, His discretion) that some are spared such abuse. He has rights over you whether or not you give them, and the only thing you can do to be dealt with lightly is to perform such-n-such action that He demands, which - luckily for everyone - is a little prayer that can be recited in less than a minute. Too bad this prayer doesn't occur to everyone spontaneously.

All this would have been much shorter had I written "God doesn't exist, there is no heaven, and there is no hell." But that doesn't convey what I think is most important to say. Religion is at its core a matter of right. It is not a matter of fact. One of the reasons I rarely call myself an atheist is that those who do call themselves atheists spend so much time and energy talking about natural selection, laws of physics, and the scientific method, it's as if they would immediately become born-again Christians and faithfully attend fundamental Baptist churches if God reveals His existence to them. Atheists who spend all their time on Science vs. Supernatural ignore that there are moral issues to be addressed. My bone to pick with conventional Christians isn't God's supposed existence. It's God's supposed authority. And until we pick apart the issue of God's supposed right to do things to us, we leave open the idea that someone may rightfully do things to us against our consent.