Salvation was the single most important dogma that encapsulated that religious upbringing, fed by various indisputable streams of doctrine such as the virgin birth, the inerrancy of Scripture, a physical resurrection, and the imminent return of Jesus after the rapture in precisely the order spelled out in the Left Behind book series. All those constructs attempted to make clear one inarguable and fundamentally unchangeable fact: we are wretched in the eyes of God, whose own holiness demands atonement. And as humans, mortal and doomed to the fiery pits of hell as the rightful justice that such holiness requires, we are simply incapable of rectifying the situation on our own. No amount of good works, humanitarian effort, reparations for past wrongs, or altering our behavior on our own would ever change God’s mind about us.

Conservative evangelism as it was practiced in the 1990s and is still practiced today is a religious perspective that looks nothing like the one embraced by the homeless mystic-sage of peasant Galilee. And it’s a theological house of cards, wobbling precariously atop the biblical narrative upon which it is built.