Interior States Page 3

  “That’s unsettling,” I said. The machine was idling above the water, appearing to stare us down. It was close enough that I could see the lens of its camera, a red light going on and off, as though winking at us.

  “It knows we’re not believers,” my husband whispered.

  “Let’s go,” I said. We made our way into the crowd, hoping to disappear within it. Everyone was dressed in brightly colored shirts and smelled of damp cotton. We passed my mother, who was laughing. The voices of the pastors carried irregularly across the water, and once we were deep in the crowd, their incantations seemed to overlap, as though it were one voice, rippling in a series of echoes. “Buried with Christ…Raised to walk in the newness…” Things were ending and beginning again, just as everything is always ending and always beginning, and standing there amid the sea of people, I was reminded that it might not go on like this forever. We made our way to the shore, where the crowd thinned out and the sand was firm with water, and beyond the fog there appeared, on the horizon, the faintest trace of a sunset.

  2016, The Threepenny Review

  HELL

  A couple of years ago, a Chicago-based corporate identity consultant named Chris Herron gave himself the ultimate challenge: rebrand hell. It was half gag, half self-promotion, but Herron took the project seriously, considering what it would require in the travel market for a place like hell to become a premier destination. The client was the Hell Office of Travel and Tourism (HOTT), which supposedly hired Herron in the wake of a steady decline in visitors caused by “a stale and unfocused brand strategy.” After toying with some playfully sinful logos—the kind you might find on skater/goth products—Herron decided that what the locale needed to stay competitive in the afterlife industry was a complete brand overhaul. The new hell would feature no demons or devils, no tridents or lakes of fire. The brand name was rendered in a lowercase, bubbly blue font, a word mark designed to evoke “instant accessibility and comfort.” The slogan—which had evolved from “Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here” (1819) to “When You’ve Been Bad, We’ve Got It Good” (1963) to “Give In to Temptation” (2001)—would be “Simply Heavenly.” The joke was posted as a “case study” on Herron’s personal website and quickly went viral in the marketing blogosphere—a testament to the power of effective branding.

  I grew up in an evangelical community that wasn’t versed in these kinds of sales-pitch seductions. My family belonged to a dwindling Baptist congregation in southeast Michigan, where Sunday mornings involved listening to our pastor unabashedly preach something akin to the 1819 version of hell—a real diabolical place where sinners suffered for all eternity. In the 1990s, when most kids my age were performing interpretive dances to “The Greatest Love of All” and receiving enough gold stars to fill a minor galaxy, my peers and I sat in Sunday school each week, memorizing scripture like 1 Peter 5:8: “Be self-controlled and alert. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.”*1

  I was too young and sheltered to recognize that this worldview was anachronistic. Even now as an adult, it’s difficult for me to hear scholars like Elaine Pagels refer to Satan as “an antiquarian relic of a superstitious age,” or to come across an aside, in a magazine article, that claims the Western world stopped believing in a literal hell during the Enlightenment. My parents often attributed chronic sins like alcoholism or adultery to “spiritual warfare” (as in, “Let’s remember to pray for Larry, who’s struggling with spiritual warfare”) and taught me and my siblings that evil was a real force that was in all of us. Our dinner conversations sounded like something out of a Hawthorne novel.

  According to Christian doctrine, all human beings, believers included, are sinners by nature. This essentially means that no one can get through life without committing at least one moral transgression. In the eleventh century, Saint Anselm of Canterbury defined original sin as “privation of the righteousness that every man ought to possess.” Although the “saved” are forgiven of their sins, they’re never cured. Even Paul the apostle wrote, “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the worst” [emphasis mine]. According to this view, hell isn’t so much a penitentiary for degenerates as it is humanity’s default destination. But there’s a way out through accepting Christ’s atonement, which, in the Protestant tradition, involves saying the sinner’s prayer. For contemporary evangelicals, it’s solely this act that separates the sheep from the goats. I’ve heard more than one believer argue that Mother Teresa is in hell for not saying this prayer, while Jeffrey Dahmer, who supposedly accepted Christ weeks before his murder, is in heaven.

  I got saved when I was five years old. I have no memory of my conversion, but apparently my mom led me through the prayer, which involves confessing that you are a sinner and inviting Jesus into your heart. She might have told me about hell that night, or maybe I already knew it existed. Having a frank family talk about eternity was seen as a responsibility not unlike warning your kids about drugs or unprotected sex. It was uncomfortable, but preferable to the possible consequences of not doing so. Many Protestants believe that once a person is saved, it’s impossible for her to lose her eternal security—even if she renounces her faith—so there’s an urgency to catch kids before they start to ask questions. Most of the kids I grew up with were saved before they’d lost their baby teeth.

  For those who’d managed to slip between the cracks, the scare tactics started in earnest around middle school. The most memorable was Without Reservation, a thirty-minute video that I was lucky enough to see half a dozen times over the course of my teens. The film (which begins with the disclaimer: “The following is an abstract representation of actual events and realities”) has both the production quality and the setup of a driver’s ed video: five teens are driving home from a party, after much merrymaking, when their car gets broadsided by a semi. There’s a brief montage of sirens and police radio voice-overs. Then it cuts to four of the kids, Bill, Ken, John, and Mary, waking up in the car, which is mysteriously suspended in space. Below them is a line hundreds of people long, leading up to a man with white hair, stationed behind a giant IBM. When a person reaches the front of the line, this man (who’s probably supposed to be God or Saint Peter, but looks uncannily like Bob Barker) types the person’s name into a DOS-like database, bringing up their photo, cause of death, and one of two messages: “Reservation Confirmed” or “Reservation Not Confirmed.” He then instructs them to step to either the left or the right.

  At this point, it’s clear that this isn’t a film about the dangers of operating under the influence. The kids begin to realize that they’re dead. One of them, Bill, a Christian, uneasily explains to the others that what they’re seeing is a judgment line, at which point Mary loses it, shaking uncontrollably and sobbing, “I want to go back! Why can’t we all just go back!” The rest of the film consists of a long sequence showing their memorial service, back on Earth, during which some kind of school administrator speaks in secular platitudes about death being a place of safety and peace—a eulogy that is interspliced with shots of Ken, John, and Mary learning that their reservation is “not confirmed,” then being led down a red-lit hall and violently pushed into caged elevators. The last shot of them is in these cells—Mary curled in the fetal position, Ken and John pounding on the chain-link walls—as they descend into darkness. There’s a little vignette at the end in which the fifth, surviving, passenger gets saved in the school cafeteria, but by that point I was always too shell-shocked to find it redemptive.

  It would be difficult to overstate the effect this film had on my adolescent psyche. Lying in bed at night, I replayed the elevator scene over and over in my head, imagining what fate lay in store for those kids and torturing myself with the possibility that I might be one of the unconfirmed. What if I had missed a crucial part of the prayer? Or what if God’s computer got some kind of celestial virus and my name was erased? When you get saved y
oung, when you have no life transformation—no rugged past to turn from—the prayer itself carries real power, like a hex.*2

  This anxiety was exacerbated by the fact that, around junior high, youth leaders began urging us to “re-invite” Christ into our lives. They insinuated that those of us who had been saved early might not have actually been saved—particularly if we were just repeating the formula obediently after our parents. Some said the childhood prayers had been provisional, a safety net until we reached the age of accountability (traditionally believed to be twelve). Apparently, the words weren’t enough—you had to mean them, and, at least to some extent, you had to live them. Good works couldn’t get you into heaven, but if your life showed no sign of the Holy Spirit working in you, this was a hint that you might not have been completely genuine when you asked Jesus into your life.

  One of the most obvious ways of living your faith was through evangelism. I recently rewatched Without Reservation and realized that when I was a kid I’d totally missed the intended message. The film was not a scare tactic meant to trick teens into becoming Christians; it was very clearly designed for the already saved, a dramatized pep talk urging us to get the word out about hell to our non-Christian friends. The most dramatic sequence of the film (apart from the elevator scene) is when John, before being carried off to hell, asks Bill, the believer, why he never said anything about eternal damnation. “We rode home from practice together every day,” he pleads. “We talked about a lot of stuff, but we never talked about this.” Bill can only offer feeble excuses like “I thought you weren’t interested!” and “I thought there was more time!”

  That this message never got across to me might have had something to do with the fact that, as a homeschooled junior high student, I actually didn’t know any unbelievers. In my mind, the “lost” consisted of a motley minority of animal-worshipping tribesmen, Michael Jackson, Madonna, and our Catholic neighbors. It wasn’t until I started going to public high school that I began to feel a gnawing guilt, spurred by the realization that my evolution-touting biology teacher, or the girl who sat next to me in study hall reading The Satanic Bible, was going to spend eternity suffering. Despite this, I never got up the courage to share my faith. Part of it was surely a lack of personal conviction. But I was also becoming aware that sharing the gospel message—which depends on convincing a person he’s a sinner in need of God’s grace—sounded remarkably offensive and self-righteous. Our pastor always said that we needed to speak about hell in a spirit of love, but he clearly didn’t know what it was like to be a teenager in the 1990s. I went to a high school that didn’t publish the honor roll for fear of hurting those who weren’t on it. The most popular yearbook quote among my graduating class was Tupac’s “Only God can judge me.” And most of those kids didn’t even believe in God.

  In retrospect, Without Reservation was likely a last-ditch effort, one of the church’s final attempts to convince the emerging generation of the need to speak candidly about eternity. Over the course of my teenage years, Christians began to slip into awkward reticence about the doctrine of damnation. Believers still talked about the afterlife, but the language was increasingly euphemistic and vague. People who rejected Jesus were “eternally separated from God.” We were saved not from an infinity of torment, but from “the bondage of sin.” Back then, nobody in ministry had the hubris—nor, probably, the sophistication—to rebrand hell à la Chris Herron. Rather, hell was relegated to the margins of the gospel message, the fine print on the eternal-life warranty.

  * * *

  —

  In the King James Bible, the English word “hell” serves as the translation of four different Greek and Hebrew terms. The Old Testament refers exclusively to Sheol, the traditional Hebrew underworld, a place of stillness in which both the righteous and the unrighteous wander in shadows. There’s no fiery torment, no wailing or gnashing of teeth. The devil had not yet been invented (though Satan, a trickster angel with whom he would later be conflated, pops up now and then). Sinners seem remarkably off the hook—so much so that Job laments that the wicked “spend their days in prosperity and in peace they go down to Sheol.” For many of these writers, the word “Sheol” simply denotes its literal translation, “grave,” or unconscious death. The psalmist prays, “For in death there is no remembrance of thee: in Sheol who shall give thee thanks?”

  In the New Testament, several writers refer to this place under its Greek name, Hades. There are also a number of passages about Gehenna, literally “the Valley of Hinnom,” which was a real area outside Jerusalem that served as the city dump. Fires burned there constantly, to incinerate the garbage; it was also a place where the bodies of criminals were burned. The Jewish rabbinical tradition envisioned Gehenna as a purgatorial place of atonement for the ungodly. This is the word Jesus uses when he gives the hyperbolic command that one should cut off the hand that is causing one to sin: “It is better for you to enter into life maimed, rather than having your two hands to go into Gehenna, into the unquenchable fire.” Another Greek term, Tartarus, appears only once, when the author of 2 Peter writes about the angel rebellion that took place before the creation of the world. Drawing from the Greek myth of the Olympians overthrowing the Titans, he recounts how Lucifer and his allies were cast out of heaven into Tartarus. In the Aeneid, Virgil describes Tartarus as a place of torment guarded by the Hydra and surrounded by a river of fire to prevent the escape of condemned souls. Except in the 2 Peter version, there are no human souls there, just fallen angels.

  The most dramatic descriptions of hell come from the strain of apocalyptic literature that runs through the New Testament, as well as from the Old Testament prophets. Apocalypticism was a worldview that arose during the sixth century BCE, when Israel was under Babylonian domination. It involved the belief that the present era, which was ruled by evil, would soon give way to a new age here on Earth in which God would restore justice and all evildoers would be punished. The authors of Daniel and Ezekiel were apocalyptists—so was John of Patmos, the author of Revelation. It’s these authors who provide us with passages such as this: “They will be tormented with burning sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and of the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment will rise for ever and ever.” It’s worth noting that this was a belief system born out of persecution. The book of Daniel was written in response to the oppressive monarch Antiochus Epiphanes; the book of Revelation came about during the rule of Domitian, who had Christians burned, crucified, and fed to wild animals. As Nietzsche noted in On the Genealogy of Morals, these passages are essentially revenge fantasies, written by people who’d suffered horrible injustices and had no hope of retribution in this life. In fact, many of the fantastical beasts that populate these books were meant to represent contemporary rulers like Nero or Antiochus.

  I didn’t learn any of this at church. As a kid, it never occurred to me that Solomon and Daniel had drastically different views about the afterlife. Christian theology, as it has developed over the centuries, has functioned like a narrative gloss, smoothing the irregular collection of biblical literature into a cohesive story written by a single, divine author. Secular scholars refer to this as “the myth,” the story that depicts all of human history as an epic of redemption. Drawing from his background as a Pharisee, the apostle Paul connected Hebrew scripture to the life of Christ. Just as sin entered the world through one man, Adam, so the world can be redeemed by the death of one man. As time went on, Satan, Lucifer, and Beelzebub were consolidated into a single entity, the personification of all evil. Likewise Sheol, Gehenna, Hades, and Tartarus came to be understood as physical representations of the darkest place in the universe. By the time the King James Bible was published in the seventeenth century, each of these words was translated as simply “hell.”

  The various depictions of hell over the centuries tend to mirror the earthly landscape of their age. Torture entered the conception of hell in the second century, when Christi
ans were subjected to sadistic public spectacles. Roman interrogation methods included red-hot metal rods, whips, and the rack—a contraption that distended limbs from their joints. The non-canonical Apocalypse of Peter, a product of this era, features a fierce and sadistic hell in which people are blinded by fire and mangled by wild beasts. Dante’s Divine Comedy has traces of the feudal landscape of fourteenth-century Europe. Lower hell is dramatized as a walled city with towers, ramparts, bridges, and moats; fallen angels guard the citadel like knights. The Jesuits, who rose to prominence during a time of mass immigration and urban squalor, envisioned an inferno of thousands of diseased bodies “pressed together like grapes in a wine-press.” It was a claustrophobic hell without latrines, and part of the torture was the human stench.

  Today, biblical literalists believe hell exists outside of time and space, in some kind of spiritual fifth dimension. Contemporary evangelical churches don’t display paintings or stained glass renderings of hell. It’s no longer a popular subject of art. If hell shows up at all these days, it’s in pop culture, where it appears as either satirically gaudy—like animated Hieronymus Bosch—or else eerily banal. In The Far Side, Satan and his minions are depicted as bored corporate drones who deal with the scourge of the postindustrial Earth. (“There’s an insurance salesman here,” Satan’s secretary says. “Should I admit him or tell him to go to Heaven?”) One of the most popular diabolical archetypes in recent years has been the effete Satan. He shows up in episodes of The Simpsons and appears in Tenacious D videos, whining about the fine print of the Demon Code. He makes cameos in South Park, where he’s usually involved in petty domestic squabbles with his boyfriend, Saddam Hussein. Satan has become an unwelcome nuisance, an impotent archetype occasionally dragged out for a good laugh. In an episode of Saturday Night Live from 1998, Garth Brooks plays a struggling musician who tries to sell his soul to the devil for a hit song, only to find that Satan (Will Ferrell) is an even more pathetic songwriter than he. When Satan finally gives up and asks if he can leave, Garth shows him out and tells him to lock the door behind him.