The Politics of Hell

Matthew Kaemingk:
Welcome to Zealots at the Gate, a podcast of Comment magazine. I’m Matthew Kaemingk.

Shadi Hamid:
I’m Shadi Hamid.

Matthew Kaemingk:
Together, we research politics, religion, and the future of democracy at Fuller Seminary’s Mouw Institute of Faith and Public Life.

Shadi Hamid:
We are writing a book together. This podcast represents an informal space where we can talk about how to live with deep difference. Thanks so much for joining us.

Hi everyone. Welcome to Zealots at the Gate. This is season three, which we’re really excited about. No, we really are. Believe us. If you like us, which we hope you do, make sure to subscribe and follow us on your favourite podcast app. Give us a rating if you can, that does make a difference. I am, as many of you may know, Shadi Hamid. The person who’s across from me sort of is?

Matthew Kaemingk:
Matthew Kaemingk.

Shadi Hamid:
Yeah. So Matt and I are good friends, but perhaps you wouldn’t expect us to be. Matt’s Christian. I’m Muslim. Matt’s conservative, maybe even a bit Republican leaning. I don’t know if he calls himself that, but still, I’m more of a Democrat, a liberal sort of, but that’s a longer story. Matt’s white, I’m brown, brownish. Matt is from the rural Northwest, and I am from the northeastern liberal elite enclave of Washington DC, the so-called Swamp.

So, together, we research politics, religion, and the future of democracy at Fuller Seminary’s Mouw Institute of Faith and Public Life. We’re actually writing a book together, as it happens, and this podcast represents an informal space where we can talk about how to live with deep difference.

So today, we have a big topic. It’s a heavy topic. Hell, eternal damnation. We might even be making a case for hell. We’ll have to wait and find out and talk it through a little bit. How serious is hell as a topic? Actually, I came across this prophetic Hadith, which I like a lot, which says that the angel, Michael, Mikail in Arabic, he actually stopped laughing when hell was created.

And that gives you a sense of the weight of this topic that when you’re aware of the reality of hell, it’s hard to just go around and laugh too much and hang out with your friends because that’s going to be weighing on you. Of course, we’re not telling you that you shouldn’t enjoy life, but just that when we’re really contending with the burden of hell and our own imagination, it is a heavy burden that is if you believe in it.

Matt, I’m curious about, maybe just to get us started, what vibe, when you hear words like hell or the case for hell, how do you feel about it? Do you feel that same kind of weight from your own perspective?

Matthew Kaemingk:
Sure. Well, I mean, I come at this as a Christian theologian and a Christian myself, but I also come at this topic as a modern American, who lives in the suburbs. And one of the things about living in the suburbs is there’s sort of a vibe of comfort and kindness and joy and happiness and a desire to, yeah, escape discomfort, escape judgement , escape, yeah, difficult and hard aspects of life.

And so, the topic of hell is not a really welcome topic in the American suburbs because it makes us uncomfortable. It’s very sort of clear and intense. And so, as just sort of a generic American, I’m uncomfortable with it. But when we were getting ready to talk about this subject of hell and its political consequences for American life, I went and looked up the stats. And it seems that the majority of Americans still do believe in hell. While we might-

Shadi Hamid:
Unlike Europeans, the godless Europeans.

Matthew Kaemingk:
Godless. And that was fascinating to me in that Americans don’t like to talk about hell, but they still kind of believe in it and they want to believe that people go there.

Shadi Hamid:
Just as long as it’s not them or their friends or family.

Matthew Kaemingk:
A large part of Americans don’t think they are going to hell, but they still believe in it. They still want to hold to that even if they’re not going to church. There is this need we have for an accounting that we will have to answer. Human beings will have to answer for how they behave.

Shadi Hamid:
Well, to be fair, it would be weird if you thought that you were going to hell and you admitted that to a pollster because if you really did think that, then presumably you’d embark on pretty serious changes in your life. It would just be hard to sit with that if you really believe in hell, if it’s not just simply an abstraction.

But this is a difficult thing, I think because maybe more so in Islam than Christianity, there is a possibility for even Muslims, believers to spend a temporary period in hell to purify themselves of their sin before entering heaven fully. And so, I think, that a lot of Muslims do contend with the prospect that not everything is all good, that they aren’t in a sense definitively saved.

When I hear Christians talk about being saved, they seem pretty confident in a way that I find a little bit weird and surprising. Like, wait, you guys are that sure you’re going to heaven? Come on. There’s got to be some doubt here. But the bigger point here is, I think, there’s this interesting question of if our conviction in hell and heaven are real and certain, then presumably we would devote a lot of our lives to making sure we don’t go into hell.

What could be more important? What could be more consequential than eternity? That when you really contend with it, it means you have to reorient your life. But so many of us, even as believers, are not able or willing to completely reorient our lives in precisely that way. So, there can sort of be a kind of paradox or a gap there.

Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. And I think, of course, I’d love to dive in with you on Islamic and Christian theologies of hell, but beyond that, how Christians disagree about these kinds of things. But beyond this, you and I actually see political consequences to our perspectives on hell that if you believe in hell or you don’t, that actually might impact the way that you behave with other people.

One quote from Rousseau that you and I play with quite a lot is this belief that Rousseau argued that human beings can’t live at peace with those they regard to be damned. That if you believe people are going to hell, you will be politically aggressive towards them.

And that’s a fascinatingly relevant topic for Muslims and Christians, which the case is essentially very clear that Muslims and Christians are incapable of democracy because they believe in something called hell. Or John Lennon’s song, Imagine, “Imagine there’s no heaven or hell.” A belief that if we get rid of our doctrine of hell, then we will be more peaceful, more democratic, more rational. That hell is a sort of backwards tool of oppression and political fear and control.

Shadi Hamid:
Yeah.

Matthew Kaemingk:
I am interested particularly in how a belief in hell might change our political behaviour. It might make us better citizens or worse citizens. And how does that impact how we talk to one another if we think people are going to hell?

Shadi Hamid:
Yeah, totally. And it’s not just us making up this idea that hell has political consequences for democracy. Hannah Arendt has a great quote. She says this, “The most significant consequence of the secularisation 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.”

So, she calls the fear of hell, the only political element in traditional religion. Now, naturally we would disagree with that, but to emphasise the political aspects of hell, I think, is appropriate here. And speaking of great philosophers as it happens, Matt, I just did a podcast the other day with Martha Nussbaum, probably one of the most important consequential philosophers alive today.

And we did actually get into the issue of hell briefly. It wasn’t the main focus, but it was interesting how it came up. And I brought it up and she sort of felt uncomfortable with it. And she said something to the effect that even with believers today, hell has kind of fallen by the wayside. That’s not how most of us talk about religion anymore. So she was kind of like, “Shadi, why are you emphasising this part of it that’s outdated?” And she was talking about her own Reform Jewish tradition and how the ideas of punishment and hell don’t really figure.

But even, I think, she was making a correct point about Christians, as you noted, Matt, that even Christians don’t emphasise hell anymore. And I would say even in the Muslim community, I remember hearing a lot about hell, not a lot, but a significant amount growing up and Sunday school, it was there. But I think that as I’ve gotten older and as we’ve seen the kind of liberalisation of the American Muslim community, there’s been a corresponding move to de-emphasise hell and to not make that as central in the kind of theological account.

So, it’s interesting how there is this kind of push and pull. You have secular philosophers like Hannah Arendt, who are like, actually hell is really important. But then there’s another side of us that is like, oh, maybe it’s important, but we don’t really want to talk about it.

Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah.

Shadi Hamid:
So when Rousseau talks about the dangers of believing in hell for democracy, that’s one way of looking at it. I think the other way of looking at it is to say that if you don’t believe in ultimate justice in the next life or in some kind of transcendent sense, it’s going to make you more likely to seek transcendent justice in the here and now and that there’s a danger in that. That can create this desire for utopia.

Even when ideologies talk about creating heaven on earth, even that kind of rendering is a very theological one. If heaven is not possible or if heaven doesn’t exist because we no longer believe in God, then we’re shifting the desire for transcendence to this world. And that has major political implications.

Matthew Kaemingk:
Right. It creates a sense of political urgency that if there is no ultimate judge, if there is no ultimate consequence, then we have to be the judge, we have to be the consequence right now. So, the loss of both heaven and hell can have real political consequences for us today. As opposed to, if you believe that there is life after death in which deep joy and flourishing can be experienced or true justice and punishment will happen, that can make this present age a little bit more mundane, a little bit more proximate, a little bit more incomplete.

You can essentially live with an election that doesn’t make you very happy or doesn’t fix everything. There’s a sense of contentment with the mundaneness or the proximateness of politics, whereas opposed when those are taken away. And we see this in the 20th century with secular states and secular rulers. There is a desire to create that heaven on earth and it has real consequences.

And communism, of course, is the most clear, almost cartoonish example of this, right, that the disposal of heaven and hell creates this desire to create an imminent heaven on earth and to do so with real violence and imminent wrath. And that’s just something for us to reflect on.

Even if you don’t believe in heaven and hell, you have to reflect on this human pattern of wanting to create a heaven or hell on earth and what you’re going to do with that.

Shadi Hamid:
Yeah. And it’s not just communist regimes, which obviously aren’t around all that much anymore, but I think this kind of utopianism, I mean, obviously is possible under any regime, under certain circumstances. And you can even see this reflected in how some politicians talk about evil. They’ll say things like, “We need to overcome evil.” Now that might sound like a somewhat banal statement, oh, who would be against that? But that sort of thing actually makes me nervous.

That’s asking a lot of politics to say that we can use political action to overcome something as fundamental to the human existence as evil itself. Is that even possible? And when you think that it’s your job to overcome evil, then you can justify not very great things as a result to get to that end goal.

Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. Well, I mean, let’s stick in your realm of international politics. So you think of the International Criminal Court, the United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights. So many of these things, I mean, incomplete, a very kind way to describe the ability of these institutions to establish justice or to hold people accountable. And so, if you don’t believe in a heaven or hell, and you look at the International Criminal Court and its ability to hold people accountable, its ability to exact justice, I think, that’s worthy of reflection.

Shadi Hamid:
In that sense, justice is not possible in the way we would have hoped. And I’ve been reflecting on this a lot just in terms of what we talked about in our previous episode on how I’ve been struggling with the implications of the Gaza War. When you see evils being committed, when you see human catastrophe at a massive scale, or even just to go back a couple years to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, there is this question of will Putin ever be held to account? Will he ever face justice for his very real crimes?

And I think that when you think about it that way, the only conclusion that you can reach is that, he probably won’t, that there isn’t actually a satisfying answer in this regard. So then the question is, what do we do with that unfortunate reality that there are a lot of dictators, just to take obvious examples because we don’t want to make clear … It’s obviously harder to assume who’s going to heaven or hell outside of extreme cases.

I mean, usually, we fall back on people like Putin, other dictators, Hitler’s the obvious one. If Hitler doesn’t spend a good chunk of eternity, if not, the full extent of eternity. Because there is actually an interesting debate among Islamic theologians. I assume it’s also the case among Christian theologians about when we talk about eternity, do we really mean eternity in the fullest sense, or is there a kind of time-boundness to one’s sojourn in hell fire?

And there’s different ways of interpreting that. And of course, through God’s grace, I mean, God has the capability to relieve even the most evil from permanent domain in hell fire. So that’s ultimately his judgement . But we take these extreme examples and there’s almost a sense of they probably should spend a long time in hell. That satisfies a kind of natural urge that we have. This sense that these people are really going to get away with quite literally murder and in this case, mass murder at the scale of hundreds of thousands or millions and so forth.

So the question is, if you don’t believe in hell, then you face some kind of difficulty when you’re dealing with someone like Vladimir Putin and the invasion of Ukraine. How do you make sense of that? And how do you sit with that? I know that it’s certainly possible for non-believers to sit with the prospect that Putin will get away with it and there won’t be true justice for him.

I would personally prefer to live in a world where I don’t have to sit with that. I mean, that seems very metaphysically uncomfortable. And then you might say, well, Shadi, just deal with the discomfort.

Matthew Kaemingk:
And I don’t know what I would say exactly to that, but I would rather not deal with that. That’s a hard one for me to get my head around because the flip side of that too is that the people who are killed unjustly in war through feminine or whatever else before their, we don’t like to say before their time. That’s also a debate within Islam as well. Does anyone really die before their time? But just to use it as a kind of colloquial expression, people who die at very young ages and premature death, whatever it might be. What happens to them because they haven’t experienced justice in other sense of having their own reward?

Shadi Hamid:
So, yeah, I mean, I think, your comments here around the mystery of hell that my take here, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, is that Christians and Muslims have disagreements about hell, not only between one another, but within themselves. So Christians disagree about who’s going to go there. They disagree about how long it’s going to last. And they disagree about what the Bible has to say about hell. So there’s lots of debates about this topic.

There’s generally consensus that hell, for Christians, hell is an unwelcome state, and there are people that go there. So, those who would deny that there’s such a thing as hell or deny that anyone goes there, they’re the ones who are typically outside the fold. But beyond that, there’s a lot of disagreements amongst Christians about this. That’s actually not what I want to debate.

Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah.

Shadi Hamid:
But I think that the important thing here is actually the mystery of hell itself. And I think that’s actually politically helpful as well in that Christian Christians, by and large, are pretty cautious about putting sticky notes on people and saying, “You’re going to heaven. You’re going to hell. You’re going to heaven,” because of this belief that that is God’s task. That’s not my task. As a human being, I don’t save people and I don’t damn people.

There are a variety of reasons why I tell my children not to say goddamn you. But one of them is essentially that it’s not your job to tell God what to do. And, of course, there are Muslims and Christians who speak of hell with such perfect certainty that they are politically dangerous.

Matthew Kaemingk:
That is absolutely true, that there are Christians and Muslims who speak of heaven and hell with such certainty that they are dangerous. That said, I would argue that a healthy sense of mystery and scepticism and a healthy sense of fear is politically formative in that I should walk an American street with a sense of humility that I don’t know who’s going to heaven or hell. And I should engage in political debate with a sense of humility and mystery about those things.

A good understanding of hell should give me a healthy sense of humility, scepticism, and a little bit of fear about how I speak and behave politically within an American democracy. Whereas, if there is no heaven and hell, and I’m the adjudicator of that today, that I can cancel people and I can make specific judgements and condemn them in that sense, that creates a very different kind of citizen where I want perfect judgement  right now.

It’s actually the mystery of hell itself that, I think, is an important one for citizens to think about.

Shadi Hamid:
Yeah, that’s really important. And there is this stereotype that Muslims are very quick to deem people unbelievers and so forth. But actually, to actually classify someone as an unbeliever, the Arabic word is kafir, which comes from the verb kaffara, which means to cover up. So there’s actually an interesting debate about what this word actually means. It’s not just someone who doesn’t believe in Islam, it’s someone who is exposed to the truth and then consciously covers it. But that’s a little bit of a side point.

But actually one thing that Muslims are not supposed to do is to go around calling people kafers. And that’s why extremist groups like Isis and Al-Qaeda are seen as so dangerous because they popularise excommunication. They believe that it is their role to make these judgements and then to punish people accordingly.

And there’s actually some traditions that say that, and this is maybe not to be taken too literally, but the one who unjustly calls someone an unbeliever becomes an unbeliever themselves. It’s a very heavy burden and one that no one should take lightly. And generally, you’re not supposed to go around making these judgments as an ordinary lay Muslim and that sort of thing.

And ultimately, I think, this is very much similar in both of our faiths. You have to reserve, you can make all your suppositions as much as you want and try to make legal judgments about who’s in what category or not. But ultimately, those are just human judgments. And then none of us as humans can superimpose a decision on God himself.

I do want to bring up the question of incentive structures here, which is maybe somewhat related to this because if we’re talking about the usefulness of hell as a political concept, then there is a certain utility in human beings treating it as a real serious thing and being conscious of it that if you are aware of hell, that will presumably incentivize you, as we alluded to earlier, to do good or to avoid doing bad.

And there’s an interesting quote from Marsilius of Padua, who was a precursor to Machiavelli and makes a very instrumentalist argument for the existence of hell. The quote is this, “The function of the priest, in fact, is to supplement the action of the police and the judge by the fear of hell.” This is really interesting that I think that this makes more sense in the pre-modern context because let’s keep in mind that you didn’t have large police forces, you didn’t have large ministries of justice that could adjudicate all the cases and inflict penalties. And you also didn’t have mass jails in the way that you do in the modern period.

I mean, the kind of modern prison as itself is a modern construction. And so, when you don’t have that same kind of punitive capacity in the pre-modern period, you can’t just rely on prisons, police and judges. There is a need for something else because the state is not all encompassing. The state is inherently limited. So, I think, it’s a very interesting thing to think about that in the pre-modern period for things that don’t really have much to do with theology, hell is more necessary.

And it seems to be less necessary now as the state becomes larger and more all encompassing.

Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. Yeah. So I’d want to push on that a little bit in that I don’t think that Joe Biden is very capable of instilling fear in the American people and making them behave. I don’t actually think it’s the state. I think more of Michel Foucault’s book Discipline and Punish and this understanding in modern society that we are being watched and we are being judged by one another.

And it’s actually the fear of being cancelled or the fear of being judged, the fear of being excluded-

Shadi Hamid:
From the social group.

Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah.

Shadi Hamid:
Yeah.

Matthew Kaemingk:
The fear of being seen as backwards or unintelligent or uncivilised. And that fear and that control is active in our universities. It’s active in our schools. It’s active in our businesses and our media that we still have a fear of hell, but that hell is imminent now. It’s being excluded. It’s being outside. So we’re still living in fear but it’s a different form of hell.

And that gets to this point that essentially by getting rid of the idea or the theology of hell, the modern world has not done away with wrath or judgement  or violence. These things are still very much active in our political and cultural lives, but they’re actually more immediate and they’re more human. Now, it’s actually we who control the fires of hell with the way that we treat one another on social media and so forth.

So, I think, it actually kind of helps us understand the wrath of a place like Twitter and the intensity of it.

Shadi Hamid:
And in that sense, hell frees us from the burden of imposing cancellations and enforcing penalties in quite the same way. It gets to this sense that we urgently need to cancel people if we don’t have any confidence that they might be cancelled by God just to extend the metaphor a little bit more. I’m curious how you deal, and this gets us a little bit into the question of theodicy or why or how God permits evil in this world.

I’m curious just from a personal standpoint, when you see mass injustice and mass suffering, how do you process that? And I don’t know, hell is probably part of hell and heaven, but just because I feel that I have actually become, I wouldn’t want to overstate this, but somewhat more religious, if I can phrase it that way, in the last seven months since Gaza, because when you’re, well, first of all, there is a kind of identity politics aspect as we talked about in the last episode, that when you see something being done against your group, it pushes you to emphasise that group identity.

So if I see this being done against Muslims, then it makes me feel more Muslim as a result. That’s more like a secular explanation for it. But I think also because I feel so powerless in the face of the injustice that I perceive in Gaza, how do I make sense of that? If I feel that we’re powerless to change it, at least in the here and now or in the short term, then that can really lead to a profound sense of despair.

But then, if you think about it that the people who are taken from us and killed in this senseless way, that they will have another life, that they will have entry into heaven. There is a kind of consolation, and again, I know that secular folks often hear things like that and they’re like, “Oh, there we go again. Religion is a crutch for the weak-minded.” But I think it’s worth dwelling on the metaphor of the crutch.

Because, actually, what’s bad about having crutches? I mean, if you’ve broken your leg, this is the way you move in the world. This is the way you get from point A to point B. Having a crutch is absolutely necessary. And if we think about human beings as being, to use the Christian parlance, broken by sin. If we are all broken in this fundamental way, then there’s no shame in walking around with crutches. There’s no shame in having consolation from religion, right?

Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. I’m just going to respond straight up as a Christian here.

Shadi Hamid:
Yeah.

Matthew Kaemingk:
So your first question was how do I respond to this intense injustice or just the tragedy of use, the example of Gaza and innocent people dying and suffering. I think as a Christian, the first thing is not so much consolation and feeling better about it or making sense of it, because I think, Christianity does not make sense of evil. It does not give you an answer and tie it up in a little bow where, okay, now I understand why children are dying in Gaza.

If you expect to get that from the Bible, you will leave disappointed. The Bible’s not meant to answer all of your questions. But I think that the Bible or the Christian faith gives us a number of steps by which we process this rage and this anger. And the first is just not to deny rage and anger so that when I feel that rage or anger, the Bible actually gives me words to express that.

So, the ancient Israelites would talk about and ask God to destroy their enemies and to bring God’s wrath and justice. In Psalm 137 just famously says, essentially, God, we pray that their babies would have their heads smashed against rocks, And that’s a part of the Bible. That is something they would pray and sing to God because they were so filled with rage about the injustice that they were seeing, so-

Shadi Hamid:
But to be clear, is that something that was perceived as good or bad or something in between in that specific biblical account, presumably that’s not good.

Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah, no, I mean, it is just said in the song and it just kind of sits there. And that’s the whole point is that in that moment where you feel rage, as a Christian, or in this case, as a Jew, you are allowed to express that rage, that raw emotion and that raw desire to God and that God will hear that. So, when the Israelites are slaves in Egypt and they’re being mistreated, they cry out to God for justice, and God hears their cry.

So I think that the first resource is rage and tears are okay. Of course, what you do with those rage and tears is an ethical question that we can talk about. But the first thing is just rage and tears are okay. The second thing is, and I guess I could say an impatient, I think, this is going to be something that makes you uncomfortable, Shadi.

Shadi Hamid:
Okay, I’m ready. Let’s do it.

Matthew Kaemingk:
You can impatiently yell at God in that you can say to God, “God.” So the term is maranatha, come quickly, Lord. We exist now in this time of God’s patience where God is patiently allowing human beings to destroy one another. And maranatha is this, come quickly, God. And there’s kind of an impatience it of essentially, God, what are you doing? Why don’t you just fix this now?

And the Bible gives Christians permission to say that to God. Now, Christians don’t stay there in that permanent state of anger and rage and sadness. They move through it. But you are allowed to say those things to God. And then, at the end of one of these laments in Job, this is the last thing, is this ultimate sense of our finitude that we don’t understand what God is doing.

And by God’s grace, we are given some level of peace that God is God and we are not. So, you’re kind of allowed to fight with your parent and your parent graciously gives you a sense of peace to continue. Those are the things that I would point to, as a Christian, how I would process something like Gaza.

Shadi Hamid:
Yeah, I’m intrigued by this idea of impatiently yelling at God. I think that one of the mainstream Muslim responses to this would be as I think you were correct, to point out, a kind of discomfort. I mean, that’s not something, I certainly growing up, I remember people, oh, you can have this contentious back and forth with God in your personal relationship with him.

But more recently, as I’ve explored or at least been more open to aspects of the Sufi path a little bit more. And one of my Sufi, I guess, I don’t want to say spiritual advisors, but he’s just someone that I talk to about these things every now and again. And I remember him telling me, kind of encouraging me, I think, I was frustrated about something. And he’s like, “Shadi, God wants you to come as you are. So if you feel a kind of impatience, if you’re kind of angry about something, God wants to hear that anger.”

I mean, obviously there’s limits to how maybe that should be expressed when you’re sort of face-to-face with God metaphorically. But this sense that we shouldn’t hide who we are from God because if we are feeling this kind of impatience or almost maybe even a resentment towards God or a resentment towards our religion, and I’ve talked about in the past how sometimes during Ramadan I felt a certain kind of resentment to religion for forcing me to be less productive because I had sort of hailed productivity as a false God, if you will.

And I had to come to terms with that, but there was an anger and an impatience there. But God knows what I’m feeling inside. So this idea that, oh, just don’t talk to him. If he knows I’m feeling resentment, then I might as well come out and talk to him outright about it. But that’s sort of where I’m at.

Matthew Kaemingk:
Oh man, all the evangelicals listening to this are just cheering for you Shadi-

Shadi Hamid:
Wow. Wow.

Matthew Kaemingk:
… because that sounds very evangelical actually. There’s one evangelical pastor, Tim Keller, he uses this metaphor that might resonate with your spiritual advisor. He talks about how when the king is sleeping, no one dares to wake up the king except the king’s child. The king’s child knows that he can go in and wake the king up and say, “Something’s really bothering me.” And the king’s child goes in without fear knowing that he’s welcome.

And the pastor says, this is the kind of access that we have to God that we can bother God with the things that enrage us. Anyways, there you go.

Shadi Hamid:
Love that. Love that. And maybe I’ll just bring up another personal little anecdote. So I was at this, it was kind of like a Muslim event at my local Muslim community centre here in DC. And it was a theme, something kind of vague like how do we turn to God better and develop our relationship with him from an Islamic perspective? And so, one of the exercises as part of this session is they asked each of us to take a minute or two and to write what attributes of God come to mind when we think about what God is? How do we describe him? And not to overthink it, but just to have what’s your instinctive reaction to that question?

And everyone else is picking all these really nice attributes and they’re trying to maybe impress other people in the group. There’s things that you’re supposed to say, and there’s ways that we think we’re supposed to feel about God, that God is all these wonderful things. Great, yeah. But I don’t know. So the two things that I wrote down, I wrote a couple things, but two of the ones that I wrote down that were front of mind, God is being stern and removed.

And I actually shared that with the group. And it was interesting that it was such a contrast to what everyone else had said, but people were like, “Yeah, so glad you said that. There’s a part of us,” because I think that in Orthodox context, in Muslim communities, there is sometimes this tendency to see God in this way. And I think it’s worth pushing back against that and challenging it and sitting with that and saying that this is something that we’re struggling with but I still have vestiges of that, that I don’t always feel that I can reach God maybe in the way that I would like.

And just to see other folks in the room to see that resonate with them made me feel less weird about it. So there’s just a basic use, even if you think it’s not going to sit well with the group, sometimes you can be pleasantly surprised and then you also signal to others that it’s okay for them to feel this way too, and they shouldn’t feel shame about that.

Matthew Kaemingk:
True.

Shadi Hamid:
But I think what’s good about my Sufi friend and what he was trying to convey to me, and what you’re telling me from the evangelical side of things, is that when you feel a kind of, maybe lie isn’t the right word, but that it’s okay to speak with God in this more personal way and to share your impatience with him, it actually can help you develop a closer relationship with him. Because if you’re holding back because you see him as a stern father, then you’re missing something. The relationship isn’t going to be as rich and deep as it probably should be.

Matthew Kaemingk:
Right. Yeah. I think that there’s something though really important when it comes to the wrath that we feel, it’s actually important to know that God has wrath. And I think you were right to push back against those who would have God as a nice guy actually. And I’d like-

Shadi Hamid:
Yeah, all this lovey-dovey stuff. Yeah.

Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. I actually think not simply because it’s theologically true. It is theologically true, that God has wrath, that God gets angry that God judges. That’s theologically true. But I also think that it’s politically important for us to think about God’s wrath and God’s judgement . And one of the authors I point to with this, a guy named Miroslav Volf, really famous theologian, written a lot of great books.

But one of his first ones that he won a lot of awards for and a lot of recognition for is called Exclusion and Embrace. And so Miroslav Volf is a Croatian theologian who went through just the horrors of the war and the Balkans, torture, exploring issues of just terrible violence and hatred and racism and religious bigotry, that is the Balkans.

And he is theologically trying to make sense of this, and how do I square what I experienced in the Balkans and my sense of rage, like my desire for these people to get justice and my sense of wrath? How do I square that with who God is? And he’s a Christian theologian. And he ends his book … So he’s at Yale, he’s in this mainline Christianity. But he has some very harsh words for those who would have this understanding of a nice God, let me just read this quickly.

Shadi Hamid:
Yes.

Matthew Kaemingk:
He says that a, “Nice God is a figment of liberal imagination, a projection onto the sky of the inability to give up cherished illusions about the goodness, freedom and the rationality of social actors.” And he just goes on and on about the necessary violence of God in order for us to be loving in this particular moment. That it helps us understand the wrath and anger that we feel to know that God feels those things too.

So if you imagine that God was always happy and always nice and always hugging people, it would be really hard to talk to him about suffering. It would be really hard to feel like he cared at all. We talk about today the sort of toxic positivity when you meet someone who’s toxically positive, but everything is amazing and wonderful.

Shadi Hamid:
I can’t stand those people.

Matthew Kaemingk:
They’re the worst, right? Well, God is not toxically positive. God experiences rage and wrath. That said, of course, it’s important to note that within Christian theology, we would say, God is love. We would never say, God is wrath. God executes moments of wrath against injustice and these sorts of things, but God is not defined by wrath.

But for Miroslav Volf, he would argue that, and this is why I opened this whole podcast by talking about me being in suburbia, is that when you’re in suburbia, it is easy to sort of conjure a sort of niceness to God and a sort of comfort to God. And that God is a suburban neighbour who will lend you his lawnmower or whatever. But if you come out of the Balkans or if you come out of Gaza and you experience that kind of violence and injustice and just horror, you absolutely have to believe in God’s wrath and judgement  or what are we doing here?

Shadi Hamid:
Yeah, well said. And just a reminder that our political and social context shapes how we view theology. So being Americans, we might have more trouble seeing God in this fashion or acknowledging these wrathful aspects. But if you’re born and raised and have to live through a different kind of political context, your theology emerges out of that in a different way. And just to see the interplay between the political and the theological and the kind of complex feedback loops there, you mentioned that the people who are toxically happy.

And maybe we can sort of begin to wrap up here, I don’t know if this will be a positive thought or not.

Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. How do we wrap up a discussion on hell with joy?

Shadi Hamid:
We go from hell to heaven. That’s what I’m trying to do here. One reason that I think maybe both of us bristle a little bit at the idea of someone who’s always smiley and happy, and it just seems like a little bit much is because in some sense, for the believer, true happiness is not possible in this world. So anyone who’s simulating a kind of complete or total or thoroughgoing happiness, there’s something suspect about that because they’re trying to give evidence of something that is simply not possible.

And that also, I think, relieves a burden from us if we sort of acknowledge that true and sort of consistent happiness is not possible in the here and now, then we can chill a little bit because we don’t feel the same kind of pressure to always be happy. And this is where I think there have been a lot of criticisms of the happiness industry. You have all these self-help books and podcasts that tell us how to be happy, and they create a kind of pressure that when we don’t feel happy, we think there’s something wrong with us, that we’re not in a kind of natural state.

And I think religion offers a kind of counter to that that Happiness isn’t a constant state. We are not meant to be happy all of the time. We’re meant to be sad, we’re meant to be despondent because life is suffering. Life does involve suffering. And this idea that we can even overcome suffering, and I’m using that word again, overcome, that we overcome suffering the way we overcome evil is a fantasy that has political implications.

Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah that it’s through technique. It’s through human technology and politics that we can perfect ourselves and we can perfect human happiness, and we can also perfect human justice. That we can visit true justice on evildoers right here and now. And that sort of overconfidence is not helpful at all, that we can hack goodness, and we can hack evil through human technique.

It puts way too much pressure on our social and political interactions as opposed to allowing politics to be mundane, incomplete, imperfect and proximate actions that are the best that we can manage as opposed to a sort of heavenly or hellish vocation, if you will.

Shadi Hamid:
Well, guys, you heard it here. Heaven is not possible here on Earth. Deal with it. Thanks to all of you for listening to this episode of Zealots at the Gate. This is pretty awesome, Matt. And it’s just a reminder of why I love our interactions and exchanges. And it feels spiritually nourishing that you come out of this and you’re like, hmm, I kind of feel good about this. Not too good. We don’t want to be too happy, but we feel good.

So, to all of you, dear listeners and viewers, if you like what you heard, check out our other episodes, give us a rating, subscribe, and also check out our host, Comment Magazine at comment.org. A lot of good stuff there on the intersection of religion, spirituality, and politics.

And, again, we want to hear from you. You can find us on Twitter at my handle, @ShadiHamid, my full name, and @MatthewKaemingk, note the Dutch spelling. And yeah, we do that joke a lot. And please feel free to use the #zealotspod on Twitter. We’ll keep an eye on that. And also, you can send us an email at zealots@comment.org. We would love to hear from you.

Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. And our thanks to our sponsor, Fuller Seminary’s Mouw Institute of Faith and Public Life. Zealots at the Gate is hosted by Comment magazine. It’s produced by Allie Crummy, audience strategy by Matt Crummy with editorial direction from Ms. Anne Snyder. Until next time. I’m Matthew Kaemingk.

Shadi Hamid:
And I’m Shadi Hamid. Thanks for joining us.

Matthew Kaemingk:
See y’all.