A Letter from Hell, and Self-Reinforcing Beliefs

I recently read a piece titled “A Young Man’s Letter from Hell.” It goes like this:

Dear Zack,

I died today. It’s a lot different than I expected. You see, I always thought that dying would bring me to a world that is foggy and hazy. But this place is crystal clear… It’s even more real than my life on Earth.

I can think. I can talk. I can even feel.

Right after the wreck I could feel my spirit leaving my body. It was the weirdest thing, Zack. I thought I heard you screaming out to me, man. Must have been just imagining things.

At first I was just standing in line, getting registered I guess. They asked me for my name…and began to look in this thing they called the Book of Life.

I guess they couldn’t find it though because this huge angel standing next to me grabbed me by the arm and started dragging me away. I was terrified. I had no idea what was going on. I asked the angel where he was taking me, but he didn’t answer. So I asked him again…

Finally, he told me that only those, whose names were written in the Book of Life, could enter into Heaven and the rest would be condemned to Hell forever.

Man I was scared. The angel threw me into some kind of holding cell. Where I’ve been sitting and thinking for a long long time. Do you want to know what I’ve been thinking about?

I’ve been thinking about YOU.

Zack, You’re a Christian. You told me so yourself. I mean we talked about it three different times today.

Kelly brought it up and you laughed it off. Coach Adams brought it up and you changed the subject.

I mean, it came up right before the wreck. Well the question I can’t get out of my mind is this, Zack. Why haven’t you ever told me about how to become a Christian?

You say you are my friend, but if you really were you would have told me about this Jesus and told me how to escape this terrible place that I’m headed for.

I can feel my heart pounding in my chest, the angels who have been chosen to cast me into hell are coming down the hallway. I can hear their footsteps.

I have heard of this Hell. They call it the Lake of Fire.

I can’t stand it, Zack. I am terrified. No! The angels are at the door. Oh no, no! They’re coming in and they’re pointing at me. They’re grabbing me and carrying me out of the room.

I already can smell the burning sulfur and brimstone. I can see the edge of the cliff where Hell burns.

This is it. I am without hope.

We’re coming closer, closer, closer. My heart is bursting with fear. They’re holding me over the flames. I am damned forever.

This is it. They are throwing me in. Fire, Pain, HELL.

Why Zack? Why didn’t you ever tell me about Jesus?

Your friend,

Josh

P.S. Wish you were here.

Okay, so, there are like 150 different things wrong with this letter. I honestly feel like a letter like this ought to be an affront even to a Christian. Isn’t there a Bible verse that warns against adding to the Bible? Things like this read like that to me. And then there’s everything else that’s wrong too, and you’re free to pick it apart on the comments, but I want to focus on something slightly different for the moment.

Namely, I want to look at the way evangelicalism creates a self-reinforcing cycle for its adherents. let me explain!

Evangelical leaders teach that Jesus said Christians—true Christians—would be despised and persecuted. If you’re not despised and persecuted, well, that’s when you should be worried about whether or not you’re actually truly saved. shortly after Lydia Schatz died of abuse at her parents’ hands, I talked to my mom about the criticism Michael and Debi Pearl, whose child training manual Lydia’s parents had followed, were receiving in the wake of her death. My mother’s response? If the Pearls are getting that level of condemnation and criticism, they must be doing God’s work.

Yeah . . .

Letters like the one above are designed to convince evangelical youth to evangelize their fellow high school students. Now first of all, most young people are already Christians, they’re just the wrong kind of Christian, so attempting to proselytize them probably isn’t going to go over well. As for those young people who aren’t Christians, it’s generally not lack of exposure that’s the issue. In most areas of the country, it would be hard to reach the teen years unaware of the gospel message. So again, that whole proselytizing thing isn’t going to go over well.

As an evangelical teenager myself, I wasn’t around non-Christians until I was in college. When I did reach college, I did very little actual proselytizing. I mean oh yes, I stood up for my beliefs, and I wasn’t shy about them. But I found that either my peers were either already Christian, or if they weren’t (or were the wrong kind of Christian), they weren’t really open to conversion. I quickly realized that if I spent my time trying to proselytize anyone who I felt wasn’t “saved,” I would very quickly push them away and look like a fool in the process.

I suppose this made me a bad evangelical. Or maybe it simply made me a realist. I justified my failure to win converts by telling myself that I was setting an example by how I lived, and “planting seeds” in people’s lives.

The point I’m trying to make is that if an evangelical teenager actually follows the advice the above letter is meant to offer, they will very likely end up having very few non-Christian friends, and may very well end up laughed at and mocked in the process, because no one likes to be told they deserve eternal torture, and so forth. And it is exactly this that evangelicals interpret as being “despised and persecuted.” The result, then, for the evangelical teenager, is confirmation that their evangelical beliefs are true—because here they are being persecuted and despised for them, just like Jesus said they would be.

proselytize peers –> be laughed at or mocked –> confirmation that beliefs are true 

Rinse, lather, repeat.

In some sense, letters like the one above are more about keeping the evangelical young person reading them faithful and ingrained in their belief system than they actually are about converting anyway. Because, if an evangelical young person listens to and acts on the information in the letter, they will likely end up pissing their peers off, which will result in them feeling isolated and despised, which will result in, for them, confirmation of their beliefs. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle that is perfectly calibrated to keep the faithful in the fold.

And somehow, I find that morbidly fascinating.

Looking back, I’m very glad I took a step back while in college and spent more time just living around people than I did attempting to proselytize them. The result was that I actually got to know people different from myself, on their own merits, and I learned that they were at once much more complicated and much more interesting than I’d thought. As I got to know people without pushing them away or making them (justifiably) annoyed by proselytizing at them, I found I had to throw out many of my stereotypes and preconceived notions. This helped open me up to rethinking my beliefs entirely.

And that, I suppose, is just what the author of “A Young Man’s Letter from Hell” was trying to avoid.