On Reflection, This Is A Troll

The one thing that's kept bothering me about Scott Adams's "conversion" is that it's a little too much like a three-panel Dilbert strip. In panel 1, a "Christian" tells Dilbert the way to get to heaven is to say, "I accept Jesus Christ as my lord and savior". In panel 2, Dilbert, on his deathbed, says this and dies. In panel 3, there's a punch line -- I'm not sure what that would be, I'm not Scott Adams, but it would undercut the whole thing the "Christian" told him in panel 1.

Actually, I don't think it would be too far from the sequence below. The context is Adams's revival of the Dilbert strip in March, 2023 as "Dilbert Reborn" following the cancellation of the original strip in the wake of harsh remarks he made about African-Americans that February. The strip's distributor severed ties with Adams, ending the comic's syndication, while his publisher canceled his upcoming next book and removed the others from its offerings.

The sequence below appears to be the "origin story" of Dilbert's rebirth and marks one of Adams's few actual ventures into eschatology (click on the image for a larger copy):

In the sequence, a garbage man encounters Dogbert atop a recycling bin. The garbage man tells Dogbert he can bring Dilbert back in a matter of hours if Dogbert gives him Dilbert's ashes. And as promised, a reborn Dilbert pops up from the recycling bin, angrier than ever. I think this gives some idea of what the final panel might be in the hypothetical three-panel strip of Dilbert on his deathbed I suggested above -- and there might well be a hell involved, certainly not a saccharine heaven with cherubs strumming lyres in the clouds that some observers appear to believe Adams finally endorsed.

And if we put Scott Adams in the tradition of dark freethinking American humorists like Mark Twain and Nathanael West, this seems like a much more consistent outcome. It was, after all, Adams's reaction to the death of his career, only a few years before he had to contemplate his actual demise. But overall, while I don't think Adams was as smart about religion as he could have been, I do think he was much too smart to believe you'll go to heaven if you just say, "I accept Jesus Christ as my lord and savior", and of course, no reasonable Christian apologist like C S Lewis or Fulton Sheen would claim this in any case, which is why I'm puzzled that figures like Franklin Graham are OK with it.

The problem is that many radical Evangelicals do in fact say this. I asked Chrome AI mode, "Are there prominent Christian spokesmen who believe you'll go to heaven if you simply say, "I accept Jesus Christ as my lord and savior"? It answered in part,

Yes, many prominent Christian spokesmen and evangelists teach that accepting Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior is the essential requirement for salvation and entry into heaven. This teaching is often centered on the "Sinner's Prayer," a short profession of faith popularized by major evangelical figures throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.

It lists Billy Graham, Franklin Graham, Joel Osteen, Rick Warren, and Jack Hyles as proponents of this view, but it includes the caution,

Some critics and spokesmen warn against "easy believism," where a person says the words without genuine heart change. Many teachers, including Billy Graham, emphasize that true belief must involve turning away from sin (repentance) and a change in desires to follow Christ's teachings. Supporters often cite Romans 10:9, which states that if you "confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved". Some modern pastors, such as David Platt, have criticized the "Sinner's Prayer" as a potentially "superstitious" practice not explicitly found in the Bible, arguing it risks giving people false assurance without a radical life change.

This brings me to a problem I struggled with during my undergraduate years. I noticed, without understanding all the implications, that Evangelicals referred to themselves as "Christians", unlike Catholics or main line protestants who referred to themselves more particularly as members of their denominations. Thus if they referred to a "good Christian lady", they meant an Evangelical, and almost certainly not a Catholic or Episcopalian. So I began to ask myself if in fact I was a "Christian" if those who most audibly called themselves "Christian" were so much at variance with what I thought was reasonable Christian belief.

And looking back, I realize that only half a decade before, I'd been through Presbyterian confirmation class, which gave me absolutely no resources even to start to answer this question. But then, decades later, I commented to a fellow parishioner at coffee hour that my wife and I had come into the Catholic Church through RCIA. He replied, "Then you've been better catechized than 90% of the parish here."

I think this is at the root of Scott Adams's final troll: an awful lot of professed Christians believe some very silly stuff, and almost none of them is willing to call it out. All we got when Adams begsn to talk like some doofus in a Dilbert strip was pious umm-hmms from people like Franklin Graham who should know a lot better. At least so far, Bp Barron and Fr Schmitz have kept quiet, but I hope to see a day when even they will speak up.