Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [7]
Nearly all Christians think that union with God, peace and tranquility, and reunion with relatives are likely to await them as well as many of the other descriptions of the afterlife previously mentioned. Yet, few are explicitly part of the official Christian doctrine of resurrection. Many of these beliefs correlate highly with immortality of the soul, which has been synthesized with resurrection in Christianity since the fourth century but is not a significant New Testament doctrine. Americans do seem to agree more or less about these criteria, but some differences do exist: Jews are slightly more likely than Christians to imagine a nonpersonal existence; one half of Jews, but only one fifth of Christians, see a “vague” existence as likely. This finding seems intriguingly tied to Jewish ethnicity. It would be interesting to compare other groups segregated by ethnicity and questioned in an “ethnically aware” environment.
The Demise of the Devil13
ANOTHER INTERESTING phenomenon in American life is the gradual disappearance of any notion of hell in the liberal and mainline churches.14 Many have seen this “demise of the devil” as a sign that we are losing our moral bearings-our sense of evil. On the other hand, one might just as easily argue that the demise of the devil is an indication that the United States is coming to terms with itself as a culturally-plural country, and as a result many of us have lost our desire to carry religious vengeance out on our fellow-countrymen in the next world, ironically just at the moment when so many fundamentalist extremists around the world are preaching our damnation.15
Jonathan Edwards, one of the founders of the Great Awakening and President of Princeton University, several times described the horrors of hell for Americans in his justly famous sermons. The one quoted below is from “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”:
That world of misery, that lake of burning brimstone, is extended abroad under you. There is the dreadful pit of the glowing flames of the wrath of God; there is Hell’s wide gaping mouth open; and you have nothing to stand upon, nor anything to take hold of; there is nothing between you and Hell but air; ’tis only the power and mere pleasure of God that holds you up.16
Eighteenth-century Americans were impressed with these images and motivated to strive even more fervently towards the good and eschew evil, though Edwards’ own theology was based on the premise that God’s will for each of us individually was unknowable. His Great Awakening was enormously successful. This vision of hell affected American’s social behavior just as much as the desire for a just society stimulated Edwards to this vision. Visions of heaven and hell serve evangelization.
Indeed, there is some evidence that the spike of interest in “gothic” or “supernatural” worldviews (for example, “vampires and vampire slayers,” the “occult,” and “space aliens”) among teenagers is not so much lack of religious guidance as rebellion against previously strict fundamentalist or evangelical upbringing. These phenomena are common enough among teenagers and frequent subjects of teen-oriented entertainment. But they appear especially often among teens rejecting their own family’s fundamentalism and evangelicalism.17 There are even attempts by evangelical churches to capitalize on this teenage interest for evangelization and confirmation of teen faith with such evangelical tools as a “Hell-house,” a Halloween walk-through depiction of the evils of non-evangelical moral codes, presenting evangelical religion as the solution to demonically controlled lives.18
Whatever the cause, there is a palpable