When I was seventeen some Christian boys I knew at school shared with me some books about The End of Times, which scared the hell out of me. Sooner than I could think, I was at their church, attending Bible studies, getting baptized, and preaching salvation to other kids with the aid of some Campus Crusade for Christ religious tracts.
At the youth group meeting where I stood up to accept Christ as my savior, I was congratulated by Christians, many who attended my high school. Word spread about my conversion, and at the next day at school a boy I didn’t know well approached me, shook my hand, and looked into my sad eyes. “Why don’t you look happy?” he asked. I didn’t tell him the truth, which is that my Jewish grandmother, who had died a year earlier from leukemia, weighed heavily on my soul because some of my new church friends told me she was in hell. I had begged God to save me from hell, but there was nothing I could do about dead family members who didn’t know Jesus. The idea of them suffering in hell made it a challenge for me to experience the perfect love of God. And I was told if I questioned God’s perfect love I myself would go to hell.
This estrangement from God grew worse and worse: The more I thought about the church people who felt privileged to tell me my grandmother was in hell the more angry I became and the more angry I became the more I started backpedalling on the faith.
During the summer, a couple months after my conversion, I left the San Francisco Bay Area to spend time with my grandfather in Los Angeles. He had just lost his wife to cancer. I didn’t dare tell him what the church people had told me about her eternal fate. But I did tell him I was going to church. I knew he wouldn’t be happy. He was an atheist socialist whose favorite philosopher in college was Nietzsche, a man some of the church people called the “Anti-Christ.” He asked me why I had turned to religion, and I told him I was afraid I was going to hell. He laughed and said that once I started college and talked to history and philosophy professors they would set me straight, they would show me that religion was nothing but a bunch of fairy tales and a bogus creation designed to control the masses. He said that most religious people he had met over the years were weird. I didn’t want my grandfather to think I was a weirdo or a stupid person who believed in fairy tales, but I was hurting. My whole world had collapsed when I discovered the universe was ruled by a god who threw people into eternal hell. And I was commiserating with people who were telling me my grandmother was damned. I tried to explain my fear of hell to my grandfather and he said, “If you want to be afraid of hell, be my guest.”
I envied my grandfather for having no fear of hell and for seeing the Bible as nothing but fairy tales. His life seemed so much easier than mine. The only thing he seemed to fear were birds—poultry in particular—because his siblings threw a headless chicken at him, the legend goes, when he was a little boy and he had a lifelong phobia to all forms of poultry so that on Thanksgiving the hosts had to make him a special dish featuring a non-bird protein. Once when we were at someone’s house that had some kind of pet macaw outside a cage, my grandfather cowered and his whole body shook until the owner put the bird in another room. So there you had it. My grandfather cowered in the presence of birds. I cowered in the presence of the New Testament God.
If I had to choose between a lifelong fear of chickens and a lifelong fear of hell, I’d take the chickens.
I often think it would be nice to have my grandfather’s point of view, that the Bible is a bunch of man-made fairy tales, but the fear of hell is so deep inside me I feel I can’t afford to be wrong because if I am wrong I’m totally screwed.
But here’s a problem: I’ve found that pursuing religion for hell insurance doesn’t work. There’s no real love there. Ironically enough, I’m trying to save my life and I’m losing it. And those aren’t my words. They belong to Jesus.
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