Bad Girls and Boys Go to Hell (Or Not)—Engaging Fundamentalist Evangelicalism

Synopsis: To question the idea of hell as a default destination is to question the entire fundamentalist evangelical worldview. This book does just that. Fundamentalist evangelicalism holds that the Bible is an infallible authority and that all are born in sin. Sinners go to hell, but Jesus, taking their place, died to save them from hell. How did this belief come to be? What were the effects on people brought up with a belief in the reality of hell? What has been the process of people leaving the fundamentalist evangelical movement? In Bad Girls and Boys Go To Hell (or not), Gloria Neufeld Redekop takes us on her own personal journey as she engages a movement in which she was raised, conducting a careful study of the history of fundamentalist evangelicalism, the attachment to a literal-factual interpretation of the Bible, and an analysis of the experience of those who have left the movement. Endorsements: "A sense of liberation does indeed emerge from knowing that what one was taught as a child is not an eternal reality, but rather a brand of Christianity born out of specific political and theological disputes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I thank Gloria Neufeld Redekop for helping set captives free from fear, and for clarifying their predicament to those who have never before understood fundamentalist evangelicalism." --From the Foreword by Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, author of Omnigender "Only those who have been members of, and thus violated by, fundamentalist evangelicalism can name the pain, expose the guilt, and lay bare the reality that Gloria Neufeld Redekop expresses in this book. To read it is to experience both exhilarating freedom and a new understanding of Christianity." --John Shelby Spong, author of Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World "Not every reader will agree with every one of Gloria Neufeld Redekop's conclusions . . . But all readers should appreciate the honesty, care, seriousness, and sensitivity of this book. It is a significant memoir, as well as a challenging theological treatise and important sociological study of those who have left fundamentalism behind." --Mark Noll, author of Turning Points Author Biography: Gloria Neufeld Redekop (PhD, University of Ottawa) has taught in the College of the Humanities at Carleton University and in the Faculty of Human Sciences at Saint Paul University in Ottawa, Ontario. She is author of The Work of Their Hands: Mennonite Women's Societies in Canada (1996).