Hell and the Modern Pastor

“Make us one,
Make us one body,
Because when we are one body,
We see something we cannot see
By ourselves ...
In the name and in the blood of Jesus,
Amen”

SO OPENS LUCAS HNATH’S PLAY The Christians, which premiered at the Humana Festival of New American Plays in 2014 and at Playwrights Horizons Off-Broadway in 2015. The play is described as a “kind of sermon,” sometimes literal, sometimes figurative. The Christians marks a distinct turning point in the history of American theater, in that its evangelical main character’s struggle with ideas is treated as a serious subject that reflects on a nation’s moral dilemma.

Religious themes are hardly a new topic for U.S. theater, but most often they’ve been treated negatively. Arthur Miller’s plays, such as The Crucible and After the Fall, treat religion as an institution of animosity, even a kind of antagonist. Tennessee Williams uses religion as a quaint and antiquated emblem of Southern culture—such as in The Glass Menagerie, where the character Amanda says, with exaggerated sympathy, “You’re a Christian martyr.” Then there’s Inherit the Wind, by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, a dramatic treatment of the Scopes Monkey Trial that depicts Christians as hostile and uneducated. If the American theater were an accurate mimesis of American truth, Christians would be lying, narcissistic, two-faced, McCarthyist bigots.

The Christians is a completely different story, in which the dramatic action depicts a loving, thoughtful pastor as the protagonist up against the institution of the church. Each character is treated with due reverence and given a fair argument, so that there are no easy answers, and the audience is left grappling with the central struggle. The play is reminiscent of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (a quote from this play is The Christians epigraph), where a citizen who tells the truth faces the wrath of a village that turns on him. Both plays explore deep ethical issues as the central characters risk their reputations and their livelihoods through standing by their principles.

The first scene of Hnath’s powerful drama is a contemporary church service, highlighted by PowerPoint slides, with a sermon based on Isaiah 30:12-13: “Because you have rejected this word and relied on oppression and depended on deceit, this sin will become for you like a high wall, cracked and bulging, whose collapse comes suddenly in an instant.”

The sermon is delivered by the energetic and youthful Pastor Paul at an evangelical megachurch that could be anywhere in the United States. He goes on to describe what he views as the crack in his church’s foundation, delivered with the smooth tones of a master orator who has always won the favor of the congregation. He tells a story he heard at a pastor’s conference about a boy, in a country ravaged by violence, who rushes into a burning building to save a little girl and dies from his burns. Pastor Paul is tortured by this story, told to him by a missionary who mourns for the boy saying, “What a shame, I didn’t save this boy for Christ...what a shame I didn’t save this boy from hell.”

Paul, deeply disturbed by the missionary’s conviction, can no longer believe in such a hell. He talks to God, who replies to him as plain as any daily conversation, “That boy, he is standing next to me right now. And anyone who tells you otherwise, lies.” The crack, it turns out, is the belief in a fire-and-brimstone hell. In a heartfelt but quiet voice, Pastor Paul says, “We are no longer a congregation that says my way is the only way.”

The play is staged as a church service, complete with a choir and the pastoral staff sitting on the stage. Whether they like it or not, the audience serves as the congregation. At the performance I attended, people bowed their heads during the prayers, even speaking “Amen” after the pastor. As the scenes unfold, the choir responds, singing traditional hymns that comment on the action.

The associate pastor, Joshua, an elder who goes by Jay, and Paul’s wife, Elizabeth, sit listening intently on the stage, becoming the church body that questions Paul’s change of belief. In a fresh and radical manner, each character is given a genuine voice, and there is nowhere to lay any blame or judgment. One by one they confront Paul, first with the associate pastor quoting scripture after scripture, feeling betrayed over what he sees as an unwarranted shift in values. The elder, Jay, representing the church board, must ask Pastor Paul to step down. His wife, Elizabeth, is deeply conflicted, questioning his integrity and ethics and her husband’s love for her. A choir member, Jenny, steps forth in an emotional testimony to challenge the pastor on how he’s leading his congregation astray.

Artfully written, Hnath’s play gently mirrors the wrestling with universal salvation that is happening in many churches and how it can tear churches apart. We only need think back to the exit of Rob Bell from Mars Hill Bible Church after the release of his bestselling book Love Wins in 2011. Indeed, Bell said he wrote the book after a congregant questioned whether Gandhi was in heaven. This isn’t the first time church leaders have questioned the existence of a literal hell and rejected the doctrine. Schisms emerge and new church bodies are formed. In Hnath’s rendition of this story, the melodrama of such church schisms is downplayed so that we can clearly hear the emerging argument. Pastor Paul, despite the abandonment of his congregation, stands resolved in his new faith: “I believe what I believe because I know it is true—but why do I know it’s true?—it’s a feeling. And where did that feeling come from?—God.. I know it’s God because God is there.”

And the question is left unresolved in the play, echoing how many of us feel when deeply held orthodox opinions are questioned. The play is clearly hitting home, with several productions scheduled across the country in the coming year. Hnath himself is not a Christian, yet he clearly understands the world of the church (he was a member of an evangelical church in his past). The relevance of Hnath’s story, told by his convincing characters in the language of now, points to the reality that many people hunger to be heard and for the space to share the truths that they feel.

We are in need of truth, as well as of people who resiliently stand by through periods of great change and tumult. Pastor Paul is such a man, a character who could become a hero for American Christians.