Bad Girls and Boys Go to Hell (or not)

Engaging Fundamentalist Evangelicalism

Redekop

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781621895312
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

To question the idea of hell as a default destination is to question the entire fundamentalist evangelical worldview. This book does just that. Fundamentalist evangelicalism holds that the Bible is an infallible authority and that all are born in sin. Sinners go to hell, but Jesus, taking their place, died to save them from hell. How did this belief come to be? What were the effects on people brought up with a belief in the reality of hell? What has been the process of people leaving the fundamentalist evangelical movement?In Bad Girls and Boys Go To Hell (or not), Gloria Neufeld Redekop takes us on her own personal journey as she engages a movement in which she was raised, conducting a careful study of the history of fundamentalist evangelicalism, the attachment to a literal-factual interpretation of the Bible, and an analysis of the experience of those who have left the movement.

Part I

Engaging Fundamentalist Evangelical History

To set the stage for a historical look at fundamentalist evangelicalism, I begin with a personal history. Then, after offering definitions of both evangelicalism and fundamentalism, I situate the movement within the history of evangelicalism, going back to the Reformation in Europe in the 1500s. The evangelical movement was transplanted to North America along with European immigration. And it was in North America, then, that fundamentalism emerged, with the purpose of maintaining orthodoxy and rejecting evolution, modernism, and liberalism. This resulted in two Protestant streams, the mainline evangelical tradition and the fundamentalist evangelical stream, the latter with an emphasis on salvation, prophecy, and the return of Christ. Believers in the movement held firmly to what they considered to be fundamentals of the faith. In the early 1900s, the movement was nurtured through literature, preaching, teaching, and music. The singing of gospel songs written during that time was crucial to the spread of the movement in that it reinforced the fundamentals in a way that encouraged emotionally charged responses.

1

Setting the Stage: A Personal History

One way to understand the meaning of fundamentalist evangelicalism is to enter the belief system experientially. Since I grew up in the fundamentalist evangelical church, I will open a window into my world as a teenager, focusing on how I understood my religion. Methodologically, I am treating my earlier experience as an object of critical examination and reflection.

While I have found that many share the same experiences, I cannot speak for others who grew up in evangelical churches. Evangelical churches vary in their emphases and the degree of fundamentalist influence varies from church to church and from denomination to denomination. My experience comes out of belonging to an evangelical denomination that was strongly influenced by fundamentalism, the Mennonite Brethren. It could easily have been the story of someone in any other fundamentalist Protestant or Anabaptist tradition with the same worldview, such as people belonging to the Baptist, Church of the Nazarene, or Pentecostal traditions.

As I identify each belief, I will explain how I understood it and sometimes follow it with a song that served to reinforce the belief. Italics are used to identify my personal thoughts.

When we went to Sunday School each Sunday morning, all ages of children and youth would first meet together to sing a few hymns and choruses. One of the books we used was a little four-by six-inch red, white, and navy spiral-bound book called Sunday School Sings: A Praise Book of Favorite Sunday School Hymns and Choruses.1 These songs served to reinforce the core beliefs of the church and many of the songs referenced in this chapter are in that songbook.

Beliefs of a Sixteen Year Old Raised in a Fundamentalist Evangelical Church

What follows is a reconstruction of the belief system I had as a teenager, using words, concepts, and songs as I understood them then.

One of the most important beliefs is the inspiration of the Bible, which means that the words in the Bible are God-breathed. People have different ways of describing this. It seems that writers of the Bible were mysteriously directed by God to write the words in the Bible as they held their pens (or quills or whatever they wrote with). They hardly even knew what they were writing because they were led by God’s Spirit to write what they did. Everything in the Bible is there because God planned it to be there. If there is anything that seems to contradict a text found elsewhere in the Bible, that doesn’t matter. It is a mystery that we will not understand in this life. Our finite minds are not able to grasp the texts that seem to contradict other texts.

We sing songs that talk about the importance of the Bible:

The B I B L E, yes that’s the book for me,

I stand alone on the Word of God, the B I B L E.

The word “Scripture” has a holy ring to it and you always spell it with a capital “S.” If you don’t, it means you are not showing proper respect for the Bible. When you refer to the Bible as Scripture, it means that it came from God and is the special Word of God (and Word has a capital letter too because sometimes it refers to Jesus). Sometimes you call it the “Holy Bible.” The New Testament (the part written after Jesus died) is more important than the Old Testament because it is the fulfillment of the Old Testament.

We are encouraged to memorize large portions of the Bible so that we can call up verses in our minds when we need encouragement or advice. I am on a Youth for Christ quiz team that competes with other teams across the province. We are given several chapters in New Testament books to memorize and then compete at Youth for Christ gatherings. When a question is asked, the first person to step on the pedal under their chair jumps up and repeats the Bible verse that answers the particular question being asked. If answered correctly, that team gets a point.

The term, Bible-believing Christian, is a short phrase that means someone is a true Christian. Bible-believing means that you believe in the “word for word” inspiration of the Bible. In other words, whatever it says in the Bible is taken literally, exactly what it says. And the Bible calls the shots of everything you need to know about being a Christian, or most other things for that matter.

Sin refers to all the bad things you do. You are born in sin. This is called original sin. Sin began with Adam and Eve. Actually it was Eve who sinned first. Poor Adam, he got into trouble with God because Eve seduced him to taste the apple God had said they should not eat. It was Eve’s fault that sin came into the world. Everyone born after Adam and Eve is sinful from the get-go, as soon as they are born. They can’t help it. Although even babies are born in sin, they are not accountable for their sin until the age of reason. But I’m not exactly sure what age is the age of reason.

There are a lot of songs that send the message of our sinfulness. One of these is:

Search me O God and know my heart today;

Try me, oh Savior, know my thoughts I pray.

See if there be some wicked way in me.

Cleanse me from ev’ry sin and set me free.

Because you are born in sin, you are not worthy to be loved by God just as you are, even though the song says, “Just as I am.” You only become worthy through God’s grace. By grace is meant a favor that you don’t deserve; the favor is that God loved you so much that God sent his son, Jesus, to die for your sins. Like the song says:

Marvelous grace of our loving Lord,

grace that exceeds our sin and our guilt,

Yonder on Calvary’s mount outpoured.

There where the blood of the Lamb was spillt.

Grace, grace, marvelous grace.

Grace that will pardon and cleanse within.

Grace, grace, infinite grace.

Grace that is greater than all our sin.

Conversion and salvation are terms used to describe what happens when you become a Christian. You ask Jesus to forgive y...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1: Engaging Fundamentalist Evangelical History
• Part 2: Engaging the Fundamentalist Evangelical Interpretation of the Bible
• Part 3: Engaging the Fundamentalist Evangelical Experience
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Appendix C
• Bibliography