Getting to the Heart of the Matter

One of my favorite questions has always been, “what happens to those who never know Christ or the story of the Bible?”  Even in the innocence of my youth I think I would have appreciated an honest answer.  Parents tend to find themselves overwhelmed when their children ask questions that they are not equipped to answer.  Instead of the intellectually honest “I don’t know,” Christian parents like to bullshit their children.  Any answer is a good one, as long as it leads the child to accepting the “truth” of the Bible and Christianity.  The answer I was given was “God knows the heart.”  This is totally unsupported by scripture; it is simply a “feel-good” bromide, usually fed casually to the children of believers in order to placate their curiosity.  For the truly curious child though, this is a recurring question, as this answer makes no sense and is not found in the Bible (For it is with the heart that we believe and are justified, but it is with the mouth that we confess and are saved--not much room for flexibility there).  

The fact of the matter is that anyone born into any faith has no chance, because faith, by its very nature, is mutually exclusive.  If I had been born in Saudi Arabia, I would have been born a muslim, thus rendering my apostasy from faith punishable by death--not just my acceptance of atheism, but any change of religion is punishable by death.  This makes the proposition “God knows the heart” problematic for muslims who never hear the message of Christ’s salvation, since the “heart” tends to value its own self-preservation.  So, in order to make this proposition work, we have to modify it to say, “God knows the heart, so if they weren’t under the threat of death and were exposed to the message of salvation, God knows whether or not they would accept the message of Christ.”  Each religious faith poses its own unique set of parameters that must be overcome for us to apply the “God knows the heart” metric.  Hindus must overcome their fear of being reincarnated as a mushroom in order to accept Christianity, Buddhists must overcome a fear of not finding enlightenment or attaining nirvana, and Shinto Japanese must overcome the possibility of pissing off their ancestors.  

Granted, I am being a bit disingenuous by not including the typical scenario posed by the astute young child: “What about those people in the Amazon or in deepest, darkest Africa who’ve never been and will never be exposed to the message of Christ?”.  Setting aside for a second that I cannot find any direct reference in scripture carrying an exception for those people, what about them?  The “God knows the heart” metric must be carried to ridiculous levels to make sense.  First, these people must surpass illiteracy, ignorance, and often bizarre tribal practices before this metric can be applied.  In other words, many of these tribes’ practices are so alien (animism, human sacrifice, polygamy, polyamory, etc.) to modern Christianity that overcoming those practices would involve a rejection of their entire lifestyle.  So what Christians really mean is “God knows the heart and what these people would do regarding the message of salvation if they were exposed to the pristine conditions available in Western civilization,” which, as I said, is completely unsupported by scripture.  It’s a feelgood assumption Christians make because they do not like the idea that--by default--the Bible excludes people who do not know salvation.