Evangelical Pique and Itchy-Ear Syndrome

I began this long series of rants against fight-or-flight evangelism (i.e., the "turn or burn" pitch practiced by so many conservative evangelicals) by reflecting on my own childhood as a turn-or-burner. As a child, I was terrified of burning forever in hell and quite conscious of the need to help others save themselves from that fate by turning to Christ. When people reacted with indifference or disinterest to my carefully laid-out case, I found myself reacting with something like wounded pride, an ugly species of "well, we'll just see who's right when you're shrieking in agony in the lake of fire, won't we?"

I didn't like that self-righteousness in myself. I still don't like it. My posts of late have therefore been my attempt to trace the roots of that rejected-evangelical pique. My theory? Much of this attitude manifests as the outward appearance of an inward anxiety. The anxiety: save yourself! Like any survival reaction, the faith that grows as a response to this threat isn't very pretty. A save-yourself evangelism results in a save-yourself, everyone for him/herself faith. Someone rejects the story of salvation? Fie on them. Shake the dust off of your feet and move on.

I must say that I've detected similar emotional tones from preachers and other evangelists invested in the hell-first mode of evangelism. There's love and (often) real concern all the way through the pitch itself: Do you know what happens after you die? Are you afraid of ending up in Hell? Do you realize you're damned to an eternity in hell without Christ? Won't you make a decision to believe in Christ today? But, if the answer is anything but "Yes, absolutely" (preferably with tears, since tears prove the authenticity of conviction and repentance)--and particularly if the answer is "I just don't believe in that"--evangelists almost always end up being at least a trifle defensive.

The debriefing sections of evangelize-on-the-air podcasts like Last Words Radio, Fish with Trish, or Wretched Radio often feature sad, tsk-tsking rationalizations for why the "fish" refused or resisted the pitch. More often than not, the explanation the hosts offer has to do with pride. The fish just refuses to believe that he or she is wretched and worthy of judgment by a righteous God. He or she will learn, alas, when it's too late. As Comfort told one especially stubborn agnostic, "I wouldn't want to be in your shoes on judgment day for all the tea in China."

These rationalizations--and the sad, head-shaking we'll-see-who's-right tone that accompanies it--worsen when the evangelistic technique gets criticized by other Christians (or "so-called Christians"). It's interesting how much resistance WotM-style evangelists report getting from people who identify themselves as Christians. The explanations? Well, such critics can't be real Christians. They're deluded, heretical. Inevitably, such resistance summons in the WotM commentators a quote from a verse like 2 Timothy 4:3 ("For the time will come when they will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear").

A funny thing, these "itching ears." Somehow it's only those Christians ("so-called Christians") who find fault with a hell-first, turn-or-burn, fight-or-flight evangelism that suffer from itchy-ear syndrome.

And it does bear some serious thought: is my resistance to this kind of evangelism a result of my own dislike of being criticized? This may be so, and I'll deal with that possibility soon.

But I'd be more apt to suspect itchy-ear syndrome in my present self (and only myself) if I didn't detect so much self-satisfied smugness the "sound doctrine" of turn-or-burn evangelism. At times I get the sense that evangelists like being rejected or criticized by other Christians. The very unattractiveness of their pitch--worship a judgmental God who mercifully offers a wretch like you a narrow chance at salvation from God's own wrath--as well as the negative reactions that pitch evokes in so many--these become proof that the evangelist is doing something right. The way of the Cross is foolishness to the world, right? So if the world calls the turn-or-burn pitch unappealing, that's just fulfilling scripture, right?

I'm not so sure.

More tomorrow,

JF