One of the biggest ironies among conservatives today is that they complain so much about “fake news” while watching Fox News.
As Donald Trump lashes out against the media, white evangelicals claim the mainstream media is attempting to indoctrinate Americans. But as the 2026 midterms approach, one of the themes at Fox News has been talking about the afterlife in order to scare Americans into surrender.
For white evangelicals’ favorite source of news, this is what passes for journalism these days.
‘23 Minutes in Hell’
One recent interview included Sean Hannity sitting down to talk with Bill Wiese, author of 23 Minutes in Hell: One Man’s Story About What He Saw, Heard, and Felt in That Place of Torment.
According to Wiese, he woke up at 3:00 one morning and wanted to get a drink of water. But then suddenly, he told Hannity, “I found myself falling through the air down this long tunnel. And I was getting hotter and hotter and I landed on an actual stone floor in a prison cell in hell. Rafu stone walls, bars, filthy, stinking, smoke filled, but like a dungeon.”
What happened from there is difficult to imagine. He claimed, “It is so pitch black in hell, you cannot see the hand in front of your face.” But then he went on to explain everything he saw in great detail.
“There were demons in the cell, reptilish in appearance, bumps and scales all over the one’s body, huge jaws, sunken in eyes, claws about a foot long. And these particular two were about 12 or 13 feet tall,” he claimed.
“How else can you describe them?” Hannity asked, on the edge of his seat.
“Bumps and twisted and deformed. No symmetry to their bodies. One leg longer than the other. One arm shorter than the other, not symmetrical. They were extremely wicked and evil,” Wiese replied. “One of them picked me up and threw me into the wall of this prison cell. … And then the other demon picked me up from behind, dug his claws into my chest, tore the flesh open.”
Again, despite hell being so dark he couldn’t see his hand in front of his face, he went on to claim he saw a pit, a mile across, filled with fire and thousands of people screaming and burning. “The screams from all the people burning. And they look like skeletons. You cannot distinguish a man from a woman. It looked like flesh hanging off their bones,” he told Hannity.
Wiese went on to describe maggots feeding on people, demons with deformed bodies shoving people into the pit, and people fighting “for even the tiniest bit of oxygen.”
He said one of his sources for his theology of hell was John MacArthur’s commentary. Maybe what you read is what you dream.
How Weis came back also is confusing. During one part of his story, he says his wife found him on their bedroom floor in a traumatized state screaming, “Pray for me!” It makes sense that he’d be on the bedroom floor since this whole saga began when he thinks he woke up thirsty at 3 a.m. and fell down a tunnel. But during another part of his story, he told Hannity it ended with him seeing Jesus and feeling so grateful and thankful that “the peace was overwhelming.”
Of course, in Hannity’s approach to journalism, none of these coincidences or contradictions were questioned. Instead, Hannity asked questions like, “Were you this well-versed in the Bible before you went there?”
‘Heaven: An Unexpended Journey’
Hannity also spoke with Jim Woodford, author of Heaven: An Unexpected Journey: One Man’s Experience with Heaven, Angels, and the Afterlife.
While he was out in the pastures at one of his properties and facing the setting sun, Woodford says, he took some pain medications, overdosed and collapsed.
Suddenly, as a former pilot, he sensed he was around 11,000 feet off the ground over his body when he was sucked into a tunnel of light and started flying through space like warp speed in Star Trek.
When he reached the end of the tunnel, he told Hannity he came face to face with a portal. But when he turned around, the warp speed tunnel of light was closing. So he said, “I had no choice but to go through the portal.”
After he walked through the portal, he looked around and described a scene that may have been reminiscent of the property on earth where his body was. He told Hannity everything was glowing, including the grass. But then he looked to his left and saw an area where the grass turned black.
Woodford says he walked over to the edge of an abyss and looked in. Then from deep in the abyss, a door opened and a 60-foot-long creature came out, whose head swiveled around like the demon-possessed girl on The Exorcist.
Woodford told Hannity there were screams coming from behind the creature in the fire below as well as screams coming from within the demon crying out for release because the demon was eating souls in hell.
“It said my name. And if a snake could speak, that’s what it sounded like,” Woodford said. Then impersonating a growling snake, Woodford told Hannity, “‘Jim. Jim. Thisssss is your time with ussss. Come to us, Jim. We have been waiting.”
According to Woodford, he then cried out, “God help me!”
Then in an instant, he said, three lights came toward him and morphed into angels. “A light shot out from the angel and went over my right shoulder,” he said, noting how the light attacked the demon. Then he told Hannity the demon “shrieked and screamed and scrambled back down that pit like a rat running for cover.”
After that, he said, the angels, who were 15 feet tall, were crying violet tears from their violet eyes.
‘8 Hours In Hell’
Hannity also spoke with Steve Kang, a former Buddhist who became evangelical and wrote the book 8 Hours in Hell: A Shocking Firsthand Experience of What Really Awaits in the Afterlife.
Kang said he was planning to become a Christian but decided to become a Buddhist because his Christian friends “were not walking the walk.”
But then after a suicide attempt, he told Hannity he went to hell on his trip to the hospital. He said the demons he saw were three or four stories tall. “They looked huge,” he recalled. “They had capes on.”
Remember, this isn’t a YouTube channel being recorded in a basement. It’s Fox News.
Whatever he experienced during his time in hell was so awful, he told Hannity, “I’d rather get tortured in a camp in North Korea, Afghanistan, than to go back to hell. … Any suffering on earth is better than the pain I felt in hell.”
‘18 Days in Heaven’
Unfortunately, Hannity isn’t the only Fox News host focusing on the afterlife. Former Trump White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany is getting in on it too.
She’s been interviewing Gabe Poirot, author of 18 Days in Heaven: I Left My Body. I Met Jesus. What He Told Me Will Alter Your Eternity.
After Poirot fell off a skateboard and hit his head on the pavement without wearing a helmet, he said, “I was suctioned up by light. This tunnel of light suctioned me up out of there.”
Then describing heaven, he added, “Like a soldier free falling into an ocean of liquid love, that was the place I found myself in.”
“And you actually spoke with Jesus,” McEnany replied breathlessly. “You saw him face to face. You had a conversation. What did he say?”
Recounting the nails in Jesus’ hands, Poirot said, “He did it just for me. Like I was his only one. I’ll forever be his only one.” Then he told McEnany that Jesus said, “Gabriel, tell them who I really am. And he said, ‘Tell my family I’m coming back soon to get them.’”
“You came face to face with your Savior,” McEnany stated as a matter of fact. She confessed, “I fully believe everything.”
The cause of light vs. the cause of darkness
When I was a conservative evangelical, we tended to roll our eyes at stories of straight white men falling out of bed and signing book deals. These stories always felt over the top, easily explained, filled with contradiction and fringe.
But the impulses they’re tapping into are theological priorities that mainstream white evangelicals fight for through Christian nationalist politics.
Each of these stories begins with the binaries of heaven and hell, angels and demons, light and dark. In order to make it into heaven, be protected by angels and experience the light, you have to surrender to their theology.
“Each of these stories begins with the binaries of heaven and hell, angels and demons, light and dark.”
In their interviews with Hannity and McEnany, these authors all talk about how liberals are those who deny the existence of evil. So in their view of reality, liberals, and by definition Democrats, are being controlled by demons. And the role of Christians is to defeat them.
“You must defeat this evil in our time,” Hannity said. “Christianity at its core teaches that we will make the choice in the course of our lives between good and evil.”
According to these men, Fox News is one of the agents through which God fights evil. “You carry the presence of God. And you’re called to this warfare, Sean,” Kang told Hannity. “So keep fighting. Faith is spelled F-I-G-H-T. … It’s not for wimps. It’s not for cowards. Jesus was not a coward. … In hell, the non-fighters are there.”
According to Wiese, hell is also a place of no gender distinctions where “you cannot distinguish a man from a woman.”
As is often the case with conservative Christians, the end result is the glory of a militant form of masculinity they project onto God.
As Poirot told McEnany, “I love how, in all these other testimonies, they didn’t meet a female Jesus. They didn’t meet a soft or a passive Jesus. Jesus is a man. And especially in America, he’s been misrepresented. And especially, even, you know there’s so many cultural things that present him as if he’s some just tolerant guy. It’s not the Jesus I met. He’s a lion. But he’s not a lion angry against me. He’s a lion angry for me. He’s a mustang on my behalf. He did it all for me.”
In other words, according to Fox News, to choose good is to choose intolerance and anger that flows from their view of masculinity.
“And what did he look like when you saw him?” McEnany asked.
Poirot replied: “Pure fire. He was 5’11”. Like 6 feet. Yet, as tall as eternity. Like an ocean of love. Yet his eyes were burning white and red at the same time. And I mean, talk about testosterone. Like a mustang, I’m telling you. He’s the lion of Judah. And there’s a roar within his voice.”
So as the midterms approach, if you find yourself wondering why so many white evangelicals either aren’t aware of or aren’t concerned about the harm the Trump administration is perpetrating, perhaps one of the reasons may be simply due to algorithms. Fox News’ Hannity and McEnany are their gold standard for journalism. And even if white evangelicals think these men they interview about hell are fringe, their theology of the afterlife, spiritual warfare and gender stereotypes are essentially the same.
And like Hannity and McEnany, white evangelicals are not interested in asking real questions. Because to white supremacist authoritarianism, all that matters is scaring Americans into surrender.
Rick Pidcock
Rick Pidcock is a 2004 graduate of Bob Jones University, with a bachelor of arts degree in Bible. He’s a freelance writer based in South Carolina and a former Clemons Fellow with BNG. He completed a master of arts degree in worship from Northern Seminary. He is a stay-at-home father of five children and is the author of a forthcoming book, Weapons of Worship: How the Songs of Evangelicalism Form the Soundtrack of Extremism. Follow his blog at www.rickpidcock.com.