I realized when I was around eight that the very concept of hell is insane and evil, and never looked back. I don’t regard this as an especially precocious perception—many other Christians I have known report a similar experience.
I wrote the above sentences for a version of this review in February, in a different world. I ate at restaurants with friends, rode crowded subways, went to the movies. Now it is early April and I have not been outside in a month. I watch Netflix, Zoom with friends, eat beans from a can. And I listen to black metal, whose refrigerated guitars I find perversely soothing during this crisis. Black metal is, of course, famed for its Satanism, but inverted pentacles, goats’ heads, and paeans to the wolves of hell have always seemed cartoonish. They seem almost quaint now, with real wolves, all too secular, at the door.
Not that everyone agrees. A pastor at Lone Star Baptist Church in Greers Ferry, Arkansas, took to Facebook to defend his decision to hold Palm Sunday services during the pandemic: “Satan’s trying to keep us apart.” So it goes. During the witch trials of 1692, the Salem minister Deodat Lawson warned that Satan may “spread the Contagious Atomes of Epidemical Diseases.”
The Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart is bemused. Nowhere in Christian scripture, he writes in last year’s brief for universal salvation, That All Shall Be Saved, “is there any description of a kingdom of perpetual cruelty presided over by Satan, as though he were a kind of chthonian god.” Hart regards it as a historical tragedy that the early church evolved into an institution of secular power and social domination, too often reinforced by an elaborate mythology of perdition based on the scantest scriptural hints and metaphors. The fear of damnation can serve as a potent means of social control.
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