From WBEZ in Chicago | This American Life

Heretics

The story of Reverend Carlton Pearson (pictured), an evangelical pastor in Tulsa, Oklahoma. His church, Higher Dimensions, was once one of the biggest in the city, drawing crowds of 5,000 people every Sunday. But several years ago, scandal engulfed the Reverend, he was denounced by almost all his former supporters, and today his congregation is just a few hundred people. He didn't have an affair. He didn't embezzle lots of money. His sin was something that to a lot of people is far worse … he stopped believing in hell.

I had read about Carlton Pearson before, and have been looking forward to listening to this show, because the whole hour is devoted  to his story, with a pretty in-depth explanation of the Pentecostal/fundamentalist backstory.  

I haven't gotten to the part yet where he realized that he no longer believed in hell, and was rejected and all that. From the excerpts of his sermons at the height of his influence, he was a funny, funny preacher. And his sermons were "not just funny, but scholarly," a rarity by some accounts in the evangelical world.  

He flew high, and far, and fast, and when the end came, it was swift. He stopped believing in eternal damnation, and in the concept of a vengeful God. And suddenly, it was all over, because questioning core beliefs is just… not… done.

What happened? That's what I'm about to find out, and it probably comes of all this scholarly book-learning and textual analysis of the original languages of the Bible, and of pondering what happens to suffering, starving children who haven't been "saved." He realizes that we construct our own hells on Earth, and that God had nothing to do with it. 

I like this guy much better when he's speaking from his heart and not from the clips earlier in the show where he was more or less performing "on stage." 

He concludes that he doesn't want to worship a vengeful God, and realizes that if the God he seems to be moving toward doesn't require people to accept Christ as their savior, that all will be taken into God's Presence. Everyone will be there. There are many paths, and no one path is The Path. And for this, people started leaving his church, and his associate pastors, and then the leaders came and said they were re-starting the church elsewhere. 

They all turned their backs on him because they were so invested in the idea of the Wrathful God who created hell especially to punish the wicked.  And then people from all over the country jumped all over him and denounced him.

He found his way, and found acceptance from some very surprising new spiritual friends, after he started preaching the Gospel of Inclusion, considered heretical in some quarters. And now, he's preaching out of borrowed space at Trinity Episcopal in Tulsa.  Very surprising indeed.