I realized something recently while lying awake in bed, fighting a tired-but-wide-awake-jetlagged-mind: It’s been a long time since I’ve had a nightmare about hell.
Not so long ago, my unconscious landscape was one of terror, rising flames, scorched earth. Every night I’d slip deep into a violent netherworld where death and endless torment haunted me. I’d encounter my hellbound soul and see there was no saving it. In my nightmares, I became what I feared in my wakened state: unredeemable.
For years and years, I felt strangely alone in my anxiety. Back then, no one spoke about death as terrifying. We didn’t talk about it because we were supposed to be unafraid. Not only unafraid, but joyfully anticipatory for the celestial afterlife and these “strange times” that meant we were closer than ever to Jesus’s return. Imagine my surprise when I began encountering other “end-times kids” (as
dubs the generation—or generation-adjacent—who were formed within a one-foot-in-one-foot-out mentality, convinced we were far closer to the end of time than the beginning of it).1 An entire subculture exists of people who lived with constant anxiety and anxiety about the anxiety we harbored.We carry our anxiety like battle scars, finally calling it what it is decades later when age, therapy, further education, etc., helped us recognize the goosebumps, aversion to certain topics, and constant feelings of terror were not normal childish fears but actual religious-induced trauma. We learned to keep the anxiety to ourselves, bury our nightmares with the sunrise. Especially as the mention of eternal insecurity was often met with trite acknowledgments like “pray about it,” “let us pray for you,” “just trust Jesus,” or “your concern probably means you’ve got nothing to worry about.”2
It’s confusing, this culture surrounding actions and blind faith and heaven and hell. We’re told our actions matter, not just our physical actions by the very thoughts that appear—often without our consent—in the recesses of our minds. In this regard, God is not much different from an American Santa Claus who knows when we’re sleeping, awake, bad, or good. But also, we’re told none of us are good. Not even a little. Our works, even the seemingly good ones, are likened to filthy rags. We’re wretches and worms and “sinners in the hands of an angry God.” A simple prayer is the antidote, a turning away from the sin we’re told we’ll still continue to be guilty of until the day we die. But now, we’re blanketed beneath figurative blood. More violence in the name of our absolution. But honestly, why absolve any of us if we’re truly such abominations? If we’re automatically hellbound, what gives me any proper assurance I’m actually saved in the end? I have a rapidly moving mind with thoughts impossible to capture. I can believe and disbelieve in the span of minutes. I hope and anticipate and despair and doubt. I’ve never been able to unceasingly pray without becoming distracted by everything around me, every thought clanging for attention.
Here is the question I skirted for years because I was too terrified to voice it: was I a Christian because I’d had a life-changing encounter with God? Or was I a Christian because I was terrified of what awaited a disbelieving soul?
In a recent podcast episode of You Have Permission, host Dan Koch speaks with Dan Hummel, author of The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism, about how dispensationalism (an end times theology Koch calls “horse shit”) became so central within American evangelicalism and affected the way we (evangelical Christians) interacted with devastating world news. Koch mentions a sub-type of religious abuse called “embracing violence” and says, “it includes the use of terror and horror to motivate religious decisions … [The idea is] God essentially and necessarily uses violence. That is one of God’s best tools for [fulfilling] God’s purposes in the world.”
I didn’t know my fears were rooted in a theological sub-type that, when deconstructed, appears drenched in violence and terrifying imagery. But I suppose it presents as nonviolent when we convince ourselves hell is a choice and anyone sent there is responsible for their fate. It’s somehow easier to view the damned through a judgmental lens instead of a turmoiled, grievous one when we convince ourselves God is judging first. It’s easier to leave the world ravaged and inflamed when we believe our own souls will be raptured out of it.
In her essay Hell, Meghan O’Gieblyn writes, “Our communal language was so rigid and coded that there was very little vocabulary to express doubt.” I highlighted this sentence, underlined it, and wrote in the margins, “THIS THIS THIS!!!” because when it comes to the conversation surrounding hell, evangelicals have a communal view that automatically absolves them of eternal torment. But we didn’t know there were alternatives, that we could question hell’s existence without being damned for our questions. We didn’t have a vocabulary for doubt because we’d been convinced doubt was disobedience and distrust. And so we held our fears close, prayed the same rote prayers while drifting to sleep, repeatedly asking Jesus into our hearts just in case it hadn’t stuck the first time.
My absorbed beliefs about hell had to be deconstructed before I could question anything else.
Before I could re-evaluate gender roles, begin healing from purity culture, read alternative atonement theories and affirming theologies, before I could disrupt any previously held convictions that were not so much my own as the ones I’d been expected to adopt, I had to unlearn everything I’d been taught about hell.
It was a slow process that started with me voicing my doubt, for the very first time, to my husband. He didn’t chastise me, argue with me, pull out every argument he’d ever heard. He said, “actually…me too.” This was the catalyst. This was my permission (not permission from my husband but the permission of solidarity. It turns out I was not the only one who carried childhood anxiety. It turns out I was not the only one harboring unspoken questions).
It’s been five or six years since that first conversation with Jordan. Feels like a lifetime ago. A whole two different people ago. We moved through our questions with fear and trepidation, grieving each certainty that crumbled, welcoming new perspectives with renewed wonder. I read and listened to podcasts and joined Facebook groups and talked with others around bonfires and tables about the subjects I once dared not touch. I learned people have been questioning this idea of eternal conscious torment for a very long time. I learned other theories exist. I learned God does not angrily dangle humanity over an endless, writhing pit. I learned I’d been traumatized by the all-seeing-eye of a distant but judgmental god. That I’d never felt divinely loved because I’d never believed I was worthy of it—how could I be when my works were filthy, my heart was untrustworthy, and my soul was automatically damned?
Rob Bell writes in Love Wins that “a gospel that has as its chief message avoiding hell or not sinning will never be the full story. A gospel that repeatedly, narrowly affirms and bolsters the ‘in-ness’ of one group at the expense of the ‘out-ness’ of another group will not be true to the story that includes ‘all things and people in heaven and on earth.’”
I think we need to ask ourselves why we feel hope and relief instead of immense sorrow for a mostly-damned world? If we hold to this limited perspective that we’re part of the in-crowd, even if we never doubt it, shouldn’t the violent, fiery pit awaiting so many others absolutely wreck any semblance of hope we have? Or have we clung too tightly to the promise of wickedness being destroyed (casting disbelieving humans into the category of the wicked) that we’ve lost an important element of empathy and, instead, embraced violence?
It’s a tragic thing when violence is so commonplace we’re no longer phased by it. Except, perhaps, in our dreams. In the trauma our bodies still hold. I know so many carry residual anxiety, fearful still of questioning anything lest it be a slippery slope to h-e-l-l. But if it’s this easy to accidentally slide from saved into unsaved, we’d all be sliding around all the time. Whatever damning that may happen to a soul, I think, is a conscious choice by those who actively choose harm and empire, power and control. This is a complex topic for another day, but I am trying to say, we’re not straddling a constant threat of damnation or being held by an angry god over raging flames. We are held in love. We were created to wonder.
And there is time and grace and permission to wander all the way out of confining systems and find sanctuary in the sort of beliefs that don’t threaten our dreamscapes.
I’m not certain of much. But I’m certain of this.
Sara uses the phrase “end times kids” in her beautiful, thoughtful, important book Orphaned Believers (*affiliate link*), which I can’t recommend enough.
I once heard a pastor use fear of hell as proof our salvation was most likely secured, which didn’t necessarily make me feel any better but did make me wonder if everyone is far more anxious than they let on.
This has given me much to think about Sarah. One can imagine, as old as I am & the denominations I came up in, what I was taught. So much to relearn and give up.