Our Beliefs About Hell Have Shifted Over Time and Influenced Our Culture
By Sarahbeth Caplin, January 22, 2019

The idea of Hell shapes the way we think — even if people don’t believe it even exists. Vinson Cunningham of the New Yorker took a look at the history of Hell in a recent article.

The further from childhood I get, the fewer people I meet who worry about — or even believe in — what Scott G. Bruce, the editor of a new and quite terrifying compilation, “The Penguin Book of Hell,” calls the “punitive afterlife.” But the Hell here on earth — the one that the preachers promised would lose in the end — hasn’t gone anywhere. You might even notice a slight uptick, these days, in its invocation. As a metaphor for global warming, hellfire is almost too on the nose. There are also the grim jokes about how, during our most recent and most wretched Presidential election, we all surely died and boarded the first elevator downstairs, where we are now in permanent residence. (Search Twitter for the phrase “We are literally in Hell” and let the scenarios wash over you.)
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It’s not only the liberals and the environmentally concerned who are prone to invoking Hell to convey the current state of things. When Donald Trump, during his downbeat Inaugural Address, conjured an “American carnage” that left “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation,” and “crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential,” what was he describing but a national apocalypse, a Hades in Chicago and at the border? Our ancestors developed their ideas of Hell by drawing on the pains and the deprivations that they knew on earth. Those imaginings shaped our understanding of life before death, too. They still do.

Whether you believe Hell is a literal place or part of an ancient myth, it remains a powerful metaphor and descriptor in our modern language. While some religious people let go of Hell early on in their path to atheism, others hold onto that belief as long as possible.