In the American imagination, hell exists beyond the afterlife. It operates as a framework in everyday life and quietly teaches us how to bow to authority, place blame on others, and justify patriarchal control. It begins as a story we tell to establish order, wrapped in vivid images of fire, Satan, and eternal torture. But the reaches of hell extend far beyond the houses of the holy. Hell is a real-world manual for punishment, embedded in childhood to police our thoughts before they ever become actions. It defines categories of good and evil, casts suffering as deserved by those who suffer, and wires the mind to associate fear with justice and morality. This system doesn’t just promise consequences in the next life but trains us to see danger in doubting authority. The Good Kids Guide to Hell equates obedience with being virtuous, especially if you are a woman, and expects surveillance as part of the natural order. 

The devil may appear in flames, but more often, he hides in daily life, in a rebellious thought, a sexual impulse, or a question spoken too boldly. The display of too much confidence. If you grew up in the Christian church, you internalized the rules long before you had language to name them.

When people are raised this way and continue into adulthood with these beliefs, the concept of Hell becomes its most dangerous; it becomes a governing principle. The theology of eternal punishment, the idea that a person can be tortured forever for not believing in Jesus as the son of god and savior of all humanity, has shaped not only how millions of Americans view morality but also how they interpret justice, authority, and obedience. When this theology bleeds into the institutions of law and politics through Christian nationalism, hell is no longer a metaphor. It is a policy.

This merger isn’t subtle. It reorganizes civic life around punishment, submission, and fear. All earthly cruelty begins to feel proportionate once you believe infinite suffering is a fair response to finite doubt. Prisons become sites of purification. Border walls look like shields against evil. Police transform into agents of divine discipline. Hell’s logic begins in church but spreads like a dirty virus into school boards, legislative chambers, and courtrooms. Theology shapes the self, then the state, then the system.

Authoritarian religious environments begin emotionally conditioning people in childhood, framing obedience as a virtue when told, “Respect your elders,”  and calling you out as a sinner if you dare question authority, especially the authority of a man. This extremely unhealthy environment casts the stakes as eternal, letting hell loom over curiosity and resistance. As psychologist Marlene Winell describes in her work on Religious Trauma Syndrome (RTS), the trauma often stems not from what others do to you, but from what they train you to believe about yourself: your doubts endanger you, and your private thoughts will damn you. This teaching implants self-surveillance long before we gain the power to consent.

That surveillance doesn’t stop at the self. It expands outward, training entire communities to mistrust empathy. In this framework, justice is synonymous with control. Any dissent signals disorder. Punishment for disorder is holy retribution. Theology wires the public imagination to assume that harm must be met with harm. The United States sustains the highest incarceration rate in the world, relies heavily on solitary confinement, prosecutes children as adults, and continues to legalize prison labor under the 13th Amendment. These practices reflect a belief system that casts some people as irredeemable and treats their suffering as morally useful.

When Christian nationalism embeds this worldview into civic life, it doesn’t just change laws. It changes what people believe the law is for. Moral crusades replace policy debates. “Woke mind virus,” “groomer,” and “illegal” are no longer descriptions, but also emotional detonators designed to short-circuit reason and sanction repression. Leaders replace public empathy with hyped-up paranoia. They recast inclusion as manipulation, frame compassion as weakness, and rebrand cruelty as keeping society safe.

The results are visible in every corner of U.S. governance: abstinence-only sex education that ignores evidence but upholds chastity; bans on gender-affirming care that are framed not as public health decisions but as acts of moral correction; the ongoing push to reinstate school prayer, marketed as liberty but functioning as theocratic enforcement. These are not random decisions. They are efforts to install a singular vision of divine order into a pluralist society, no matter the human cost.

The parallels to Weimar Germany’s descent into fascism are not one-to-one, but they are troubling. Leaders cast loyalty as virtue and treat dissent as heresy. They scapegoat trans people, immigrants, and Black voters as threats to the social order. These tactics go beyond culture; they shape law. Gerrymandering, voter suppression, and selective rulings erode democracy from within while keeping its facade intact. Legalism becomes the tool for dismantling legal rights.

At the center of this shift is a transformation of language. Emotional terrorism replaces public debate, and conspiracy substitutes for civic literacy. The press, universities, and courts are portrayed as indoctrination machines, while fantasies of the “deep state” or messianic salvation flourish. The V-Dem Democracy Report classified the U.S. as a backsliding democracy in 2021, the first time it fell out of its high democratic category. Especially among young white men, there is a growing nostalgia for authoritarianism, not because it promises justice, but because it promises dominance.

This is our theological inheritance. And it has global cousins. The logic of divine punishment justifies political violence across contexts: in Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, India’s Hindu nationalist displacements, and Myanmar’s Buddhist-led ethnic cleansing. In each case, metaphysical certainty becomes a mandate for real-world cruelty.

The United States has grown more dangerous in the 2020s as political leaders secularize this theology. They no longer need to invoke God, and hell’s logic holds without divine language. If people accept eternal punishment as reasonable, they learn to accept abuse in the same way. If obedience is morality, then questioning becomes a threat. Once internalized, this logic requires no preacher. The state becomes the sermon. The people who have been taught to police their doubts since childhood begin to self-censor long before the knock at the door.

Yet this is not the only way forward. We are not without resistance. The U.S. legal system, flawed as it is, includes mechanisms that slow authoritarian momentum. Local governments, public defenders, and federal courts have occasionally blocked overreach. Grassroots movements such as Black Lives Matter, immigrant defense networks, and trans rights coalitions remain active, intersectional, and digitally fluent. Transparency technology, despite algorithmic suppression, still circulates truth. Friction exists, and friction buys time.

Time, waiting for this to pass,  cannot correct this path. The normalization of violence disguised as moral protection continues to accelerate. What once required extreme justification now passes as common sense, especially when cloaked in the language of safety, patriotism, or divine will. The fusion of corporate and state power under banners of freedom, family, and faith has gained velocity. Together, they manufacture an illusion of stability while extracting compliance, turning entire communities into surveillance zones and labor markets into punishment economies. Beneath this machinery, a quieter sabotage unfolds: spiritual gaslighting. It is the deliberate inversion of moral language, a tactic that transforms the language of care into a signal of danger. A  real-world example of this kind of spiritual gaslighting is the phrase “love the sinner, hate the sin,” commonly used in Christian rhetoric around LGBTQ+ people.

This tactic targets the conscience, not the body, severing people from their inner compass. When people stop trusting their moral instincts, they struggle to speak out, organize, or even recognize abuse. If you lose the ability to feel with conviction, you begin to second-guess your instincts. That uncertainty fractures empathy at its root, and when people can no longer trust what moves them to care, they struggle to act together purposefully. Resistance doesn’t vanish. It dries up and splinters, being cut off from the roots. It becomes hesitant, misdirected, and easily manipulated. Confusion is not a byproduct of this indoctrination. It is the strategy. It isolates us, dulls the moral imagination, and leaves authoritarianism to present itself as the only remaining source of order.

To resist this, we must confront the theology beneath the policy. We must unlearn the belief that people deserve torment, that order requires fear, and that authority is synonymous with goodness. 

To imagine a world without hell is not to erase accountability. It is to reimagine it. To build systems of repair instead of retribution. To practice caring for others as a basic framework of society. To replace obedience with engagement and curiosity, punishment with personal and community responsibility, and surveillance with trust.

We are standing on a threshold. One foot is in the myth of hell, and the other in the possibility of shared liberation. The decision before us is not between church and state but between cruelty and caring for one another.

We must choose now to be brave and speak out, before silence becomes consent and our conscience goes quiet beneath the weight of our grief and loneliness.