‘Hell is a World Without You’ shows readers how clear they would have been on the road to January 6 if they had come of age in Evangelicalism

Jason Kirk’s first novel, Hell is a world without youtells the coming-of-age story of a grieving teenager in the American evangelical subculture of the 2000s. The details that make it feel authentic to those of us who grew up in this environment will be fascinating to those who didn’t.

Beyond these details, however, Kirk’s novel resonates with much of the current discourse on American religion. The flight of millennial and Zoomer evangelicals from churches, the contentious politics of American Christian nationalism, and evangelical attacks on LGBTQ+ rights provide a backdrop to this coming of age story.

RD recently spoke with Kirk, an editor-in-chief The Athletics and co-creator of several popular podcasts, about the book Christian Nationalism, Hell, and What It Means to Believe.

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

RD: Jason, thanks for taking the time. Like I said before, read Hell is a world without you was a bizarre experience, both as a scholar of American religion and as the child of a former preacher. It’s such an incisive portrayal that it’s neither apologetic nor a parody. And despite being set in high school in the early 2000s, it says a lot about the current moment. Sometimes I thought of it as a prequel to January 6th. How does the landscape of the early 2000s compare to contemporary American Christianity? And how many of the novel’s telling details came from your own experience?

JK: All the right-wing issues my characters encounter (complex lyrics of persecution, casual misogyny, supposed queerphobia, etc.) could only have come from my memories, though I also studied. And I tried to show parallels with non-evangelical politics, because there isn’t a problem that we can only blame on one kind of Christian. After all, Jerry Falwell, conservative Catholics, and Rush Limbaugh said the same things.

I consider September 11 as crucial, but not really because anything has changed. Rightists have just started narrowing their list of group characteristics. The 2016 election, when so many Christians abandoned their late 1990s “character matters” mantra, was another expose.

I remember looking down at my TV from the captured Capitol on January 6 and seeing words I had written about 2000s teenagers drowned in Christian nationalist rhetoric. Did any of my characters grow up to appear on TV in that image? One of the book’s goals fell into place: to show normie readers how clearly they would be placed on that path if they had grown up that way.

The other goal: to show people who grew up as evangelical misfits that we were never as alone as we felt.

That last point was definitely a hit for me. But I did wonder how well those normie readers would understand the book. One evening I happened to mention it Karman (the Christian musician and evangelist who gets a few references in the book) to my partner, and she had no idea what I was talking about. I took her down a YouTube rabbit hole of Carman videos, which she found horrifying. What have you heard from readers who didn’t have firsthand experience?

I treated it like a science fiction story. Within a few pages, I want the reader to accept that these are kids who flirt at summer camp, then wallow in genuine guilt, and then flirt again. And every day I hear from someone who didn’t grow up evangelical, but still says they’re shocked by how relatable they found it.

Some readers have told me they’ve done a deep dive on Spotify to catch up on the musicians I mention, while others have merely picked up the references they did know (yes, Sixpence Not richer and DMX were Christian musicians, albeit in very different markets) and treated the rest as scenery. Most of all, I want the reader to know that he or she is reading about a world with its own history, one that includes things we ‘. Gerbert and James Dobson and a literal Satan, all of whom are tasked with controlling children. (Sorry, Gerbert.)

Mike, as someone who views religions as a set of signifiers that we use to decide who is (and is not) in them us What do you think are the similarities between high-control religious environments like this one and other societal systems?

To me, this is one of the fundamental ways society works. One of the questions in your novel is what does it mean to believe something? and you show that faith is not about some agreement with an idea, but about being part of a group. We do not to have beliefs, as many as we identify the kind of person who believes. What we think of as our beliefs are ways in which we recognize ourselves. So when the beliefs that make us a group tell us that we are broken, ashamed, guilty, and under attack by outsiders, that becomes truly harmful. Many scenes in the book illustrate how that works. It’s also why your characters grow by building a new group identity.

Another thing about faith that struck me, though, is when you make a comparison between Pastor Jack, the head pastor of the church, and the Undertaker, the undead former WWE Champion and current old white Texan. Sometimes, like professional wrestling, faith is an achievement. Not that it is a completely inauthentic performance. Pastor Jack, like all celebrity preachers, has to put on a show. He has a gimmick. What do you think about that performative element in American Christianity, and how has it shaped the way you wrote about this world?

Collective experience only works if we agree it works, right? Whether it is a concert, a sporting event, a scripted sporting event or a religious service, the only way to taste joy is to follow convention. After all, it works for everyone – or at least it seems that way.

Pastor Jack reminds me of neo-Calvinist superstar pastors, a scandal-plagued televangelist or two, and professional wrestlers like the late Windham roundaboutwhich portrayed charismatic cult leaders who audiences simply agreed to play along with, creating eerie magic, for better or for worse.

Which brings me to a central theme of the novel: hell. After reading it, I realized that despite all the talk about Jesus, God, and country, the form of Christianity you describe is actually all about hell. More than anything else, the belief in a literal hell is at the core of this social formation. In an early version, Hell wasn’t in the title. Did you know how central hell was when you started?

After more than a thousand years of Christian leaders using hell as an attack dog, one of the many consequences is this: an obsession with the afterlife leads us to ignore hell all around us. It is no coincidence that some of the most privileged people in the world fantasize about leaving the problems of others behind them, while liberation theologians preach that the Kingdom of God is at stake. on earth.

The first scene I wrote was about a violent conflict between teenagers and a church elder. Ultimately, I realized that a conflict would be about what it means to throw away the belief in eternal conscious torment. The arrogant recklessness of that, when hell is proven to be real. But also the liberation, when it turns out that we cannot simply pass on our inherent responsibilities to each other.

As I play Diablo II and listen to emo, my characters explore theological rabbit holes that lead them to glimpse ancient Eastern Christian theologies of universalism. For them, learning about St. Gregory of Nyssa feels as forbidden as anything else they do in that basement.

Is this an “evangelical novel?”

On one level, absolutely. I view its setting as 2000s American white evangelicalism. I also view the word “evangelical” as referring to the tradition in which Jesus told his immediate followers that they were born go inside a world, but they are not by It. Or the Hebrew Bible instructing its immediate audience to define themselves by their ancestors’ escape from oppression and to pay that liberation forward.

On another level, it’s not about evangelicals or Americans. Evangelicals have a lot of bad ideas, but they’ve invented about zero. It’s about self-loathing versus learning to love your neighbor, a battle we’ve all been fighting since long before Billy Graham started shouting about communists.

I would also like to note that you donated the proceeds from the book to the Trevor Project in the first three months. Why did you want to do that? And how much did you ultimately raise?

Growing up, I saw my LGBTQ friends being abused by religious and political leaders, and I took it personally. Thanks to people who bought hundreds of expensive hardcovers (plus our thousands of regular sales and sold-out launch parties), we’re in the process of donating $56,000 to the charity that keeps LGBTQ kids alive.

That is amazing. Thanks for that and thanks for taking the time to have this conversation!