The Prayer I Just Can’t Pray Anymore

Despite no longer considering myself an evangelical, I still have many friends who do. So, I try to walk the line between respecting their beliefs and saying a firm “no” to the aspects of evangelicalism that I believe are harmful.

This has created a few awkward moments.

For example, when an evangelical friend gave me a prayer request the other day, I politely refused to pray for what he asked. “I’m sorry, I cannot pray for that,” I said.

It was the kind of prayer request that wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow in the evangelical church world, but I just can’t pray it anymore. In fact, even if I did pray it, I’m not sure God would answer it, anyway.

You see, my friend is running a Christian youth camp. The goal of this youth camp is to convince young people to become Christians. The method of getting these young people to become Christians is to convince them that they are wicked and sinful and in need of the mercy of God, who has poured out the punishment for our wicked sinfulness on his own son, Jesus Christ… apparently.

Evangelicals call this message the “Gospel,” which, ironically, means the “Good News.”

It doesn’t sound like good news to me.

However, to my friend, this is THE good news. And so, he sent through a prayer request that said this:

“Please pray that the Spirit would convict the young people of their sinfulness and their part in the sin of this world.”

But I ain’t praying it.

No way.

Here’s why.

The choice that isn’t a choice

When Evangelicals present their version of the “gospel,” it usually goes something like this: “You were born sinful from birth, and the punishment for your sinfulness is eternal conscious torment in a place called Hell. However, God sent his Son, Jesus, to take the punishment for your sins so that if you choose to believe in him, you won’t go to Hell.”

Step one in converting someone to “Christianity” by this method is convincing a person that they are so wicked that they are destined for Hell without intervention from God. That intervention comes to us in the form of Jesus Christ: Choose Jesus and live. They call this “the good news,” and they present it as a free choice every human has to make.

But, let me ask you a question. Does this really seem like much of a free choice to you? I mean, I can get people to do a lot of things if I threaten them with death. If I point a gun at a person and say, “You have a choice to do what I ask, or I’ll kill you,” does that really constitute a choice? After all, if I threaten to torture a person, I could get them to say whatever I want ninety-nine times out of a hundred. Heck, I might even get them to profess that they believe me to be God.

And if I pin a person face-down on the ground, hold their arms behind their back, and dig my knees into their kidneys, I could probably force them to say they loved me if I promised to get off their back. But would they actually love me?

No.

Ditch hell from your sales pitch

As soon as you try to get people to follow Jesus by convincing them of their sinfulness and then bringing Hell into the equation, you are, in fact, taking away free choice by reducing it down to a non-choice.

You cannot create free lovers by force.

A person who follows Jesus because they believe they are bound for Hell without him is not following Jesus for who Jesus is — but for what Jesus can do for them. They are not compelled by love. They are, in fact, simply doing what most human beings would do at a basic, instinctual, animal level: Self-preservation.

Only when you remove the threat of eternal punishment — and even the promise of eternal reward — can you say you are truly intrinsically motivated to follow Christ — rather than merely following him for what you can get out of the deal. The person who follows Christ without the threat of Hell or the promise of Heaven is a true follower.

Photo by Samuel Martins on Unsplash

Hell doesn’t create lovers of God

Right now, there are millions — if not billions — of people across the world who are terrified of dying because they believe they are so sinful that God will cast them into a fiery pit where they will be tormented for trillions of years.

Many of them say they follow Christ, but they are not motivated or compelled by the life of Christ or his teachings. The fact that Jesus was the preeminent teacher of love, grace, and compassion is nice but ultimately extraneous to the primary reason they call themself a Christian: To obtain their ‘get-out-of-hell-free’ card.

Don’t you see?

Hell doesn’t create lovers of God. Hell creates people who try to appease God by saying, doing, and believing the right things because they believe their acceptance by God depends on those things.

And what does that leave us with? A fear-based religion where salvation is dependent on human performance rather than the goodness and grace of God.

The kind of “Christians” this creates.

Fear-based religion and shame work well to keep the troops in line because fear is certainly a powerful motivator — but only in the short term. It does not result in real, lasting transformation. In the longer term, it produces some somewhat different results.

A system that uses fear to achieve its goals ultimately makes out God to be the same — a fearmonger. Unwittingly, the church made God seem like an arm-folding, eye-rolling, head-shaking, fist-waving, disapproving megalomaniac who is impossible to please and constantly unimpressed. Moreover, the church made it seem like God, with a heaving sigh, begrudgingly came and died for our sins, and we ought to feel constantly guilty about making him die in the first place.

Consequently, the “God” the church presents seems to struggle to show unconditional love or mercy to sinners, even though, according to Jesus, it is in God’s very job description.

In fact, under the message that most of us have heard, we end up being more loving than God and then not taking God very seriously. When I think about my non-Christian friends — ordinary people — I know that they would usually give a guy a break, overlook someone’s mistakes, and, even on their worst days, would not imagine torturing people who do not like them, worship them, or believe in them. Yet, that is how the “God” that the church presents appears to be.

In the church, we are told that we ought to love unconditionally, but the God who commands this is depicted as having a very conditional and quite exclusive love, it seems. We are told to love our enemies, but it appears that “God” clearly does not. God punishes them for all eternity.

Why would anyone trust or love such a God and want to follow him? Much less want to spend eternity with such a being?

I wouldn’t.

What I prayed instead…

A person will only follow another out of fear for so long before deciding to break free from their puritanical regime. Love, on the other hand, compels a person to follow indefinitely. The problem is that love takes longer to reap a harvest than fear, and the church has never been known for its patience.

In the words of Australian poet Michael Leunig:

“There are only two feelings.
Love and fear.
There are only two languages.
Love and fear.
There are only two activities.
Love and fear.
There are only two motives,
two procedures, two frameworks,
two results.
Love and fear.
Love and fear.”

Trying to convince young people of their sinfulness so that they become so frightened of Hell that they accept Jesus… which do you think that is?

Love or fear?

So, when my friend asked me to pray for the kids at his camp to recognize their own sinfulness, I politely declined. Instead, I offered to pray a different prayer. I said: “I pray that the Spirit would reveal to the young people a profound understanding of the fact that they are beloved sons and daughters of God.”

We love him because he first loved us.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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