Relax, Hell isn't Real!
Dante, Hitler, and punching your friend in the face for no reason
Welcome new subscribers! This week, we’re continuing our series on FEAR. There’s a bit on parenting here, but if you’re looking for a more parenting-specific article, I can recommend The Extreme Weirdness of Trying to Buy a Bible for My Kids. You can also search “parenting” in the archive.
Obsessing Over the Afterlife
Growing up Evangelical, there were a lot of things to be afraid of, including but not limited to:
being “left behind” at the rapture
demons
tarnishing one’s purity
Simultaneously, we were shamed for being afraid and told that our fear was due to a lack of faith.
By far though, my biggest fear was Hell. Would I forget to confess a sin and be cast into eternal damnation? Could I “backslide” and lose my salvation? I worried about friends and loved ones and even strangers on the street.
It seemed to me that no one else was taking Hell seriously enough—it was ETERNAL, after all. I wondered how my fellow churchgoers could believe in this vision of Hell and not spend every waking moment obnoxiously evangelizing every single person they met?
God was love, I was often told, but God was also perfect and He demanded perfection. Trying to be perfect was the only way of ensuring I wouldn’t be condemned. God was the Big Angry Man in the Sky who was just waiting to drop the hammer on all of us.
A Change of Heart
It took a lot of life experience, theological study, and therapy for me to admit the truth: Hell makes no sense. Penal Substitutionary Atonement (the predominant way of looking at Jesus’ crucifixion in most American churches) makes no sense, either.
Once I became a parent, I could not imagine God (who is supposed to be the perfect parent) subjecting any of his children to eternal punishment or coercing them into loving him by threatening to torture them forever.
I can imagine hackles rising even as I write this. If you are a believer in Hell and PSA, you probably want to stop reading right here. But I want to challenge you to consider the alternative—can you imagine how your faith and your life would be different if you let go of these beliefs? If, at the end of my article, you’re unconvinced, that’s fine. Just give me five minutes, if you please.
Do All Dogs Go to Heaven?
I’m not alone in doubting Hell’s existence. Christian Universalism (the idea that all people will eventually be saved) dates back at least 300 years, if not longer. (For reference, the modern belief of a Pre-Tribulation Rapture is only about 200 years old.)
Author and Methodist minister, Derek Ryan Kubilus, explores the arguments for and against Hell in his book, Holy Hell: A Case Against Eternal Damnation.
Kubilus examines the Bible verses commonly cited as evidence for Hell, pointing out that many English translations put a thumb on the scale. For example, certain words are sometimes translated as “Hell” and sometimes simply as “pit” or “grave.”
He also points out that our modern understanding of Hell comes more from Dante’s Inferno rather than the Bible. The Ancient Jews and Greeks who were writing and reading the Bible had very different schemas of the afterlife.
In Kubilus’ telling, even the Bible’s allusions to fire and brimstone aren’t about torture, they’re part of a series of metallurgical metaphors, speaking to the process of refining ore into gold rather than punishing baddies.
Wait, What About Hitler?
Kubilus, like some Universalists, believes in Purgatory—that is, that based on our sins, we will all be subject to some process of “refinement.” For someone like Hitler, it might take 5 million years, but eventually even he could be saved.
I was surprised to find a Protestant version of Purgatory. Is it necessary? Couldn’t God just choose to forgive, like we humans do? But I admit, it does deal with the problem of justice: we don’t want people like Hitler to go to straight to Heaven, do we? It just doesn’t feel right.
When You Punch Your Friend in the Face for No Reason
This question of justice became real for me recently, when my 11-year-old, T, got in trouble at school for punching his friend in the face for no reason. (Ironic, given that this is the first ethical example used in Michael Schur’s How to Be Perfect, which we read last year.) T was experiencing test anxiety and he took it out on his friend.
T felt horrible afterwards, and his friend forgave him, but it still felt like something was missing from the process, like the scales needed to be rebalanced—we needed… justice???
Given that T couldn’t un-punch his friend, was there a way of making things right?
After talking with T, his friend, and his friend’s mom, we decided that making amends would look like a three-day screentime ban, an apology letter, and a Roblox gift card, purchased by T with his allowance. I also stressed to him that the biggest part of making amends was not repeating this behavior.
This justice isn’t perfect, but I hope it does three things:
emphasize that this behavior was not okay and is out of bounds for our family & community
give T meaningful consequences that will help him not make this choice in the future
attempt to repair the relationship and reestablish trust between friends
But these attempts at justice are for an ongoing relationship during, well…life. What would afterlife justice look like?
I have no idea!
Nobody Knows Anything
Let’s be real, neither me, nor Derek Kubilus, nor the most obnoxious street preacher you’ve ever met actually knows what happens after we die. We won’t until it happens. It’s incumbent on us to be humble about our beliefs, no matter how strongly held they are—we could always be wrong!
Maybe the afterlife is closer to The Good Place. Maybe we’re reincarnated. Maybe we just stop existing or maybe we rejoin the universal life force.
I didn’t believe in any sort of afterlife when my brother, Karl, two years ago. Then I had a weird experience with a bald eagle that made me less certain.
What Can We Know?
What I do know is that there are people living in Hell right now. Addiction is Hell. War is Hell. Divorce is Hell. Serious disease is Hell. I wish the church would triage the suffering people are currently experiencing rather than some far-off Hell that probably won’t happen.
What I know is that all “right” beliefs must lead to increasing love of others and ourselves. When I believed in Hell and that I needed to “save” people from it, I saw them as numbers, not full humans with rich inner lives, not equals who could teach me as much as I could teach them. Not people I ought to get to know and form relationships with.
And yes, #NotAllEvangelists, but I gotta say, most evangelism efforts I’ve been part of have felt more transactional rather than relational.
Christianity Without Hell
When I was an Evangelical, avoiding Hell was the whole point. I was a Christian because of my fear.
You may think that without the threat of Hell, most people will stop being Christian. You may be right. But is believing in Jesus solely for purposes of Hell avoidance really the kind of spirituality we want to encourage?
For me, letting go of the fear of Hell has opened a whole new world. I can choose to run towards rather than away from something. I am learning more about my interconnectedness with others, with the natural world, and with God. I am more open to learning from people whose beliefs differ from my own.
And that’s a journey I can recommend to anyone.
Do you believe in Hell? An afterlife? Why/why not? Have you ever had any FREAKY WOO-WOO EXPERIENCES after a loved one’s passing?
As always, I love to hear your thoughts. questions, rants, and ramblings in the comments, via DM, or email.
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I grew up adjacent to Evangelical Christian communities, thus was influenced by them but not fully indoctrinated. I was afraid of Hell and of sex before marriage, but I was also taught to question everything and that all religions have similarities, therefore some validity. I joined a queer affirming ELCA church as an adult and eventually got married there. Then I got disillusioned and quit church permanently. I don’t believe in Hell, because like you said some experiences in this life are already hellish enough. As a U.S.-ian of Irish descent, I am now especially interested in Celtic myths and spiritual traditions. The nature-based practices make more sense to me than worshiping some invisible sky daddy!
Thank you!
As is often the case with your posts, several things resonate with this Jewish agnostic. Most notably, what you describe happened with T, I believe, is restorative justice - now used more and more (though in my view not nearly enough) in the youth and adult criminal justice systems. We need a lot more of that because the evidence is that it does, in fact, reduce committing another injurious act.
And, about hell: I was not raised with that notion, and have never understood the threat of an unknown thing that supposedly follows death as the incentive to be a good person. So, I totally support your view (for whatever my opinion is worth on that) - live kindly and justly and lovingly because we are. That's all.