Walking Away from Evangelicalism

Evangelical Christianity promises to deliver a lot of great things for its adherents. Chief among those is salvation: entrance into heaven. But how does one gain entrance? It turns out that within evangelicalism, one merely has to believe all of the correct sets of beliefs. The problem with that notion is, of course, that the answer to the question “What must I believe in order to get into heaven?” changes depending upon which person, or denomination, you ask.

So, is my entrance into heaven contingent on a set of theological propositions to which I must give intellectual assent?

But what if I get it wrong? What if I end up believing a set of incorrect propositions, or am given faulty information about what I should believe by a well-meaning (but misinformed) evangelical? I could be standing at the Pearly Gates after I die, only to discover then that I believed the wrong things. In the end, I’ll be banished to Hell because I got it wrong. Surely the stakes are too high for us frail and feeble humans, because if we make a mistake on this issue, the implications are terrible. Why didn’t God make it simpler and easier to get that golden ticket to heaven, and know for certain that you’re definitely in? Why doesn’t the Bible simply boil it down into one nice, neat, little section somewhere and give us a list of bullet-point propositions?