Nicolae: The Rise of Antichrist; pp. 296-299
As Chapter 14 wraps up, readers are, like Hattie Durham, exhausted and disgusted, but also relieved that Rayford Steele’s abortion sermon is finally whimpering to an end.
Rayford seems a bit relieved himself. He clearly didn’t enjoy this either. Rayford seems to think of lecturing pregnant women about abortion the same way he thinks about evangelism — it’s an unpleasant duty he is obliged to perform in order to exempt himself from the guilt of others’ damnation. That’s how he approached his awkward attempt to “witness” at Hattie back in the first book and it’s how he approached his anti-abortion sermon here.
This approach didn’t help his cause in either case. In both conversations, it was abundantly clear to Hattie (and to the reader) that he wasn’t primarily interested in her. His main motive was to exculpate himself from any liability for her damnation or baby-killing. Unfortunately, Rayford isn’t unique in this regard. Such guilt-avoidance is a rather widespread motivation for a great deal of the evangelism practiced by American evangelicals.
If you’ve spent any time within the white evangelical subculture, you’ve probably heard several sermons urging you to witness to your unsaved friends and co-workers for exactly this reason. You have the “gospel” message that can save such people from an eternity of torment in Hell. You know the magic words of the sinner’s prayer that can save them from certain damnation. You are therefore obliged to share this secret knowledge — this salvific gnosis — with them. If you don’t, you will be guilty of allowing them to be damned.
A particularly vivid example of this argument for evangelism went viral a few years ago in the form of a “Letter From a Friend in Hell.” Maybe you saw a version of this on Facebook or watched the “dramatic presentation” of it on YouTube. The letter purports to be from a newly dead sinner named Josh, addressed to his still-living Christian friend Zack and mailed, apparently, just before avenging angels cast him into Hell for eternity.
“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,” Josh writes. The letter ends with this:
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?
The intent here is to motivate Christian high school students like “Zack” to tell their friends about Jesus before it’s too late. If you don’t do that, then you will have to bear the guilt of being partly responsible for their eternal suffering in Hell. You may as well have set fire to them yourself.
The emotional appeal of this “argument” tends to outweigh its theological incoherence,* but my main point here is the way this motivation of avoiding guilt tends to change the character of the evangelism it promotes. Rayford wasn’t trying to help Hattie “get saved” as much as he was trying to fulfill his obligation so that he would not be complicit in her damnation.
Hattie could tell that was what he was doing. People can always tell when that is what you are doing.
And since that was the main thing Rayford was trying to do, that was what he did. And that was all he did. He fulfilled his obligation. Now it’s on her, not on him. His work here is done.
The same thing happens here in the third book with Rayford’s lecture on abortion. He wasn’t so much trying to persuade her to bring her pregnancy to term as he was trying to fulfill his duty to present her with the obligatory anti-abortion message, thereby ensuring that he will not be culpable for or complicit in any baby-murdering that may follow.
In both cases, this motivation shapes what Rayford says. He doesn’t attempt to engage or to persuade, but he’s obliged to recite certain assertions and to ask her to accept them. He’s not obliged to provide any reason or argument for why she should accept them, and it doesn’t much matter to him whether or not she does. What matters to him is that he fulfills his duty to say the required phrases.
And, again, Hattie can tell this is what he is doing. And she again displays remarkable patience in allowing him to do this at her.
Rayford completes his obligatory lecture, and:
With that, she had wrenched fully away from him and had buried her face in her hands and wept.
That same sentence reads like it belongs in some other context. It reads like the next sentences should tell us about Rayford getting up, getting dressed, and tossing some crumpled bills on her nightstand.
Rayford had been angry with himself. Why couldn’t he learn? How could he sit there spouting all that? He believed it, and he was convinced it was God’s view. It made sense to him.
Like his evangelistic soliloquy back in the first book, it made sense to him, but not to Hattie.
In both of these cases, Rayford is playing his usual role in these books as the authors’ mouthpiece. His lecture on abortion, like his earlier evangelistic lecture, represents Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins’ idea of What Good Christians Should Say.** They present both monologues as templates for their Christian readers to imitate when talking to the unsaved or to “fallen” women.
Yet Rayford is still speaking on behalf of the authors when he acknowledges that none of what he says seems to be persuasive. They believe it. They are convinced they are presenting “God’s view.” It makes sense to them. But yet the unsaved people and/or fallen women they target with these lectures don’t often seem convinced.
This baffles the authors, and thus it baffles Rayford on their behalf. Rayford thus begins to form some theories as to why his presentation of “God’s view” isn’t as compelling to Hattie as it is to him.
He believed it, and he was convinced it was God’s view. It made sense to him. But he also knew she could reject it out of hand simply because he was a man.
That’s theory No. 1: Sometimes women just won’t listen when a man explains God’s view to them. He ponders this for a few hours, apparently, before he decides to give it one more try.
Hattie had not spoken to him for hours. … “Hattie,” he had said. She hadn’t looked at him. “Hattie, please let me just express one more thing to you.”
She turned slightly, not looking fully at him, but he had the impression she would at least listen.
“I want you to forgive me for anything I said that hurt you personally or insulted you. I hope you know me well enough by now to know that I would not do that intentionally. More important, I want you to know that I am one of a few friends you have in the Chicago area who loves you and wants only the best for you. I wish you’d think about stopping in and seeing us in Mt. Prospect on your way back. Even if I’m not there, even if I have to go back to New Babylon before you, stop in and see Chloe and Buck. Talk to Amanda. Would you do that?”
Now she had looked at him. She had pressed her lips together and shook her head apologetically. “Probably not. I appreciate your sentiments, and I accept your apology. But no, probably not.”
Someday you may try to write a scene in which a hideously abusive man mansplains, sprinkling in all kinds of insidious condescension and contempt. Give it your best shot, but you’ll be hard-pressed to outdo the paragraphs above.
Hattie, for some reason, doesn’t leap at the invitation to hear an identical lecture presented three more times by Chloe, Buck and Amanda. And she remains unpersuaded by the things that Rayford believes — that his intentions are all good, that she is unloved apart from him and his circle of friends, and that he knows what is best for her better than she knows herself.
This prompts Rayford to form Theory No. 2 for why his attempts to evangelize Hattie continue to fail:
And that’s the way it had been left. Rayford was angry with himself. His motives were pure, and he believed his logic was right. But maybe he had counted too much on his own personality and style and not enough on God himself to work in Hattie’s heart. All he could do now was pray for her.
It seems, at first glance, that Rayford is piously blaming himself for his failure to persuade Hattie. “He had counted too much on his own personality and style and not enough on God.” But note that this explanation offers only one possible path to the desired outcome: God working “in Hattie’s heart.”
And if that is the only path to the desired outcome, then there can be only one explanation for an unsatisfactory outcome: God failing to work in Hattie’s heart.
And this, ultimately, is the reason the authors provide for why their recommended template speeches on evangelism and abortion are usually not persuasive. It’s God’s fault. The Lord works in mysterious ways, after all.
When the plane finally stopped at the gate, Rayford helped Hattie pull her bag from the overhead rack. She thanked him. He didn’t trust himself to say anything more. He had apologized enough.
Rayford has done enough. He fulfilled his obligation. He dutifully recited the speech, so he was no longer culpable. Now the blame for Hattie’s damnation and baby-killing couldn’t be laid at his feet. From here on, it’s all God’s fault.
– – – – – – – – – – – –
* The logic here is that I can incur guilt by failing to tell others how to be saved. Specifically, I incur the guilt of their suffering in Hell. I become complicit in the suffering of the damned.
That only makes sense if the eternal suffering of the damned is evil and unjust. One cannot incur guilt by being complicit in something that is good and just and desirable. The argument here, in other words, is that “Zack” and I, as Christians, have a duty to prevent God from doing evil to people like “Josh.”
Again, the emotional weight of this dramatic appeal tends to overshadow that logic, but the seed of that idea remains tucked away inside all such guilt-based appeals for evangelism. They all depend on — and thus, at some level, teach — the idea that any God who sentenced “Josh” et. al. to eternal, conscious torture would be an unjust, evil God. This is why many of the Christians who are saturated in these guilt-based appeals for evangelism eventually come to reject this idea of a cruelly unjust God — either by rejecting belief in God entirely or by learning to separate their idea of God from this sadistic folklore of Hell.
This is also why many of the Christians who are saturated in these guilt-based appeals for evangelism eventually come to embrace this idea of a cruelly unjust God. Thus, Calvinism.
** Such templates — whether for evangelism or for “crisis pregnancy counseling” — are also abstract. They are one-size-fits-all lectures that are presumed to be appropriate and sufficient for any and all would-be converts or fallen women. No consideration of any potential target’s particular circumstances is necessary.
This is particularly strange when it comes to Rayford’s anti-abortion lecture here. It’s an abstract “argument” that never engages Hattie’s particular situation. That’s extraordinary because Hattie’s situation is extraordinary. Her boyfriend is the Antichrist — the epitome of superlative evil. And she has become pregnant near the end of the second year of the Great Tribulation, meaning that the best-case scenario for any child born nine months hence would be four and a half years of suffering from divine torment and/or beastly persecution, followed by certain death.
Whether or not you think that such extraordinary circumstances have any bearing on Hattie’s situation — whether or not you think any of that makes any difference — it seems like these things ought to be at least acknowledged in any discussion with her.
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