Jen Hatmaker Is Done With Hell but I’m Not Ready to Be

What Fundamentalism Distorted and Deconstruction Discarded

There is a recognisable trajectory among public evangelical Christians.

Someone begins in a conservative Christian world, builds a substantial platform within it, and then begins to question parts of the theology that formed them. As their beliefs change, their audience changes with them. Eventually, they no longer need to find another Christian home because the platform itself supplies many of the things a church once supplied: community, affirmation, authority, purpose and income.

The audience becomes a portable congregation.

This does not mean their questions are insincere. Nor does it mean money explains someone’s theology. It means that a platform changes what is socially and economically possible. Most ordinary Christians who leave one form of Christianity have to find another community—or face the loneliness of having none. A successful public figure can make the journey itself into a continuing vocation. Deconstruction becomes content. Reinvention becomes a brand. And an audience can follow the person long after they have ceased to belong meaningfully to a church.

Jen Hatmaker is a particularly visible example of this journey. She began in conservative evangelicalism, became one of its best-known authors and speakers, progressively departed from its beliefs, publicly announced she stopped attending church, and continued to speak about faith from an increasingly post-church position.

Her recent reflections on hell are therefore about more than hell. They offer a window into what happens when someone raised within a cramped version of Christianity discovers that it is intolerable but does not discover the greater Christian tradition waiting beyond it.

The subtitle of Hatmaker’s essay says it plainly: “Laying down my belief in hell didn’t cost me my faith—it rescued it.”

She describes an enormous psychological release, as if “ten million pounds” had come off her shoulders. The God who had terrified her disappeared, and in his place she found a God she could trust—a God of love, patience, kindness and compassion.

It is easy to understand the relief. But relief is not the same thing as truth.

The relief

Photo by Samuel Regan-Asante on Unsplash

Christians should not mock the relief people feel when they abandon a frightening doctrine of hell. We should ask what kind of hell they were taught.

Hatmaker describes a God who watched her constantly, recorded her failures and seemed ready to condemn people for being born in the wrong family, country or religion. Her Evangelism was driven by panic. The Christian life became an extended attempt to remain on God’s good side while rescuing everyone else from a punishment God appeared eager to inflict.

That picture of God should be rejected.

A God who delights in torture is not the God revealed in Jesus Christ. A heaven from which Christians gaze approvingly at the sufferings of their neighbours would not be heaven. It would simply be another form of hell.

Some preaching about hell has been psychologically destructive. It has manipulated children, intensified scrupulosity, turned evangelism into terror and made God appear less merciful than an ordinary human parent. Christians should acknowledge this without defensiveness.

If that was the burden Hatmaker laid down, then some of her relief was deserved.

But psychological relief is spiritually significant and theologically ambiguous. It can mean that a lie has been removed. It can also mean that a difficult truth has been numbed.

The question is not merely whether a belief makes my head and heart feel aligned. The question is whether it tells the truth about God, the human person, freedom, evil, justice and love.

The proper alternative to abusive theology is not the abolition of theology. It is better theology.

The hell that should be rejected

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Hatmaker appears to have been given two possibilities: either God actively sets people on fire forever, or there is no hell.

But these are not the only possibilities available within the Christian tradition.

Christian history contains plenty of lurid preaching, speculative geography and attempts to frighten people into good behaviour. But the church has never required every imaginative description of hell to be treated as a photograph of the afterlife. Fire, darkness, exclusion, death, thirst and destruction are biblical images pointing towards a reality beyond our present comprehension. They tell us that the reality is terrible. They do not give us a visitor’s guide to its physical layout.

At the centre of historic Christian teaching is something more profound: hell is the final separation of a created person from the God who is the source of life, goodness, truth and joy.

God does not create human beings for damnation. God desires their salvation. Hell is not God discovering one final opportunity to be cruel. It is the terrible possibility that a person can persistently refuse the love for which he or she was made.

Sin is not merely the breaking of an arbitrary rule. It is the deformation of desire. We repeatedly give ourselves to certain loves, tell certain lies, justify certain cruelties and make certain compromises. Those actions do not remain outside us. They form us.

We become people capable of particular kinds of action. We may also become incapable of other kinds. Pride can make apologising almost impossible. Resentment can become an identity. Deceit can so thoroughly shape a person that truth feels like an attack. The refusal of love can become the kind of person we are.

Hell is the final seriousness of that possibility.

This does not require us to imagine God gleefully throwing people into a furnace. It asks us to believe that our lives possess real moral substance and consequence, that freedom can be tragically misused and that God will not call evil good simply to make the story end pleasantly.

The false choice

The great Christian tradition offers neither the religion of terror nor the religion of automatic reassurance. It holds together judgment, mercy, freedom, purification and hope.

Judgment is not the moment at which Jesus ceases to be loving. It is instead our encounter with the truth of his love.

In that encounter, everything false is exposed. The ways we have harmed others, deceived ourselves and resisted grace can no longer be hidden. For many, this encounter can be understood as a painful purification: the fire of divine love burning away what is false so that the person can finally become capable of communion.

That is a very different image from a divine torturer maintaining a cosmic prison. But it is also very different from saying that nothing finally matters because God is nice.

Grace does not make wrong into right. Forgiveness does not mean that the victim’s suffering was insignificant. Mercy does not declare the oppressor and the oppressed morally interchangeable.

Those who have destroyed other people cannot simply be seated beside their victims at the eternal banquet as if nothing happened. Reconciliation requires truth. It requires judgment. It requires the death of whatever made the destruction possible.

Christian faith has always insisted that the Judge is also the Saviour. The one before whom our lives are exposed is the one who has already given himself for us. Judgment and mercy meet in the person of Christ.

This is why Christians may hope for the salvation of every person without declaring in advance that damnation is impossible. We are not authorised to populate hell. We are not invited to speculate happily about which enemies are there. The proper Christian posture is to hope for everyone else while taking the danger to ourselves seriously.

Hell is first a doctrine about me, not a doctrine about the people I dislike.

What else disappears?

The problem with abandoning hell is not simply that one item has been removed from a list of doctrines. The more revealing question is what else must change once it has gone.

Hatmaker’s argument does not appear to stop with rejecting literal flames. Judgment itself begins to disappear. Evangelism becomes embarrassing. The distinction between salvation and lostness becomes morally suspect. The goal of faith becomes being loving, kind, emotionally healthy people and good neighbours.

There is much here that Christians should affirm. Christians should be good neighbours. We should reject manipulative evangelism, spiritual superiority and delight in the imagined punishment of others.

But Christianity cannot be reduced to neighbourliness. The gospel is not the announcement that God wants us to become pleasant, well-adjusted people.

If there is no meaningful possibility of being lost, what are we saved from?

The New Testament speaks of salvation as forgiveness, liberation, healing, reconciliation, resurrection and participation in the life of God. We are not merely reassured. We are rescued from powers we cannot defeat by ourselves: sin, death, falsehood, self-deception and the inward curvature of the human heart.

If our central problem is that religion made us feel ashamed, salvation becomes the discovery that there was never anything fundamentally wrong with us. Jesus becomes the great confirmer of our underlying goodness. The cross becomes an illustration of divine solidarity rather than the place where sin is judged, death is defeated, and humanity is reconciled to God.

Something similar happens to our understanding of evil. A therapeutic culture is often highly sensitive to suffering but less capable of speaking about guilt. It knows how people have been wounded. It is less certain how to say that wounded people can also become people who wound.

Some evil is not adequately described as ignorance, trauma, maladaptation or the failure to flourish. Human beings can knowingly exploit, degrade and destroy one another. We can love power, cruelty and falsehood. We can refuse repentance because repentance would require the surrender of the selves we have constructed.

A world without final judgment risks becoming a world in which the victims of history are never finally vindicated. Their pain may be acknowledged, but the moral order itself remains unsettled. The dead receive no justice. The torturer and the tortured arrive at the same end without any necessary reckoning.

Then love changes too.

“God is love” is not a progressive revision of Christianity. It is at the heart of the Christian confession. The dispute is not about whether God is love. It is about what love means.

Christian love is not limitless affirmation. It seeks the real good of the beloved. It opposes whatever destroys the beloved. It forgives, but it also purifies. It comforts, but it also commands. It receives us as we are but refuses to leave us there.

A love unable to judge anything cannot protect anyone. A God who is never opposed to evil is not more loving to evil’s victims. He is indifferent to them.

Hell and the self-made self

Beneath the argument about hell is a deeper disagreement about what a human being is.

The modern self increasingly understands identity as something discovered within and then expressed outwardly. My desires, experiences and psychological sense of integrity tell me who I am. Institutions, communities and traditions are legitimate to the extent that they affirm that identity. When they do not, they become obstacles to authenticity.

Within this world, relief possesses enormous authority. A belief that produces inner conflict is assumed to be oppressive. A belief that produces psychological integration appears self-validating.

Historic Christianity begins somewhere else. The self is not self-originating. I do not create my nature, my purpose or my final good. I receive life as a gift. I discover myself not by turning endlessly inward but through communion with God and others. Freedom is not the power to invent the good; it is the power to recognise, receive and participate in it.

This is where the doctrine of hell becomes unexpectedly revealing.

Hell is the terminal form of the self-made self.

It is not the created person successfully becoming independent of God, since no creature can become the source of its own existence. It is the person refusing to receive their life as gift—curved inward, defending their own sovereignty, preferring the diminished world of the self to the surrender involved in love.

The project of self-creation cannot finally produce freedom because it leaves the self imprisoned within itself.

This also helps explain the importance of the post-church platform. A church, at its best, is a community we did not create, composed of people we did not select, receiving a faith we did not invent. It connects us to the dead, the unborn, the poor, the inconvenient and the stranger. It can contradict us.

An audience is different. An audience gathers around a personality. Its continued presence confirms the personality’s authority. If part of the audience objects, another audience can replace it.

Again, this does not make public theological change dishonest. It does mean that a platform can insulate the self from the kind of belonging in which beliefs must be tested against something more durable than personal experience and audience response.

A platform can follow my evolution. A tradition can ask whether my evolution is growth.

The striking feature of many public deconstruction stories is not simply that people leave conservative evangelicalism. There are many historic Christian homes beyond that world. The striking feature is that they often cease looking for a home at all. The journey moves from one cramped form of Christianity not into the breadth and depth of the church’s tradition, but into a post-ecclesial faith organised around personal intuition, therapeutic categories and a curated community.

The tragedy is that the tradition they believe they have outgrown may be one they were never actually given.

The hope beyond fear

Christians should hope that hell is empty.

We should pray for the salvation of every person. We should refuse to name anyone as certainly lost. We should believe that grace can reach people in ways hidden from us, including at the final boundaries of life. We should never speak of hell with relish.

But hope is not the same as advance knowledge.

To hope that every person freely receives salvation is different from declaring that refusal is impossible. Christian hope is not optimism about human nature. It is confidence in the mercy of God while remaining honest about the terrifying capacities of human freedom.

The doctrine of hell was not given so that Christians could terrorise children, control congregations or imagine their enemies screaming. It is a warning addressed to every human being that our lives matter, our loves form us, and the refusal of truth can become a prison.

At the same time, hell is never the centre of the Christian proclamation. Jesus Christ is.

The Christian story is not that God created a torture chamber and then offered us a technical means of escape. It is that God entered the depths of human violence, estrangement and death to find us. In Christ, the Judge has borne judgment. The one who exposes our falsehood has descended into our darkness. The one who calls us to repentance has already given himself for our salvation.

That is why evangelism need not be frantic or manipulative. It can be witness: an invitation into the life for which human beings were created. It says not merely, “Avoid punishment,” but, “Be reconciled to God. Come out of the closed room. Receive the life you cannot give yourself.”

Jen Hatmaker is right to throw out the image of a bloodthirsty God who enjoys suffering. She is right to reject smug Christians imagining themselves applauding from heaven. She is right that fear can deform faith.

That is the bathwater. Throw it out.

But the baby is the truth that love, freedom, evil, justice and salvation are real enough to possess eternal significance. It is the truth that God’s love is more demanding and more beautiful than affirmation. It is the truth that we are created rather than self-authored, that our choices form us, that victims will be vindicated, and that grace does not call evil good but overcomes it.

Perhaps that is the larger invitation.

When the version of Christianity we inherited becomes impossible to believe, our only choices are not fundamentalism or departure. There is an older, deeper and far richer Christian tradition than many of us were given. It has wrestled with judgment and mercy, freedom and grace, heaven and hell, without resolving the tension through either terror or sentimentality.

If that tradition can help us recover hell from its caricatures, perhaps it can help us recover other things we were preparing to discard.

Before announcing that we are done with hell, we should ask whether we have ever encountered the doctrine at all.