Hell is no longer the driving force it used to be

Hell is having a moment, again.

On July 30, TikTok evangelist Whitney Lynn was kicked off an Alaska Airlines flight for proselytizing passengers and crew during a delay on the tarmac. While Lynn’s antics clearly garnish a following and fill her bank account in turn, I’d argue the very concept of hell itself is what motivates her to stand in the middle of an airplane aisle and spout a most fearsome version of the gospel.

Hell can be quite the motivator, after all. But what happens when fear of the fiery inferno is no longer the driving force it used to be? What happens when people change their minds?

In December 2025, evangelical darling Kirk Cameron, star of the Left Behind film trilogy adaptation, and prior to that, of the late 1980s and early ’90s television relic Growing Pains, “stirred up a theological hornet’s nest after he revealed he no longer believes in a Hell that includes ‘eternal conscious torment.’”

To be sure, Cameron hasn’t necessarily declared that hell isn’t a place sinners go after they die. He’s merely softened its blow by letting go of previously held notions of endless torture and instead merely seeing the place as one of banishment.

More recently, last month, author, podcaster and progressive Christian influencer Jen Hatmaker took it a step further and announced that she no longer believes in a literal hell. In a Substack article titled, “There You Are,” Hatmaker wrote that quietly laying down this belief “is the best thing that ever happened to me.” In the past, all notions of God were entirely tied to punishment, she said: “God was offended. God was punitive. God was vengeful.”

That led Hatmaker to feel “terrorized by an arbitrary, blood-thirsty God.” As it goes, letting go of such beliefs proved a balmy rescue to her faith.

Hatmaker and Cameron aren’t alone in changing their minds, not when the entire landscape of Christian spirituality continues to evolve by the day.

Just as the countercultural Jesus Movement largely marked the 1960s and ’70s, the seeker movement, which highlighted megachurch models like Willow Creek and Saddleback, branded the ‘90s, the emerging church movement became the definitive indicator of the late ‘90s and early 2000s. Each of those movements was still rooted in evangelicalism (or, as it pertains to the third, to general reactions against the evangelical megachurch model). Pastors may not have been heralding a message of hellacious damnation precisely because the message of these movements erred on the side of positivity and grace.

A rootedness in evangelicalism still clings to more conservative theologies that espouse traditional versions of hell, even if the belief is more implicit than explicit at the end of the day. Here, theories within each theory of hell abound. For example, when it comes to the theory of infernalism, is the tormented conscious at the time of torture, and is said tormenting a one-time deal or an everlasting, always-and-forever type of thing? As for the all-consuming fire: Is it in a lake, under the earth, or just made up of burning, sulfurous flames in general? Here also, hell may have simply been a metaphor to Jesus, but it became a literal place to many in the church, thanks in part to the great doctor of the Latin Church, St. Augustine.

The church father argued on the side of punitive judgment, spewing predictions of a day when “true and full happiness shall be the lot of none but the good, while deserved and supreme misery shall be the portion of the wicked, and of them only.”

According to Bradley Jersak, author of Her Gates Will Never Be Shut, however, Augustine’s view of an endless, sulfuric hell soon became the only way to view hell, further enflaming (no pun intended) “the early universalist Fathers as heretical and their modern proponents as liberal.”

Even though the word “hell” is found 54 times in the Bible, just more than a quarter (25.9%) of those references originate in the New Testament. According to Brian Recker, author of Hell Bent, the Hebrew word sheol is sometimes translated as “hell,” sometimes translated as “the grave” and sometimes kept untranslated as a proper noun. Although it is most often referred to as a metaphor (and at times an actual underworld), “it is certainly never spoken of as a place of suffering and punishment.”

“Issues of translation have been mistaken for issues of doctrine.”

Instead, Recker says issues of translation have been mistaken for issues of doctrine. This, combined with references that are completely apocalyptic in nature (and are “actually about the coming judgment on Israel, Jerusalem, and its temple,” as Jersak reminds), should be taken as hyperbole. Such fantastical images would have been evident to those who sat at the feet of Jesus, even if, over the course of a couple of millennium, literal interpretations of a real, fiery place came to dominate theological narratives.

This, of course, leads to thoughts about how hell is perceived today. Although some might surmise that the church has entered a period marked by a decentralized micro-church movement or even by a surge in Gen Z spirituality that values raw and authentic community over the sparkle of big-tent production, we also firmly find ourselves living in a post-Christian, post-institutional era. Belief systems are evolving, deconstructing, changing. And for better and for worse, the blistering subject of hell is often one that keeps people from staying in or returning to faith

Just as an 2025 Pew Research study showed that one in 10 adults under the age of 55 have left the religions of their childhood, the concept of hell — which is found in each of the five major world religions — is often cited as one of the main reasons.

Americans are changing their minds about hell, in other words, becoming “slightly less likely to believe in heaven or hell, or to believe in God or a universal spirit with absolute certainty.”

Hell is no longer the driving force it used to be, especially not when the “unbiblical understanding of hell (and) … of a God who is instead sadistic, vindictive and malevolent” no longer stands. I don’t doubt that’s a good thing.

Instead, at least for some of us, even if we let go of previously conceived or held notions of hell, we still hold onto love. If God is love, we say, then we center our beliefs around love. We pound tent pegs down into holy, ethereal ground rooted not in hate, exclusion and fear, but instead in love, compassion and justice.

And somehow, somewhere, along the way, if we stay, we also become way more hopeful of Jesus than we are of hell — which is perhaps where we should have been all along.

 

Cara Meredith was raised in the American Baptist Churches in the USA but currently worships as an Episcopalian and recently was ordained there as a deacon. She is a freelance author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is the author of Church Camp: Bad Skits, Cry Night, and How White Evangelicalism Betrayed a Generation.

 

Related:

What in hell became of heaven? | Analysis by Alan Bean

On telling a brother he is going to hell | Opinion by Joe Marlow

Heads spin as Kirk Cameron gives up eternal conscious torment | Analysis by Rick Pidcock

Whatever happened to heaven? | Opinion by Brian Zahnd