Hell

In 2005, my husband and I had a conversation. We had many that year, but the topic of this particular conversation was faith, and because of this, it took place in the basement on the spare bed while we both stared at the ceiling rather than each other. After seven years of marriage, we were able to discuss sex of all types, unpleasant bodily functions and even menstruation comfortably, but not faith.
“What if,” Jeff began tentatively in a near whisper, “the Bible isn’t true?”
My husband’s unforgivable sin of doubt caused a vision to flash through the mass of rapidly firing neurons I like to call my brain, and it was less than pleasant. Something like the father of my children writhing in agony, surrounded by non-consuming flames, his eternal body being devoured by worms and violated in various methods by grinning demons with pitchforks.
You get the picture.
You might wonder where I got the picture.
Church, of course.
As a child, I could swear the most oft repeated phrases in church were “Lake of Fire” and “weeping and gnashing of teeth.” The Chick tracts sold in the church bookstore that served as my “light” Sunday afternoon reading did nothing to help my images of this place of nightmares. The wicked sinner in the story always wound up in hell with a gleefully grinning fork-tailed Satan poking him.
In services, the fire-and-brimstone preachers became most enthusiastic when speaking of hell. “Imagine the worst possible pain and suffering,” they would say, voice trembling dramatically, “And that is what Hell will be like if you do not repent now and beg God for mercy!”
For some reason, as I grew older – say, preteens, early teens – this worst possible thing became sexual. Hence the violations by the demons in the earlier scenario. Rather disturbing, wouldn’t you say? One of the biggest things I feared about hell was, well, rape.
Why is this? What is a young girl doing picturing hell as a place of sado-masochistic sex by firelight?
I posed this question to Jeff recently, when we were trying to determine if we were to the point of considering hell “silly” yet. His answer, once he’d recovered from the obvious disturbing visuals, was something like this:
The biggest sin in church is sexual sin, i.e., sex with someone who is not your spouse in something other than the missionary position and for another purpose besides bearing children. Sex is preached as dirty, filthy and evil. Dramatic phrases like, “lust of the flesh” are bandied about in scandalized tones. Therefore, hell involves sex.
Wow.
Next post: Why heaven is the lesser of two evils. But just barely.