Hell is an Evangelical billboard in rural Alabama

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Visiting family in Niceville, FL for Thanksgiving required driving through the majority of Alabama. On that ride, I saw a lot of Evangelical Christian signs and billboards. I imaged a preacher getting up and selling his congregation on the expense. “Jesus said go into all nations and preach the gospel. We’ve got heathens right here on I-95!”

One of them had three numbered points. I don’t remember point two or three. But point one was “You are a sinner.”

I remember I was in college before I ever heard a professing Christian tell me he didn’t believe in Hell. I grew up Southern Baptist and had been taught that Hell is a literal place where people who don’t accept Jesus Christ as their personal Savior went after they died where Satan and his demons tortured them for all eternity. Alternatively, everything was the same but instead of Satan & Co. torturing you it was simply the fact that you were separated from God, which was torturous.

College is also where I talked theology with Calvinists for the first time. I’d been taught that predestination was heresy. At some point, very, very late in the game, I began to notice that the better educated my interlocutors were on the Bible, theology, and just in general, the more likely they were to disagree with me on fundamental Christian beliefs. I also noticed that I learned more about the Bible in one Biblical Perspectives class, (which everyone at my Baptist university was required to pass to graduate), than I had in 18 years of thrice-weekly church attendance, plus Sunday School, mission trips, church camps, and retreats.

All that to say: No, dear rural Alabama billboard. I am not a sinner. I reject the idea of “sin.” Well, let me take that back. There is no way to determine with anything resembling certainty whether “sin” exists. We can have even less certainty over which behaviors would constitute sin if it did exist.

There was a time when I would have said that the Bible is the inerrant word of God. Today, I admit that I have no idea whether the Bible is the inerrant word of God. It seems like if I were writing a book that’s supposed to form the basis of humanity’s ethical system I would have tried to make that book make basic sense. And if I were an omnipotent being I probably would have succeeded.

But, maybe God is a sadist. In fact, that’s really the only explanation for any of this that in any way checks out. Other than the explanation that the Bible was put together by a group of men who had access to a ton of writings that had some relation to this long-dead dude named Jesus and the religion he was born into called Judaism that people were reading and needed to cull this long and contradictory reading list into a semi-coherent theology to help reduce religious infighting and delegitimize certain beliefs, especially those that could pose a threat to existing hierarchies.

Either way, my reading of what the Bible says about what Jesus said and did makes it seem like his goal was to move away from the existing requirement of having to make regular ritual sacrifices to make it up to God for all the times you failed to perfectly follow Jewish law. When Jesus talked about sins of the mind, for instance, it really seems like his point was that it’s better to strive to not be an asshole than it is to get wrapped up in dogmatic interpretation of Byzantine rules.

While I might never know for sure until the great hereafter whether sin is real, what I have a lot of confidence about is that the way people in power use the concept of sin causes a lot more problems than it solves.

As far as I can tell, the only real problem the concept of sin is even supposed to solve is to browbeat people into acting right. I’m hardly the first to point it out, but it just seems like people who say that without the threat of eternal damnation they’d be going around killing and raping are really telling on themselves. As it turns out, the evidence is really strong that the vast majority of people the vast majority of the time are consistently pro-social and absolutely do not need the threat of eternal damnation to act right.

Not only that, but when it comes to getting people to act right, positive reinforcement works a lot better, and is more pleasant, than threats. We see this over and over and over again. Punishment and threat of punishment not only reliably fail to work but they also reliably make the problems they’re supposed to solve worse. Take prisons, which are demonstrably criminogenic. Or fat-shaming, which makes people fatter. Or look at slut-shaming. Abstinence-only sex education increases incidences of sexual assault, STIs, and unintended pregnancies. Drug prohibition is famously ineffective.

I do not have the time to go into all the harms directly caused by or related to the concept of sin. But I will point out that the Southern Baptist concept of sin justifies shaming young girls for wearing two-piece bathing suits while actively protecting hundreds of church leaders who sexually assaulted thousands of children over decades.

Gay married? Kicked out. But if you’re a prominent spokesman for one of America’s largest Christian camps who’s accused of raping multiple children, or Bill Gothard, head of the Institute in Basic Life Principles, who’s accused of sexually assaulting dozens of children, the Evangelical church will protect you.

How interesting how little uproar there was over the fact that a sitting US Senator claimed a 13 year old can consent to sex. How much worse that he spent more than a decade directing youth programming at the Falls Creek Baptist Conference Center, which hosts more than 50,000 school-age kids each year.

Is sin real? Is Hell real? I don’t know. But what’s pretty obvious to me is that they don’t work. It’s time for some new concepts.