Show Me Something Real
Show Me Something Real. Tell Me Something True. A Mission Statement.
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Phillip Hancock was on death row at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. He was convicted of two murders committed in 2001, resulting in a penalty of death. Devin Moss was his chaplain, or spiritual advisor as Moss described it. Moss had spent much of the prior year conversing with Hancock leading up to the night of the scheduled execution, November 30, 2023. This scenario is not uncommon, at least as it relates to inmates on death row. It isn’t terribly unusual that Hancock professed to be an atheist, although inmates on death row who already have some religious belief or those not already religious finding some belief is more common. What was more unusual here is that Moss is also an atheist.
Devin Moss, like Hancock, grew up a Christian but later rejected belief in God. Moss became an atheist and a chaplain, and counseled Hancock as he faced execution.
There is an adage that says there are no atheists in foxholes — even skeptics will pray when facing death. But Hancock, in the time leading up to his execution, only became more insistent about his nonbelief. He and his chaplain were both confident that there was no God who might grant last-minute salvation, if only they produced a desperate prayer. They had only one another.
An Atheist Chaplain and a Death Row Inmate’s Final Hours - Emma Goldberg - NYT
Both men shared a familiar path to unbelief. Both grew up in homes where Christianity was at least nominally practiced. After entering prison, Hancock was at least considering a Christian faith. But all of the hardships of his life finally turned him away from a belief in God.
Over his early years in prison, Hancock had come to feel abandoned by God.
Then, in 2007, a court denied the appeal of his death sentence. Hancock had a revelation: “I decided, it makes more sense to me to hate a God that does not exist than to be slave to one,” he said.
What did Moss have to offer Hancock in a relationship where neither believed in anything beyond themselves? The answer to that question may have something to say to those of us who profess Christianity and who find the root of answers to ultimate questions in that faith.
In prison, they have a name for people who find God after they are locked up: “Jailhouse Jesus.” History is rife with examples including, famously, Malcolm X, who found faith in prison and left to be a minister of the Nation of Islam.
Scholars who examine the phenomenon find that in prison, faith can be a comfort. People are searching for a new identity beyond “criminal,” a sense of empowerment, the vocabulary to ask for forgiveness and the feeling of control over their future. Religion answers all these calls: The new identity is that of a convert. The power is in being an agent of God. The route to forgiveness runs through belief, or proselytizing. And past sins become just steps on the path to God.
Identity, comfort, empowerment, forgiveness, and a road away from the past. These are all powerful reasons to believe, understandable draws. But there are more foundational way stations on the road to belief.
Hancock had one request of his spiritual adviser. It was drawn from a set of Bible verses, Philippians 4:7-8.
“Show me something real,” he said to Moss. “Tell me something true.”
Here we see it, we get to the heart of belief. We believe what is true, and we see its truth when we experience its reality. A more clarion call for the Christian church is hard to imagine. Show them what is real, tell them what is true.
And here is the heart of unbelief. Reality that isn’t experienced or is rejected, truth that isn’t believed or is ignored. This is why some turn away from belief and why many never consider it. It isn’t that it is easier to hate God. I very much doubt that it is. Hating God can be, I suspect, rather difficult - or it has disappointing results that are never ascribed to God fully (by one who decided not to believe in a God that they also hate). It is easier to hate everything about belief in God when it seems to promise what it doesn’t deliver. Or, it doesn’t deliver it often enough, or the delivery isn’t recognized as such.
All of the reasons for belief in prison echo out here in the outside world. People believe because it lends an identity, or it gives comfort, points the way to the future, or offers forgiveness. I believe Christianity offers all of these things, in a sense. But that cannot be the heart of a belief that is more than transactional - a belief in return for its benefits isn’t belief in the actual thing, just what the thing is supposed to bring.
All of those things are, as foundational as they may seem, secondary things. God exists or He doesn’t. We don’t get to decide that. My subjective experience of that belief doesn’t change this basic reality. But it is more than that. If I experience those things as part of belief in a God that is truly there, then I usually experience them on His terms - which involve self-denial, disappointment, surrender, sacrifice … all the “benefits” come via this path. They come, in other words, via the path of not looking for them. And they are easy to miss.
And yet. The church is called to show something real to the world around us (and to each other). The church is called to tell the truth. And that real thing will look like an identity, it will be experienced as comfort, it will be seen as powerful, and it will offer forgiveness & grace. And that truth will correspond to this real thing on offer - even as it might be uncomfortable or as it carried some mystery and paradox. We believe the reality that is really real and the truth that is really true. And reality matters. What is true matters.
Devin Moss was there to help Phillip Hancock at a cost that is remarkable and commendable. That means something. But that doesn’t mean that the help offered is, in the final analysis, what is truly helpful.
But if the hour of death came to pass, what would the chaplain do? Moss felt viscerally the absence of any higher power on the prison compound that morning.
“It’s well known that people that really believe, that really have faith, die better,” he said. “How can we help people die better that don’t have supernatural faith?”
That is a very good question that depends on what it means to die better. People die better who are not alone, who feel cared for and loved, surely. But what it means to die better partly depends on what the reality of death is, and if there is anything following it.
He rested a hand on Hancock’s knee and recited the words that he had written in his notebook: “We call the spirit of humanity into this space,” Moss said. “Let love fill our hearts. We ask that in this transition into peaceful oblivion that Phil feels that love, and although this is his journey that he is not alone. We invoke the power of peace, strength, grace and surrender. Amen.”
C.S. Lewis wrote* that helping those around us requires some knowledge of reality, despite all of our best intentions. He supposed we came across a man dying of starvation - how best to help him? Help, despite all of our best intentions, wouldn’t mean giving our imaginary subject a large meal. That, for someone on the brink of starvation, would likely kill them. Even though, in giving him that meal, we would have the best intention to help. Moss showed Hancock something real - a real relationship, a presence, a connection - more than I gave him, which was nothing. He helped him die better, in a sense. But he only prepared him for a good death insofar as we understand what death is. Reality matters - to belief, to life, to death.
Who am I to say anything about it? Good question, I wasn’t there and Devin Moss was. It is hard for me to say the church failed in being there because the church tried to be there, in some sense, but, for the reasons listed above and perhaps some others, Hancock did not want the church there. Perhaps we had not showed him something real. Or perhaps, being shown it, he was not interested. The atheism of Moss and Hancock is understandable. But I don’t think it corresponds to the reality that is really there, and so I don’t think it is able to provide help that is truly helpful.
On November 30, 2023, Devin Moss was with Phillip Hancock through the process of his execution by the state of Oklahoma, from beginning to end.
Looking at Hancock’s body, Moss surprised himself by murmuring a spontaneous prayer, which came out involuntarily, like a sneeze. He prayed that whatever came next for Hancock, that he would be dealt a better set of cards.
Here is another statement for the mission of the church. It is not to offer the benefits of belief as part of a favorable transaction. But to display belief, to show what is real, to tell what is true and, in the process, to deal a better hand. Even though that hand might be experienced as painful, lonely, exhausting, and disappointing at times … it will be real.
Links
An Atheist Chaplain and a Death Row Inmate’s Final Hours - Emma Goldberg - NYT
Why God is Often Found Behind Bars: Prison Conversions and the Crisis of Self-Narrative - Maruna, Wilson, and Curran - Research in Human Development
*God in the Dock - Man or Rabbit? - C.S. Lewis - Eerdmans Publishing, 1970 (Essay originally published in 1946)
