The Very Worst Thing About Hell

My Sunday School teachers and pastors had a strange way of driving home lessons about Hell—maybe this was a trend throughout fundamentalism, that’s entirely possible. But the adults responsible for informing me of my impending doom typically felt the need to isolate the worst thing about Hell. There wasn’t universal agreement on what that was, far from it. It was almost like this deranged variation of the Desert Island Five question: If you were stranded on a desert island with nothing but recordings of five songs (or albums) and a way to play your music, what five songs/albums would you pick*?

But the Christian Fundamentalist version of this question, especially in the stricter circles in which all of my musical choices would most certainly prevent the question from being moot, was this:

If you were stranded IN HELL for all eternity, what would be the worst part?

Let me tell you, the people responsible for scaring me shitless as a child LOVED this question, and they seemed to enjoy subtweeting each other too. One Sunday School teacher said, “The worst part about Hell is that God isn’t there.” But the pastor of that same church would step out from behind the pulpit and retort, “Some people say that the worst part about Hell is that God isn’t there,” and I’d be squirming in my seat going Oh my God, was he in class today? But then he’d pull the subterranean rug out from under us with, “But that isn’t true. The worst part about Hell is that God is there!”

And that might sound like a weird thing to say about God, but if you’ve ever watched an ‘80s sitcom in which the main character befriends a weird kid or some kind of nerd or outcast or otherwise marginalized person and then made fun of that person in front of the cool kids so as not to be shunned by the IN group (which, I know, sounds a lot like any random 5 minutes of FOX News) only to discover that the weird kid was standing right there listening the whole time, you know vicariously how awful it feels to be confronted by the presence of the person you’ve hurt. Yeah, I know, in this scenario, God the almighty creator of the universe is somehow the ostracized dork, but if you’ve rejected God apparently it’s awful to be near Him as you burn for it.

I’m getting off track, because the most convincing WPAH (Worst Part About Hell) answer I ever heard went something like this: “The worst part about Hell isn’t the burning or the screaming or the torture; the worst part about Hell is being alone.”

So here’s the thing about deconstruction. Intellectually, it’s not that difficult. Emotionally, psychologically . . . how do you recover from being threatened as a child with eternal loneliness? Because that shit? That doesn’t leave you. That stays with you when you think about deconstruction in the first place. I’m not the type of person to actually write out a pros and cons list, but when you think about maybe thinking about turning away from Christianity, the list of red flags and warning signs that streams through your head looks like this:

• I don’t want to go to hell.

• I don’t want to hurt the people I love.

• I don’t to lose everything.

• I don’t want to be alone.

Beneath any mental gymnastics over the existence of God or the glossing over of contradictions or the justification of hypocrisy or general inhuman awfulness toward outsiders . . . and insiders, there’s an undercurrent of psychological trauma and fear telling you not to step outside the safety zone. Do not say you don’t believe. Do not cross that line. Do not lose faith, or you. will be. alone.

Honestly, I still can’t extract that fear completely. The memory of how that fear struck me as a child is, ironically enough, my constant companion. It sounds like a song lyric. My fear is riding shotgun or something, I don’t know.

We’ll explore this more tomorrow, but for now, without further explanation or deconstruction, I want to remind you that, no matter what your Sunday School teacher or fire-and-brimstone preacher might have told you, you are not alone.

I swear to whomever, you’re not alone. I’m right here with you. I’m literally right here and figuratively with you and totally committed to making sure you know it gets better. The worst thing about Hell is that we bought it.

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