The modern day heresy of Pastor Rob Bell

For some time now, I have been keeping an eye on the growing storms within the American Right. The philosophical split between the moderates and the Sarah Palin extremists has been growing for a long time, and the recent ascent to party of so many of the Tea Party’s best and brightest into actual power, where their crazy ideas and violently vehement visions have to face the cold clear light of public scrutiny as real actual policies that will affect their lives, has proven far more of a disaster than a boon.

All of this, I feel, should be seen against the backdrop of history. It is clear to any student of the current events of decades previous to our own that what defines being a conservative changes quite a lot from era to era. The conservatives of our parents’ generation fought for the Establishment, the Government, and the status quo. Modern conservatives say government is the problem. And so on.

So what we are seeing, right now, with the Madness of the Right in the United States, and to a lesser extent all over the democratic world (with things like anti-Sharia Law legislation, for example) is the process one generation’s conservatives go through as the last gasps of their power and relevance are played out in the public arena. It is not pretty, and considerable damage can be done by these panicked, angry, unthinking, blind beasts as they stampede over the horizon, but luckily, history assures us that they soon will be gone into that big sunset and no longer a worry to the rest of us.

And as this happens, there will be the few among them who, cognizant of this, or perhaps merely cognizant of just how bitter, mean, and frankly evil their kind seems to have become, will open the door to the next generation, show that the old guard has at least some flexibility and maybe actually enjoy a little approval from the younger conservatives before they shuffle off this mortal coil.

They, of course, will be set upon by their cohorts like a pack of wild dogs as the worst kind of traitorous backstabbing coward for daring to get out of ideological lockstep with the rest of the baying hounds.

And that is what is happening to Pastor Rob Bell. Here’s the skinny on him :

Mr. Bell, 40, whose Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Mich., has 10,000 members, is a Christian celebrity and something of a hipster in the pulpit, with engaging videos that sell by the hundreds of thousands and appearances to rapt, youthful crowds in rock-music arenas.

According to this article on the New York Times website, Pastor Bell has been a controversial figure amongst evangelical Christians in the USA for some time, but what has gotten him doused the boiling brimstone of the devout’s disapproval lately has been news that his upcoming book endorses the radical and hatefully blasphemous idea that Gandhi is not currently rotting in Hell next to Hitler.

In short, he challenges the idea that everyone but a very small, narrowly defined group of evangelical Christians are going to Heaven after this life, and absolutely everybody else is going to suffer the most possible pain for the longest possible time possible in Hell.

This idea, that our little sect going to Heaven and everyone else is doomed, is a great recruiting tool for small splinter religions who are recruiting amongst the disaffected and disgruntled who might have a great deal of reason to feel that the secular world doesn’t find them special at all, and hence a religion that tells them that, despite what society tells them, they are actually super special and the only ones God likes enough to let into his private after-death club really appeals.

But to young, thoughtful people with a conscience, the idea that God would hand out the ultimate punishment conceivable to a great person like Gandhi or Mother Teresa or Martin Luther King just because they did not belong to the exact right tiny little splinter of humanity simply does not jibe at all with the notion of a loving, just, and fair God.

It is like saying someone is a wonderful parent because if their kids misbehave, they shoot them dead.

So while in the moment all the madness loose in the USA is depressing, people like Pastor Bell show that this too shall pass and greater enlightenment comes even to the church going traditionalists.

Let’s just hope that the old guard doesn’t torch the palace out of spite on the way out.