Certainty and Anxiety in Evangelical Faith

So--by the time I was in my mid-teens, I had grown up about as immersed in Southern Baptist culture as one could be. By then, I was really, really sick of the evangelical definition of faith. Conservative evangelicalism, as I experienced it, tended to figure faith as a dialectic of certainty and anxiety. The parts of my faith that I knew I needed to have no doubts or fears about were simultaneously ones I needed to attend to constantly.

The result? Certanxiety--a swirling cluster of emotional patterns affirmed as essential to Christian life. Let's see if I can sketch out a few of these:

* The certainty of literal heaven/hell: In truth this is practically the same as the endorsement of the inerrant/infallible truth of the (Protestant) Bible, particularly basic stuff about the deity of Christ and the import of his advent, death, and resurrection. But in practice, the literal truth of Eternity tends to eclipse/precede/underlay those other truths. Why? Because the other face of the certainty about afterlife is...

* The anxiety about said afterlife. If you died right now, as you could at any moment [or, If Christ returned right now, as he could at any moment], would you awaken in heaven or hell?

From the Southern Baptist perspective, it's the Reality of Our Eternal Fate that moves us to begin (or, rather, accept) a relationship with God in the first place. A deep conviction about the fact of hell similarly motivates evangelism ("you wouldn't want your friends to suffer forever in the Pit, would you?"). Evangelism techniques often rely on convincing non-Christians of the reality of their ultimate destination (in Ray Comfort's oft-used analogy, if you're on a broken airplane that's going to crash, you convince other passengers to put on their parachutes by getting them to agree that the plane is doomed, not that parachutes make the flight more comfortable).

Even the vocabulary of conversion--salvation, getting saved--relies on the centrality of hell's literal reality. Now, for most Christians I know, evangelical and otherwise (for me, certainly), Christianity is more than a get-out-of-Hell-free scheme. But the certanxious emphasis on eternal punishment can sometimes make it seem like Christ and God are worth knowing only to the extent that they threaten me with/can save me from burning in unquenchable fire for all time. More on this later.

* The required amount of anxiety about that certainty: It isn't enough to be concerned enough about Hell to get saved. You must identify and cultivate a tense relationship to your own afterlife status, as expressed in the typical revival question, "Are you 100% sure about your eternal fate?" Anything less than total certainty suggests that you maybe-sorta don't have faith. Now, as I've said, this shouldn't be the case for Baptists who value the doctrine of eternal security.

Nevertheless, every revival sermon, every bible camp Friday night service, countless sermons and teachings I remember--all of these and more seemed designed to destabilize your own sense of eternal security. Yeah, you got saved early on in life, but was that an Authentic Experience? If it was, why have you backslid in X, Y, and Z ways? Why do you have doubts and questions about A, B, and C? Why aren't you more concerned or effective at reaching the lost? Are you "bearing Christian fruit"?

Many's the time when, after a particularly harrowing sermon, I'd be half-convinced that in fact I wasn't Christian enough, that I thought I was saved but I'd find--in a tragic reversal trope common to evangelical narratives--that in fact God will say, "Depart from me, ye accursed--I never knew you."

So. Christians were to be anxious about the certainty they felt about their fates. But (as a sub-paragraph to the law of anxious certainty), these demands for anxiety were coupled with repeated warnings about pride (don't be too self-confident about salvation) and fear (constant fear shows a lack of trust in Christ).

All of this certainxiety leads to one final dimension:

* The certainty of anxiety. Philippians 2:12b says that we are to "work out our salvation with fear and trembling." Evangelicalism of the Southern Baptist variety (and, from what I can tell, more generally) takes a literal view of this. Faith is like medicine. You know medicine works when it stings or tastes awful. You know faith works if it occasionally reduces you to tears at the fate you are sure to suffer without Christ. Part of life in the church, you can be sure, can and should involve a degree of anxiety provocation.

Pastors preach hellfire and damnation sermons not only to crowds of the unsaved but also (even primarily) to members of their own flock. Baptists believe in "once saved, always saved," but if you don't ever feel the need to walk down the aisle and rededicate your life, something's wrong. We are to be constantly reminded of the ultimate cause of our anxiety--Hell.

Hell, and the God who controls it.

More tomorrow.