Talking With Teens About Whether Heaven Will Be Boring

It is a more common fear among Christian high school students than you might think.

In the last ten years, I have regularly encountered Christian teenagers who worry that heaven will either be boring or that it won’t be nearly as interesting as life on earth. This was also a worry of mine when I was in high school. I took my salvation for granted. God hadn’t freely chosen to love me. He was obligated to love me by some law of His nature. He “loved the world,” after all.

In heaven, all love would be obligatory—not only the love of God for man, but man’s love for other men. People in heaven have to love each other. Accordingly, the only place where I could know for certain that I was capable of inspiring the free and voluntary love of another human being—and this was the only sort of love I could take seriously—was here on earth. So from the time I was 14 until I got engaged in my late 20s, the only thing I wanted in this world (or the next) was a girlfriend.

Consequently, there was nothing God had that I really wanted, neither was getting to heaven the sort of project that required any exertion or effort on my part whatsoever, and so I lived with the fear that I would either find heaven boring or that once I got there, I would be forced to like it. However, even at the tender age of 14, I intuited enough about the human will to know it wasn’t possible to force someone to like something without unmaking something essential to their personhood. While it’s possible to overpower a person and physically manipulate them into doing something they don’t want to do, it’s not possible to physically force someone to want something. You can’t threaten enjoyment. On this account, I also had some doubts that I would still be me when I got to heaven. The very act of dying make turn me into someone else, in which case it didn’t really matter what I did with the personhood that was currently mine.

At seventeen, my fear that heaven would be boring was also grounded in a constant fear of encountering boredom anywhere in this life. What I really wanted was a girlfriend, and yet I knew that I couldn’t get a girlfriend unless I was cool, and the best way to become cool was to love and worship and imitate cool things. Thus, for someone whose loves were shaped by (and directed toward) Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, Radiohead, Garbage, New Order, Trainspotting, A Clockwork Orange, The X-Files, Total Request Live, and Shipmates, the idea that heaven would be genuinely enjoyable seemed unbelievable. Heaven was nothing like the things I loved.

Actually, that’s not quite it.

The real problem was that church was nothing like the things I loved, and I suspected that people who found church boring would find heaven boring, as well. My pastor’s insistence that “heaven won’t be an eternal church service” wasn’t convincing. It was the holiness of church that bored me—and I knew heaven would be holy, too. Holiness comes either from ceremony or obedience to the rules, neither of which is very cool. Coolness comes from bending the rules, breaking the rules, or knowing hidden rules. Coolness is always selfish, indulgent, rebellious, or iconoclastic. Coolness is the very opposite of holiness.

I don’t mean that Tarantino’s philosophy got to me or that I began to adopt Thom Yorke’s worldview. There was never a point when I started to think that Christianity was bunk or that God wasn’t real. I was simply bored with church—and given the way I spent my time outside of church, why wouldn’t I find it boring? There’s nothing in Pulp Fiction or Taxi Driver or OK Computer that backs up church. None of it coincides with church, jives with church, vibes with church. None of it is compatible with church. At seventeen, there was nothing in my tastes that primed and prepared me for hymns, prayer, scripture, sermons, or sacrament. Rather, everything I listened to, watched, and read made me painfully bored once I got to church.

I discuss all of this at length in “Will Heaven Be Boring? A Conversation About Beauty and Good Taste,” a short book I published last week which depicts a long and meandering dialogue between a nameless teacher and his student. My thesis is that the books we read, the music we listen to, and the films we watch need to work with church, not against it. If a fellow expects to sing “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” the Magnificat, the Cherubic Hymn, or Psalm 22 on Sunday morning, the music he listens to in the meantime should prepare him to find those holy songs compelling and satisfying. Your tastes should make sense of church.

What exactly does this mean?

It means that anyone who listens to Bach, Chopin, or Haydn throughout the week isn’t apt to think Psalm 22 a snooze. Bach, Chopin, and Hayden—even Ravel, even Debussy, shoot, even some Stravinsky—don’t actively fight the aesthetics of a quasi-conventional worship service.

Likewise, the sort of people who read Austen, Bronte, Chekhov, or Dostoyevsky aren’t going to find church dull or insipid by comparison—provided, of course, they attend a traditional church wherein worship has not changed all that much in the last fifty years. Granted, this describes very few American churches, but my concern here is not for the sort of churches that take their aesthetic cues from secular culture and openly aim at making traditional churches seem dull. My interest is in putting forward a standard that will help traditional-minded Christians maintain their faith in a world which is increasingly hostile to old things.

Nonetheless, Dostoyevsky is high art and I think a great many lesser writers (and contemporary writers) are also compatible with church. Take Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day or Never Let Me Go, for example. Or Eugene Vodolazkin’s Laurus, Brisbane, or The Aviator. I would also put Raymond Carver on the list, Patricia Highsmith, John Cheever, Graham Greene, John Updike… I really could go on and on. I’m not claiming these writers are safe because they’re all Christian—they’re most certainly not. What I’m saying is that these writers won’t make church seem dull and stupid. They won’t blow out the reader’s senses and make him numb to intellectual matters and spiritual concerns.

So far as music is concerned, anything from Brian Eno’s Music for Airports to Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska could comfortably sit beside the Cherubic Hymn or “A Mighty Fortress is Our God.” The standard I am proposing is hardly narrow, although it is narrow enough to rule out most blockbusters, bestsellers, and Top 40 stations.

A certain sort of reader is likely to respond, “This all seems quite subjective,” to which I would happily agree. People who don’t want their tastes critiqued tend to argue as though any element of subjectivity creates a complete free-for-all, even though such a position is completely unlivable. Granted, the sort of cultural artifacts that help one person align himself with the church may not help another; however, when it comes to fighting temptation, Christ Himself speaks relatively. “If your right hand causes you to sin, cut if off,” says the Lord—but if it doesn’t cause you to sin, leave it alone. Every Christian is conscripted in an austere battle against sin, but it’s not as though every Christian is tempted to every sin in the same way. It’s not a sin to eat ice cream, but if you can’t eat a bite without eating a whole bucket, then you can’t eat ice cream—even though other people can. Learning to love church isn’t a project that comes with a paint-by-numbers kit, but that doesn’t mean we’re free from the obligation to try, or that every effort to love church is equally valid or invalid.

Despair that church will ever be interesting or satisfying has the tendency to sap our spiritual energy. The sort of people who find church dull don’t tend to see an incentive to zealously strive for the glories of heaven. When church seems unworthy of our full attention, where is the incentive to “walk worthy of the calling”?

And yet, it’s possible to listen to music and read books and watch movies that will make a boring old traditional church worship become fascinating. There are books that have nothing to do with God that will make you long for Him. There are songs that make no reference to spiritual things that will nonetheless “set your mind on things above.” There are paintings of sad women in firelight that will put you in touch with the Trinity. You can find these things in what we commonly call “the classical tradition.”