Evangelical is Not Enough

There are moments when a single article exposes a much larger divide that runs through Christianity itself.

Christianity Today recently published “We Need the Doctrine of Hell,” suggesting that it is the harshness of hell that exposes the full extent of human depravity and the magnitude of Christ’s redemptive work on the cross. It was typical evangelical theology, turning spirituality into a coercive tool of control rather than a transformational Way to walk.

Growing up evangelical meant living beneath a giant spiritual scoreboard run by an abusive father. My faith was fear itself. Every action measured and every misstep recorded. The whole world was a battlefield, with eternity at stake. Sexual purity, quiet time, and church attendance were religious litmus tests. The more tightly I suppressed my true self, concealed my vulnerability, or projected them onto others, the closer I was to God. Behavior modification was the way, and forced conformity was the evidence I was going in the right direction. I now recognize this as moralistic compliance, or sin management. In evangelicalism, I was never a hereditary child of God, but rather a problem to the fixed before it was too damn late.

It’s a familiar logic within external Christianity, where spiritual life is framed less as inner awakening and more as threats and rewards. Sociologist Christian Smith describes this dynamic as a form of “moralistic therapeutic deism,” where faith becomes less about encounter with the divine and more about being a good, well-behaved person. Every spiritual tradition eventually faces a choice: whether it is managing people or forming souls, whether faith is an external system of beliefs or an inner path of transformation. When the balance tips toward the former, the central question quietly shifts from Who am I becoming? to What am I doing, and who is watching?

The result is a subtle but powerful inversion of what Jesus originally taught. Instead of behavior growing naturally out of an inner life, behavior becomes the main focus.

But, there is another way. In the words of Deng Ming-Dao:

“There is no curse on humanity. There is no original sin. There is no bad karma from previous transgressions. There is no spiritual wisdom forbidden to people. The true spiritual downfall of humanity occurs only when people ignorantly and willfully close themselves to spiritual wisdom.”

And what is this ancient, spiritual wisdom? Our path is inward, not outward. Or as Aldous Huxley wrote, “Morality is not enough.”

The heart of spirituality, shared across traditions, is the move inward. Instead of purifying our outward activity, we gradually awaken inner consciousness. Instead of placating an angry, external deity, we directly experience God in our innermost being. Instead of this fixation on future rewards and punishments, we are transformed in the present moment.

All great spiritual traditions recognize salvation as an inner unfolding rather than an outward expression. “For our spirituality to be authentic, we must experience things from the inside out instead of just the outside in, writes Father Richard Rohr. Or, as Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, “The only journey is the one within.”

Last night, I began a work by Richard Smoley that pushes back against the punitive theology embedded in the wider evangelical imagination.

In his book Inner Christianity, Smoley notes that this outer, exoteric form of religion is only one layer of our tradition, and a pretty anemic one at that. The exoteric is public, behavioral, and institutional. It organizes belief, enforces doctrine, and draws boundaries of exclusion, orienting the self toward future outcomes rather than present transformation. But beneath this outer, imperial shell of Christianity is a more ancient and authentic version of our religious inheritance.

From its earliest centuries, Christianity has held more than one depth of expression or spiritual path. Alongside its public worship, creeds, and moral teachings, there existed an inward, contemplative stream focused on inner awakening and individual transformation. Early communities such as the Alexandrian theologians, the Desert Fathers and Mothers, Syriac poets and mystics, and later monastic and apophatic traditions understood faith as a gradual healing and illumination of the soul. These traditions assumed that Christian truth unfolds in stages—offered publicly in symbol and sacrament, and more deeply through prayer, contemplation, and lived reality. Far from being marginal, this inward path was woven into the heart of the Christian tradition, shaping its understanding of salvation as a change in being, not a change in eternal destination.

In this inner tradition, the symbols of Christianity are not merely historical claims to believe in, but living realities to embody. The Fall is not just something that happened long ago, but a description of the human condition here and now. Redemption is not rescue from future punishment, but the gradual reintegration of the self. Smoley even argues that where exoteric Christianity sees time as a linear drama—from sin to judgment—the esoteric collapses that timeline into the present moment, where transformation is always available now.

I’m sure my evangelical friends will think this emphasis on inward awakening is New Age mumbo jumbo, but in truth, it stands at the center of Jesus’ teachings. Again and again, Jesus locates the kingdom not in external conformity or future reward, but in interior renewal. “The kingdom of God is within you,” he says in Luke, redirecting spiritual attention from outward observance to inner realization.

This same trajectory appears more plainly in Jesus’ earliest recorded sayings found in the Gospel of Thomas. Here, Jesus insists that what saves is the unveiling of the inner life, not outward religious performance. He tells his disciples:

“The kingdom is within you and it is outside you. When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you live in poverty, and you are that poverty."

Later on in Thomas 89 he proclaims, “Why do you wash the outside of the cup? Do you not understand the inside?” Want more from the very mouth of Jesus? What follows is another summons to the inner labor that spiritual awakening requires. “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you; if you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

The spiritual danger Jesus names here is not moral failure or doctrinal error, but inner repression—refusing the work of self‑knowledge, healing, and awakening.

Across both canonical and the earliest Christian texts, the pattern is consistent: faith is not primarily about managing behavior or securing outcomes, but about a deep reorientation of consciousness. Like Jesus, who shows us the Way, the path is one of death and rebirth—a cleansing of the inner life through downward movement, and a personal transformation that begins within and radiates outward into the life of the world.

This is the fundamental difference between performative Christianity and inner wisdom.

Exoteric Christianity speaks in terms of belief, behavior, and future outcomes. Esoteric Christianity speaks in terms of consciousness, awareness, and union with God in this present life. One manages sin; the other seeks to understand and dissolve its root. One looks outward—to authority, doctrines, pastors, and rewards or punishments. The other turns inward, toward the direct experience of the divine presence at the core of one’s being.

In Smoley’s words:

“The word ‘esoteric’ is somewhat forbidding, usually connoting something obscure, exotic, and irrelevant to daily life—in short, something ‘far out.’ But etymologically the word means exactly the opposite: it comes from the Greek esotero, which means ‘further in.’ You have to go further in yourself to understand what this knowledge is about. Esotericism teaches that this world within us is as rich and diverse as the outer world and consists of many different levels of being.”

Leaving evangelicalism opened the door to this deeper stream. Instead of obsessing over what I was doing, I began to encounter God in my very being. I no longer see God as a distant judge, but the very ground of my being.

From this perspective, sin is no longer a checklist of moral failures to control, but a condition of disconnection in need of healing. The goal is not less sinning, but inner coherence, or the alignment of the self with the divine. As Swami Prabhavananda writes in his book The Sermon on the Mount According to Vedanta, Christ’s message was not merely ethical or public, but “uncompromisingly spiritual.” It is an invitation not just to behave differently, but to become something different entirely.

If the aim of the spiritual life is awakening rather than punishment or reward, fear loses its authority. If God is not fundamentally external and obsessed with outward expression, but encountered within, then there is nothing to bargain with and no one to appease.

What’s left of your theology if Hell is deconstructed? Nothing less than the eternal work of inner transformation! And, this is where the logic of carrot and stick, heaven and hell, falls apart.

In esoteric Christianity, the entire architecture of promise and threat collapses. If God is not primarily an external authority to appease but the very core of my being, then the spiritual life is no longer payoff or penalty. In esoteric Christianity, Heaven and Hell are not distant destinations held over the soul as leverage, but descriptions of inner states: separation and union, contraction and awakening, forgetfulness and remembrance, harm and healing, cruelty and compassion, autonomy and inter-connectedness.

What the esoteric tradition insists on is that transformation is not something imposed from the outside by fear or incentive, but something revealed from within through attention, stillness, and awakening. The goal is not to behave well enough to earn divine favor, but to become aware enough to recognize that nothing was ever separate in the first place. In that shift, the logic of spiritual accounting loses its grip. There is nothing left to manage, no tally to maintain, no external score to improve. We exist to awaken to what is already here.

This is why the heaven-and-hell language of evangelical Christianity is never enough. It shrinks spirituality into a system of religious control rather than inner formation. It’s transactional, not transformative. And, it always asks the same ponderous questions: “What is gained, what is lost, who’s in, who’s out, and who is deserving?”

Inner Christianity points toward something less negotiable and more immediate: the direct experience of presence itself. Not reward, but realization. Not avoidance of punishment, but the end of separation.

In this sense, esoteric Christianity is not a more refined version of external, evangelicalism, it is a different path entirely. It does not ask how to secure a better outcome, it asks how to awaken to what is already here. In that awakening, the need for spiritual carrots and sticks quietly disappears, replaced by something more unsettling and more freeing: the possibility that nothing but our ignorance was ever wrong in the first place.

Gary Alan Taylor