Today my roommate and I had a brief discussion about the beliefs of universalism, which is the belief that all people go to heaven, no matter what they do in life, which also means no matter if they go to church, believe in God, or ask for forgiveness for their sins. Sounds like a pretty simple idea when you really think about it, but something he said absolutely struck me. Just before he left the room he said “that would be a terrible business plan for churches…” and it struck me. I realized right then that we don’t think of churches like we think of businesses, but that is basically what they are. I don’t mean to discount the divinity of the church, or the fact that it is a holy symbol, but I realize now that there is a totally new way of looking that this that I hadn’t thought of before.
Picture a Lutheran church as a corner store. It doesn’t really sell much, but it is really good at selling happiness, a feeling of acceptance, and guarantees life after death. Pretty cool right? Well these services are free, which makes it a difficult business model to uphold, but luckily the customers they bring in are willing to give. They tell everyone there is a sale on Sundays, and then when everyone comes in they pass around a tip jar and hope that it covers the expenses. The more people you bring in and keep coming back the more tips you will receive each week.
Then you start having a sale on Wednesday for people who can’t make it on Sunday. You encourage people to shop there on major holidays like Easter and Christmas, and pretty soon you have a large number of customers coming in quite frequently, and the salesmen start telling them why they should come more often, and come on a regular basis. Things are going great for hundreds of years and your store thrives just fine, but now it is the modern age and there is a problem, you have competitors.
Pretty soon a fancy new online store opens that says you never have to come to the actual store, you don’t have to even really buy anything, but you still get the same products delivered right to your home for no money at all. People realize that this is a much less time consuming business model, and pretty soon that old corner store is almost out of business and relying on its few faithful customers that it has left.
Obviously the new online store is the idea of Universalism, and suddenly it made sense to me. I am in that generation that was told that everyone wins, everyone gets a ribbon, everyone is equal no matter what, and if I hadn’t been raised in such a religious family I would have probably thought to myself that since everyone is equal, everyone should go to heaven, and hell is just something to scare you. Pretty soon I probably would have thought that since hell is just meant to scare you so is prison, and pretty soon I would wind up there. America did a really good job of preaching equality, but I think in the process we may have tried a little too hard and gotten ourselves into a situation where God doesn’t scare people anymore. That worries me.
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