AI Is A Gateway To The Welfare State
October 6, 2026 |
Keith Giles
In 1987, Belinda Carlisle released a pop song that accidentally wandered into theology. The song was called “Heaven Is a Place on Earth.” At first glance it’s just another glossy 80s pop anthem. But once you stop and think about the central lyric, something slightly uncomfortable begins to emerge for modern Christianity.
Belinda Carlisle may accidentally have a better theology of heaven than a lot of Christian sermons.
That’s awkward. Not because Belinda Carlisle is wrong, but because the church might be.
Modern Christianity largely treats heaven as a destination — a place people go after they die if they believe the right things, pray the correct prayer, or sign the appropriate doctrinal paperwork. Heaven becomes the reward at the end of the story, the final location secured by correct belief.
Jesus, meanwhile, spent almost no time talking about people going to heaven.
What he talked about constantly was something else entirely: the Kingdom of God.
And the way he described it doesn’t sound much like the afterlife waiting room most sermons are selling.
If you grew up in church, the story probably sounded something like this. The world is broken. People are sinful. If you believe in Jesus, your soul gets saved. When you die, you go to heaven instead of hell.
That framework sits at the center of modern evangelical theology. Salvation becomes the transaction that secures your eternal destination. Faith becomes the belief that guarantees the outcome.
Heaven, in this system, functions like a cosmic retirement account. Believe the right things now, survive the chaos of the world, and someday you cash out in paradise.
Which explains why so much Christian teaching ends up focused on escape. The world burns, people suffer, systems grind the vulnerable down — but the real hope, we’re told, is that believers eventually get out of here.
The gospel becomes less about transforming the world and more about securing a seat on the lifeboat.
Jesus never framed it that way.
Jesus almost never told people they were going to heaven. Instead, he kept talking about something called the Kingdom of God.
Over and over again.
“The kingdom of God is among you,” he tells people in Luke 17:21. In the Lord’s Prayer, he instructs his followers to pray, “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
Notice the direction of movement. Heaven isn’t where people escape to. Heaven’s reality is meant to show up here.
Jesus’ favorite way of explaining the Kingdom wasn’t through abstract theology. He used ordinary images from everyday life — seeds growing in soil, yeast spreading through dough, workers laboring in vineyards, outsiders invited to banquets.
None of those images describe people leaving the world.
They describe the world changing.
When Jesus talked about the Kingdom, he almost always tied it to how people treated one another. Forgive your enemies. Love people who hate you. Release debts. Feed the poor.
Welcome the stranger. Eat with people your society says are unclean.
Where those things happen, something heavenly appears.
Not later. Now.
For Jesus, heaven wasn’t simply where God lived. It was what life began to look like when people started living as if God’s way actually mattered. The Kingdom of God wasn’t primarily about where you go when you die. It was about how the world begins to change when love, mercy, and justice start shaping human behavior.
In other words, heaven isn’t just somewhere else.
It’s something else.
So how did we end up with a version of Christianity that mostly talks about heaven after death?
Because a future heaven is extremely convenient.
If heaven happens later, the present world can stay mostly the same. Injustice can be tolerated.
Power structures remain intact. Suffering becomes something people endure while waiting for their reward.
It’s a theology that asks very little of the present. Believe the right things. Protect the right doctrines. Wait patiently for the real world to start after you die.
But if heaven is meant to appear here and now, everything becomes more complicated.
Faith stops being about belief alone and starts being about transformation. Communities would have to reflect mercy. Economies might have to reflect generosity. Power might have to reflect humility.
Systems built on domination suddenly start looking… less heavenly.
A postponed heaven is easy to preach.
A present Kingdom is much harder to live.
Rome didn’t execute people for promising paradise after death.
Rome executed people who announced a different kingdom in the present.
That kind of message had political implications. A world organized around forgiveness, shared resources, and dignity for outsiders isn’t particularly useful to empires built on hierarchy and control.
Which helps explain why Jesus wasn’t executed for offering comforting thoughts about the afterlife.
He was executed for announcing that God’s Kingdom was arriving — and that it didn’t look much like the one Rome was running.
Which brings us back to an 80s pop song.
“Heaven is a place on earth.”
Strip away the synths and the hair spray, and that line lands surprisingly close to Jesus’ vision of the Kingdom. In the song, heaven isn’t somewhere distant. It appears when love changes the way people relate to each other. When connection transforms the world people live in.
It isn’t a destination.
It’s an experience.
And oddly enough, that sounds suspiciously like what Jesus kept trying to tell people.
The church promises heaven later.
Jesus kept asking why we weren’t starting it now.
One promises escape.
The other demands participation.
And if Jesus is right, heaven isn’t waiting somewhere beyond the clouds.
It’s waiting on us.
If this felt a little too accurate, there’s more where that came from.
The Tribulation Survival Guide
— same world, fewer guardrails.
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Want to know how you’d actually survive the end times?
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