‘Dilbert’ cartoonist Scott Adams died Jan. 13 after a short battle with prostate cancer. Adams was known for his wry satire of white-collar office life through his long-running comic strip, which appeared in 2,000 newspapers in at least 70 countries and 25 languages from 1989 to 2023.
Beneath this, though, was an undercurrent of antisemitism, misogyny and racism.
In a 2006 blog post, Adams questioned the extent of the Holocaust, asking if it was like “every other LRN (large round number) that someone pulled out of his ass and it became true by repetition.”
In 2011, he compared women to children and the mentally handicapped.
In 2015, he complained that sex requires the consent of both parties.
In 2023, on a podcast livestream, Adams labeled Black people a “hate group” and told his white listeners to “get the hell away from Black people.”
Beginning with the 2016 political cycle, Adams dove headfirst into conservative punditry, turning into a MAGA acolyte who cast doubt on the 2020 presidential election, downplayed the January 6 insurrection and denied the efficacy of COVID vaccines. This political path, along with his views on race, gender and other social issues, gave Adams a new core audience — evangelical Christians.
This alliance was not exactly a traditional marriage, as Adams had been a lifelong agnostic, writing in a 2007 blog post that he did not believe in “Intelligent Design or Creationism or invisible friends of any sort.” He called agnosticism “the only intellectually defensible position” and generally perceived all religion as intellectually dishonest.
In his book The Dilbert Principle, Adams called religion “irrational.” In God’s Debris, he called it a “delusion.” In his novella The Religion War, Adams lampooned religious fundamentalism — including Christianity specifically — envisioning a dystopian near-future where fundamentalist Christianity and fundamentalist Islam are set to destroy the world. Adams’ protagonist, the Avatar (a stand-in for Adams himself), defeats the violence of religion by undermining religious certainty by asking “the most powerful question in human history,” a question meant to show the ridiculousness of a God-concept. That question? “If God is so smart, why do you fart?”
This disdain for religion clashed with Adams’ mortality. In May 2025, he announced he had been diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer. In the months that followed, Adams detailed how Christian friends and followers attempted to convert him: “I usually just let that sit because that’s not an argument I want to have. I have not been a believer.”
His final public message indicated an intention to convert just before the moment of death. Adams wrote: “Many of my Christian friends have asked me to find Jesus before I go. I’m not a believer, but I have to admit the risk-reward calculation for doing so looks attractive. So, here I go: I accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior, and I look forward to spending an eternity with him.”
A misunderstood wager
But in Adams’ statement there is no grief for wrongdoing, no confession, no acknowledgment of harm done to others, no awareness of the spiritual rot that shaped so much of his public career, no repentance whatsoever. There is only the cold, corporate language of outcome optimization — “a risk-reward calculation” — a bit reminiscent of Pascal’s Wager.
Based on the thinking of 17th-century philosopher Blaise Pascal, the wager applies elements of game theory to show that belief in Christianity is rational and pragmatic. In his Pensees, Pascal writes: “Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.”
“Faced with his own mortality, Adams reluctantly gave in to what he previously called an irrational delusion and accepted the wager.”
Faced with his own mortality, Adams reluctantly gave in to what he previously called an irrational delusion and accepted the wager. But by deliberately delaying until the moment of death, Adams misunderstood the wager. Pascal was not offering a contingency plan to escape hell, but a rationalization of putting the Christian faith into practice. The wager is the beginning, not the end, of the spiritual journey. Pascal is inviting his skeptical readers to “taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34:8).
He is certain if they will act as if they believed, they will come to belief. He concludes the argument in Pensees: “You will thereby gain in this life, and that, at each step you take on this road, you will see so great certainty of gain, so much nothingness in what you risk, that you will at last recognize that you have wagered for something certain and infinite, for which you have given nothing.”
By delaying until death, Adams lays bare the facetiousness of his alleged faith. This isn’t a confession; it’s a calculation — not just about heaven, but about his MAGA evangelical audience and earthly legacy.
The efficacy of selfish confessions
What Adams is fulfilling isn’t Pascal’s Wager but Bonhoeffer’s “cheap grace.”
In his seminal work, The Cost of Discipleship, German pastor and Nazi resister Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote: “Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the Cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”
So then, the blunt question must be asked: “Is Scott Adams in heaven?” Does “cheap grace” buy your way in?
By the standards of Adams’ evangelical friends, it isn’t at all clear. “If you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead,” Paul writes, “you will be saved” (Romans 10:9-10). While Adams certainly made this declaration, did he believe in his heart? Perhaps he did. I will not pretend to know his heart.
But I will say this plainly: If Scott Adams is in heaven, it is not because he made a clever wager. It is not because he gamed the system, spoke the right sentence at the last moment, treated salvation as a kind of eternal insurance policy or produced some pure, coherent, well-formed faith on his deathbed.
Scott Adams would be in heaven for the same reason anyone is: Because the gospel is true. Because salvation is not ultimately a human accomplishment — not a moral résumé, a transaction or a clever risk-reward calculation. It is the work of God.
Jesus saves sinners, including the sinners we struggle to forgive, the sinners whose lives were marked by harm and the sinners whose public record makes us recoil.
In the end, the hope of heaven is not that Scott Adams found the right bargain or believed the correct delusion. The hope of heaven is not that the powerful can injure the vulnerable and then purchase absolution with a final sentence.
It is that God can redeem even Scott Adams.
Josh Olds
Josh Olds is a public theologian and pastor for those disillusioned with institutional church. He is the creator of the small-group video series “Year on the Mountaintop” and a featured contributor to Fostering Hope: A Prayerbook for Fostering and Adoptive Parents. Follow his work on Facebook or at JoshOlds.com.