CHURCHES AND HELL-FIRE

This week's Independent News & Media column.

Michael Commane

‘Come Sunday’ was released on Netflix on Sunday April 15.

The film is about Bishop Carlton Pearson.

Pearson is an African-American Christian preacher, who ran one of the busiest fundamentalist-style churches in Tulsa Oklahoma.

During the early 1990s he attracted over 6,000 people to his services. 

While attending the Oral Roberts University in Tulsa he came under the influence of tele-evangelist Oral Roberts, who was greatly impressed by Pearson. 

In 1997 Pearson was ordained a bishop in the Pentecostal Church.

He mixed with the great and the good, including Presidents Clinton and George W Bush. He was a popular television preacher and appeared as a guest on many TV programmes.

The church preaches a fundamental style religion. It talks a lot about hell and is strong on preaching against homosexuality and non- acceptance of LGBT people.

Having seen a film in 1994 on the genocide in Rwanda, Pearson began to have a change of mind about his church’s teaching that all non-Christians are condemned forever to hell. Today Pearson believes that hell is created on earth by human depravity and behaviour.

He ran into trouble with his bishop peers and in 2004 the Joint College of African-American Pentecostal Bishops judged him to be preaching heresy.

Award winning English actor Chiwetel Ejiofor plays the lead role of Carlton Pearson and Oral Roberts is played by Martin Sheen in the film.

One of the strongest images in the film, at least for me, is the viciousness of those who oppose Pearson’s views, especially on hell and homosexuality. But as Pearson quips: ‘If every gay person in our church just left or those who have an orientation or preference or an inclination, or a fantasy, we wouldn’t have a church.’

Like most films, ‘Come Sunday’ is dramatic, might tend towards hyperbole but it has a message for all religions.

Pearson’s questioning of hell reminds me of how Pope Francis recently ran into trouble about alleged comments he made on the same place.

When I hear people expressing harsh views in the name of God I am reminded of the lines from the Book of Wisdom: ‘You spare all things because all things are yours, Lord, lover of life, you whose imperishable spirit is in all.’ 

If the Catholic Church or, indeed for that matter, all Christian churches were to bar homosexuals how empty would the pews be? If the same churches were to banish homosexuals from ministry how depleted would be their numbers? I recently heard a priest say that it was his belief that the majority of those in ordained ministry in the Catholic Church are gay.

Everything to do with God can only be spoken or written on a large tapestry. When we are convinced we know the inner thoughts of God we enter dangerous territory. It’s important to remember that everything we say about God it said in terms of analogy.

Pope Francis in ‘Gaudete et Exsultate’, which was published earlier this month, writes: ‘When somebody has an answer for every question, it is a sign that they are not on the right road. They may well be false prophets, who use religion for their own purposes, to promote their own psychological or intellectual theories. 

God infinitely transcends us; he is full of surprises. We are not the ones to determine when and how we will encounter him; the exact times and places of that encounter are not up to us. Someone who wants everything to be clear and sure presumes to control God’s transcendence.’