Hell Was Not a Place. It Was a Church Pew.
I was 8 years old.
The rough fabric of the church pew cushions scratched against my legs, which couldn’t yet reach the ground, while the loud, thumping praise and worship music rang in my ears. This was an old school Pentecostal Holiness Church - the kind that had church both Sunday morning and Sunday night.
Sunday night church especially terrified me, because there was no place for children to go during adult worship.
I was surrounded by an ocean of adults whose hands were raised, their bodies convulsing, while they cried aloud, thanking God for sparing their lives from eternal damnation. As I watched the chaos of bodies hitting the floor as they were being “slain in the spirit,” or wailing as someone received “deliverance," I felt like I was stuck in a slow motion horror movie with no place to go. Not a single adult was attuned enough to notice the terror I felt in my body.
On this particular night, there was a guest pastor. Before the sermon had even started, he had sweat beading down his face that he wiped with his red and gold handkerchief.
As he told the violent and graphic story of his “unsaved” friend dying in a car accident, my body began to shake internally and I grabbed the pew in front of me, bracing my body. For just a moment, I was able to float away, focusing on the waxy rounded corner of the pew underneath my fingers.
The intensity grew as the preacher began pleading for everyone to be saved, since death could come at any moment.
He screamed and wailed,
“Please, don’t be like my friend and burn in hell for eternity!”
His “P” hit the mic so hard, it caused my body to jump. The shaking internally became external, my lips began to chatter uncontrollably, and my heart beat so loud and strong I thought I was dying.
He proceeded to prostrate on the floor, taking his hand and beating the floor repeatedly, sobbing and screaming,
“Please don't be the one that dies in a car accident on the way home tonight. Please!! Please!!”
The adults in the room stood up and began aggressively shouting, bringing themselves into repentance; double, triple, quadruple-checking that their hearts were right in the eyes of God.
When my mom finally noticed I was shaking and terrified, instead of comforting me, she celebrated my terror. She put her arms around me, and as her mascara dripped onto my hands, she gave thanks to God, as if the fear in my body communicated my repentance and salvation.
There I was, frozen in terror, held hostage by a punitive God, in a body that was unable to run and unable to hide.
Hell was not a place.
It was a Church Pew.
Fast forward 8 years later - I was 16 years old.
As I walked into the church, I made every attempt to be unseen. I can remember pulling my sleeves over my hands, folding my arms across my stomach, and tucking my head down to avoid eye contact at all costs.
Everyone around me interpreted this as rebellion. As I was greeted by church goers who told me they were praying for my soul, they cloaked their veiled threats of hell and eternal damnation behind a smile and a hug.
Worship would unfold in the same familiar way. Behind my folded arms, I could feel my heart begin to pound, and my throat constrict.
I was suddenly unable to breathe.
I looked over at my friend from youth group and signaled, “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
The church was located against the backdrop of the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. I pulled out a pack of cigarettes, and remembered feeling relief with the first inhale. I leaned against a tree, feeling its support against my body; while I wondered when I would escape this hell hole.
About 15 minutes later, my friend and I began making our way back to the church building.
As we approached the door, the youth pastor’s wife came outside and said, “I am so sorry, I tried to find you before it was too late.” Before she could even get the words out, my mother rushed out of the church, screaming and crying. She grabbed me by the shirt, and slapped me across the face as hard as she could.
“How could you?!” She yelled.
My body did not even have time to process what was happening.
All eyes were on me.
Suddenly, I had an audience backing up my mother, who had just publicly assaulted me in the name of God.
Every part of my body screamed:
“This is not normal.”
“This is not safe.”
“This is not God.”
The irony is that my childhood bore an awful resemblance to the ancient practice of sacrificing children in the Valley of Hinnom in the name of Molech, as described in the Old Testament.
Molech was a bloodthirsty Canaanite god. His worship demanded the unthinkable. Gripped by the fear of punishment, parents offered their children to be burned alive in the fire of the Valley of Hinnom.
Some part of my own inner-child recognizes the shape of that suffering.
What if Christ provides us a way to reclaim hell?
In the New Testament, Jesus speaks about “hell’” more than a dozen times.
Each time, he is confronting religious leaders whose behavior reveals the collapse of moral integrity. The word translated as “hell” in English is actually Gehenna- the Greek form of the Hebrew Gē Hinnom, meaning the Valley of Hinnom.
Jesus was using the word “hell” to invoke a cultural memory.
The religious leaders of this time knew that the Canaanites’ sacrifice of children was the lowest a society could go.
In referencing this, Jesus was drawing parallel correlations about moral collapse:
When you exploit the poor, that is moral collapse…
When you sanctify religious trauma, that is moral collapse…
When you weaponize God against the powerless, that is moral collapse…
And the violence that my mother and her church justified in God’s name echoed the same moral collapse- the willingness to sacrifice a child to a god of fear.
Maybe you see parts of yourself in this story.
Maybe you remember…
A tightening in your chest…
A dread that curled in your stomach…
The way your body braced every time you walked into a church…
But your body was always telling you the truth.
Every single tightening, curling, and brace was not rebellion, sin, or proof that you were broken. They were sacred signals made from our bodies that were created in Love.
They were the voice of God speaking through your body saying:
“This is not normal.”
“This is not safe.”
“This is not okay.”
When we take seriously the words of Jesus, we reclaim the hell narrative as a condemnation of fearful theology and idolatry that leads people to sacrifice the most vulnerable.
To reclaim hell is the refusal to allow religious trauma to define your sacred worth.
To reclaim hell is to expose systems that confront the gods of fear that were preached as love.
To reclaim hell is to return to the Christ who frees the body from terror.