Excerpt from This American Life

TAL presenter: So here he is, at the top of his game. It's late 1990s. But something didn't feel right. Carlton had always preached a pretty conventional, evangelical theology: hell was a horrible place -- weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth for eternity. And the only way to avoid it was to accept Jesus. But he was always reading and studying the Bible's origins, boating up on the original Hebrew and Greek, and he'd begun to doubt some of the stuff he'd been preaching. And it all came to a head one evening, in front of the television.

Carlton: When my little girl who'll be 9 next month was an infant, I was watching the evening news. The Hutus and Tutsis were returning from Rwanda to Uganda. Now Majesty was in my lap -- my little girl -- I'm reading the mail and I'm watching these little kids with swollen bellies and they look like their skin is stretched over their little skeletal remains and their hair is red from malnutrition. The babies, they've got flies in the corners of their eyes and their mouths and they'll reach for their mothers' breasts and their mothers' breasts look like a little pencil hanging there. The babies reaching but the breasts have no milk. And I, with my little fat-faced baby, plate full and a wide-screen television. And I said, "God, I don't know how you can call yourself a loving sovereign God and allow these people to suffer this way. You just sucking them right into hell." Which was what was my assumption. And I heard a little voice say within me, "So that's what you think we're doing?" And I remember I didn't say yes or no, I said, "That's what I been taught."

"We're sucking them into hell?"

I said yes.

"And what would change that?"

"Well, if you get saved."

"And how would that happen?"

"Someone needs to preach the gospel to them and get them saved."

"So if you think that's the only way they're gonna get saved is for somebody to preach the gospel to them and that we're sucking them into hell, why don't you put your little baby down, turn your big screen television off, push your plate away, get on the first thing smoking and go get them saved?"

I broke into tears, I was very upset and I remember thinking, God don't put that guilt on me. I've given you the best 40 years of my life. Besides I can't save the whole world. I'm doing the best I can.

And I believe it was God saying: "Precisely. You can't save this world. That's what we do. You think we're sucking them into hell? Can't you see they're already there? That's hell. You keep creating and inventing that for yourselves."

... And I thought, well I'll be. That's weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. That's where the pain comes from. We do that to each other. And we do it to ourselves... I saw how we create hell on this planet for each other. And for the first time in my life I did not see God as the inventor of hell.

Recording of Carlton's preaching, after the moment of awakening: I'm sitting next to a Tibetan monk. He's been a Tibetan monk for the fourth generation. Here's a monk that all he does is every morning he takes the goats, he milks the goats, he takes them to another pasture, he works in the garden, he says some prayers, he burns some incense. He never marries, he never kills, cuss, fight, lie. He's never heard the Gospel. Never seen a television or radio, tracks way up there in the cold. He's taking goats from one pastures to another, slips off a cliff, falls into a valley and dies. Is there a Jesus anywhere to save that man? Or is there a devil sucking him into hell? I would say no no no, my God loves him.

-- This American Life #304 Heretics: The story of Reverend Carlton Pearson, a renowned evangelical pastor in Tulsa, Oklahoma who cast aside the idea of hell--and with it, everything he'd worked for over his entire life.

This was a man who went from being religious adviser to Clinton and Bush, to being ostracised, harrassed and abandoned by most of the Christian world because he started preaching that it didn't matter if you were Muslim, Jewish, gay or straight; God loves us all and we should all love each other.

Apparently we really, really like the idea of having everyone else burn for eternity.