(This essay contains spoilers.)
[content-1]As a former fundamentalist Christian and missionary, I’m one of the few people in the audience during a recent performance that may have needed something akin to a trigger warning in advance of the G-rated trauma portrayed in The Christians. Indeed, after reading a review of the show, which is about an evangelical church divided against itself, I nearly decided to skip it because of my deeply personal connection to the material. It isn’t mentioned in the promotional materials, but The Christians seems to be an almost a blow-by-blow dramatization of the real-life account of Oklahoma minister Carlton Pearson—a story that had a profound impact on my own spiritual struggles.
I’m not sure I ever believed wholeheartedly in this mission, but I came to LA desperately searching for purpose. Instead, I found the opposite. My once robust personal faith had eroded slowly over the previous decade, after I escaped the downstate Illinois bubble I was raised in for a college life that exposed me to different people, philosophies, and religions. My beliefs weakened further when—like in The Christians—my church in Missouri endured its own small-time schism. Some of the more conservative members left for other churches when a small faction of staff members began adopting the theology of a trendy kind of alt-evangelism known as the Emerging Church. I felt caught in the middle of the divide and began doubting everything.
I slowly shuffled out of Steppenwolf in a daze, alone in the dark but for a street light on Halsted shining above, when a terrifying thought crossed my mind. By refusing to believe in a literal otherworldly hell that unbelievers are sent when they die, maybe I, like Paul, have banished myself to a version here on earth. Sartre is right: Hell really is other people—and somehow that’s no more comforting than the idea of eternal damnation.
