By Jasun Horsley in Newsletter — 14 Aug 2025

Christianity as Spiritual Protection Racket

The Gospel of Unconditional Salvation, part 2 of 3

A Radical Re-interpretation of the Gospel, based on a passage from The Historical Figure of Jesus, by E.P. Sanders

Salvation Lost & Found

This good news about God is potentially a much more powerful message than the standard exaltation to give up wickedness and turn over a new leaf. In a world that believed in God and judgment, some people nevertheless lived as if there were no God. They must have had some anxiety about this in the dark watches in the night. The message that God loves them anyway might transform their lives. I must, however, hasten to add that I do not know that Jesus’ message was effective in actually changing the outlook, and consequently the lives, of the wicked of Galilee. Like the women who followed Jesus to Jerusalem, watched him die and returned to anoint him, the wicked of the gospels disappear from sight. We do not know what happened even to Levi, the customs officer whom Jesus called. It is hard to find room for such people in the Jerusalem church headed by James the Just (as tradition has called Jesus’ brother, who was very law-abiding). Perhaps they lived out their lives in Galilee, hoping that the man who made them feel so special would be back. This glance forward to the situation of the early church is very useful for understanding Jesus. Were he a reformer of society, he would have had to face the problem of integrating wicked people into a more righteous social group. Then there would have had to be explicit rules about the parameters of behavior, and also some sort of policy on sources of income. None of this exists (Sanders, p. 234, emphasis added).

The kingdom that Jesus is referring to, the kingdom of God, is not of this world (John 18:36).

It is not a social system which has to regulate who enters in order not to fall into disarray, or that has to make sure all entrants are reformed if guilty of sin (which is all of us). It is not run on rules that have to be observed.

We don’t exactly know, of course, what the kingdom of God is.

In Paul’s account (1 Corinthians 12:12), the body of Christ seems closely synonymous, a realm or state in which we are all members of a single body. This likewise suggests a system that regulates itself.

If just by entering into the kingdom, one is integrated into it, one is saved, then repentance and reformation are not necessary as a prerequisite for entering. Simply entering is salvation; and with salvation, there is no more need for repentance.

Nor is there a need for repentance prior to salvation, because our sins are forgiven, and once you’ve passed over the threshold, you’re instantly changed (1 Corinthians 15:52).

On the other hand, according to Paul, salvation is something that has to be “worked out” after it happens (Philippians 2:12), as well as something that can be lost (Hebrews 6:4-6).

On the third hand (Paul again):

“For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39).

So What Becomes of the Wicked?

Of course, the central Christian tenet is free will.

We still have to agree to enter into the kingdom, just as a lost sheep has to cooperate with the shepherd once it’s found, and not act like a goat and keep trying to run away (in which case, one supposes, it must be subdued).

The so-called wicked, the people who have strayed from their moral core and from right living, who have indulged in all kinds of sinful or aberration or behavior—in other words, all of us—these are the lost.

Although we may not consent or assent to being saved at a conscious level—this may not even really be possible, any more than a lost sheep can find its way back—we will surely be happy, like the prodigal son, to find our way home and discover that we are saved.

Which sheep, no matter how lost, does not recognize the shepherd when he comes?

You might say that many people didn’t recognize Jesus, as recounted in the gospels, which raises a thorny question: what exactly is the difference between Jesus, the man, and Christ, the state or station of the Anointed Messiah?

The paradox of Jesus Christ being man and God indicates two aspects of his being: it is the history of a man who is also—or who becomes on death and resurrection?—a doorway to God.

Is Jesus saying, “To get to God, you have to go through me,” as in Jesus the man? Or is he saying we have to go through the same eternal Logos that he, as a man, led the way through, and thereby became the historical incarnation of?

Logic (logos) dictates the latter: To follow Jesus is to become as Christ/Logos is.

There is more. If the kingdom of God is not extant at a social level, is it really about recognizing Jesus at that level, either? (I.e., the born-again idea that we must consciously believe certain historical things to be saved.) Or is it about being found by the Logos, if not on this side of life, then on the other side (though better by far on this side)?

If God will not let a single one of his little ones be lost, this clearly implies universal salvation. It fits far better with the scripture, with what Christ is supposed to have said, and with what Christians believe about Christ.

(To believe in eternal damnation for any soul is to disbelieve in, even to refute, the power of the love of Christ.)

Yet there is a counter-message in the scripture, one that nobody can deny, which is that, if you don’t repent in time, you’re out of luck, because you won’t have any opportunity afterwards to repent. There is no more free will in the afterlife, the reasoning goes, so Hell is forever.

This doesn’t seem particularly fair, if we consider the sorts of circumstances that many people are born into—including being raised by fundie Christians, which is arguably a much worse starting place for salvation than atheism (my own background).

More to the point (since fairness may be irrelevant), it doesn’t seem correct, consistent, or realistic, for God to require individuals to repent, when they haven’t had the opportunity to see the error of their ways because they haven’t recognized the presence of God in their lives.

If we haven’t had an encounter with Jesus—outside of dogmatic social distortions—how can we be expected to love him?

The idea that we are supposed to repent without actually having a visceral sense of our sinfulness—barring an external morality being imposed on us and used to shame us—has little to no equivalency to the example set by Jesus in the Gospel, that of grace, or absolute freedom from the Law.

Selling Hell

Similarly, with the idea that we are supposed to believe in Jesus in order to be saved— without necessarily having a direct encounter with Christ, as Paul did, why is it seen as a virtue to believe something we don’t understand and have not encountered, simply because we are told to do so by some external authority (whether institution or book)?

Once again, paradoxically, this seems to run counter to the example of Jesus (or Job in the OT, who rejects pious platitudes and will only be satisfied with a direct encounter with God).

The idea that we need to believe (without understanding) to be saved is a powerful tool, since it inevitably conjures the flip side, that of being damned by our lack of belief. People made to believe in Hell are certainly going to want to believe in the proffered solution, and they will do pretty much anything to avoid that fate.

As seen in 2020-22, the contagious fear of a manufactured threat will ensure people line up, en masse, for potentially deadly pseudo-solutions.

Jesus Christ thus becomes the Savior that saves us from Hell, the Capo of a spiritual protection racket.1

Eternal damnation is the head cornerstone of the social engineering psychological operation that is organized Christianity.

It is the backbone of a millennia-long agenda, and the belief that we have to believe in Jesus in order to be saved from eternal hellfire is the ostensible Frankenstein’s monster that has been stitched together around that spine.

The kernel of truth is that one does have to believe that Christ has the power to forgive our sins, that his love cancels them out, forever, to enter into a state of grace. Faith is essential to faith healing; without it, we can’t be healed.

The lie is in the idea that we have to earn the remission of our sins, before or after. Salvation is a done deal. Even the inhabitants of hell have been routed.

If we choose to sin and to suffer after, that’s our choice. We can psychosomatically re-generate the symptoms of our sickness after we are healed, and so fall prey to old patterns. But nothing can change the fact of our salvation—“and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matt. 16:18).

Heaven Sauna

To be clear: I’m not ruling out the “purgatorial” or purifying (not punitive) aspects of God’s love (Jesus gives quite a few stern warnings about it).

This is where free will comes in: if we want to resist the cleansing fires of God, and deny the truth God’s love, we will suffer more, and for longer, than if we accept it.

The kingdom of God is like a sauna: if you’re not used to the heat and you’re full of toxins, it’s going to be quite unpleasant once you get here, and for however long it takes.

Hell is the experience of heaven for those who are not yet purified (which is all of us to some degree).

How long that hellish transitional period goes on, and what’s left of us (in terms of a continuity of consciousness) at the end of it, is presumably a very broad spectrum. Broad enough that, one might suppose that, many individuals will have nothing left of them at the end of it but (raw) soul.

As our impurities, distortions, and delusions are burned away in heaven’s sauna, whether there will be anything recognizable left of us once we’re through that process will depend on how complete our identification with those patterns was at the start of it.

But either way, the soul itself has been saved. This is necessary reasoning: nothing else makes sense within the schemata of Christ and the Gospel.

Sanders writes:

[Jesus] was an absolutist. He required a few people, those who actually followed him, to give up everything. To others, he promised the kingdom without setting down a lot of stipulations and conditions. It was coming; God intended to include even the wicked. Jesus did not want the wicked to remain wicked in the interim, but he did not devise a program that would enable tax collectors and prostitutes to make a living in less dubious ways (p. 234).

The kingdom of heaven is at hand, our sins are forgiven, God loves us, let the dead bury the dead. The opportunity of the moment is to let go and let God, to surrender to God’s love, to believe the truth that God loves us and our sins are forgiven.

In the parable of the prodigal son, the son does find his own way home. He learns the error of his ways, which is why he comes home; he’s sorry that he left because he lost all his money and can’t find anything to eat; he comes home because he’s hungry and is reduced to eating with pigs. His change of heart and mind is the pragmatic result of his confrontation with reality.

This is the only meaningful criteria there is for morality: when we see the consequences of our actions, we change tactics. Because anything else is madness.

Of course, this essentially extends to the infinite.

All self-will is error, because God is the only will that must be done, the only will that knows what it’s doing. But if it is God’s will that not a single soul will be lost, then this must likewise trump all the lesser wills of humans.

Including—or especially—the will to deny God’s love and burn in hell forever.

Part 3: