Steve Quayle News Alerts

Sept. 10, 2002
By Mike Anton and William Lobdell LOS ANGELES TIMES

The Rev. Bill Faris believes in hell, that frightful netherworld where the thermostat is always set on high, where sinners toil for eternity in unspeakable torment.

But you'd never know it listening to him preach at his evangelical church. He never mentions the topic; his flock shows little interest in it.

"It isn't sexy anymore," said Faris, pastor of Crown Valley Vineyard Christian Fellowship in Orange County, Calif.

In churches across America, hell is being frozen out as clergy find themselves increasingly hesitant to sermonize on Christianity's outpost for lost souls. The violence and torture that Dante described in the "Inferno" during the Middle Ages and that Hieronymus Bosch illustrated on canvas five centuries ago have become cultural fossils in most mainstream Christian denominations, a storyline that no longer resonates with churchgoers.

"There has been a shift in religion from focusing on what happens in the next life to asking, 'What is the quality of this life we're leading now?'" said Harvey Cox Jr., an author, religious historian and professor at Harvard Divinity School. "You can go to a whole lot of churches week after week and you'd be startled even to hear a mention of hell."

Hell's fall from fashion indicates how key portions of Christian theology have been influenced by a secular society that stresses individualism over authority and the human psyche over moral absolutes. The rise of psychology, the philosophy of existentialism and the consumer culture have all dumped buckets of water on hell. The tendency to downplay damnation has grown in recent years as nondenominational ministries, with their focus on everyday issues such as child-rearing and career success, have proliferated, and loyalty to churches has deteriorated.

"It's just too negative," said Bruce Shelley, a senior professor of church history at the Denver Theological Seminary. "Churches are under enormous pressure to be consumer-oriented. Churches today feel the need to be appealing rather than demanding."

A 1998 poll by Barna Research Group, a Ventura, Calif., company that studies Christian trends nationwide, found that church-shopping has become a way of life: One in seven adults changes churches each year; one in six regularly rotates among congregations. That fickleness has helped give rise to "mega-churches" - evangelical congregations of more than 2,000 people that mix Scripture with social and recreational programs in a casual atmosphere. Mega-churches routinely pay for market research on what will draw people to their ministries and keep them coming back.

"Once pop evangelism went into market analysis, hell was just dropped," said Martin Marty, professor emeritus of religion and culture at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

Hell is far from dead. A Gallup Poll last year found that 71 percent of adults nationwide believe in hell. They just don't want to hear about it.

Even among some "born-again" churches, hell is a rare topic of conversation. Born-again Christians believe in hell, but they also believe their decision to embrace Christ has earned them a one-way ticket in the other direction.

"When you have a group of people who are born again, you're not going to hell," said Bob Anderson, 51, a lawyer who attends an evangelical church in Fullerton, Calif. "So why talk about it?"

Traditional denominations also have pushed hell to the margins. The first catechism of the Presbyterian Church USA, drawn up a few years ago by a committee, mentions hell only once.

George Hunsinger, a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary and the catechism's principle author, would have liked the document to address hell more directly and "talk about divine judgment in a responsible way." But the committee rejected the idea without much debate. "It's a failure of nerve by churches that are not wanting to take on a nonpopular stance," Hunsinger said.

Where once hell was viewed as a literal, geographic location, it is now more often considered a state of the soul. In 1999, Pope John Paul II made headlines by saying hell should be seen not as a fiery place but as "the state of those who freely and definitively separate themselves from God, the source of all life and joy."

As much as that may have seemed like a departure from church teachings, the pope's words weren't all that new. As part of the modernization of church teachings by the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), the Roman Catholic Church has moved away from the view of hell as a Gothic torture chamber.

Individual priests kept hell's fires burning for years, aided by a Catholic catechism of beliefs published in 1891 whose tone one priest calls "positively medieval." A new catechism, published in 1994, uses gentler language and emphasizes that hell's chief punishment is the separation from God.

"When you take [hell] away as a threat, everything changes," Marty said. "Who goes to confession anymore? Time was, a [Catholic] church had 16 booths and people snaked around the block. Today, a church might have one left.

Another measure of hell's decline can be found in the changed attitude of the Rev. Billy Graham, who came to prominence in the 1940s as a fire-and-brimstone Gospel preacher. His depiction of hell was unequivocal. Even Graham has reconsidered hell - not if it exists, but what it is.

"I believe that hell is essentially separation from God. That we are separated from God, so we can have hell in this life and hell in the life to come," Graham said in 1991. "But to describe hell in vivid terms like I might have done 30 or 40 years ago, I'm not at liberty to do that because whether there is actually fire in hell or not, I do not know."

The history of hell is long and complex, a product of evolving religious thought that has shaped and been shaped by literature, art and popular culture. Hell's roots are tangled in the Hades of Greek mythology and the ancient Hebrew concept of Sheol - locales where the dead, good and bad, resided.

Hell became more hellish when the early Christians infused it with a serious fear factor. Jesus is quoted in the Bible describing hell as the "outer darkness" cosumed by an "everlasting fire." Matthew's Gospel offered a soundtrack: the "weeping and gnashing of teeth."

During the Middle Ages and through the Renaissance a lurid image of hell was firmly cemented in people's minds. Dante wrote that within the seventh circle of hell runs "the river of blood, within which boiling is/ Whoe'er by violence doth injure others." Bosch depicted naked souls being tormented by half-human demons.

For churches, the fear of hell became a tool to teach the consequences of a sinful life.

In the centuries to come, scientific discoveries and the European Enlightenment would begin to crack hell's veneer, leading some to question whether a merciful God would be so cruel. More palatable theories of hell eventually developed: Souls not ticketed for heaven simply cease to be. Hell is a temporary state before heaven. Everyone goes to heaven.

"How can something as wonderful as redemption ... be based on fear?" the Rev. Wilfredo Benitez of St. Anselm of canterbury Episcopal Church in Garden Grove, Calif., asked. As a young preacher, Benitez said he warned nonbelievers they would burn in Satan's lair. He has dropped the tactic: "Can we accept a gift at gunpoint? This is total nonsense and madness."