It’s been awhile since we heard from Rob Bell, the Grand Rapids, Mich., superstar pastor whose 2011 book asking if hell is truly real got him booted out of evangelical Christian circles. He was quite the phenomenon a decade ago and then he disappeared for a time.
Turns out that, like many folks who live in the northern half of the country, Bell wanted to escape to a better climate — so it was off to California he went.
Los Angeles Magazine just ran a long piece on what Bell is up to now as he lives near the tony Venice Beach section of Los Angeles. The soulful photos look like, as one Twitter poster remarked, “like he delivers sandwiches for a hipster restaurant in Portland.”
Bingo.
The story begins with a casual mention about Bell having surfed that morning in Malibu. But (cue the flashback) 10 years ago:
… Bell was among the most prominent Evangelical pastors in America. His Michigan megachurch, Mars Hill, attracted over 10,000 worshippers a weekend. His debut book, 2005’s Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith, sold half a million copies. And he performed annual speaking tours to packed theaters around the world. One newspaper called him “The next Billy Graham.” But that was before Bell went to hell.
In his fourth book, 2011’s Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived, Bell wondered aloud whether a loving God would really condemn billions of nonbelievers to eternal torment. The book sold half a million copies and landed him on the cover of Time. It led to friendships with the likes of Oprah Winfrey. But it also led conservative pastors to label him a heretic and a false teacher; it led to him leaving not just his church, but the church; it led to him questioning the faith that had made him famous. And it led him to Los Angeles.
Then he began a podcast in 2015.
More than 300 episodes and tens of millions of downloads later, the Robcast has helped to resurrect Bell’s career. His book sales have bounced back. This year, he’s embarked on his first international speaking tour since the pandemic. As Americans increasingly leave religion behind, many former evangelicals have found comfort in Bell’s no-strings-attached spiritual instruction. And once again, Bell has found himself at the forefront of evolving religious expression in the United States.
This first-person story then –- annoyingly –- shifts to the viewpoint of the reporter who (#SURPRISE) tells how he grew up evangelical near Tampa but also got turned off of his own church’s talk of hell and got attracted to Bell’s message because it was edgy and asked questions. The reporter then uses his own church disenchantment to buttress everything Bell says and is.
Near the end, we learn the reporter goes surfing with Bell, so there is no critical distance in this piece.
Bell comes across as a sage for the burgeoning church-leavers movement among the young; termed “nones” by pollsters who try to number them. After “Love Wins” got him enough bad PR to cause him to quit his Michigan church and move to California, the story picks up on his emotionally battered family who turned to spending Sundays at the beach.
On those Sunday mornings, he would paddle in parallel to the beach, his mind moving as quickly as his body, trying to process the pain he’d felt at having been so harshly rejected. All he’d wanted to do was to help people see God as he did — not as exclusive and judgmental, but as inclusive and welcoming. After a few hours, he’d return to shore with sore shoulders and an aching heart.
The prose is heavy breathing at this point. Truth is, Jesus talked an awful lot about hell — so it’s not just “God” we’re referring to here. The story pits nasty evangelical/fundamentalists with their awful God-who’s-into-hell versus the more enlightened masses who think hell is medieval at best.
Where this story did shine is explaining how Bell –- in between visits to the beach and bike rides around the neighborhood — discovered a whole new audience in Podcastland.
Without local congregations sending busloads of the faithful to his speaking engagements, ticket sales to his tours shriveled. Without prominent placement on shelves in Christian bookstores, his follow-up to Love Wins, 2013’s What We Talk About When We Talk About God, sold only a tenth of the copies. Through his Hollywood connections, Bell wrote a pilot for a drama called Stronger with Carlton Cuse, the showrunner on Lost. ABC optioned it, but it never aired. He filmed two episodes of a talk show for Oprah’s network OWN, but it wasn’t picked up. The problem was he was looking for a new audience in the same old spaces. Religious conservatives crowded traditional platforms — the pulpit, publishing, television, and radio.
But podcasting is still the Wild West of opinion and Bell has done well there because the younger demographics may not be into organized religion, but they are into “spirituality” big time.
One huge gap in the story was what happened to the church Bell left behind in Michigan. The article gives him a pass, saying the separation was necessary for both parties, but no quotes from the leaders of that church are included. For more on how Mars Hill has recovered from going from 10,000 members to 1,200, read this recent piece by Bob Smietana for RNS.
Another thing that struck me is how, thanks to the pandemic and the shifting nature of journalism, a lot of us have been out of work more than once in the past decade. However, no one I know has asked to write a TV pilot or an Oprah episode. Bell came to California with tremendous connections and real advantages over the rest of ordinary folks in this strange period of time.
The story is just one plaudit after another and not one critical quote thrown in from someone who’s followed Bell’s career. As the story ended, we see that Bell wants to call himself a Christian again, drops the F-word in a closing quote and likes to spend time with his kids. His new life is apparently making enough money for his family to survive and life in West Hollywood is pretty high rent.
But I never felt the article let me inside the man’s head. Instead, we got inside the reporter’s head –- where I didn't want to go — and left me with little new factual information about Bell that we couldn't glean from his website. Some of my fellow religion writers may be calling this — on Twitter — one of the best religion stories of the year but believe me, it’s not.
Bell is the kind of guy media love to profile: The former evangelical-turned-prophetic critic whose newer, looser theological stance is getting them noticed by the secular world and who has shaken the dust of narrow-minded religion off his feet.
Why is it we never see stories about folks going more conservative (unless it’s about women who decide to wear hijab)? The bias is toward those who break away and re-invent, even though it’s questionable if the traditions they left really needed reinventing.
I’ve seen so many stories of this ilk and my annoyance has nothing to do with Bell but more toward the sacred space that exvangelicals hold — rent free — inside the minds of many mainstream journalists. And universalism is really popular on the religious left.
I get that the very idea of “news” is the coverage of the unusual and new — I just wonder if Bell is saying anything really new these days. Again, the piece spends more on the reporter’s own thoughts rather than telling us of how Bell has changed over the past six years; information that could have proved very valuable.
Instead we got soulful reflections on how Christianity is not Donald Trump and how hurt some people feel by their churches — all interesting observations that have been out there for some time. Next time, make the story about Bell himself and how being in Los Angeles has made a difference, not about the reporter or vapid observations about “moving forward.”
For example: At one point Bell was on board as one of Oprah’s spiritual advisors. What happened to that?
Bell is clearly moving forward into more book contracts. But there’s a downside, a twist, a sorrow somewhere. That’s what I wanted to read about, but couldn’t.
FIRST IMAGE: Photo taken from Rob Bell’s Instagram account.