Carlton Pearson

Love me some Carlton Pearson. I mean, seriously. The Oral Roberts protegee whose megachurch congregation scattered like cucarachas when he announced to them his heretical revelation that all of us – all of us – are cut from the same spiritual cloth and will partake coequally of the same eternity. That means day trader and night watchman, Jew and Gentile, Mother Theresa and Benito Mussolini. All of us. Every last one.

He calls his message the “Gospel of Inclusion” and it’s a knife to the heart of dualism. The only Hell, he says, is the one we create for ourselves here on Earth. Like Nadia Bolz-Weber, he rejects the tradition of, as she puts it,  “God (as) an angry bastard with a killer surveillance system who had to send his little boy to suffer and die because I was bad.”

I was thinking of Pearson today, so I visited his website and that’s where I found a link to Daniel Karslake’s excellent 2007 documentary, “For the Bible Tells Me So.” More heresy, this time pertaining to the “abomination” of homosexuality. Anita Bryant, anyone?

These things reminded me again of the fundamentalist Christian who told me a few years ago, told me with a smile so serene, that unless I “do business with Jesus,” I’m going to Hell.

No, friend. Not unless you succeed in making it so for both of us. And then only for a short while.