ILLUSTRATION BY GRAHAM ROUMIEU/THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Marq de Villiers is an award-winning author whose latest book is Hell and Damnation: A Sinner’s Guide to Eternal Torment, from which this essay is adapted.
So is Satan now toothless? Scoffed out of existence?
On the face of it, it does seem that hell, like Satan himself, has lost its sting. The phrases are now trotted out without any sense of their residual meaning. To hell and gone. The hell with it. Go to hell. It is hellishly hot … Hell is just an epithet, not a place; as Michael Gerson put it in The Washington Post, “For a lot of people, hell is little more than a mental holding place for Hitler.” Carol Zaleski, in an Encyclopedia Britannica article on national hells, suggested that “In the modern world, especially in the West, cultural shifts caused by the Enlightenment, 19th-century liberalism, and the psychotherapeutic culture of the late 20th century have contributed to a decline in the belief in an everlasting hell.”
In this view, evil was caused by misfiring synapses and failed education, nothing more. Indeed, the whole idea of god and the devil began to seem increasingly obsolete, concepts unworthy of free men. Thus, the notion that men and women should bow down and worship some unseen abstraction came to seem more and more undignified (the very word “worship” is cringe-making in itself); similarly, the idea that anyone should debase himself as a miserable sinner just because a long-ago, know-nothing ecclesiastic says he should seems … primitive.
And yet … the idea of hell and its punishments persists, and in more than one not-so-obscure corner of the religious universe. Removing hell from Christian doctrine leaves a hell-sized hole in the afterlife narrative: Major religions are not used to not having answers. If there is nothing to fear, why be sinless? Thus, as Philip Almond says in his profile of the devil, “The existence of the Devil, and his capacity to act in history, nature and human lives, remains for many Christians, both Protestant and Catholic, a satisfactory explanation of natural misfortune and human suffering, mitigated by the paradoxical conviction that, at the end of the day, Satan is carrying out God’s will, and that, at the end of history, he will be defeated and eternally punished for doing so.”
It’s predictable that many outré branches of Christianity, including some of the more fundamentalist fire-and-brimstone sects, still cling to the older notions of hell.
Even in 2016, you could still see billboards across parts of the American South declaring that “Hell is Real;” and some churches still operate “hell houses,” in which terrified teenagers are herded by “demons” and shown graphic strobe-lit scenes of violent assaults, suicides, and drug takers here on earth. So much, so predictable. But you’d be hard pressed to find an adherent of even the more mainstream Christian doctrines who denies hell altogether. As recently as 2004, Gallup polled Americans of all backgrounds for their views on hell, and found to its own evident astonishment that despite the supposed secularizing of society the number of people who believed that god would punish people in the afterlife had actually increased, significantly, in a decade – from 50 per cent to 70 per cent (it was 80 per cent for evangelicals). Even stranger, half of those who said they never went to church said they nonetheless definitely believed in hell, while 3 per cent of those who didn’t believe in any god at all still believed in hell. In 2011, an Associated Press poll found that eight in 10 Americans believed in angels – and for those who never went to church the ratio was still four in 10. The gap is a little different in Canada: More than half of Canadians believe in heaven, but only a third in hell.
To put all this in perspective on the credulity meter, it’s also true that in 2009 the Pew Research Center reported that one in five Americans had experienced ghosts and that one in seven had consulted a psychic. And then, consider that in April 2012, one in 10 Americans was convinced that Barack Obama was the Antichrist, and they didn’t mean it politically – they meant for sure, for real, that Mr. Obama was inhumanly evil.
It is worth remembering, too, that the late American Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, referred to in many obituaries as one of the foremost legal minds of his time, said in an interview with New York Magazine that he believes in Satan. “Of course!” he said. “Yeah, he’s a real person. Hey, come on, that’s standard Catholic doctrine! Every Catholic believes that.”
Somewhat further down on the intellectual scale, consider the Florida college student accused of randomly killing an elderly couple and chewing on the dead man’s face; his defence, if it can be called that, was that he was fleeing a demon called Daniel. In his flight, he stripped off his clothes and dashed into a random garage, where he promptly killed the people he found there and started gnawing away. Not his fault – Daniel’s.
Carl Sagan once pointed out (in The Demon-Haunted World) that demonic possession was still very much a current idea. In a 1992 “spiritual warfare manual” called Prepare for War, Rebecca Brown informs us that abortion and sex outside of marriage “will almost always result in demonic infestation;” that meditation, yoga and martial arts are designed so unsuspecting Christians will be seduced into worshipping demons; and that “rock music didn’t just happen,” it was a carefully masterminded plan by none other than Satan himself.
And then, in 2017, came reports of a growing number of non-church or “private” exorcists operating in ostensibly secular France, along with “a host of … healers, mediums, kabbalists, shamans and energiticians,” whatever energiticians are. A piece in The Economist quoted one of the exorcists, Philippe Moscato, who it found after he “de-spooked” (the magazine’s word) a Paris apartment, as suggesting that three parts of France are particularly vulnerable to “black magic”: Paris, Lyon and the French Riviera; Mr. Moscato was confident that this could be countered by sufficiently strong exorcists. The demand for these, he said, spiked after prominent terrorist attacks in France in 2015. Apparently, many victims of possession are reassured at the ease of booking an exorcist online.
A more sophisticated apologia for hell is offered by Ross Douthat, The New York Times’s house conservative: “Doing away with hell … is a natural way for pastors and theologians to make their God seem more humane. The problem is that this move also threatens to make human life less fully human. Atheists have license to scoff at damnation, but to believe in God and not in hell is ultimately to disbelieve in the reality of human choices. If there’s no possibility of saying no to paradise then none of our no’s have any real meaning either. They’re like home runs or strikeouts in a children’s game where nobody’s keeping score. In this sense, a doctrine of universal salvation turns out to be as deterministic as the more strident forms of scientific materialism. Instead of making us prisoners of our glands and genes, it makes us prisoners of God himself. We can check out any time we want, but we can never really leave. The doctrine of hell, by contrast, assumes that our choices are real, and, indeed, that we are the choices that we make. The miser can become his greed, the murderer can lose himself inside his violence, and their freedom to turn and be forgiven is inseparable from their freedom not to do so.”
The physicist Sean Carroll, in a Discovery essay, was scathing in response: Mr. Douthat, he wrote, “does us all the favour of reminding us how certain ideas that would otherwise be too ugly and despicable to be shared among polite society become perfectly respectable under the rubric of religion. In this case, the idea is: certain people are just bad, and the appropriate response is to subject them to torment for all time, without hope of reprieve. Now that’s the kind of morality I want my society to be based on.”
A toothless Satan is better than that.