by MEGHAN O’GIEBLYN
Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights features one of the world’s best known depictions of hell. PHOTO/Photoservice Electa\UIG/REX
Growing up as an evangelical, I was terrified of hell. But in recent years, Christian pastors have abandoned damnation in favour of a more upbeat vision
A couple of years ago, a Chicago-based corporate-identity consultant 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 take for a place like hell to become a premier destination in the travel market. Herron decided that what hell needed 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 lower-case, bubbly blue font designed to evoke “instant accessibility and comfort”. The slogan, which was once “Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here”, 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 south-east Michigan, where Sunday mornings involved listening to our pastor preach something akin to the 1819 version of hell – a real diabolical place where sinners suffered for all eternity. In the late 1980s, 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, memorising scripture such as 1 Peter 5:8: “Be self-controlled and alert. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.”
I was too young and sheltered to recognise this worldview as anachronistic. Even now as an adult, it’s difficult for me to hear biblical scholars such as Elaine Pagels refer to Satan as “an antiquarian relic of a superstitious age”, or to come across an aside, in a magazine or newspaper 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 Nathaniel Hawthorne novel.
According to Christian doctrine, all human beings, believers included, are sinners by nature.
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