No matter how hard evangelicals try in their evangelism, they can’t help themselves. Fear will always peek out through their entreaties to convert. Fear is always the endgame for evangelism. It can’t be any other way—not for them, anyway. Today, we check out Taylor Standridge, who really want evangelism to be more than just terrorizing people with threats of Hell.
(This post first went live on Patreon on 5/16/2024. No voicecast today, I’m afraid. I’m still kicking a cold that has my throat very sore. Sorry! We’ll have our planned topic on Tuesday instead.)
SITUATION REPORT: Another evangelical dreams of love instead of fear in evangelism
In July 2024, Taylor Standridge wrote a post for Baptist Standard. He titled his post “Evangelism without the guilt trip.” It begins with a sermon from Standridge’s childhood wherein a preacher told the flocks that if they refused to evangelize, their targets’ “blood is on your hands!”
Standridge tells us that this message was not an isolated or rare one. And it isn’t. That tallies with my own experience and that of many other ex-Christians.
Evangelicals like to sneer at me over it, too. They love to say that such messages aren’t Jesusy at all, then ask how I possibly could have gotten such an outlandish idea. But evangelical leaders talk like this all the time. Evangelicals like “BJS” declare that Christians have a “responsibility” to evangelize, echoing all the guilt trips I heard as a Christian.
Today, we’ll examine why evangelicals dislike using fear-based evangelism, but do it anyway.
Fear hijacks our primate brains in ways love just can’t
Over millions of years, our primate brains evolved into marvels of threat detection. One interesting 2023 paper about fear tells us, “The sensory cortex has participated in this process since the ancestral amniote.” That’s the first egg-producer, the one that evolved into all modern creatures that nurture their young in a “fluid-containing membrane,” or amnion, that surrounds the embryo. Combined with that paper, another from May 2025 suggests that Earth life has been capable of fear for about 350 million years.
As a result, we humans can detect threats very well. We can even detect threats where none exist (through cognitive misfires like pareidolia). Often, we detect threats before we even consciously realize something is amiss. Even women’s oft-lauded “intuition” is likely to be, at its core, a superior threat detection mechanism women need because they’re more vulnerable to harm than men are.
To our primate brains, survival matters more than sentiment. Sure, love is very nice. But threats are what really gets a human brain’s attention. Our brains quickly process threats, flooding us with the biochemicals of fear—a process which in turn pushes us into a response: fight, flight, freeze.
Love evolved much later, likely from parental care for offspring. That simpler devotion evolved with early vertebrates around 400 million years ago. The selfless agape Christians preach grew within mammals and then peaked in primates. Our expanded prefrontal cortex added the capacity for greater altruism and empathy. But these emotions remain far, far younger than basic fear—with the most exalted, self-sacrificial forms of love being perhaps only a couple million years old.
So in our brains, fear screams far more loudly than love.
Indeed, the bigger the threat, the more pronounced our reaction to it—and the further we’ll go in response to it. In real life as on social media, fear gets the clicks and views.
And there really isn’t a threat bigger than eternal torture in Hell.
When Christianity sparked to life, Hell wasn’t that bad-sounding. Over the centuries, though, Christians honed and sharpened that threat to the utterly preposterous, outsized, disproportionate punishment that scares millions of believers today.
(Here’s our series tracking the evolution of Hell from Christianity’s earliest days to the modern age!)
Fear-based evangelism gets the message to the flocks as well
When I was a Pentecostal teen, I freaked out to imagine my loved ones in Hell. My leaders taught me that if they went to Hell, it was my fault for not converting them. It was exhausting. When everyone naturally resisted my calls to convert, I only got more frantic to rescue them.
Taylor Standridge knows how much domestic chaos these tactics create, too. In his post, he talks about “Hell houses,” which are religious riffs on Halloween haunted houses. Evangelicals use them to scare visitors about Hell. But Standridge saw them as ultimately counterproductive:
These practices both instilled a dread of damnation and encouraged children to spread fear among their peers. Rather than sharing the “good news,” the bad-news approach led to confusion and concern among their parents when confronted with these dire warnings from their children when they got home.
Yep, that about covers how my parents reacted the night I converted to evangelicalism! Looking back, I can see they were both confused and concerned—but for me, of course, not for their immortal souls.
Oh, but see, Standridge doesn’t like that approach now.
Salvation as a form of fire insurance
In his post, Standridge says he wants to do away with threats as evangelism tactics:
Such fear-based evangelistic methods make the goal to avoid hell rather than enter the communal relationship God has with his church.
The idea that Christianity is about avoiding a place reduces faith to a transaction aimed at escaping punishment, overlooking the opportunity to live a life anchored in God’s love.
In response, one can only say: DUH, dude.
That’s such a common situation that evangelical preachers have a name for fear-based conversions: Fire insurance. They know fear sells like nothing else. That’s why they use it.
Oh, they act disapproving about fear-based conversions, sure. They grouse that those converts are missing out on the lovey-dovey parts of their religion. But evangelists get their payoff through conversions, not through lovey-dovey methods of conversion. It doesn’t matter how they get the conversions, as long as they get ’em.
When I was Christian, I knew nobody who’d converted only on the basis of love. Everyone I knew converted out of fear, like I had. Even people who claimed they converted out of love let the truth slip out in dozens of ways: They feared missing the Rapture. Or dying with unconfessed sins on their conscience. Or backing the wrong denominational or doctrinal horse and getting told by Jesus after death: “I never knew you. Depart from me!” as we see in Matthew 7:15-23.
When fear crashes our neurochemistry party, it overwhelms love’s subtler voice. Fear always takes the top position. Christian threats are just so out-of-scope that they elbow out any gentler considerations and motivations. It’s completely exhausting, too. When I deconverted, losing that fear felt like a literal rebirth. (Ironic, no?)
The fear of Hell doesn’t motivate Christians to do anything past escaping it
Hell is such an evil, coercive threat that of necessity, Hell-believers make avoiding it their top priority. Once they’ve secured safety from that threat, nothing else matters—not even Jesus’ apparent command to evangelize. They’re safe. Unless something can take away their safety, they don’t need to lift another finger. As one evangelical men’s group leader, Gary Yager, writes (emphases are all from original sources):
The true gospel is the four-chapter gospel of the kingdom not just the two chapters of fall and redemption— that we have a plane ticket to heaven, paid for by Christ’s blood on the cross. If that were the true gospel our job right now would be to wait around at the airport.
And yes, that is exactly how most evangelicals act. After getting their ticket out of Hell, they wait around at the airport! This guy accidentally illustrates why evangelical leaders are so singularly incapable of getting the flocks to act more Jesusy. Just as conversions matter more than how the conversions are achieved, getting to Heaven matters more than any other thing anyone could do with their entire life. Once that ticket is punched, nobody has to do anything else.
Acting more Jesusy doesn’t get Christians to Heaven any better than not doing it, so it becomes a side concern. They’ll do it if they feel like it. Whether they do or don’t, though, they know Jesus is letting them into Heaven. Doing anything more is wasted effort.
But but but they want Christianity to mean more than just fire insurance!
Still, evangelicals sometimes fight against fear-based evangelism. Gary Yager laments:
In the traditional view of sharing the gospel that I started with, the hearer must admit he is a sinner who can’t save himself and trust the work of Jesus on the cross as the atoning sacrifice for his sin. Such faith is his admission ticket to heaven. While this is true, it is only two chapters of a four-chapter story—1) the fall, 2) redemption. Failure to see the whole gospel story will cause our gospel message to focus just on another’s sin and Jesus’ death on the cross so he can avoid eternal separation from God in hell.
First off, there’s no “sharing” involved in “sharing the gospel.” It’s one-sided preaching, usually done according to scripts.
Second, Yager doesn’t reject fear-based evangelism. He just wants evangelicals to preach a four-part gospel, not just the two parts about Hell and escaping from it. His suggestion hasn’t caught on at all, though. It really can’t. He’s demanding more evangelism work from flocks that already don’t like and don’t want to perform this task in the first place.
Evangelicals want their religion to mean something more than “fire insurance.” They desperately want to sell it on the basis of love and not fear. I get it. But as long as they reach for threats of Hell to bolster the sales pitch, it can’t ever be anything else. The very second threats come out of their mouth, any love they’ve preached is already gone.
So when Standridge rhapsodizes about “life enriched by the Holy Spirit” and “an eternity with God that transcends the mere avoidance of hell,” most evangelicals—and probably more ex-Christians and heathens—can hear the veiled threat that always comes along with it:
Yes yes, life with Jesus is all good and all. But if you don’t obey me now, you will suffer unthinkable tortures forever and ever and ever in Hell after you die. Do it before it’s too late for you.
There is always a threat behind evangelism. Without threats, evangelism would never succeed. If you ever wonder about it, just ask the evangelist what happens if you refuse his request that you change your entire life to obey him.
It’s still Hell, but sold with the lovey-dovey shit evangelicals already know doesn’t work
In his post, Standridge tries to ease a tremendous burden of guilt from the shoulders of the rank-and-file. He tries to tell them not to worry about the “results” of evangelism, but instead to focus more on “building relationships, leaving for God the preparation of souls to hear his message.”
Unfortunately for Christians, it won’t matter. Fear isn’t working to reverse their decline, so not using fear won’t fill churches either. Christianity’s message simply isn’t compelling to most people. Adding fear to it worked for a long time, but it’s not as effective now—particularly for younger adults. Gen Z seems to have an easier time seeing through that kind of emotional manipulation. That development bodes poorly for evangelism-minded Christians!
That’s why Christians struggled so much to find their footing in their religion’s first couple of centuries. Even in the New Testament of the Bible, many verses offer tantalizing hints about Christian leaders’ inability to retain new members. (See: 1 John 2:19, Hebrews 6:4, 2 Peter 2:20, and 2 Timothy 4:10.) Until they gained real temporal power, they couldn’t hang onto their converts. Once they got that power, they used it to the hilt. They haven’t had to sell themselves in any real way since then. So they really have no idea how to do it now.
As they lose more and more cultural power, they only lean harder and harder on fear. But these days, fear doesn’t convert many new people. Perhaps it will hold onto some of their existing flocks a bit longer. That might be all evangelical leaders can hope to achieve. It has to be enough, because I doubt they’re ever getting much more.
NEXT UP: We’ll check out a Calvinist hypocrite—and ask why they seem so numerous when their Jesusing is the best of the best of the best (with honors, SIR! Just ask them!). See you soon! <3
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