Fear is a tool used by Evangelical preachers to manipulate and control church attendees. While many Evangelical churches are taking more of a relational approach that focuses on feel-good how-to sermons, hellfire-and-brimstone churches can still be found in virtually every American community. These kinds of churches are known for sin-hating, devil-chasing “hard” preaching. The men — women need not apply — who pastor such churches take pride in the fact that their toe-stomping sermons cause sinners and saints alike to fear God. And in some instances, not only do church attendees fear the Almighty, but they also fear the preacher.
There are two methods commonly used by preachers to cause people to fear God. First, there are various Bible verses that promote fear of God. The book of Hebrews says that it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. In the book of Ecclesiastes, Solomon said that the whole duty of man is to fear God and keep his commandments. The Bible also says that people should fear he who has the keys of life and death, “he” being, of course, God. Then there are also various Bible stories that remind people of what might happen if they disobey God. Preachers remind congregants that disobeying God shows that they have a lack of fear. Church members who are not regular attendees or faithful tithers are told that their disobedience reveals a heart that does not fear God. No matter the sin, according to Evangelical preachers, the root cause is a lack of fear of God. If people feared God they would do all that God commands them to do. Of course, far too many Evangelical preachers confuse their personal convictions and way of life with the laws, commands, and precepts found in the Bible. I have written several posts in the past about the long list of rules and regulations that can be found in many Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) churches. (Please see An Independent Baptist Hate List and The Official Independent Baptist Rulebook) These rules and regulations are little more than personal interpretations of various Bible verses. There are no verses in the Bible that prohibit many of the things that Evangelical preachers preach against, but this does not keep them from conflating personal beliefs with the teachings of the Bible. While many Evangelical churches have softened their stance on many social issues, plenty of churches still preach against “sins” such as alcohol drinking, drug use, gambling, mixed bathing, movie attendance, swearing, immodest clothing, long hair on men, pants on women, rock ‘n roll music, dancing, petting, and premarital sex. Preachers scour their Bibles looking for verses and stories that can be used to prop up their peculiar social and moral codes. Again, the main purpose is to put the fear of God into people so they will not do the things that preachers and churches consider sin.
The second method that Evangelical preachers use to promote the fear of God is the telling of personal stories that are meant to remind people of what happens when people ignore God and live in ways that show a lack of fear. Remember, people show that they rightly fear God by obeying God and the teachings of the Bible. People who attend church, yet ignore God’s commands, are treading on thin ice, and if they do not repent, God could bring judgment down upon their heads. Preachers often tell stories about former church members who ignored their preaching and stern admonitions, only to find themselves being punished or even killed by God. Years ago, I listened to a preaching tape by Calvinistic Southern Baptist evangelist Rolfe Barnard. His sermon was titled, God kills people. Will he have to kill you? The purpose of Barnard’s sermon was to provoke church members to explicitly obey the commands of God. Threatening people with death was certainly a good way to get their attention. Of course, despite all the fear-mongering, most church members remain passive attendees who throw a few shekels in the offering plate and say, great show for a buck.
Evangelists are often the best storytellers. These merchandisers of fear and judgment use unverifiable stories about people in other churches who did not fear God. With thundering voices and apocalyptic pronouncements, these men of God tell stories about people who angered God. This God made them sick, took away their jobs, killed their children, or caused them to suffer any of a number of other reversals of fortune. Instead of seeing such things as shit happens, evangelists see these things as signs of God chastising his children.
I vividly remember a revival meeting with Don Hardman in the late 1980s when the evangelist left the pulpit and came down to where the church teenagers were sitting. With a raised voice, Hardman pointed his finger at each teenager, telling them that GOD sees everything they do. He then recited a list of the typical “sins” committed by rambunctious, hormone-raging young people. By the time he was done, I could see that the teenagers were fearful. I thought, at the time, that God was using Hardman to ferret out sin and rebellion against God. I now know that the church teenagers did not fear God as much as they feared Don Hardman. Or perhaps they feared being found out. Either way, come invitation time, numerous teenagers came to the altar to pray. I suspect very little changed for these teenagers, but by coming to the altar to pray, they showed, outwardly at least, that they had received God’s and Evangelist Hardman’s message.
Many Evangelical preachers save their best fear-mongering stories for unsaved church attendees. This kind of story is used to show unsaved people what could happen to them if they put off getting saved. Every Evangelical preacher knows of people who heard the gospel and had an opportunity to be saved, yet put off their decision to another day. And before they could be saved, some sort of tragic accident happened that led to their death. Once dead, these sinners no longer had an opportunity to make things right with God. They should have feared God and taken him up on his offer of eternal salvation, but because they didn’t, they are now burning in Hell.
I wish I could say that I did not use such manipulative stories and means to get people saved, but I did. I justified it, at the time, by reminding myself that the Apostle Paul became all things to all men so that by all means he could save some. What is the harm of a psychologically manipulative story if the end result is sinners saved from the fiery pit of Hell? I employed all sorts of justifications for my use of heart-wrenching, tear-inducing stories of human tragedy, suffering, and death. Believing that I somehow had to get people’s attention, I used these stories to force people to see the brevity of life and the importance of putting their faith in Jesus Christ. Over the years, hundreds and hundreds of people came forward at invitation time, knelt at the altar, and asked Jesus to save them. Nearby, at the same altar, would be saved church members who were also doing business with God — confessing secret and not-so-secret sins.
Putting the fear of God into people is good for business. Without it, I suspect many people would not bother to attend church. Without fear and threats of judgment, most people would choose to sleep in on Sundays and enjoy a leisurely brunch before they turn on the game. I know I would have. One of the greatest joys that came with becoming an atheist was that I no longer feared God. Since God doesn’t exist, I no longer have a need to quake in my boots at the very mention of his name. Of course, Evangelicals are fond of reminding me that there is coming a day when Bruce Gerencser WILL fear God, but I am confident that when that day comes, the fear-inducing God will be AWOL. This God is little more than a tool used by preachers and churches to keep asses the pews and money in the offering plates. Remove fear from the equation, and I suspect there will be a lot more Baptists at the lake on Sunday morning.
Did you attend a church where the preacher regularly made use of fear-inducing sermon illustrations? Was his fear-mongering successful? Please share your thoughts in the comment section.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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It moves like a virus does, in the bloodstream, on the air, on the surfaces of your life. It may well be fearful prayers of love to God, allegiance and best wishes for expectant mom. Then a child is born into the ‘life’ of faith and the parentals define reality, the Almighty Judge and Love always invisible and always there. The earlier the child is infected with the reality of Hell’s reward for badness, the better. So it goes and goes…
I would suggest that the new lah-lah love sermon preacher is every bit the bully that Don Hardman (apt name!) was/is. The false hopes and extreme love message bullshit encourages human imbalance and denial. It is essentially the same poison with a Jesus smile instead of the old God thump in the head.
My father (a Baptist preacher) scared the bejeeezus shite right out of me as a young child so that I had nightmares of entering eternal Hell and went begging to be ‘saved’. Fucking asshole, my dear dad, much respected in his little churches, loved dear Jesus his whole life and gave it to all his kids. The mindfuck is that people like my dad are really very gentle folk in most ways and very kind. But when it comes to evangelical beliefs, wham-bam… I wish there was a Gawd to go after for what was done. I mean to to confront. I have no proof to lay out for you that there is no big cheese bastard. If there ever could be, I welcome a chat with the prick who gifted me with that childhood terror, who plays tsunami and crusades…
Late to the party as usual, but I remember crying and crying when I was a kid over all the poor foreign babies who would never hear the gospel and would go to hell. My mother tried to tell me that people who had never heard about Jesus wouldn’t go to hell, but that wasn’t what the preacher was shouting at the pulpit on Sundays. Because of this and some (probably overblown) missionary adventure stories we heard in GAs, I really wanted to be a missionary.
Yeah, me too, Silver… For awhile, after I realized I didn’t believe, I still thought I could tag along and do missionary work, dig wells, build schools, something worthwhile. Even then I still refused to admit that all of it, the whole shebang was about control and othering people. Denial is a Milky Way of darkness.
The Trump-effect has gone this far in America because of a similar inability to see what is in front of the nose, a need to NOT see it, in fact.
It doesn’t have to be hard-preached from the pulpit. The West Coast, liberal, freshly-post-Vatican II Catholicism that provided my formative Christian education back in the 1960s and 1970s was all about getting right with God and staying right with God because that was what was truly fulfilling. I never worried about non-Christians being tortured in Hell, because the God I was exposed to at church and in Catholic schools was a loving God. You confessed your sins weekly in Confession, and focused not so much on not sinning per se as recognizing that sinning got in the way of doing God’s work, because you were separating yourself from him.
That might have worked on me if my mother had not been raised in a very authoritarian, Midwestern, pre-Vatican II Catholicism that made her afraid of sinning, of having unconfessed sins, and convinced that her job was to pray for the saints to intercede with God so that he would manipulate the people she loved to do what she thought was good for them. My generation was taught to just pray without pestering intermediaries, and not make unethical requests. But Mom was Catholic and my liberal nuns were Catholic, which made me realize that religion was whatever people made of it. That’s an early step in questioning it all.
And yet…I was brought up to know that one of the few things that could get a believer a ticket to Hell was rejecting God and deciding he didn’t actually exist. Hell haunted me long after my deconversion.
And of course there’s the other part of the traditional hell-scaring sermon. That if I didn’t witness to every heathen person I knew or met, they could well get run down by a bus on the way home that night. (It was often a bus accident IIRC). Then they’d go to hell and I’d carry an enormous burden of guilt for that happening. It would confirm that though saved by jesus’ precious blood, I was still a miserable sinner.
Some people are really into an authoritarian, vindictive, angry deity. They like to think of God as a powerful superhero battling evil and meting out punishment to the unrepentant (typically those whom the believer deems as enemies).
I do remember plenty of those scare stories about people who had the opportunity to get saved, put it off, and tragedy befell them before they got saved. It took me awhile (not until I was an older tedn) to realize those were canned stories in the preachers’ toolboxes.
The Southern states, because of their culture have churches on every corner, and use the scare tactics very well, like that three- day rule. ” If you don’t get up right now and come down the front at the altar, God will kill you in three days. This is what God’s telling me about you !”. I’ve heard it on TV heard it yelled in churches. Wherever a Pentecostal or AG church is, they’ll be doing that any given day. And some are low enough to say that if you don’t tithe, or attend church weekly, God will take your life and send you to Hell. How I wish such things were made up. If God could bring up such threats, why not warn people not to molest kids then ?? No one ever had an answer for THAT.
I grew up in a secular home. but every school morning the radio would be on for the local news. It would also be on for 5 minutes of fundy-crap. I hated it, If you try to make me sing “Amazing Grace” (that was the opening to the fundycrap show) I will refuse. Some people I know think I’m a freak for hating that song, it’s just a song, right? Nope. It’s like a vaccine reaction, I hear it and am reminded that Fundigelical beliefs exist and are hurting people.
I suppose, once my mother realized how much I hated it, that she made sure it was on, so I would never fall into fundamentalist beliefs, who knows what that stupid radio show saved me from? She was atheist and had a special dislike for Catholicism.
I noticed in church that the pastor would preach fire and brimstone sermons for a week or two, but then switch over to Jesus loves you more that you can ever imagine type sermons, as if realizing that too much fear would push people away. But then if people would be feeling too safe and happy and losing their fearfulness, he’d know it was time to do some fire and brimstone sermons again. Like relaxing a dog’s leash a bit, and then yanking it back tight again.