What would happen if a preacher stopped preaching to the choir? Well, if the story of Carlton Pearson is any indication, the choir stops listening.
If you’re not familiar with Carlton Pearson, he was once an evangelical superstar. A jet-setting friend of U.S. presidents, a familiar face on TV, a preacher to thousands every Sunday at his Tulsa mega-church. A church with annual offerings in the millions of dollars. Until he wondered aloud whether God might not be as vengeful as we’ve been taught to believe and that there may be no Hell. That little departure from the orthodoxy sent his flock running, leaving him with but handful of stragglers.
As Mr. Pearson explained it, “People don’t follow preachers as much as they follow popularity. I always knew that. And as soon as I quit preaching what was popular, the people were gone.”
More simply put, fear of Satan can pack a church. No fear, no following.
So why do I bring this up? Because we have a cadre of preachers dispensing unbending orthodoxy to true believers, pointing to devils lurking around every bend. They’re the devils known as Obama and Boehner, bankers and immigrants, liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats.
The preachers are Limbaugh, Olberman, Hannity, Maddow. We may think they are teaching us the truth, when in reality they are feeding us what we want to hear – and the minute they stop, they know we’ll go running. So they keep feeding it to us. And we continue to not only lap it up, but regurgitate it as gospel. Worse, we dismiss any dissenting opinion as blasphemy.
The day will come when one of two things will happen - we decide the shepherds are selling us a bill of goods and turn them off, or we end up buying that bill of goods, in which case we will discover that hell is not only real, but well deserved.
