A CENTURY AGO, the baseball-player-turned-evangelical-revivalist Billy Sunday preached a gospel supercharged by conspiracy theory and nationalism. He spoke against the backdrop of World War I to masses seized by national security anxiety directed at immigrant communities. Deploying a message made urgent and relevant by its conspiratorial frame, Sunday preached, “They call us the ‘melting pot.’ Then it’s up to us to skim off the slag that won’t melt into Americanism and throw it into hell or somewhere else.”
Hellish rhetoric has a long history in the United States for animating theological paranoia in service of supremacist political power. It’s also been part and parcel of American evangelicalism.
Like many kids growing up in evangelical culture in the 1990s, I was extremely familiar with hell. Popular preaching led with hell before it ever spoke of heaven. It described a place of terror reserved for the unbelieving, who always happened to be from the wrong political party or country. In those days, evangelical churches hosted so-called hell houses to “scare straight” teenagers who strayed from a very narrow moral code. My own church did annual dramas depicting people in hell. I prayed the “Sinner’s Prayer” more times than I could count, hoping I really meant it enough to save me for good. If you were to ask me then: “Do you believe in hell?” I would have said “Of course! I’m a Christian!” Belief in hell went hand in hand with belief in Jesus.
My faith today requires me to dismantle the understanding of hell I received as a child and the cultural use of hell popular today in the rise of Christian nationalism. Hell, in the Trump era, is a rogue theological element, unmoored from the Christian story. When Donald Trump says, “I want to make the country great again. This country is a hellhole,” he casts himself, theologically, in the role of Christ, dispensing judgment on who is good and who is bad.
Trump wields diabolical power to throw people to political hells — and that’s what he’s doing. This isn’t new. Poet Langston Hughes wrote prophetically in 1936, “Fascism is a new name for that kind of terror the Negro has always faced in America.”
In this stream of prophetic thought, we are roused to consider our own responsibility today. We cannot look away from the political hells rising up around us, including indiscriminate ICE raids at churches; repurposing the Guantanamo Bay detention camp to hold migrants; freezing funding for critical family services and health programs in the U.S. and around the world; dispossessing hundreds of thousands of civil servants from their livelihood; and blocking asylum access for those in fear for their lives — all creating indescribable suffering for those who don’t fit a very narrow white supremacist or libertarian agenda.
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The darkest of days
WHAT HAS ALL this to do with Holy Saturday? Many nondenominational or evangelical Christians in the U.S. don’t have much experience with Christian tradition as it has been practiced for thousands of years. We are unfamiliar with the liturgical shape of the Easter story: Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday.
These days fit together like a trilogy — three parts telling a single story. Just as The Empire Strikes Back is the second and darkest film of the original Star Wars trilogy and The Two Towers is the grim volume two of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, so Holy Saturday is the dramatic middle of these three days.
Holy Saturday is when the church remembers that Jesus goes to hell. Between the gruesome crucifixion on Friday and the miraculous resurrection on Sunday, where is Jesus? He’s not merely resting in the grave, building strength for his grand return. No, Jesus has another mission. He wrestles not only the powers of this world, but also the powers of hell. Tradition teaches that between his own torture and his resurrection, Jesus goes among the dead to wrest them free from the clutches of hell. Christians refer to this dark element of the Easter story as the “harrowing of hell.” It is featured in Christian expressions of art and music across the millennia. “Harrowing” is an Old English word for “sacking,” “plundering,” or “crushing.” Jesus raids hell to release its detainees.
This action is an essential part of the most primal confession of the church universal. The Apostles’ Creed, with its earliest formulations circulating around 200 C.E., is said by millions of Christians weekly: We believe in Jesus Christ who was “was crucified, died, and was buried; he descended to hell.” The hell referred to here is not a place where Satan lives or rules; it is where the dead are imprisoned. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians that Jesus was raised from the dead — not only from the state of being dead but from the place where the dead are jailed.
Perhaps some history of “hell” can help us here.
The Greeks gave us Hades, god of the underworld, whose dark judgment hall was surrounded by a river of fire. Before the Greeks, empires of the Near East embraced the idea of Sheol — a holding tank for the dead, good and evil alike. Later rabbinic scholars developed a distinctive understanding of hell as a place with an address in the world of the living. This was the “valley of the son of Hinnom” called Gehenna, located on the south side of Jerusalem. The prophet Jeremiah, preaching from prison, excoriated Zedekiah, king of Judah, for allowing God’s people to build altars to Baal in the valley of the Gehenna. On these altars they passed their “sons and daughters through fire” (Jeremiah 32:35) — a horrid, terrible euphemism for child sacrifice — to beg Molech, Canaanite god of the underworld, to protect them from the attacking Babylonians. To sacrifice to Molech was, as people today might put it, a “necessary” act of national security. Today, like then, the logic of national security justifies all sorts of hells of our own making.
The Hebrew scriptures preserve Israel’s memory of these acts. In his prophetic actions against the theo-political state, Jeremiah predicted a name change for this valley. No longer would it be called “Hinnom”: It would become the “Valley of Slaughter” (Jeremiah 7:32). This prophetic rebrand turned a site deemed essential to national security into a wasteland of the dead.
Jesus is situated in an ongoing conversation emerging from Israel’s prophetic community. When he speaks of hell in the gospels, he speaks in the grammar of Israel’s memory of failure and hope in its deliverance. He speaks, like Jeremiah, of justice. Hell stands not only for the power of death but for the presence of justice. And God’s judgment, concentrated in and centered on the Crucified One, does not leave the oppressed without an advocate, without a judge.
Looking for Christ among the damned
IT'S ONE THING to say that on Holy Saturday, Jesus went to hell. It’s another to ask what exactly that entails for us here and now.
Holy Saturday forces us to confront an uncomfortable truth: Many of our ways of talking about hell have come to us through cultural media. What is meant by hell is rarely shaped by regular attention to the story of Jesus. Hell in America is not so much confessed as it is consumed. The hell preached at us by American culture is not that of the Apostles’ Creed.
Hell-talk saturates our zeitgeist. It salts personal conversations and social media. It’s used to consign political opponents to eternal damnation. On the campaign trail, now Vice President J.D. Vance uttered an anathema over his opponent Kamala Harris: “She can go to hell!” President Trump stoked the crowd on Jan. 6, 2021, saying, “If you don’t fight like hell, you won’t have a country anymore!”
The nationalized politics of hell can furnish a dangerous moral sanction for authoritarianism as it endlessly codes “the damned” as deserving of subjugation by “the saved.” A commercialized hell can prime citizens, including Christians, for a self-justifying, but ultimately rogue, Christian identity. To “believe” in hell without reference to Christ is a distinctly anti-Christian claim. In other words, nationalized hells are downriver from a nationalized messiah.
As we disentangle our Christian belief from the cultural and political hells used as propaganda, perhaps we can glimpse a necessary path. Can we reclaim our ability to face the power of death that hell represents? If we do, it may reshape our understanding of where Christ does his “harrowing” today.
Think about Gaza or Myanmar. Hidden camps and cells. Cameroonian political scientist Achille Mbembe calls these places “death-worlds.” These are “new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead,” Mbembe writes. The hells of Christian nationalism are hidden over the horizons of our national security states. But their existence betrays the truth at the heart of Christian faith, that even hell beyond death has been disarmed and defeated.
The Christian is always prepared to recognize the very real threats and terrors of hell as “surrounded by the Kingdom,” as Karl Barth puts it — a place where Jesus “carried life into the midst of death.” Jesus does not go into hell like the heroes of Greek myth, wrestling with death for secrets. He enters as a liberator to bring justice to the captives of sin, death, and evil. This is why we affirm the Apostles’ Creed, because death has no dominion. We find in this confession a God who suffers with us.
Theologian William Stringfellow framed it like this: “A Christian is not distinguished by his political views, or moral decisions, or habitual conduct, or personal piety, or, least of all, by his churchly activities. A Christian is distinguished by his radical esteem for the Incarnation. ... The characteristic place to find a Christian is among his very enemies. The first place to look for Christ is in Hell.”
This Christ is familiar with the hells of today. He goes with migrants into the camps. He is indistinguishable from the marginalized, those consigned to the hells both within and beyond the pale of our political moment.
On Holy Saturday, Jesus visits the camps of death’s campaign, waged against God’s good creation. Holy Saturday announces that hell is now an occupied territory. The victory of the gospel is proclaimed upon its broken gates.
And so, Christ’s descent into hell is not merely a rote confession of faith. It is a courageous affirmation and fearsome responsibility. As we glimpse Jesus’ raiding of hell, his harrowing of death’s camp, we witness too the weapons of death that he has dismantled and left useless on the ravaged landscape.
If we are to stand with Christ in the hells of today, then we must be tempered with dissent and discipleship. We must abjectly refuse any rogue words or rival movements that abrogate to themselves the messianic victory of Jesus. It requires of us creative resistance, throwing sand into the machinery of death. The church is not to wield hell as a weapon to plow the field of violence and damnation in political landscapes. What the church holds out is hope, Christ’s victory over the “death-worlds.” Christ calls us to stand with those whom political powers cast out. There are no God-forsaken among us, as Barth said.
It is true that death menaces us, still. But it does so only as a power raging against its own defeat. All talk of hell must first recognize Christ’s Easter declaration: “I have the keys of death and hell” (Revelation 1:18). The church cannot opt for the power to crucify over the power of the Crucified One without betraying the faith that creates it. The state doesn’t hold the keys of death and hell. And it never has. No one holds the keys but Jesus.
Jared Stacy is a theologian and ethicist who writes on the intersection of political extremism and Christian theology. He lives near Washington, D.C., with his wife and three children.
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