Two weeks ago, my interview with Tim Mills, The Harmonic Atheist, was published on YouTube. As of today, over 20,000 people have watched our interview.
With the interest in hearing my story have come scores of Evangelical Christians telling me that I am headed for Hell; that I never was a Christian; that I just needed to pray a simple prayer to Jesus and he would save me. Numerous zealots have weighed in on my story, certain that they know exactly what is “wrong” with me and what I must do to avoid being eternally tortured by their peculiar version of God. Several Calvinists weighed in, saying that it is evident I am a reprobate — one who is beyond the grace of God and cannot be saved. One man simply said, “Bruce is full of horseshit.”
Such is the nature of YouTube. Most content creators don’t moderate comments, so Evangelicals can and do bully and attack people who run afoul of their theology, beliefs, and practices. Tim did delete several comments that were over the top. I appreciate him doing so. On this site, I have strict commenting rules, which Evangelicals routinely ignore. If I had the same comment policy as YouTube, I would be overrun with abusive comments (as was the case years ago). There was a time when hateful comments really got under my skin and caused harm both to me and to the readers of this blog. Sometimes the hostile comments got so bad that I stopped blogging. Those days are long gone. I returned to blogging in December 2014. I made sure that I instituted strict policies governing Evangelicals. I also let Evangelicals know that if they sent me hateful emails I would publicly expose them for doing so. This has dramatically cut down the negative emails and comments I receive, but, as regular readers know, Evangelicals still feel led by the Holy Spirit to “share” with me what Hey-Zeus has laid upon their hearts.
I was raised in the Evangelical church, attended Bible college, and pastored churches for twenty-five years. I preached countless sermons about Hell. I fully understand what Evangelicals believe about Hell, the Lake of Fire, and eternal, everlasting punishment. And my critics KNOW that I know these things. Yet, over the past fifteen years, Evangelicals have told me I am headed for Hell more times than I can count. What do they hope to gain by telling me this? Or is the real issue that they find my story threatening; a reminder of the fact that if someone such as I can lose their faith anyone can? So they hurl hellfire and brimstone my way, hoping to quell their own questions and doubts. That’s why they rarely engage in meaningful discussions with me. Questions and pushback from someone who knows the Bible inside and out threatens their spiritual security, so they stand on the corner across the street from my house and chuck rocks.
Many Evangelicals try to discredit me by saying that I never was a Christian; that I was deceived; that I met a false Jesus. By doing this, they can, with a wave of their hand, ignore my story. The problem with this approach is that they have no evidence for their claim. Evangelicals cannot provide one church member or colleague of mine in the ministry who, at the time I was a pastor, believed I was a “false Christian.” Not one. They can, however, find numerous people who will tell them that I was a devoted follower of Jesus; that I took seriously God’s calling on my life. I wasn’t perfect, to be sure. I am sure my wife, Polly, and our six grown children could share plenty of stories about their husband and father being less than Christian. However, they would likely testify that the bent of my life was certainly toward holiness and love for God.
Many Evangelicals can’t square my story with their soteriology and interpretation of the Bible — especially Baptists — so they assuage their theological confusion by saying I never was a Christian. Instead of questioning their theology or trying to make my story fit their beliefs, they lazily decree that I was a false Christian.
I hate it when people say I never was a Christian. By doing this, Evangelicals discredit fifty of my six-six years of life on planet earth. They pretend that those years and how I lived my life don’t exist. When someone tells me their story I generally believe them. If I have doubt about some aspect of their story — say Evangelicals who say they were atheists before they got saved — I ask questions. I don’t automatically assume they are lying. When someone tells me they are a Christian, I believe them. It is their life, their story. Who I am to say that their experiences are invalid? I may think that some of their experiences won’t survive rational, skeptical examination, but unless they are directly interacting with me or trying to use their subjective experiences as evidence for the existence of God, I am inclined to accept their stories at face value. Life is too short for me to spend much time deconstructing the lives of others. I wish Evangelicals would take the same approach with me. Read my story, ask questions, and I will respond. Read my story and threaten me with Hell or discredit my life? I am likely to gut you like a fish.
The strangest approach comes from Evangelicals who think that prayer is some sort of magic spell; that if I would just sincerely pray a prayer they prescribe (which often contains heretical theology), Jesus would hear my prayer, save me from my sin, and give me a home in Heaven when I die. Every time an Evangelical takes this approach with me, I stop what I am doing and pray their prescribed prayer. I have done this countless times, yet I remain an atheist. Either prayer doesn’t work the way they think it does, or God is a myth. My money is on the latter.
As many Evangelicals-turned-atheists/agnostics have done, when I began having doubts about Christianity and the Bible, I pleaded with God to show me the truth. I begged him to show me a way to remain a Christian. One former friend and a colleague in the ministry told me that I needed to stop asking questions and just faith-it. A former church member told me that I needed to stop reading books. “Just read the Bible, Bruce,” she told me. Of course, I couldn’t do that. I had always been a voracious reader who was willing to change my beliefs if warranted. As congregants and pastor friends, they admired my intellectualism, but now they wanted me to return to an ignorant, child-like faith. My best friend, at the time, took a different approach with me. He wrote me a blistering email that said I was under the influence of Satan, unstable in all my ways. He made no attempt to pull me back from the abyss. Instead, he castigated me for ruining my family. None of these people, and others like them, were willing or able to honestly, openly, and without reservation, interact with me. Would their intervention have made a difference? No. I knew that their answers were no match for my questions. I was reading non-Evangelical scholars and theologians. I was also reading books by prominent unbelievers. I had spent twenty-five years reading books by Evangelical authors, so there was no need to re-read their books. Solomon said, “there is nothing new under the sun,” and that is especially true when it comes to Evangelical theology.
As my knowledge increased and the truth came into better focus, I once again asked God to step in and save me from myself. Alas, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords was silent, and he has remained silent until this very moment. I have concluded, then, that either God doesn’t give a shit about me or he doesn’t exist. All the evidence suggests to me that he doesn’t exist.
There’s nothing I can do to stop Evangelicals from doing what Evangelicals do. All I am saying in this post to Evangelicals is this: you might want to try a different approach with me (and atheists, in general). Threats of Hell fall on deaf ears. Suggesting that I was never a Christian only brings laughs and incredulity. And finally, asking me to pray shallow, often heretical prayers is making you look bad. How you frame the gospel in your prescribed prayers suggest that you really don’t understand the Christian gospel at all. Instead of asking me to pray a prayer, you might actually want to read your Bible and seriously study Christian soteriology. Maybe you are the one who isn’t saved. 🙂
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen 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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alas, the magic spells christians give us e.g. special prayers, never work.
i’ve often wondered how “christians” can imagine, after all the times i have heard their drivel and rejected it, that /THEY/ will be the ones finally to get through to me, with EXACTLY the same drivel… 🤨🧐🤯
stupidity doesn’t even come close.
PRZXQGL–Sometimes I think it’s not about actually bringing you, me, Clubschadenfreude, Bruce or any one else back to Jesus (or to Jesus in the first place.) Rather, I think each of those evangelists is just looking for a feather in his or her cap.
1, 2, 3, repeat after me. Incantations only achieve helping people feel like they are actually convincing an invisible deity to save them from something awful. So incredibly silly.
lisbeth, i also think it’s because they are so unsure of their own salvation that they have to try as hard as possible to convince other people to believe, because they think that if they can convince others, then MAYBE their own belief won’t be so unbelievable. 🤣