Hell

a chapter I wrote on a hell I don't believe in for a book I never published.

Hello and happy equinox! It was a devilish 99 degrees here in Nashville yesterday, but as if on cue, today the fever of this godforsaken heat basin has broken and from here on out it’s my favorite time of year; long golden light, leaves dancing in the air on their way to graciously fertilize my grass (I am a devotee of not raking my yard ever), and the air still kissed with warmth before the chill of frost arrives.

The designated moments on our solar calendars of seasons changing seem to be fertile times for reflection, creativity, and expression; in that spirit, I wanted to share something that has met its end in me. The enmity in my body has begun to be able to calm and heal due to my letting go of the concept of an afterlife hell where the wicked go to perish. As a reminder, I wrote a book for an imprint of Penguin Random House that I decided not to publish because I really wasn’t sure if I could meet the requirements of promoting a book for a progressive and expansive but still ultimately Christian imprint.

Interestingly enough, the writing process I did on hell for this book revealed to me just how much my experience in the Christian music industry triggered me in certain areas; and how those repeated triggers actually ended up helping to wake me up to my religious trauma. (Thank you, Christian music industry! And I say that with no salt or sarcasm. Almost none, anyway, let’s be real.) I think that realization also helped me see how I didn’t want to use my faith to make a living quite in the way I had somehow found myself doing as a Christian music artist, and that ultimately led to me not publishing this book. I find life’s circuitous nature to be so frustrating and so profound all at once. It feels good to share these chapters freely, knowing that I will never make money off the book that I wrote—the process of writing it still helped to heal me and I hope it might do the same for others. I’m almost done paying back my advance money, and sharing the chapters here feels so good.

I let my belief in hell begin to leave my body a long time ago, but do be aware that I wrote this chapter when I was still attempting to stay in the Church, so you may see that in these paragraphs. That is no longer the case for me, so I have felt uncertain about how to share this book, but something whispered in my ear today that it was time to share this chapter. I hope it brings you some comfort, some good questions, or maybe even a little disruption. (gasp) Please feel free to leave questions and comments; as always, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

XO,

Audrey

“Hell”

“Shall not the judge of all the earth do what is right?” - Genesis 18:25

I heard ‘the Gospel’ a lot growing up. Even though we rarely had visitors, especially people who weren’t Plymouth Brethren, we had weekly Sunday night gospel preaching, and most of us attended without fail. On Sundays my brothers and I often awakened to the soft but insistent chiming of the neighborhood Episcopal Church bells, and we whispered and tiptoed around upstairs, hoping by some chance our parents would sleep in and we’d miss church. It rarely happened, but we never gave up hope or tip-toeing! We’d pile into our van or station wagon, depending on the era, and drive fifteen minutes or so to Park Street Chapel, a tiny white church with tennis-court green metal awnings straight out of the seventies covering its two front windows like a couple of gaudy eyelids. There was a postage stamp of a lawn fringed with honeysuckle bushes and a chainlink fence, and a small faded plastic slide playset sat in the back yard where the 9 or 10 kids of varying ages could take turns crawling over it in between services. I can still feel and taste and smell the delicacy of fragrant honeysuckle nectar, falling like dewdrops on my tongue from the blossoms I shook loose by the fence.

Sunday evenings felt a little sparser than Sunday mornings did, with more empty brown wooden chairs and a little more acoustics for the singing. I remember feeling like those of us who attended every Sunday night were the real ones. We were there to hear the truth yet again about the danger of separation, about the heroic feat achieved by Jesus, about the chance he offered us to escape eternal conscious torment; we believed we needed this weekly to remind us of not only our own possible fates, but also our role as truth-bearers to a lost and broken world. I sat through these meetings in full assent to the teaching, but wishing to high heaven I felt less fear and torment about it. I felt like I was in hell’s waiting room, with the flames of the wrath of God leaping out from under the entryway and licking my feet, anxious to visit upon me the wages of my sin.

It has often surprised me that some Christians don’t seem to feel any pain from growing up with this concept of hell. I would absolutely describe younger versions of me as being ‘hell-haunted’; perhaps it was my sensitive temperament, or my as-yet-undiagnosed case of OCD, or my deep and real concern about saving the souls of others. I spent most of my childhood worrying about hell and how to successfully help myself and others to avoid experiencing it. I brought Christian films to sleepovers and  preached to my poor unsuspecting Catholic friends on the walk to elementary school, warning them that if they didn’t ‘get saved’ they would go to hell when they died and burn constantly, forever. Unsurprisingly, I spent a lot of childhood struggling to make friends. (lol) Then again, I was overtly taught to be an outsider. Abstinence from fitting in with ‘the world’ was a must when it came to showing ourselves approved to the Father, and I was desperate to do so. Because, well, hell.

The ‘blessed assurance’ we sang about at church in hymns seemed completely unavailable to me. I felt so ashamed that I couldn’t access a feeling of certainty, and I thought that surely something hadn’t ‘taken’ correctly; I asked Jesus into my heart hundreds of times some nights before bed, trying to feel or word it correctly or meaningfully enough to finally feel some peace and rest about where I was going to spend the afterlife. Instead, the gap between me and blessed assurance remained unbridged until I finally allowed myself to question, and eventually release, the idea of hell entirely.

I began doing this in the summer of 2015, when I sat cross-legged on the bed in our 600 square foot pillbox of a house, my finger hovering over the trackpad of my laptop. My youngest brother Philip had recommended a documentary called, curiously, ‘Hellbound?’ to me during a phone conversation in which I’d confessed that I was beginning to…well…really wonder about things. I’d always had nagging questions, of course—I didn’t really sleep much at night as a child due to the machinations of my intensely quizzical and overactive mind—but I hadn’t really been used to permitting myself to follow the paths of my deepest curiosities once they got me too far away from whatever was considered orthodox or conventional. Something was shifting, though. My brother had mentioned it on the phone several days prior, and from its title alone I felt a gravitational pull too strong to resist. I had this feeling that once I had seen it, I would have been given some kind of permission I’d been longing for for many years.

I was not wrong. By the time I’d reached the end of the film just over an hour later, I was feeling simultaneously liberated and frustrated. On one hand, I felt deeply freed from the feelings of isolation that had been growing for the past several years as my questions had grown more insistent; but on the other, even as I breathed in the fresh air of this sudden release from loneliness, that joy was promptly and harshly interrupted by the realization that the doctrine of hell was popularly seen as so crucial to Christianity—so central, so integral, so foundational—that I was now in very grave danger of becoming someone who might be seen as a heretic‚ and a public one at that.

It wasn’t the first time theology and authenticity had been a difficult intersection in my life as an artist with a platform. Being a Catholic in Christian music already carried its own stigmas and complexities. When I signed a record deal at a major label in Nashville and recorded my first album, The House You’re Building, I was whisked off on radio tours to promote it. These ran me ragged and brought new depth and color to the dark circles under my eyes, as we hopped aboard as many as three flights a day for several days in a row.  At almost all of these radio stations, eyebrows were raised politely when I told them about my Catholicism, and I was nearly always asked not to mention it in our conversation on the air. I remember being struck immediately by the inauthenticity of this approach to interviewing. The radio single I was out there to win DJs and station owners into playing more often contained the line ‘it’s Your Sacred Heart within me beating,’ and was inspired by a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins (a Jesuit priest). I had poured a lot of intention and work into writing a song for radio that said what I felt were nuanced things like ‘You are my deepest longing, and so I see you everywhere,’ making the point that part of the reason I saw God everywhere is because God is what I so deeply desired. I had an intuition then, and still do, that we create for ourselves gods who look like our inner children, our parent figures, and our truest and deepest longings all overlaid on top of each other. And I’d mentioned the Sacred Heart of Jesus as (at the time) a passionate and deeply devout Catholic who desired to build  more bridges between Catholicism and Evangelicalism. This, to me, seemed like profoundly important work, and one that music could uniquely make more possible. But these things were rarely given room in interviews. More often, I was asked my coffee beverage preferences, when I’d ‘found the Lord’, and what my favorite Bible verse was. None of these questions are stupid. But they only scratched the surface, and as the years wore on I found these shallows to be increasingly meager. I began longing for depth in an industry that rewarded me for keeping it light.

I was asked to dial it back in other ways as well. I believe the words used by a record label executive were ‘You’re giving us yourself at an eleven. I’d like you to try dialing it back to six if you want to have a career.’ In the beginnings of my time at the record label there were media trainings for me to undergo, where I was taught how to take the reins of a conversation that was going off the rails, and how to present my unique point of view with both pith and dexterity. As part of the training I was asked if I had any particular platforms, charities, or causes that were close to my heart that I might be able to weave into my work as a public artist. I immediately piped up that I wanted to talk about pornography usage, as it was something I’d had a lot of experience with trying to reconcile in myself. I also said I’d love to talk about mental health. Not only was I discouraged at that time from publicly discussing either of these things, but I recall being told ‘Oh…no. You definitely don’t want to be known as ‘pornography girl’ right off the bat.’

I began waking up to the scope of my religious / spiritual trauma the year after I watched “Hellbound”, 9 years after I’d first begun interfacing with Christian music business. I sat in a therapist’s room which was then quiet, save a white noise machine’s steady, shushing hum of static in the background. The air between me and my sweater-vested counselor, who was resting deep in the corners of his leather easy chair, was awkwardly noiseless. He leaned forward after several silent moments of rubbing his white-whiskered chin with his hand. ‘I feel that it would benefit you to see a trauma therapist,’ he said gently. ‘This is sort of above my pay grade to diagnosis, but in my opinion, you are showing symptoms of PTSD.’ I felt profoundly embarrassed. I’d just exploded into yelling at him as we were exploring an experience I’d had with a Christian music executive who had told me in a meeting, among other things, that he’d dropped many female artists for being far less opinionated than I was. This man in a suit in a top-floor office had led off the entire conversation with “How’s your heart? It seems to me like you’re really struggling right now.” After I declined to engage in that emotional space, he proceeded to rebuke and lecture me and instruct me to tone it down. All this because I had begun asking if we could think more creatively about how to spend money, since the content we were making wasn’t really bringing a lot of clicks or sales my way. My anger had overtaken me as I recalled this, and I had shouted at my counselor as though he were the offending human, the man in the suit in the top-floor office; this was the first time I’d ever experienced anything quite like it, and it deeply scared me. “Okay,” I whispered, looking down at the floor. I wrote a trauma therapist’s name (Susan) and number down at his request, walked out, and heaved sobs in my messy car until I could get myself together enough to begin crunching my tires down the gravel driveway toward the road home.

This yelling episode in my kindly therapist’s office was just the latest in a string of symptoms I’d been experiencing. I’d begun having anxiety any time I walked into a church building. The familiar butterflies in my stomach would start fluttering in the hours leading up to my entering a church, whether on a Sunday morning for Mass or on a Friday night before I played a concert. I’d walk in and sit nervously, fidgeting with my hands, rummaging through my purse, reminding myself to take deep breaths.

I didn’t get the nerve up to call Susan for many months. I was terrified that once I started naming my pain, I would never be able to stop. I became fixated on the fear that something “big” had happened that I couldn’t remember—my understanding of trauma was so limited that I believed only people who have experienced one significant earth-shattering, life-interrupting event could have PTSD.  My construct and concept of that were limited to the post-wartime ‘shell shock’ I’d seen in movies and read about in books. So my brain started scanning for some large event, some gigantic repressed memory that would explain my symptoms. What I didn’t know is that trauma is not an event, but rather the response of the body to an event (or events) and can come just as easily from a 'slow drip' of painful or scary experience as it can from a one-time shock to the system. I never found one defining thing that had caused the PTSD symptom cluster for me. Instead, it turned out that there were many threads to the knots I felt in my body, and it would take time and patience to untangle them.

It wasn't just hell that tormented me. I, much like sweet and funny and elderly Gladys Hardy of The Ellen Show fame, loved Jesus but I cussed a little. This was somewhat permissible backstage and behind closed doors, especially for men in the business, but I preferred to be myself everywhere, including on social media. For my authenticity, I was regularly treated online to accusations of ‘being unfeminine’, heresy, and more. There were other things that set me apart, too, like my consistent doubts and my incorrigible spiritual curiosity. As I grew to understand myself more deeply, I found myself clumsily navigating an industry that reinforced the religious and emotional bubbles of their listeners—it did this to the extent that I was often asked not to share my authentic self with them, and it became quickly apparent that, even as a deeply spiritual and devout Christian at the time, I did not fit in. These repeated demands for muting and softening and ‘dialing back’ deepened and intensified some long-held feelings of dissociation from Self that I had already generally experienced in Christianity. I very quickly began to feel like I was masking myself in various ways to avoid upsetting ticket buyers and radio listeners. The challenging but important conversations I was interested in about faith, politics, and justice were not, I was told, conducive to album sales.

Nearly every time I did or said anything online that was perceived by Christian music listeners to be ‘post-modern,’ ‘political’, or ‘progressive,’ I was accused of shilling for acceptance popularity. And yet these were the precise moments I lost followers, fans, and sales. As I began to feel an intensifying and deepening dichotomy between who I was evolving to be and how I was being asked to present myself, my PTSD symptoms worsened. All of the faking and the posing wore on me more severely over time, and it stirred up the side effects of a lot of trauma that lingered from my fundamentalist upbringing. For this, I am ultimately grateful. Christian Music business was my portal to awakening in ways of which I am only now becoming aware. The discomfort I underwent as I tried to please the powers that be was part of what eventually woke me up and brought my questions to the surface. The Christian music industry helped me wake up to the spiritual trauma I carry from religious abuse—precisely by triggering me relentlessly in the areas where I held the most pain. Anything can be the Teacher—including, it turns out, CCM.

Somewhat oddly, for as much territory as hell occupies in orthodox Christian belief and teaching, it takes up almost no space at all in the lyrics of the Church’s songs. Jesus’ triumph over death at the cross is often sung about, but there isn’t much singing about what this triumph is actually supposed to be saving us from. I think most of us who grow up believing in hell are afraid to take our beliefs to their logical ends. Furthermore, for most of us, it seems that singing about it would feel terrifying and truly distasteful. Many of the hardest and most difficult Christian beliefs seem to get shuffled to the emotional back burner in our daily lives. We gasp in horror at Jack Chick’s overdramatic and theatrical tracts about hellfire and evil demons; but why? The fact remains that most Christians believe that a significant number of people in this world are going to hell when they die, to experience either complete separation from God or eternal conscious torment—or perhaps, by some metrics, both at once. If we believed that, why on earth wouldn’t we be talking about hell all the time, to anyone who would listen? Wouldn’t that be the most loving way we could live? I’m not the first person to make this point. But I am making it in service of another, which is that Christian songs contain little to no mention at all of hell. It would seem that for some reason, most communities don’t generally believe it’s helpful or edifying to sing about it. There is at least one notable exception to this, and that’s Westboro Baptist Church. They are, in my opinion, the most hyper-logical Evangelicals of our time.

Westboro Baptist Church is notorious for picketing at the funerals of American soldiers holding signs reading everything from “God Hates F*gs” to “God Sent The Shooter” (which they carried outside Sandy Hook elementary school). And unlike most of us who find it offensive to sing or shout about hell, they have made it their signature move. They have written parody songs like ‘Eternal Pain, Sulfur Rain’ (set to the tune of Prince’s Purple Rain) and ‘God’s Wrath Is Blowing In The Wind’, and they sing them outside wakes and weddings alike. While I find all of that entirely horrendous and hateful, and while I know most Christians aren’t doing things even remotely approaching this, I actually found myself watching the documentary and wondering why that is the case. I had to hand it to the Westboro Baptists. Their angry picketing and cruel songs, in some weird way, made complete and total sense. They followed a God whose wrath must and would be poured out on the majority of humans, and they believed in real hell where that wrath would be experienced forever by anyone who found themselves outside the fold. In view of that, they were doing the most sensible, logical thing—spending their lives warning people about it with little to no concern for anyone’s feelings on the subject.

Why are we even surprised at all by the content of Westboro Baptists’ songs or Jack Chick’s tracts? At the end of the day, don’t most Christians technically believe the same things, however reluctantly they might do so? It’s interesting that hellfire is something we are apparently required to believe in as Evangelicals, but also something many of us have long found incredibly difficult and unnecessary to discuss. “Oh,” our reasoning has often gone, “God doesn’t desire to scare anyone into heaven. Heaven is actually about finding union with God, not about avoiding hell.” I came to believe this in my late twenties, but couldn't long sustain it either. 

I now wonder if anywhere where an afterlife consisting of hell is even suggested in the religious equation as a real possibility, there are scant ways to move toward ‘union with God’ without fear—or, more interestingly, without feelings of relief. That sense of relief we feel when we think about how God has ‘saved us’ reveals our spiritual fears very clearly. We are afraid of God’s wrath, we are terrified of eternal conscious torment or of our souls being totally snuffed out. “Save me, God,” becomes our prayer—but we are not only looking for a savior from earthly pain, but from a future hell as well. We can have all the discomfort in the world admitting it, but if we believe in hell, I think we are simply a few steps away from Westboro’s logic has taken them. To be completely logical about the hell I was warned about would inevitably need to lead to my picketing a gay wedding and shouting at the grooms.

I now see how much my struggle against the social and spiritual veneers I was expected to wear in Christian music contributed to my awakening about hell. I began to see the facades around me everywhere like so many Guy Fawkes masks. I was wearing one myself. I began to slowly and carefully slip it down, peering over the top. Watching this documentary brought the mask further down as I finally, gloriously, tormentedly admitted to myself that I believed Rob Bell was right: love wins. And I began to feel the relief I'd always longed for; this time, not because Jesus had saved me from hell, but because maybe He had never needed to.

When religion makes solid or authoritarian claims about the afterlife, it seems to me to enter the territory of science. It is all well and good for it to do so, but I believe those claims are rightfully questionable, just as science must be. If we approached religion more as we do science, maybe we’d have an ever-evolving body of observation whose data are open to the interpretation of a million inquiring minds, from centenarians to six-year-olds. Why is church so little like a science fair? Where are religion’s baking soda and vinegar volcanoes, its frog dissections, its chemistry labs? When the potential of retribution is innate to its mission, how freely from fear may we actually question—or believe—its tenets?

I wonder, if we were to peel back the layers of psyche and archetype from Christianity’s varying claims and beliefs about hell, if we would ultimately encounter our deep and abiding terror that we are Spiritually Alone in the universe. I wonder if the concept of hell makes some of us feel safer because it involves a God that punishes evildoing, and if some of us dearly desire and indeed need to feel like God cares about the bad things that happen to us. I wonder if, for many of us, hell feels like a better option than Aloneness.

I wonder if there is the possibility of a reality in which we are neither cosmically alone nor in danger of separation from God; a situation in which God has never once planned or even experienced a separation from us. If the thought of even wondering this scares you, I can tell you that you are not alone; I used to be afraid of even asking if this, or anything approaching it, was possible. However, at every step and with every deepening question, I have felt the mercy and love of God’s Spirit. I wonder if you might, too.

Today, if you choose, perhaps you could just dream about some of these things yourself; uninhibited, unedited, and unfettered. For a few minutes, maybe you could imagine that there is no potential destruction of your soul, and wonder about a universe in which the Christ actually reconciles us all to ourselves and to each other and to God.

What comes up for you? Sit with it compassionately, if you like, and ask God to commune with you there.

Give them not hell, but hope and courage. Preach the everlasting love of God.– John Murray