Emergent church leader Rob Bell couldn’t ask for better publicity on his upcoming book, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived.  As Dan Brown (Da Vinci Code), William P. Young (The Shack) and Rhonda Byrne (The Secret) can attest, the surest way to get your book on the bestseller charts in America is to have it labeled a heresy.

Love Wins hasn’t been released, but has already generated a Twitter storm. Comments on Justin Taylor’s blog  resembled the New Testament afterlife dispute between the Pharisees and Sadducees.

I watched the YouTube video that has evangelicals like Taylor, Kevin DeYoung and John Piper proclaiming Bell a universalist--someone who believes everyone will go to heaven--but couldn’t see what the uproar was all about. 

Maybe this is because Bell begins by asking whether Gandhi is in hell, which is exactly the sort of question my Presbyterian youth pastor in Boulder might have asked.

But therein may lie the problem. Evangelicals have been crowing for years about the decline in attendance in liberal mainline churches, Baby Boomers who, in a negative reaction to the “social gospel,” migrated to more conservative evangelical churches.. The notion the door might swing both ways, and the millennial generation could reject the “social conservative gospel,” must be frightening to them.

But it’s not surprising to me. A few years ago I returned to college in midlife. In an undergraduate essay writing class a young man who was raised listening to Focus on the Family shared his personal conflict upon discovering a close friend was a lesbian. A young woman wrote an angry essay about her abstinence ring. A discussion in a medieval England class on Beowulf turned into a discourse about whether Christianity was inherently misogynistic, until one young man finally yelled, “The devil is the father of lies, not the mother!” A home-schooled journalism student emphasized her concerns about Eritrea and Darfur.

Evangelical leaders couldn’t have laid heavier burdens on young Christians had they tried. It makes sense a new generation might seek a more inclusive heaven and hell.