Who the Hell Invented Hell?

And who does it serve to keep believing in it, anyway???

Photo by Ian Stauffer on Unsplash

We’ll wrap up a hell-ish month (ba-dum-ching) jumping off from this line last week: “You have to question just how much evangelicals believe in the lure of their belief system if hellfire and damnation are the threats they have to resort to in order to keep people in the fold.”

Why does hell exist? Who invented hell? Why do so many keep on believing in it?

There is, of course, a “right” answer to these things that I learned. Hell was an unfortunate byproduct of God being perfect and righteous and hating sin. It was originally just intended for the devil and fallen angels, but then whoops, that whole thing with Adam and Eve in the garden and the first sin, and oh well, now most of mankind turns out they’re destined for eternal condemnation too. Real bummer. Poor God. He really wishes we could all be together, but being as his hands are obviously tied because of that whole perfection thing, it’s ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Must be tough to be perfect and loving and wrathful. I can’t imagine how hard that must be, really.

Oh and people who don’t want to think about hell? Well, that’s taking the easy way out and just thinking about heaven and a loving God (I know, the audacity, right??). Not to worry, though: I was raised right, raised in a church that made sure to specify on their belief statement that hell is a real place of eternal conscious torment. We were a proper “Bible-believing church.”

Uh… or were we? Because you know what they don’t tell you when you grow up evangelical? How hell is a construct that has been shaped by different cultures and belief systems over time. That the modern evangelical notion of hell as a final landing place for unrepentant sinners who don’t believe in the evangelical gospel of Jesus Christ is… quite an evangelically specific notion.

A brief history of hell

Various cultures and religions have believed in some version of hell for, well, I imagine as long as religion has been around. We humans have a thirst for justice and desire for evildoers to somehow get their due. We hate the idea of wrongdoers just walking free. Just look at our modern justice system and how we’re willing to punish and even kill [usually Black men] who may or may not be guilty to assuage for crimes that have been committed. We’d rather kill the wrong person than kill no one at all.

I imagine hell emanates out of this same desire.

Hell is rarely mentioned in the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible). It’s usually called Sheol and seems to be thought of as a place where people go when they die – almost like taking a long, long sleep (but where they are still accessible to the living if you conjure them in the right way).

Then later, in the book of Daniel, according to this article, the idea of a “moral judgment” was introduced: where depending how you’d been when you were alive, you were either punished or granted rewards and everlasting life upon death.

Furthermore, the idea of Satan as a figure of pure evil, which is how Satan is generally thought of in evangelical circles today, may have been a Zoroastrian addition. Zoroastrianism was the religion of the Persians…who ruled over the Jewish people from 530 to 330 BCE. But the meaning of Satan is “accuser” or “adversary” in Hebrew, and in Genesis is phrased as “the satan” as in, the accuser.

And some version of universalism, according to scholar

David Bentley Hart

, was actually more common than non-universalism up until about the 4th century CE: until the Roman Empire really began to double down on their use of Christianity as an imperializing tool. A quote from his New York Times op-ed:

As the company of the baptized became more or less the whole imperial population, rather than only those people personally drawn to the faith, spiritual terror became an ever more indispensable instrument of social stability. And, even today, institutional power remains one potent inducement to conformity on this issue.

They don’t tell you any of this when you’re an evangelical, or quite frankly, when you’re a Christian in general. (Unless you go to a particular kind of seminary, which I did, but MOST people never get introduced to these ideas and it’s a real shame). Why??

So who DOES it serve to believe in hell?

Promoting belief in hell is a useful tool of the oppressor – and by oppressor, I mean that “institutional power” that Hart refers to above. Which is, oh wait, also an oppressor of many: women, children, people of color, non-Westernized nations, non-Christians, non-evangelicals, and honestly, anyone outside those in power.

Threats of punishment are an excellent tool of subjugation. If you can just keep people scared enough to not question, you can control many aspects of their thinking and behavior.

Eliminate diverse religions and diverse thoughts and implement conformity, and you can get yourself some version of social stability. The empire is indeed interested in social stability. Our empire (I’m in the USA as are many of you) is certainly interested in social stability. A two-party system, one I find certainly more problematic than the other, but both seem highly invested in greedy capitalistic systems and funding the war machines… But if we just keep worried about our personal salvation and whether we’re going to hell, we’ll never have time to worry about all those earthly problems!

So, social stability? Unfortunately, yes. But this type of social stability serves the empire and the power brokers most of all.

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It is funny to hear an evangelical say the quiet part out loud: but if there’s no hell… people will just leave the church!

Well, yes. Maybe they just leave your church, maybe they leave church altogether, but if that’s all that’s keeping people belonging to your institution: it says a lot more about you than it does about them.

It’s amazing the shifts that occur when you shift the question from “is hell real or not, and am I headed there?” to “WHY would someone want me to believe in this?” It lets you step back a bit and look at the idea itself, instead of being immersed in believing the idea is true.

What else did you experience freedom from once you shifted from worrying about whether you answered the question right, to wondering whether the question itself was legitimate? What do you think about this paradigm shift? Any thoughts or reflections you’d like to share? Please press that “heart” button if you liked today’s post, and I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!