No Chance in Hell

For many believers, it’s hard to imagine heaven without its less desirable opposite. That kind of duality—a leftover from the days of Plato—provides religion with balance but also begs a messy question that’s hamstrung theologians for centuries: “How can the God of love also be a God of judgment?” In his new book, Hell NO!, (Cold Tree Press, 200 pp., $12.95) Nashvillian Raymond D. White takes on the existence of the netherworld—but with a twist. White isn’t a theologian; he’s a civil engineer.

Unlike theological exemplars such as Augustine and Ambrose—and retired Vanderbilt Divinity School professor David Buttrick (who’s thanked in Hell NO!’s introduction)—White is only half serious. Following the old joke about Reaganomics, his book is divided into three “halves.” The first takes the point of view of a “Hellion,” the author’s sarcastic term for people “whose theology is not complete unless a lot of people wind up in hell.” According to this argument, hell has to exist “because of all the people we know who absolutely need to go there.”

White himself plainly doesn’t believe in the likelihood of eternal damnation. In Hell NO!’s second half, he contends that hell is impractical due to “space problems” and “operating costs.” The concept must derive, instead, “from the Hellion’s own little minds” because a loving, practical God would never have created it.

Having thus dispensed with hell (and almost 2,000 years of Christian theology), the book’s third “half” turns its attention to how religious folks might better spend their time. “Our religion is going to boil down to what we do,” he writes. “Love and compassion are going to be the big things.” In White’s scheme, our religious lives have nothing to do with either heaven or hell.

Hell NO! makes the most of engineering principles to make this case. For example, the Second Law of Thermodynamics (that all systems are heading toward decay) is applied to morality: “We don’t have to fight to be bad,” White says, “but we do usually have to struggle to be good.” Unlike the Second Law, however, divine experiences don’t usually adhere to principles of logic, and White seems closed to the role mystery plays in faith. Additionally, he doesn’t properly address more progressive interpretations of hell that depend on existential suffering and separation from God, rather than fire and brimstone.

That said, White scores points for eliminating hell as a destination for “the other” and those who may not believe as we do. In a world growing increasingly small, there’s less room for my-way-or-the-highway fundamentalism. Such discrimination not only leads to confusion about the next world, but also makes it impossible to live in this one.