Hell is A World Without You, and the political echoes of religious trauma
Hell is a World Without You is a funny and touching book that, in its early chapters, has me frequently shocked by how closely my own experiences mapped onto those of the protagonist, a fictional person who would have been about nine years older than me. Isaac Siena, Jr. is not entirely a fictionalized version of author Jason Kirk, but I could not help but read it largely as autofiction because of what Jason has revealed about his upbringing in the approximately thirteen years I’ve been listening to his podcasts and the interview I read leading up to the book. But we’ll set that aside for the moment; let me give some broad strokes about what the book is about. Some spoilers ahead, as well as a thick section where I talk about my experiences in churches.
Hell is a World Without You is a coming-of-age novel about living in the intersection of capitalism, jingoism, and Christianity that is the American Evangelical movement. It is about how that space transformed at the turn of the millennium and how it had been shaped in the latter half of the 20th century around the American conservative movement. It is a four-year snapshot which historically contextualizes a political-religious movement whose ideology rests on an ahistorical conception of itself. It’s a book that is simultaneously about paintball and budding sexuality in one scene, Diablo II and theological uncertainty in another. It’s about how self-loathing builds up in children trying to navigate the rules, a handful of which may have some real moral basis, but which are drowned out in their utility by the many of which are contortions of morality to control women’s bodies and use young people’s Bible study as spaces of social reproduction while setting them up for a twisted relationship with physical reproduction.
This book made me think so much about middle school and high school, which feels like misplaced nostalgia and wistfulness at the best of times (and relentless criticism of a child at the worst), and in the first hundred pages here was a combination of kind and cringing familiarity. As someone relatively young that has been trapped in unending self-inquiry about “what is wrong with me?” probably since elementary school, the poignancy of its imagery was unceasing. I felt a sadness and a kinship with Isaac Jr. because of how his failure to live up to impossible moral aspirations haunts him into suicidal thoughts, something you might not escape just because you escape that kind of church. You might find yourself holding onto that sort of harsh self-evaluation even when you lose religion as your moral north star. The feeling of not being enough, not having any certainty and just wanting so badly to believe in the things you are meant to believe is so potent here, and Kirk effortlessly… well, probably it took a lot of effort, so let’s say *expertly* blends teenage moral inquiry, lust, and self-doubt with tremendous authentic-feeling comedic chops. “In this life or the next, I will see her whole sports bra” is a funny line without context, but it’s a funnier one within it.
The book is in part a theological treatise or polemic, not so much demanding you agree with it but most purely in the sense of exploring Siena’s own journey reconciling the things he feels are most true and most nonsensical about the version of Christianity passed down to him, leading to a belief in something simultaneously truer and more nebulous. Isaac’s life is guided by a deep fear of hell, impacted greatly by his father’s death and his uncertainty about where he ended up. Isaac worries a lot about what other people think of him, noting the cruel judgmental murmurings of other churchgoers.
Isaac goes on to reconcile the conflicts within him as, around him, a father figure that once told him not to worry about the rapture grows his humble church by combining hellfire, brimstone, and patriotism, using the absolute thinnest of metaphors to praise a warmongering president. Isaac’s close friends include the pastor’s niece Sophie, who does ASL interpretation of the sermons, Josiah, the pastor’s son who goes from arrogant to insecure about his place within the political dynasty, and a coterie of girls with the middle name Grace, boys called Caleb. Outside of church his best friends are a young lesbian named Bobbi with whom he plays Pokémon and debates the nature of reality and a Sikh football player named Amir who becomes targeted by racist and ignorant students after 9/11. Isaac explores the bible, multiple churches, theology, and morality as the contradictions sharpen between what he’s been told in church and what he experiences in real life. He starts a Video Game Church bible study with his young friends, has a fling with a girl of a different denomination, experiences the lasting and temporary ways young people love one another. He clashes internally and externally with the idea that men and women are made impure by sex outside of wedlock, and that it is a sin for men to look lustfully at women and that it is women’s fault if men fail in this way. He assembles a men’s accountability group so the pubescent boys can take account of how often they’re battering themselves. He is puzzled by when he is told the Bible is being metaphorical (basically anything to do with giving up riches) versus being literal (anything punitive).
The writing point-of-view is, again, expert artistic crafting. You feel the protagonist grow through the first-person perspective of being almost 14 to almost a legal adult, complete with the haunting and threatening voice of a mean moral advisory voice – a pseudo-schizophrenia or a brimstone preacher sycophant, an angry and unforgiving angel on his shoulder. It is a vivid past tense description that immerses you in that growth, through the awkwardness of thought and spoken idea from being just barely out of middle school to being on the tip toe toward college, and the articulation of the thoughts evolves thusly. It has a nearly diary-like quality while occasionally importing formats like AIM messages or dropping in song titles to soundtrack a summer. It’s a book about relationships – Isaac’s with his self and his spirituality and with his family and friends, who are the objects of collegial, fraternal, and romantic affection that make him care about church and make him question it.
My experiences with religion are not the exact same as Isaac Siena, Jr.’s, but I do want to talk about the overlap and why this book so strongly resonates with me. I was baptized Lutheran (in elementary school at a mostly white church) but didn’t finish my catechism (in middle school at that same church) for reasons that are unclear to me (I still have mostly fond memories of both the pastor – who let us stay in his house one summer when we were moving from a house on his street to one around the corner – and the youth pastor there, who moved back to Minnesota after a little while). Then, when we moved states (in high school), we went to a Baptist-derived nondenominational church and, along these later years I stopped believing in God. We visited megachurches in Henderson, Nevada, and Randall Cunningham’s church in Las Vegas. My sophomore year of high school, I started going to Catholic mass on Saturdays with my granddad across the Las Vegas Valley (at a rival high school near my house, at a large purpose-built church near the strip, and so forth) until mom gave me the ultimatum that I could go to both church with her and mass with Pop or just church with her.
I remember figuring out that I thought homophobia was stupid in middle school, and I also remember that I internalized homophobia in part because of the church and that kept me from coming out as bisexual to myself and later my friends and still later my family for several years. Reading the book, I couldn’t help but think about how quickly I fell out of the ranks of the most devout and how my relationships with my church friends were not tight enough to bind me to church or even make me feel like I was missing anything for most of the decade-plus since I’ve been a regular attendee. I remember rejecting a seventh-grade science lesson about entropy and the swallowing of the Earth by the Sun in Fontana, CA, then later being bemused that the first day of my biology class in junior college in Houston, TX began with us watching a documentary about the ability for Christians of various denominations to work in the sciences and accept evolution as part of God’s plan. How the turn tables.
Reading the first couple dozen pages of Hell is a World Without You, I mentioned to my girlfriend the time in middle school where my mother, brother, and a couple of my teachers prayed around the flagpole early in the morning. The next day I was reading the book and Jason Kirk and Isaac Siena are talking about that same practice. Isaac mentions “Open the Eyes of My Heart, Lord” and I think about singing along to that in the predominately white Lutheran church.[1] Which, I guess, we can pull back here from my smattered recollections to the book and its cultural references which have this strange resonance because I was born so much later than the protagonist but I existed in the same cultural milieu eight years later, where some of the songs were becoming oldies but some of the pop punk and rap and Christian music was prevalent in my life. We were allowed to read Harry Potter when I was in elementary school and middle school and Mom thought it was silly that was considered such a big deal by some Christians; conversely, we weren’t allowed to see The Golden Compass when it came out when I was in ninth grade because some people at the church said it was bad.
I remember, in elementary or middle school, being cornered by another church youth with a church elder for not supporting Bush’s wars, which felt awkward then and feels resentful now, but at least the pastors never advocated for it from the pulpit. I remember being told that an older church youth knew he was gay but had chosen not to live that “sinful lifestyle,” as if it were some challenge from God to overcome. I remember being in the youth service in the predominately black church in high school and one of the youth ministers saying he wasn’t sure he could support Obama because of his stance on abortion and responding out loud, “There are wars going on.” I remember that same minister answering my concern that the Bible didn’t make sense with things I was learning in school by saying “Sometimes things don’t make sense, but we still have to believe anyway,” which I felt was inadequate to the moment. The other youth minister told me he was disappointed and expected me to get it together and be a leader among our cohort. Moments earlier, my younger brother had chided me for starting problems since we had been called to confirm or deny our faith during the service. I had told him and my stepdad I didn’t believe in any of this anymore a few days before. It was a funnier and less stressful coming out than the sexuality thing later.[2] I can’t remember if my mom more ended up feeling angry or embarrassed about my newly explicit atheism – I know there were fights about it later, the latest and most surprising when I was about 21. Here’s a funnier memory, from earlier in the same high school period when I still believed in God: a video was being shown in the main sanctuary celebrating the purity pledges (promising to stay a virgin until marriage) that the older youth had recently taken. I was so confounded but found it funny, thinking to myself with a mixture of humor and panic, “They gon’ make me lie to Jesus. It’s not gonna work, he knows my heart.” I have an imprecise memory of a conversation that matches with a very vivid feeling – thinking that, with all the many religions, maybe they draw from the same source; I’m hardly the first person to come up with this concept, but I was disheartened it was treated as heresy.
That was all between when I was 13 and 15. From the ages of probably about 8 to 12, anytime I was alone in the house and I didn’t know where everyone else was, I would worry that I had been “left behind” during the Rapture (when God takes all his chosen people away before the antichrist comes to make everything terrible for a while before Jesus returns and establishes a thousand-year kingdom), something the protagonist of Hell is a World Without You experiences once in the book. My mom had read the Left Behind books and I had gotten me the first four or five books in the Left Behind for Kids series. We watched the first several movies, as they lowered in production value and moved from cinema releases to straight-to-DVD; of course, the idea has gotten some gradual mainstream non-Christian religious purchase through shows like The 100 or The Leftovers, which draw on the concept if not taking it wholesale.
I learned in graduate school from a friend raised Protestant that converted to Catholicism as an adult that the Rapture was a fringe Protestant belief and from a born-and-raised Catholic that (most) Catholics didn’t believe in it. It may or may not surprise you to know that the prevalence of the Rapture in the American Evangelical movement is part of American political support for Israel aside from other material considerations – the largest pro-Israel lobby by membership at over ten million members is Christians United for Israel. CUFI’s co-founder, John Hagee, all-but-explicitly endorsed Trump in September 2020 and his lobbying group believes that Israel needs to be propped up to bring about a cataclysmic war to prompt the Second Coming of Christ, and for Jews to be converted or sent to hell on Christ’s return.[3]
It stands to reason that these beliefs being so influential in American Christian politics – the sending of money to Israel, the many of these people who get elected to Congress –feels like it should come up more in contemporary conversations about the conflict of occupation and the related genocide. It’s probably worth mentioning, in any case, the prevalence of Christian Dominionism as a motivating ideology in the contemporary Republican movement and recalling George W. Bush’s bold expressions of serving God’s mission with his wars.[4]
I mention all these things, my experiences and some of the wider political context, to explain why this book is important to me and why it is important beyond that. My life has been shaped in large part by my relationship to Christianity – one where, even if I am now very far from among the faithful spiritually, I remain in physical and familiar proximity. And for all the damage that was done to me mentally and emotionally, I am not among the many thousands forced into gay conversion therapy. My clothing might have occasionally come under criticism, but I didn’t deal with sexist ideas of modesty. I had it a lot easier than some. No church elders ever ran into our sanctuary as masked-up gunmen as a test of faith like happened in Hell is a World Without You, turning a teenager into a zealot.
I also must admit I was not totally bereft good experiences. One of the youth leaders at SonFest (our summer vacation bible school) lent me his Initial D DVDs. We used to go to Graziano’s pizza and play Metal Slug in the arcade. I don’t remember the worst parts of the lock-in, but I remember generally enjoying it as well as the Halloween festival. The first time I played Dune 2000 and Command & Conquer: Red Alert were at the same church friend’s birthday party. I learned who Alfred Molina was beyond being Doctor Octopus when I watched Luther in youth group. And I remember the park barbecues at the black church being a mostly very good time. Having to read the whole Bible in middle school was not an awful experience, even if Revelations did scare me. I always liked Exodus and The Ten Commandments. I’ve forgotten it now, but I had Psalm 23 memorized for years after I let go of the church. And my lasting interest in trying to decipher the real meaning of things I think are metaphorical or exaggerated was a useful entry point for Jason Kirk’s podcast Vacation Bible School, where he and his wife Emily Kirk practice a heresy that might have let me stay in the church if it were more prevalent – they are open-minded and inquisitive, analyzing meaning in the Bible, and bringing on scholars and friends of various faiths at co-interrogators and interlocutors. My penchant for such things probably contributed to whatever value I have as a critic and whatever merit I had in my training as a historian. It will be obvious from reading any things that I write, and certainly this, that I have difficulty with vulnerability and yet crave connection. I also struggle with conciseness.
Hell is a World Without You feels like a miracle to me, causing me to reflect on the deep-running mental and emotional scars of my Christian upbringing, and how they are woven through how I still see the world. I don’t believe in God but sometimes still find myself thinking I’ll have to answer for all my shortcomings and mistakes. I don’t know that I could have avoided the punitive introspection in pursuit of perfection if I hadn’t been subject to Christianity in the ways I was. I do know that there’s a balm for the lack of personal resolution in knowing that so many of us in this broad and interconnected network do survive and take what is good from these experiences and pay it forward into the lives of people around us. My most prevalent concern might be that the ending is too happy, but it is nothing if not earned – the climax about blew me away. And, while I may be entering one of those periods where I crave sad or angry endings, I’ve also found that I don’t want a lazily cynical one. There’s nothing wrong with cynics, but I don’t think I want to read or watch or hear anything creatively lazy ever again.
Anyone curious about American Christianity, including but not limited to American Protestantism, including but not limited to the American Evangelical Movement, should read this. Anyone curious about the good and bad of youth group and vacation bible school should read this book. It’s compassionate and entertaining. It feels important as a cultural historical artifact that can resonate beyond the people who directly relate to it, and which has value in examining and refracting a significant cultural force in the world. But it also doesn’t feel like it’s up its own ass, and it’s the fastest I’ve finished a book in a long time.
[1] Abbott Elementary has an episode where Mary Mary’s “Shackles” plays prominently and I remember being at a party in grad school and showing my (atheist and Catholic and Mormon) friends that song, the one song of all the gospel my mom played in her minivan on the way to swim lessons that I still recognize as being an excellent track.
[2] Imagine being 24 and worrying if you were going to have to stay with one of your friends instead of your mom because of your sexuality
[3] This millenarian ideal was crucial to the settlement of Palestine by Jews in accordance with Protestant political theology in the 19th century. This is one of the key arguments of the third chapter of Ilan Pappe’s Ten Myths About Israel.
[4] There’s also the whole red cows thing, which is almost too stupid to discuss. It’s one of those occasions where the South Park version (with Van Halen performing at the Vatican) is far superior to the real things people believe, notwithstanding Parker and Stone’s requisite casual racism.
pcvulpes 
Pingback: Monkey Man, or, Dev Patel’s Baadasssss song | pcvulpes