Hell Bent: How the Fear of Hell Holds Christians Back from a Spirituality of Love

by Brian Recker

And yet, no matter how much good you can find in it, at the end of the day, there is a big black hole right at the center: the belief that everyone who doesn’t follow the right faith is going to hell to suffer for eternity.

For most Christians, the whole point of Christian spirituality is salvation. Salvation from what? Salvation from hell. If you remove hell, there is no punishment to be saved from.

I told her that I wasn’t sure if it helped to hear, but they almost certainly did love her—it’s just that, unfortunately, a spirituality of hell twists and corrupts love into something that feels a lot more like hate.

But the evangelical doctrine of hell makes it very difficult to have the priorities of Jesus. Hell has the gravitational pull of a black hole, sucking in and crushing every other priority under its weight. It leaves us with a spirituality of fear instead of love, one that is focused on the afterlife at the expense of this life.

It disconnects us from ourselves because it is not aligned with the truth of who we are: God’s precious image bearers, reflections of divine love. The foundation of a healthy relationship with ourselves is knowing that we are worthy of love.

The gospel—the good news—is that you are already fully loved and accepted. That’s the message of grace at the heart of Christianity. You don’t have to do anything to be loved. Not anything at all.

The spirituality of hell is fear based, and fear always separates. It is very difficult to be inclusive or accept someone as they are if you believe that who they are will result in eternal damnation.

If I believe that you’re going to burn for eternity unless you listen to me and agree with me, then you are my project, not my friend. I don’t need to have curiosity or listen to you. I need to save you. This creates a sense of superiority and alienation.

Connection with God and others is a feast of love. It’s a joy we were made for and one that is always available to us, but it takes an act of opening our hearts. It means recognizing that the party God is throwing is not just for people like me or people who believe like me. It’s for everybody. As Richard Rohr has said, “The only thing Jesus excluded was exclusion itself.” It is a great tragedy that Christians took that message of scandalous inclusion and mutated it into a story about needing to convert people.

True justice works for the liberation of the oppressed as well as the oppressor, and recognizes that because we are all in this together, none are free until all are free, oppressors included.

But as Rohr says, “How can a person who does not trust himself know how to trust at all?”

Salvation cannot merely be about “who’s in” and “who’s out” in the next world. Ultimately, one way or another, everybody’s in. God will be all in all.

The impact of this interfaith meeting went both ways. Merton, a Catholic priest and mystic, was deeply moved by their connection. In a staggering statement, this Catholic priest wrote that Nhat Hanh “is more my brother than many who are nearer to me by race and nationality, because he and I see things exactly the same way. He and I deplore the war that is ravaging his country. We deplore it for exactly the same reasons: human reasons, reasons of sanity, justice and love.”

He was a Christian, but he knew that God was not owned by Christians. God is not owned by anyone. God is a universal spirit of love and is the inheritance of all people.

When we refuse to acknowledge the universal scope of grace, it keeps us in hell. It keeps us disconnected from our neighbors, both local and global. It keeps us out of the divine dance of grace.

Jesus’s commission to go to the nations was not a call to dominate other cultures but to lovingly engage beyond our tribalistic tendencies with the ways God is at work all around the world, in other cultures, and even in other religions.

Jesus knows that salvation often comes where we least expect it, in the form of the one we are most likely to exclude. I’m not using the word salvation to talk about our afterlife destination—I’m talking about the state of our souls in this life. Our exclusivism damns us, not to hell but to a state of separation from our brothers and sisters. We are saved when we let go of our superiority and our need to exclude, when we see that our savior is present in “the least of these.”

We show favoritism, but God does not. God accepts everyone. God cares about how we treat one another, but God is not auditing our beliefs. The good news—the gospel of Jesus—is a message of peace and reconciliation.