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Bruce, Will You Repent on Your Deathbed and Return to Jesus?

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Several years ago, a reader of this blog asked me to answer this question: Bruce, Will You Repent on Your Deathbed and Return to Jesus?

Good question.

I divorced Jesus in November 2008. Since then, I have proudly worn the atheist label. I am often asked WHY Jesus and I had a falling out and I ended our five-decade-long marriage. (Please see the WHY? page.) While the reasons are many, the primary reason I left Christianity is that its beliefs and practices no longer made sense to me. (Please see The Michael Mock Rule: It Just Doesn’t Make Sense.) I no longer believed the central claims of Christianity: the existence of the triune God, the deity of Christ, the virgin birth, the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, to name a few. I no longer believed in original sin or that humans were inherently broken and in need of saving. I no longer believed that the Bible was an inerrant, infallible text supernaturally written by God. I came to the conclusion that Jesus lived and died, end of story; that the miracles attributed to him were human fabrications. As you can see, I reject out of hand virtually everything Christians believe and hold dear. Thus, I am an atheist.

Heaven and Hell are religious constructs used by clerics to keep asses in the pews and money in the offering plates. Heaven is the proverbial carrot, and Hell is the stick. Since these places do not exist, I need not fear spending eternity in the Lake of Fire being tortured by God for my unbelief.

While I am confident that Christianity is untrue, I remain open to evidence that suggests otherwise. It’s doubtful that any such evidence is forthcoming. Christian theologians and apologists have been making the case for Christianity for 2,000 years. I suspect everything that can be said, has been said. Solomon was right when he said, “There’s nothing new under the sun.” Countless Christian apologists have stopped by this site to ply their apologetical skills, hoping to reclaim Bruce, the atheist, for Jesus and perhaps save a few of his “followers.” Every one of them has left frustrated that their super-duper, clever, sophisticated arguments failed to win anyone to their cause. Why? Same shit, new day.

I am sixty-seven years old. In poor health, struggling just to make it to the next day, I know that I shall die sooner, and not later. Maybe I will live twenty more years. I doubt it. Dealing with chronic illnesses and unrelenting pain wears me out. There could come a day when I have had enough and I put an end to my struggle. Or, I could have a stroke, heart attack, cancer, or die from a hematoma on my brain from being clocked with a Lodge cast iron skillet by my wife. Or I could trip over toys left on the floor by one of my grandchildren, breaking my neck. The death possibilities are endless. Cheerful thoughts, people, cheerful thoughts. 🙂

The question posed to me presupposes that I will have a terminal illness that makes me bedridden, affording me the opportunity to repent of my sins and ask Jesus to save me. On that day, will I have the courage of my convictions and remain true to atheism, or will I pray the sinner’s prayer just in case Christianity is true?

The pattern of my life suggests that I will remain true to my convictions; that I will die, not with the name of Jesus on my lips, but that of my partner and family. I do not doubt that upon hearing of my soon demise, Evangelical evangelizers will seek me out, hoping to get one last word in for Jesus. Ceiling prayers will be uttered by Christians, pleading with God to save the vile, wretched, sinful atheist Bruce Gerencser. Will these efforts have their desired effect? I doubt it. The fact remains that I deconverted because Christianity no longer made any sense to me. I came to see that the central claims of Christianity were false. Intellectually, I simply don’t buy what Christians are selling. Since it is highly doubtful that any new evidence is forthcoming, I see no reason for me to change my mind on my deathbed.

Let me conclude this post with an excerpt from Lawrence Krauss’ New Yorker article titled, The Fantasy of the Deathbed Conversion:

Earlier this spring, a prominent evangelical Christian named Larry Taunton published a book alleging that Christopher Hitchens, an outspoken atheist, had been, during the last years of his life, “teetering on the edge of belief.” Taunton, who claims to have been one of Hitchens’s friends, cites as evidence two conversations he had with Hitchens during car trips on the way to debates about religion and atheism—debates, it must be said, that Hitchens was paid to attend.

Hitchens’s family and actual friends—people who didn’t pay to spend time with him—know that this claim is absurd. (I was honored to be one of Hitchens’s friends during the last five years of his life.) Hitchens saw Christianity as little more than a social virus with interesting literary overtones. That view never changed during his final year of life—a period during which Taunton didn’t even meet with him. Hitchens loved to engage in generous intellectual repartee, even with those with whom he unequivocally disagreed. His civility, it seems, has been misinterpreted.

This most recent claim, of course, is just the latest in a long line of similar claims about famous atheist conversions. It raises a worthwhile question: Why do evangelical Christians so often seek to claim converts among the dead?

In relatively recent history, the most well-known postmortem Christian evangelist is probably Elizabeth Cotton. In 1915, she declared that, thirty-three years earlier, Charles Darwin himself had revealed to her, on his deathbed, his wish to recant the doctrine of evolution in exchange for Christian salvation. This claim was shown to be false by none other than Darwin’s daughter, Henrietta Litchfield, who was with him at the end. She pointed out that Cotton—like Taunton, in Hitchens’s case—hadn’t actually visited him during his final days. And evangelical Protestants aren’t the only Christians addicted to the narrative of the deathbed conversion. Catholics have made claims about the “long conversion” of Oscar Wilde; the Mormon Church has gone so far as to baptize dead people who haven’t asked for it—pro-bono conversion, as it were.

….

In a conversation we had a few years ago, Hugh Downs, the television anchor, suggested why this might be so. One of the reasons people go to church, he said, is intellectual validation. People attend church for spiritual and social reasons, of course: to pray and to see friends. But they also want to hear their religious convictions affirmed—convictions that, as the Dawkins survey suggests, may seem a little dubious during the rest of the week. Could it be that evangelicals seek to convert the famous dead because they’re insecure about their own beliefs? If they can claim that people they admire as intellects—Darwin, Wilde, Hitchens—ultimately agreed with them, it validates their own faith.

In the end, what evangelists don’t recognize is that atheism is not a belief system like Christianity, from which one might defect after hearing some arguments or having a few sombre conversations. It is, instead, simply a rational decision not to accept the existence of God without evidence. As wise thinkers, including Laplace, Hume, Sagan, and Hitchens, have often said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. It’s hard to imagine a more extraordinary claim than that some hidden intelligence created a universe of more than a hundred billion galaxies, each containing more than a hundred billion stars, and then waited more than 13.7 billion years until a planet in a remote corner of a single galaxy evolved an atmosphere sufficiently oxygenated to support life, only to then reveal his existence to an assortment of violent tribal groups before disappearing again.

The idea of the deathbed conversion raises another question: even if an atheist were to accept a theistic worldview, why should he choose to adopt Christianity, rather than any of the world’s many other religions? Evangelical Christians assume, rather presumptuously, that the natural choice is Christianity. Hitchens was unlikely to share that view. As he emphasized in his own writing, no one talks about Hell in the New Testament more than Jesus; the New Testament, he wrote, is worse than the Old. Hitchens described the New Testament as envisioning a “Celestial Dictatorship, a kind of divine North Korea.”

In this regard, the saddest thing about these imagined deathbed conversions is that, even if they were real, they could hardly be seen as victories for Christ. They are stories in which the final pain of a fatal disease, or the fear of imminent death and eternal punishment, is identified as the factor necessary for otherwise rational people to believe in the supernatural.

If mental torture is required to effect a conversion, what does that say about the reliability of the fundamental premises of Christianity to begin with? Evangelicals would be better advised to concentrate on converting the living. Converting the deceased suggests only that they can’t convince those who can argue back. They should let the dead rest in peace.

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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19 Comments

  1. Avatar
    mary

    good post. i have said for years that i am okay with simply not existing anymore just like before i was born. in fact i have more peace when i accept that the end is the end and not some eternal punishment or eternal church service. when i was a kid, heaven did not sound appealing as i thought it would be an eternity of sitting thru a pentecostal church service. thanks for your honest writing. so many here in america just can’t seem to even talk about death from a realistic point of view.

  2. Avatar
    ObstacleChick

    Bruce, you have done so much reading and studying, and your reasons for your atheism are well-reasoned and sound. If someone told me that you had a deathbed conversion experience, I would surmise that an overzealous evangelical sneaked into your room and caught you when you were full of morphine or somehow in the throes of lack of mental acuity and were persuaded to say all sorts of familiar things that were part of your first 50 years of life. I would question the authenticity.

  3. Avatar
    clubschadenfreude

    the delusion of deathbed repentance shows how stupid most Christians think their god is. it matches well with the pascal’s wager “believe just in case” stupid god.

    How many Christians are on their deathbeds coming to the realization that their god doesn’t exist?

  4. Avatar
    Yulya Sevelova

    After decades as a Christian, now perched on the chain- link fence, I must say that I hope that Oscar Wilde is right. All considered, I prefer oblivion to any kind of afterlife. Good or bad. I told that to God many times,when this came to mind. I don’t want any rewards, save one. Absolute oblivion. He’s welcome to give my rewards to others. Oblivion is the real prize. Celestial North Korea. Spaniard VIII said that some university did a study on consciousness after death and “quietly concluded that there is one,” and I’d like to see that study for myself. I’ll have to go back and get that info. The New Yorker magazine is carried by my local library, and one of my favorites. We don’t know when or if it will open in the next three years,or not. For our state it could be at least two years. Even before COVID, we were already the ‘Tarnished State,’ lol.

  5. Avatar
    Steve Ruis

    However a religion gets started, if it is to prosper and survive, it must serve to control the masses, specifically to serve the interests of the secular and religious elites. As seekers after power, priests and potentates are natural enemies, but they long ago realized that they would be far better off were they to join forces. The secular elites provided state power, through soldiers and taxation and the religious elites provided power through control over the minds of the masses.

    Civilization began with a confluence of things. Agriculture produced myriad things but the most valuable was grain in that it could be dried and stored and hence was the first medium of taxation. But people didn’t want to work for others so they had to be coerced to become farmers. When they ran out of locals to do the work, they started raiding nearby villages for labor. This is the advent of mass slavery. Prior to that it was only occasional. Slaves, of course, needed coercion, so more soldiers were needed, which required more agriculture and more slaves. This was the primary cause that the earliest civilizations went belly-up in short order.

    It turns out that religion is a more effective control system that physical force. It costs very little because nebulous promises can be “interpreted” as gifts given. Good weather can be claimed as a benefit of being well-behaved. Bad weather can be a punishment for presumed bad behavior. An almost perfect scam … and it is still operating.

    How long was it after the Romans crucified Jesus that Christians were sucking up to Roman prelates seeking state power and funding. Christians prior to being adopted as a state religion of Rome were preaching tolerance. As soon as they got a little state power they preached intolerance, first toward pagans and then toward other Christians, Christians with whom they disagrees. The pagans were unused to being attacked by other religious cults as it had been a live and let live religious world, until Christians got state power. The the larger Christian sects used Roman state power to eradicate the smaller, weaker Christian sects, until “orthodoxy” was realized.

    It has always been about power. Power is what the secular and religious elites have always striven for. And the power they seek is to control our behavior … because their wealth is based upon confiscating our “surplus labor” (lovely term those economist have invented). Ideally, we would work as hard as we needed to to supply for our families and then after that, we would rest or pursue personal interests. Instead a system was created, what I call the “pay as you go” society that requires you to work far more than is necessary to earn your wages, with your “surplus labor” being translated in to wealth (and more power) for your “owners.”

    And, like the role of President Trump, the idea of an afterlife, deathbed conversions, who is in or out, these topics are just diversions from things that really matter. The classic is, “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” What is life after death? The only people who care are those who have been convinced that if they work hard, shut up, don’t complain they will be rewarded after they die. The elites rewards come now (your “surplus labor”), your rewards come after you die. How convenient … for the elites.

    Islam means submission. That is all they want. Do as they tell us and it will all be okay. … Right …

  6. Avatar
    GeoffT

    For Hitchens to have undergone a deathbed conversion would have been for him to obliterate his entire life. It’s almost impossible to know how it feels to be on one’s deathbed, so close to the actual time, but I like to think that’s the point at which you seek to think that there has been some purpose to your life. To think that apologists seek to try and negate this last mark of respect to a dying person shows an almost morally bereft position, but is also an insult to the god they worship, who can surely see the reality of what goes!

  7. Avatar
    Matilda

    They said that Professor Stephen Hawking had a deathbed conversion too. Around that time, by coincidence, two elderly fundies I knew died. They’d both spent a lifetime in the service of jesus. Both had a x-tian relative with them in their last few hours who told me their dying loved ones began to fret that they wouldn’t be accepted into heaven, they hadn’t been good enough x-tians. Woulda thought a loving heavenly father (whom I know doesn’t exist) would have reassured them in those last hours that a glorious and wonderful eternity in his loving arms awaited them. The deteriorating human brain does weird things as it fades away……so I challenge the reality of the deathbed conversion of any heathen when the brain is malfunctioning and on the way out.

  8. Avatar
    velovixen

    I think Hugh Downs made a great point about church, and it can be applied to claims of “deathbed conversions.” People who fervently believe in, and devote their lives to the service of, something that has no more basis than their belief in it don’t want to think they’ve wasted their lives. Those of us who have read this blog over a number of years have a glimpse of what Bruce experienced when he walked away from something that had defined his entire life. It makes me wonder how strong the belief is of those who impute “deathbed conversions” to others, or some clerics and apologists who act and claim outrageous things to rationalize such belief.

    Now, if anyone claims that, in my final moments. I became a Toronto Maple Leafs or Boston Bruins fan, don’t believe them. Allez les Canadiens!

  9. Avatar
    ObstacleChick

    Unfortunately, I have been with people who were dying, and for several days, they weren’t in their right minds. Whatever was going on in their brains was filled with hallucinations – it’s like their brains were firing signals and activating memories, visions, etc.

    If someone tries to tell you I had a deathbed conversion, please know it wasn’t due to me being in my right mind.

  10. Avatar
    Danny Plumber

    Great post, Bruce! Do you remember when mass murderer Ted Bundy supposedly had a deathbed conversion? Yeah, evangelicals were yanking themselves over that one. How offensive that must have been to the families of the victims. Oh great, now Ted is up in heaven playing ping pong with St. Peter! I think many christians are quite insecure. It’s kinda weird if you think about it. You can be a complete immoral asshole your whole life but as long as you say the magic words ten minutes before you die you can still go to heaven. As the church lady used to say, “How Convenient”.

  11. Avatar
    Heidi in Montana

    This brings me back to the behavior of my three siblings when my 86-year-old father, who never had any interest in spirituality of any sort, was dying in the hospital about a year ago. When we knew he only had a few hours left and he was in no way cognizant, they pulled out a Bible and read verses and prayed with him in this fervent, embarrassing way that was deeply awkward for the rest of us. Did they think he was going to regain consciousness and make some sort of belief statement? Was he supposed to repent in his subconscious? It was just awful and I had to leave the room. (Then at the memorial two of them stated that he might be in hell and perhaps it was their fault because their imperfect christianity had led him astray. As with most clueless christians, they found some way to make it about themselves.)

    Deathbed conversions are yet another weird aspect of religion that don’t hold up to 2 seconds of scrutiny. If I were a life-long Christian who sacrificed sex, dancing, cards and rock music, I would be resentful that someone who lived the high life is allowed to sneak into heaven at the last second.

  12. Avatar
    Jimmy

    According to the ‘easy believism’ mindset of evangelicals it could be possible that heaven is populated with mass murderers and hell is stuffed full of humanitarians. I said that out loud one time to my father-in-law and he didn’t even blink about it being so ridiculous. Talk about bass ackward.

  13. Avatar
    Michael Mock

    I mean, if Jesus Henry Christ himself comes to visit you on your deathbed and answers some very pointed questions before restoring you to health, then I think you should consider reconverting. Failing that — and I’m not holding my breath — why would you change your mind? On top of all the very good points that other commenters have made already, the idea of a deathbed conversion betrays a very deep failure to understand how and why people deconvert in the first place.

    Like, I didn’t leave Christianity because Jesus and I had a spat and stopped talking, and it’s not like now that I’m (hypothetically) on my deathbed I might want to reconcile with him before it’s too late. I’m not a Christian because as far as I can tell, there’s just nothing there, which means nobody to reconcile with, no eternal reward that I’d be missing out on, etc. etc. etc. “Courage of my convictions” doesn’t really enter into it.

  14. Avatar
    Burr Deming

    “While the reasons are many, the primary reason I left Christianity is that its beliefs and practices no longer made sense to me.”

    Strikes me as a pretty good reason.
    As a Christian, I have no trouble accepting that, and I admire the intellectual integrity that I perceive it involves.

    Ostensibly, those who disrespect you are concerned with your soul.
    Some part of their concern is probably what they think it is.
    But I suspect there may be something less noble at work.

    At some level, I think I understand the anxiety of my brothers and sisters in Christ who feel that their own faith is threatened by those not in the tent.

    Perhaps you can forgive that.

    • Avatar
      Sage

      “ At some level, I think I understand the anxiety of my brothers and sisters in Christ who feel that their own faith is threatened by those not in the tent.”

      I don’t understand this anxiety. When I was a Christian for all those decades my belief was not threatened by anyone, believer or nonbeliever. It seems if your faith is threatened then maybe you should figure out why.

      And why should I forgive anyone who disrespects because of anxiety? The source of disrespect is irrelevant because they still choose to disrespect. Perhaps I am an exception, but I have no need to forgive disrespectful people.

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