Although we differ on the specifics, both of us believe in hell. This makes us part of a shrinking majority. Only 59 percent of Americans today believe in hell. That’s down from 71 percent in 2001. But these figures, while striking, fail to capture the remarkable shift currently underway in the United States. No one talks about hell much anymore, at least not publicly—not even religious people. We’ve both attended weekly religious services for most of our adult lives, and there’s just no other way to put it: Hell comes up less.

Hannah Arendt was one of the few modern philosophers who grasped the political consequences of losing belief in hell, writing, “The most significant consequence of the secularization of the modern age may well be the elimination from public life, along with religion, of the only political element in traditional religion, the fear of hell.” The contemporary retreat from hell has any number of causes, many of them understandable. As pastor Robert Golding notes, modern people find the concept of hell “illogical, unnecessary, and cruel.” Innovations in criminal justice now emphasize rehabilitation over mere punishment and bristle at the thought that anyone—even hardened criminals—deserves endless punishment or, worse, death.

Many readers will, no doubt, scoff at this idea. They might protest, “I could never believe in hell!” That’s okay. We’re not going to try to convince you to believe in it. One need not believe in hell to grasp its importance or its utility.

For the good of our democracy, you should want your religious neighbours to take their belief in hell more seriously—not less. And even if you don’t believe in hell, you should take some time to ponder its political utility and ask yourself how you intend to make up for its absence in your own life.

Hell Hasn’t Gone Away

There are dangers with the doctrine of hell. Both of us have been put off by pastors or imams who turned our rich faith traditions into simplistic morality plays of heaven and hell with their fire-and-brimstone preaching. We take modern criticisms of hell seriously. Neither religion nor politics is healthy when it is driven by fear.

In addition, hell can easily be used for religious and political manipulation. If leaders claim to hold the keys to heaven and hell, their judgment of who is damned and who is not can quickly stifle dialogue and debate. After all, what is the purpose of consultation or compromise if one person wields the powers of damnation and salvation?

Despite these religious and political dangers, hell’s retreat from the public square hasn’t fixed modern politics. In fact, political life appears to have become even more hellish in the absence of hell. This might not be an accident.

We spend a lot of time in hell—or what feels like it. Politics is hell. Social media is hell. The modern workplace is hell. Dating apps are hell. Climate change is hell (sometimes literally, if we take hell to be a place of fire). In an America without God, we haven’t destroyed damnation; we’ve secularized it. We don’t believe in hell, and yet it feels like it’s everywhere.

The new, secular forms of hell seem to differ, however, from their religious counterparts in one important way: There’s no clear path out. Religious people believe they can avoid eternal hell by living righteously or receiving divine mercy; secular hell, on the other hand, feels inescapable. We don’t so much fear going to hell someday. We wake up to find ourselves already there.

The rise of secular hell reveals something fundamental about human nature: As a species, human beings need to make sense of the persistence of human evil and suffering. We need a story to tell, a villain to blame, a jail cell to slam shut. It turns out that the ancient belief in hell serves as more than just a deterrent to sin. It is also an explanation for why the world feels so hopelessly wrong. Today, people still have this haunting sense that something is deeply wrong with the world. This is because we haven’t abolished hell; we’ve just relocated it. And this relocation has profound implications for how we understand politics, democracy, and one another. To understand how this happened, we need to go back to one of the architects of modern statecraft, Thomas Hobbes. The famed seventeenth-century philosopher saw Christian belief in demons, evil spirits, and hellfire as a dangerous political problem—one that he was committed to solving.

The Modern Reinvention of Hell

England was being torn apart, and Hobbes wanted peace—at any cost. If you think polarization in the United States is bad, you’ve clearly not studied the civil war in England. Hobbes struggled with a question that sounds too familiar in a culture of constant religious and political quarreling: How can a nation hold together?

Hobbes believed that the natural condition of human beings was violence and domination—a war of all against all. In this natural state of lawlessness and fear, the only way citizens could end religious and political strife was to empower a single sovereign, whom Hobbes called “Leviathan.”

With a monopoly on power and violence, Leviathan could put a forceful end to all the fighting. Leviathan would not make peace; he would enforce it. In order for Leviathan to enforce a lasting peace, he would need to wield the most potent political weapon of all: fear.

While having a monopoly on material violence is rather straightforward—simply control all the soldiers, weapons, and police—a monopoly on a nation’s fear is something else entirely. Leviathan had a formidable competitor when it came to scaring the English people—the church. While Leviathan could condemn English subjects to prison, the church could condemn them to hell. Leviathan could make them suffer and even die, but, unfortunately, it could kill them only once. By damning them to hell, the church could make them suffer for eternity. In a contest between the fear of prison and the fear of eternal damnation, hell tends to win out.

This was precisely Hobbes’s discovery. Hell is not simply a religious belief; it’s a political power.

Ultimately, Hobbes concluded that if the state was going to establish peace, it needed to undermine the citizens’ belief in hell: “The maintenance of civil society depending on justice, and justice on the power of life and death (and other less rewards and punishments) residing in them that have the sovereignty of the commonwealth, it is impossible a commonwealth should stand where any other than the sovereign hath a power of giving greater rewards than life, and of inflicting greater punishments than death.”

Hobbes began a pattern that has been repeated throughout the modern, post-religious West. First, modern citizens reject hell—a distant place of wrath, judgment, and alienation—in the hopes of creating peace. Second, they discover that contemporary society has become a place where citizens visit wrath, judgment, and alienation on one another.

Once again, the modern world does not abolish hell; it reimagines it.

The Spectacle of Secular Hell

An American college student is on her first trip to Paris. She decides to visit the Louvre. She walks amid the grand and majestic works of the Greeks, the Romans, and the Renaissance. She is satisfied and serene. But then she turns the corner and finds herself in the medieval wing. Here, to her horror, she finds outsized and gruesome paintings of the punishments of hell. Demons and devils bounce about with great delight, finding all sorts of creative ways to torture their human subjects. As the student leaves the Louvre, the images of suffering haunt her. She wonders how a society could make punishment such a spectacle.

Returning to her hotel room, she opens her laptop and scrolls through social media. She watches a viral video of a black man being chased down by police officers and dragged off to prison. She reads detailed stories about male celebrities being sued for sexual harassment. She watches as her favourite commentators give these men their due justice. She watches a video of ICE agents raiding a factory and deporting a group of immigrants. Finally, in an effort to wind down before bed, she catches up on her favourite courtroom television show, in which a man who might be innocent (but also might not be) is given a long jail sentence. Closing her laptop, she lays her head on the pillow and wonders to herself again how those strange medieval artists could turn punishment into such a spectacle.

Human beings not only thirst for justice; they want to see it happen. There is something in us that wants to take in the spectacle of bad guys “getting theirs.” Our television sets are filled with true-crime shows, celebrity scandals, and legal dramas. We scroll through social media with a sort of delighted horror as bad guys are caught and punishment is served. We want armies to send a message. We want more than victory; we want shock and awe. It is not enough to bring force. We have to make a show of force. This is what it means to secularize the spectacle of hell. We no longer believe that evildoers go to hell, so we’re forced to bring it to them.

But Hobbes had a problem, and so do we. Fear and spectacle work, but only to an extent. No matter how spectacular the disciplinary action, modern forms of punishment fail to bring unity and peace. Despite the incredible power of the modern world to surveil and cancel, incarcerate and bomb, the whole system is still ultimately fragile and fallible. 

Hell: Medieval Versus Modern

As we’ve seen, the modern citizen demands a form of public punishment and wrath that is both spectacular and swift. Justice delayed is justice denied. What do we want? Justice! When do we want it? Now! Lock her up! Drain the swamp! 

As we scan the current political discourse on the right and the left, it is clear that our patience for political dialogue, negotiation, and due process is waning. There is a spirit growing within the West that demands a solution to human evil that is immediate and final. A distant deity does not hold the keys to hell; we do. 

Medieval hell is different. It might be gruesome, but it’s both delayed and distant. Medieval hell affords both the offender and the offended a measure of time and space—a critical opportunity for confession, transformation, and reconciliation. As long as the offender has breath, they still have a chance to be transformed and redeemed. The door to hell is left open a crack. Hell is not here. It is not now. There is still time for persuasion. 

But there’s an even more profound difference at work here—something that emerges when we look closely at the ancient words that Jesus uses when he talks about hell. Jesus never uses hell as a weapon to judge outsiders. He never says, “Here is why those people—the ones you don’t like—are going to hell.” Instead, Jesus uses hell as a mirror. When he talks about hell, he’s talking about you. Where might you go when you die? What eternal destiny do you deserve? What path are you on? Jesus wants his audience to think primarily about their own sin, not the sins of others. If we actually read the words of Jesus, they do not inspire us to hope for hell for other people. They cause us to look for the signs of hell within ourselves. 

This approach to hell creates an entirely different political dynamic. 

A college student may be scrolling through social media looking for hell in the lives of criminals, broken politicians, scandalous celebrities, and sexual harassers. She never pauses to look for the power of hell within herself. 

An Invitation to Hell

Hell in both Islam and Christianity is profoundly egalitarian. Simply said, anybody can go there. It doesn’t matter if you are rich or poor, black or white—all people will receive a judgment. There is no way to buy, manipulate, or threaten your way out. All stand before the throne vulnerable. In this way, the doctrine of hell creates a level playing field based on an individual’s character rather than their wealth or power. 

Here on earth, the wealthy can buy their way out of consequences; the powerful can shield themselves from justice. When powerful figures escape justice—whether dictators dying peacefully in exile or corporate criminals receiving minor fines for major crimes—it corrodes public faith in democratic institutions. The apparent lack of just deserts for the powerful has political consequences. It feeds populist rage and democratic cynicism. In this context, the concept of ultimate justice, of a future hell, serves as a crucial safety valve. 

But hell’s democratic function goes beyond mere deterrence or consolation. Traditional religious conceptions of hell actually embody principles that modern democracies strive to implement: proportional punishment, equal treatment for equal crimes, consideration of both actions and intentions. The Islamic tradition, in particular, emphasizes that divine justice operates with perfect fairness, treating similar actions alike while accounting for individual circumstances and intentions. 

Heaven on Earth?

If a political movement promises heaven on earth, most of us know, instinctually, that it’s time to run for the hills. Historically speaking, such movements are willing to crush the things of earth for the sake of their heavenly vision. Communists sought to create a heavenly state of sharing and the perfect distribution of goods. They made the lives of millions a living hell as a result. This wasn’t exactly surprising. 

There are other, less obvious turns of phrase that we take for granted, like the notion that we can “overcome evil” through politics. Have we ever really taken a moment to think of the implications of such a phrase? It’s messianic. It is a way of superimposing the vastness of God onto the smallness of politics. In reality, the domain of temporal politics is simply not equipped for a goal as ultimate and transcendent as ending evil. Perfection—at least in this life—isn’t possible. 

The late Jesuit priest and philosopher James Schall had a wonderful, albeit frightening, way of capturing the paradox of secularism’s desire to overcome evil: “The belief that evil can be removed by political action, thus, turns out to be the cause for the secularization of hell as a political instrument to justify the good life.” This is why hell is so important. If you take hell seriously, it can lift a critical burden from your politics. Suddenly, the next election does not need to fulfill all your hopes and dreams. It does not need to make your country great again. It does not need to bring all evildoers to account. It does not need to dispense perfect justice, because that justice is coming from elsewhere. It is not yours, and it is not today. But it will come soon enough.