Framing the Question 29
neighborhood outside the gates. That is the sort of prestige that
cannot be bought where the common people shop. In my ex -
perience, these kinds of believers can often be found among
converts from one version of the faith to what they take to
be an older, purer version - say, former Evangelicals who have
embraced an especially severe form of traditionalist Catholi-
cism or an especially fideistic kind of Eastern Orthodoxy or an
especially siccative brand of orthodox Calvinism. I cannot help
but see them as victims of their own diseased emotional con-
ditions; and I have no doubt that, if one were to inquire deeply
into their pasts, one would encounter any number of depress-
ingly mundane psychological explanations for their heartless-
ness. Whatever the case, however, I refuse to believe that they
are a particularly numerous or representative faction among
believers. I still insist that most putative believers in an eternal
hell do not really believe in it at all, but rather merely believe
in their belief in it.
This is not to say, once more, that I want to impugn any-
one's sincerity. Again, I take all parties at their words. I am
quite sure, for instance, that a certain kind of soberly ortho-
dox Christian thinker with which I am very familiar-say, a
Catholic philosopher at a fine university, a devoted husband
and father of five children -fervently believes that he believes
the dominant doctrine of hell, and can provide very forceful
and seemingly cogent arguments in its defense; I simply think
he is deceiving himself. Then again, I may be the one who is de-
ceived. My own, probably shameful prejudice-at least, most
of the time-is that the whole question of hell is one whose
answer should be immediately obvious to a properly func-
tioning moral intelligence, and that a person either grasps the
truth of the matter without much need to be persuaded by
arguments ( whether dialectically solvent or merely intuitive)