In the early aughts, when he was barely in his thirties, Rob Bell was a star. Bell, a pastor, was the founder of the evangelical Mars Hill Bible Church, in West Michigan. The church had started scrappily, in 1999, with just a few hundred congregants (it was a transplant from an established congregation in Grand Rapids where Bell had worked before), but, largely thanks to Bell, it quickly ballooned in size. Within a few years, Mars Hill was meeting in a building that used to house a mall, and Sunday attendance was around ten thousand. Bell had built an impressive reputation as a preacher; he had a conversational style and a knack for making his messages straightforward and appealing, especially to young people. But, as his preaching thrived, Bell’s personal faith was reaching a point of crisis. He began to feel that he could no longer share the standard evangelical messages that he had been preaching—about salvation and damnation and the infallible scripture—in good conscience. So he modified his approach, avoiding some topics and opening others to skepticism, and changing how the church was run. This evolution caused fractures in the congregation, some of them quite large; when Bell opened up church-leadership roles to women, for instance, attendance dropped by two thousand. In the course of a decade, the once celebrated wunderkind became a polarizing figure, and the turmoil came to a head in 2011, when Bell published a book called “Love Wins.” The book called into question the idea of a punitive, horrific, eternal Hell where God sends nonbelievers. The book was hugely controversial in evangelical Christian circles, and within a year Bell left Mars Hill. In this video from the Amazon Originals series “The New Yorker Presents,” based on a story by Kelefa Sanneh that appeared in the magazine in 2012, Bell talks about the path that led him to the center, and then out to the fringes, and beyond, of American evangelicalism. At his new home, in Califor