A guide takes the audience from scene to scene. The tour starts with a teenage girl in a doctor’s office being told she has gonorrhea. How will she tell her parents? The guide makes clear the irony: this girl was a Christian, and she knew that premarital sex is a sin.

Next up is a gaunt young man being told that he has AIDS. He also knew that his homosexual lifestyle was sinful.

Then there’s a girl on a filthy gurney in a back-alley abortion clinic. There’s blood everywhere, and she’s screaming in pain. A drugged drink leads to rape. A drunk driver crashes, killing himself and everyone in the car. A drug overdose. A demon greets someone dabbling with Satanic spells. A suicide. Worse of all would be dying without getting right with Jesus, which would commit you to eternity in hell. Sin has consequences, people!

Welcome to Hell House, a haunted house attraction recast with an Evangelical moralistic viewpoint. It’s designed to scare the Jesus into you.

Hell House with a twist

Hell Houses are out of fashion, at least where I live. If you’re in the same situation, left out of the hellish fun, I have good news. I came across an interesting variation on a Hell House. It’s a video about getting a letter from a place you’d never expect. It’s called “A letter from hell!”

In the story, Josh and Zach were in high school. They had classes together, they played sports together, they partied together. They were best friends. One thing Zach never got around to doing—it was a small omission, really—was sharing with Josh his personal relationship with Jesus.

Then one night, Josh drove home from a party. He was drunk, and he crashed and died. Zach’s small omission meant that his best friend hadn’t accepted Jesus before he died.

After the funeral, Zach got a letter in the mail. It was from Josh, describing the afterlife. He says he’s in line at heaven’s gate. But his name isn’t in the Book of Life, and he’s dragged away to a holding cell. Josh is terrified and blames Zach. “You say you’re my friend, but if you really were, you would’ve told me about this Jesus.”

Angels come into the cell and drag Josh off. He can smell the sulfur, and then he feels the fire. “Zach, why didn’t you tell me?!”

Josh ends his letter, “P.S. Wish you were here.”

Zach’s reply

Zach defends himself with his own letter, saying, “Don’t bother me.” He has school to do, sports to play, and life to live. He rationalizes that his friends will make up their own minds.

Presumably the mixture of Josh’s anguish, his revenge wish that Zach would also be sentenced to hell, and Zach’s callous reply is supposed to push the right buttons to scare teens into evangelizing their friends.

That motivation for a congregation is understandable. Christianity must be continually replenished with new blood, and with adults, it’s too late since they rarely switch into a religion. Christianity’s primary feedstock is the children of Christians, but another important source is Christian teens bringing in their friends. (I explore the embarrassing fact that Christianity survives only with children indoctrinated before they’re old enough to understand here.)

Critique

While this video letter might make an effective emotional argument for some, look more closely and we’ll see it has problems.

– The story Josh wanted from Zach is the story of a god who’s infinitely good and yet created hell. It’s the story of a loving deity who slipped infinite torment into his “perfect” plan, hoping no one notices. It’s incoherent.

– It makes no sense to dump the blame on Zach. Who in America hasn’t heard about Jesus and the Christian concept of hell? Josh even admitted that he had. Sharing the Jesus story is like giving someone a stock tip—maybe it’s a good investment, and maybe not. It’d be awkward to pressure a friend to buy the stock and then have its price fall. Christianity is like a thousand other religions—Shintoism, Jainism, Mormonism, Scientology—that we agree are invented. Why think Christianity isn’t more of the same?

– Many Christians are embarrassed by the doctrine of God creating hell. I occasionally see C.S. Lewis used to salvage God’s honor with the claim, “The doors of hell are locked on the inside.”

But Christians must pick. (1) They can have God as a heartless monster and accept Zach’s story that hell means exquisite torment. He’s in a frenzy to get out, but he can’t. Or, (2) they can have Lewis’s hell, in which the inmates of hell are in a prison of their own making, but then Zach would be gone, and this “Letter from hell” makes no sense.

– Does God want the threat of hell to scare us straight? Then he can come down and tell us about it. As always, God avoids the opportunity to do something significant on earth—end covid, stop natural disasters, or make an unambiguous statement about how to go to the “Good Place” after death. Instead, we’re assured by his self-appointed human messengers that they can speak for him—which is what we’d see if there were no God.

– How lasting will a commitment to Jesus be if someone is frightened into it?

The Great Commission makes no sense

This is the big one.

The foundational claim supporting this entire Jesus-died-so-you-could-avoid-hell project is that Jesus himself demanded that his flock spread the word. That’s the Great Commission, where Jesus said, “Go and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19).

That sounds like the last word on the subject. Jesus has spoken, so why are you still hanging around? Get out and evangelize!

But here, as with the letter from hell, a little thought uncovers many problems.

– Jesus wasn’t talking to you. Read that chapter, and you’ll see that Jesus’s audience was his disciples.

But what about passing on the message long-term? The original disciples would eventually die, so surely the Great Commission was binding on future generations?

Nope. There was no “long term” in the Jesus story. He was an Apocalyptic prophet, and he thought that the end would come in just a few years. He said, “This generation will not pass away until all these things take place” (Matt. 24:34). “All these things” included stars falling from heaven, so the typical Christian excuses fail. (For example, apologists often tap dance that Jesus actually meant the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE. That was a disaster, to be sure, but it’s very different from the end of the universe).

We find the same “the end is nigh” thinking from Paul. He likened the resurrection of Jesus to the first fruits of a harvest. With Jesus risen, Paul expected him to soon harvest those who belong to him (1 Corinthians 15:20–23).

Paul also reassured one of his congregations when they grumbled that Jesus was late, and Christians were starting to die. Paul said that when Jesus came, the dead would be swept up, followed by “we who are still alive and are left” (1 Thessalonians 4:17).

– Jesus’s message was not a universal message. In what has been called the lesser commission, Jesus said,

Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans. Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel [that is, Jews who have been abandoned by their Jewish leaders]. As you go, proclaim this message: “The kingdom of heaven has come near.” (Matt. 10:5–7)

No modern Christian interprets Jesus’s instructions as a command to preach solely to Jews.

– When Jesus sent apostles out to spread the word, he gave them superpowers: “Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons” (Matt. 10:8). Incredibly, Jesus also granted the power to judge sins, a power you’d think would be reserved for God himself (Matt. 18:18, John 20:23).

Christians today who don’t have these superpowers probably shouldn’t flatter themselves that they have been chosen to walk with the apostles.

– It’s arrogant for one person to imagine that their interpretation of the message of Jesus is the correct one. There are 45,000 denominations in Christianity. That’s a lot of different interpretations. It’s not realistic for any Christian to feel certain that they had it figured out.

– Evangelizing isn’t necessary to get people saved because we’re already saved. Paul in Romans 5:18–19 draws a parallel between Adam and Jesus. Just as we didn’t need to opt in to inherit Adam’s sin, Paul assures us that we don’t need to do anything to get Jesus’s grace.

See you in heaven.

(Read more on the irrelevance of the Great Commission to modern Christians).

If God has a really important message for us, I suggest he come down and give it to us and stop looking indistinguishable from a god who doesn’t exist.

“Why is God hidden?”
I’d say for the same reason that
unicorns and dragons and leprechauns are hidden.
— commenter C Peterson