Hell As Moral Compass

Kathryn Gin shines a light on why "Hell never stopped mattering in America"

[B]elievers in universal salvation did not become a majority after 1800. Instead, the Protestant orthodoxy found new ways to argue for hell’s relevance in the fledgling nation. It was a nation founded, after all, on the radical premise of republican virtue. Without a monarch to rule over the people, what would keep them in line? Hell.

Yglesias ruminates on folk hell for the American middle class:

Folk hell has two relevant features. One is that it’s really awful. The other is that being sent there is the act of a just and moral God not an arbitrary and capricious one. … [T]he rules of morality ought to be realistic and achievable. It can’t be that a just and moral God is sending 99.9 percent of the population to a fate of endless suffering in Hell. God is good, so he wants to punish the wicked. But by the same token, God is good so his definition of “wicked” must be something that most of us are able to steer clear of.

My worry is that hell in the afterlife distracts from the hell here and now. That hell, in Christian theology, is about rejecting the unconditional love of God, because we refuse to recognize it, because we feel unworthy of it, or because we are just too distracted by the passing sirens of happiness – money, fame, power, sex, the Internet – to turn to face it. This hell is now; it is why so many in such plenty are still miserable.

To my mind, withdrawing from God's unaccountable, unconditional love – and it is our choice – is what makes life hell. I know my many atheist readers will object to this, so let me state it as my belief, not as some kind of empirical fact. And if you live a life like that, why would your eternal soul be any different? The whole notion of hell as some distant, future rapping on the knuckles if you fail to observe certain rules now can work as theology and as practice. But it makes God into a recognizably human authority figure. And God, whatever else God is, is not human.

We choose to accept God's love. And that choice affects us now – and after we die. Because in Christianity, unlike Buddhism, we remain ourselves for ever.