A detail from Jan van Eyck's Last Judgement, c. 1430–40.Metropolitan Museum of Art
Alexander Wooley is a Canadian working in international development, based in Virginia, and the author of the coming book The Cult of the Yamato.
What the hell happened?
Or more accurately: What happened to hell?
Hell has gotten noticeably less hot. No one I know thinks they are going to hell, or is willing even to consider what the experience is like. People laugh in your face if you speak of a place with demons and flames and pitchforks and serpents.
We’ve just decided we don’t want to even think about hell. Like the United States, it has a mass-incarceration problem that we all agree is a blight. It’s too punitive, too final. And all those wrongful convictions! Who wants to think about all that? Plus, hell has all those goats, and it’s never once paired them with yoga. Consumers demanded better.
Organized religion had been bringing everyone down for centuries, with fire and brimstone and all those negative vibes. Dude, why so serious? Hell is the creepy abandoned ranch house at the end of a wooded cul-de-sac with the blinds always drawn. It hasn’t been refurbished or updated since at least Dante’s time. Why should we want to move in, or even live in the same neighbourhood?
It was kind of like how, if you didn’t like the results of a presidential election, whether it be a win for Donald Trump or Joe Biden, you could just do up a protest sign and decide that he was “Not My President.” Despite the reality, the most important thing is telling yourself and others that you’re going to resist – which basically means ignoring that president’s existence, even if he was busy executive-ordering his way into your life. We can’t be hurt by anything we put out of mind and simply refuse to accept – or by anything we don’t take seriously. And by us merely ignoring him, Satan and his forked tail have hightailed it and become a cartoonish object of fun.
Heaven, on the other hand, is easy to picture. A favourite aunt, your cat Tigger, buddies whom you served with: They’re all up there, waiting. In the popular imagination, heaven has become more inclusive; everyone is going, and you don’t want to be left out.
It used to be an elitist institution – you had to earn your way in – but now it’s abandoned standardized testing, dropped the math section of the exam. It’s less restrictive than most airport club lounges, cheaper than a flight to Santorini or St. Barth’s, and easier to get into than the Eras Tour (and it has great after-parties, too). Heaven is like Texas: Everyone wants to move there. At the same time, Paradise is becoming very customizable. It even has next-day delivery. You can put together your own playlist; you no longer have to listen to the harp 24/7. Despite seven billion souls down here on Earth, heaven has become increasingly bespoke, individual and on demand – apparently, service has dramatically improved in Paradise, even though way more customers are demanding express check-in.
Little wonder that polling through the years has shown that more people believe in heaven than hell.
Today, there are no wrong ideas of what heaven is like. Everyone’s view is valid and respected. If one encountered a person who was deeply spiritual and spoke of heaven as if it was a foregone conclusion that they were going – preparing for it like a retirement fund that could not possibly crater in value despite the small-print caution suggesting otherwise – it’s now considered rude, anachronistic, embarrassing even, to ask them about even the possibility of hell. You’d be treated as if you were the literal Devil’s advocate. The cosmic duality was becoming a singular monopoly: Heaven was like Apple, or Google, or Amazon, but benevolent, worker-friendly. By merely wishing it to be so, presto: Heaven can be yours. And if at one time heaven was a fervent aspiration, it now feels like an entitlement, a universal human right. Like Social Security, but solvent and sustainably funded.
It would be outrageous to suggest that someone isn’t going. The middleman has been eliminated as Paradise moved to an increasingly flat organizational hierarchy. Nobody is oppressing you or judging you any more; there are no longer any performance reviews. (And that was a relief, because everyone had hated doing them while alive anyway.) Heaven only has mentors, no bosses. To achieve all this, you just had to want it, not work for it.
Strangely, there are probably equal proportions of good and evil people today as in medieval times – back when perdition was really scorching, doing standing-room-only business – and there are many more people on this planet. Yet the growing belief that Heaven Is For Everyone – this Open Pearly Gates policy – suggests that maybe, just maybe, bad people (Karens, Vladimir Putin, pedophiles, ISIS, obnoxious influencers) are getting into heaven, too. Yes, the same wall-to-wall cloudy cosmos you expect to go to. Meaning … it might be pretty much the same crowd up there as down here on Earth. Nevertheless, even as the Earth warms, wildfires run rampant and hot yoga finds itself on trend, Hades’s underworld has gone cold (in defiance of the subterranean-cooling deniers).
Today, religion has given way to “spirituality,” which means personal growth, individual meaning and self-centric purpose, achieved through things such as meditation and StrengthsFinder and mantras to accentuate the positive or find your happy place. It’d be preposterous to admit the Devil into such an uplifting safe space. A mindful mind is too at peace for hell. When thoughtful people travel, they want to see temples, sunsets, native plants, immerse themselves with ancient, wise peoples who also slow-cook. They don’t want to hear about the country’s hellish oppressive regime, or jailed political dissidents, or historical misdeeds.
No: What people want are rewards and unlimited spending limits. They want to be able to buy a shiny new vehicle even if they have a wrecked credit score. And heaven is just the kind of risk-taking car dealership to make that happen; they’ll put you in the driver’s seat, no question asked. In an age when we question the legitimacy of every institution, it’s only right you should be accountable only to yourself.
Not so in hell. No one feels they deserve to be punished, especially for eternity – which is, coincidentally, how long it takes to recover your credit score after declaring bankruptcy.
Under the old organized-religion regime, heaven and hell were a package deal – a functioning two-party system. The terms and conditions were standardized and pretty clear. You were individually accountable and could go to hell based on your actions, but at the same time, if you belonged to certain groups – a certain nation, religion or sexual persuasion – someone might scream that everyone in that group was going to hell too. In older Greek myths, only heroes such as Heracles and Theseus could get out of the underworld once they entered. Now, any schmo can escape its clutches. Not only are you no longer personally accountable for your actions, but you are individually enabled, empowered to claim a little piece of heaven should you choose. That’s obviously a better deal – and it’s apparently as easy as wishing upon a star.
But still: For all the bad press and its declining enrolment, there was something romantic about hell. It meant high stakes and inherent risk, and that always makes for a better narrative, for an element of danger, for appointment viewing. It kept you guessing, right up until the end, about your own personal series finale. Heaven without hell is Star Wars with no Sith, Lord of the Rings with no Sauron. No risk, no thrills, like the Canadian Football League’s regular season, where almost everyone makes the playoffs.
Right now, if you’re at the blackjack table and you beat the house, you win; but if you go over 21, someone takes your chips. That’s what makes the game worth playing. But under the new rules of spirituality, if you go over 21, the house tells you not to worry: The game is now called “31,” and you keep your chips and get more cards and you win.
Is that really heaven? Or does heaven only work if we raise a little bit of hell?