In the film "The Prestige," there’s a scene in which a magician is attempting to wow his audience through a simple vanishing act. Bringing out a caged bird from his collection of magical items, he places it on a table in front of him for his audience to see. He next covers the cage with a cloth and suggests to his viewers that he is going make it disappear, bird and all. He raises his hands with gusto and brings them smashing down on where the cage should be under the cloth, but, miraculously, the cage is gone. Smiling, the magician removes the cloth from the table to reveal that the cage (and bird) have disappeared.
While the majority of the audience bursts into applause, one young boy in the front row begins crying, claiming that the magician killed the bird. Even when, as the next part of the trick, the magician appears to produce the bird out of thin air, the boy remains upset, refusing to believe that the magician hadn’t killed a bird during his trick. Even the attempts by the magician’s assistant to console the boy by reassuring him that the bird is truly alive do not work. The rest of the audience, however, is stunned and joyously applauds the magician.
In a later scene, as the magician’s assistant is cleaning up after the show, it is revealed that the boy was actually right- in order to perform the trick, the magician had to kill the first bird and produce a second one from his coat-pocket. What the rest of the audience didn’t know was that the cage holding the bird was collapsible; thus, when the magician brought his hand down on it, the cage- and the bird within- were flattened so as to not be visible to the audience. This gave the appearance of a vanishing act, but the cage and the dead bird were really on the table the whole time.
In these scenes, then, we have two sets of reactions to the trick that occurs. The first is the reaction of those who are in support of the vanishing act: the audience, who is wowed by the spectacle and remains ignorant of the dark underside of the event, and the magician’s assistant, who, while disturbed, simply sees the inhumanity of the trick as being a necessary part of the business. For this group, the spectacle and the magic take primacy. The second type of reaction is that of the boy, who sees through the spectacle and realizes the inhumane thing that’s really occurring. For him, the magic trick is not worth the cost of the bird’s life- he refuses to justify the magician's actions.
What I want to suggest is that these reactions are parallel to people’s reactions to the idea that Jesus saves us from hell by dying for our sins on the cross. While there are some Christians who are like the audience in that they merely celebrate the magical event of forgiveness without being aware of the dark underside- namely, the notion that people who don’t accept God’s forgiveness burn forever- in my experience a larger portion of Christians mirror the magician’s assistant: they are disturbed on some level, but feel the need to justify the event anyways.
Having spent a long time in a variety of Christian subcultures, I’ve heard quite a few arguments that attempt to legitimize hell and make it rationally justifiable. Yet almost all of these arguments seem to place a greater value on the trick that occurs- God granting us forgiveness through Jesus taking our place on the cross- rather than on the lives of “birds” who might get crushed by the trick (those who are destined to a fiery eternity in hell).
For instance, it is typically supposed in conservative Christianity that only those who actively accept God’s forgiveness through Jesus make it into heaven. This raises a series of troubling questions. What happens to people who never even hear of Jesus, such as the entirety of the people of North and South America before 1492? What happens to people who reject Jesus because Christianity was used to oppress them, such as victims of clerical sexual abuse? Does the priest, a believing Christian, avoid hell, while the battered, scarred child is sent there straightaway?
Moreover, if people’s acceptance of Jesus relies to a great degree on Christians’ ability to represent Jesus to all people, and to do it well, then why is God making a gamble with people’s eternal destinies by giving us the responsibility of evangelizing? Why entrust other people’s souls to bumbling and irresponsible humans?
Or, to follow another line of thought, how could heaven be heavenly if I know that I made it while those I love did not? How could I ever be happy if I knew that my brother, or best friend, was suffering for all eternity? How could God be okay with that, and if he isn’t, why doesn’t he change the rules of acceptance?
When these questions are raised, many Christian leaders will attempt to argue for why God would be justified in sending these people to hell, or why you wouldn’t be sad that everyone was burning away while you were being showered with blessings. Is the perversity of this not apparent? Such leaders appear in these moments to be more concerned with defending what they understand to be a doctrinal “truth” than with the eternal torture of quite literally billions of people. They want a trick more than they want the lives of others.
The effects of such a misalignment of priorities is drastic. Not only does it make Christianity wildly unappealing to a huge portion of the population, it actively tears apart the inner lives of Christians who feel that there can’t be any other way (even more “birds” crushed!).
For instance, one of my friends recently recounted to me how “messed up” she had been due to the pro-hell arguments her pastor made during her youth. On one occasion, upon asking her pastor whether she could be happy if her relatives were in hell while she was in heaven, she was told that in heaven she “would see things from God’s perspective and realize that they deserved to be in hell due to their sin” and thus that “she would praise and worship God for his justice.”
A small child being told that she would one day praise God for the torture of her family members. Understandably, this scarred her, because she assumed that her pastor had to be right and that this is what “Christianity” meant.
In my experience, to truly believe in hell, to actually take it seriously and live life as if every non-Christian could be seconds away from spending their eternity in torture, turns your life into a living hell. If the only thing that can “save” people is converting them, then what value does anything else have in life? What good does jazz, or business, or feeding the poor do if ultimately these things don’t prevent eternal damnation? Hell, when truly believed in, creates the impression that a) nothing you do outside of conversion matters, producing an incredible sense of meaninglessness, and that b) anyone you love could in an instant die and go to hell, producing incredible anxiety.
(For this reason, I argue that people are only able to believe in hell because they don’t actually believe in it. They are protected from the horror of such an idea because they haven’t taken it seriously enough to think through the repercussions of what the world would be like if it was true. It is only a surface-level belief.)
In sum, hidden behind the trick of the cross will inevitably be crushed birds, whether they are crushed here and now or in an unforgiving afterlife. As Christians, those who are meant to identify with the victims of the world, those who are meant to alleviate rather than produce pain, we should not be like the magician’s assistant, justifying the inhumanity of hell in order to prop up the trick of forgiveness. Instead, we should be like the child, refusing to accept that such a trick be performed at all.
Does God need to create such a tragic reality, where birds are crushed merely so that forgiveness can be offered? Is God no better than a magician who needs to kill things to perform a trick?
Child-like, and in the belief that Christianity can do better than hell, the answer is no.
