On the side of the angels
By Stephen Cave
Published: November 20 2009 23:20 | Last updated: November 20 2009 23:20
Heaven and the Afterlife
By James Garlow and Keith Wall
Bethany House £9.99, 272 pages
FT Bookshop price: £7.99
Pocket Guide to the Afterlife: Heaven, Hell, and Other Ultimate Destinations
By Jason Boyett
Jossey Bass £8.99, 224 pages
FT Bookshop price: £7.19
Who Goes There?: A Cultural History of Heaven and Hell
By Rebecca Price Janney
Moody Publishers $14.99, 119 pages
The Garden and the Fire: Heaven and Hell in Islamic Culture
By Nerina Rustomji
Columbia University Press $45, 240 pages
There is a story of Christian missionaries attempting to use their most trusted tools – the threat of hell and the promise of heaven – to convert a group of Eskimos. After listening to the account of paradise, one Eskimo asked: “And the seals? You say nothing about seals. Have you no seals in your heaven?” “Seals? Certainly not,” replied the man of God. “We have angels and archangels, 12 apostles and a lamb, but none of your sea calves; we have – ” “That’s enough,” cut in the Eskimo, “your heaven has no seals, and a heaven without seals is not for us!”
Our visions of the afterlife tell us much about who we are and what we hope for. This remains true today, as billions of people continue to act in the belief that they are earning a place in paradise or avoiding one in hell. In the world’s war zones, this has taken on a terrifying dimension, as ever more young men and women show themselves willing to die and to kill for a fast track to the hereafter. But even in the secular west, the hope of divine reward has survived the march of science: half of Britons and more than three-quarters of Americans profess belief in heaven. Four new books show the startling extent to which images of the next world still both reflect and shape life in this one.
One thing is clear: Christian proselytisers have learnt their lesson. Their heaven is now whatever you want it to be, whether a city of God or a colony of plump seal calves. The pastor James L Garlow, one of America’s most successful religious writers, and his amanuensis Keith Wall tell us that it is “the place where your every desire is satisfied more abundantly than you’ve ever dreamed”. This is the Hollywood heaven, a pick ‘n’ mix paradise for the consumerist age in which, according to their new book Heaven and the Afterlife, “there likely will be goods, services, major events, transportation, and communications”. In other words, godly hot dogs while you watch the Saints v Angels Super Bowl.
Garlow’s view is typical of American evangelical Christianity, a force with enormous influence in the US cultural and ethical landscape. His book is aimed at believers – especially those whose faith may need buoying by the anticipation of a candy-floss heaven. But it is also of interest as a statement of what (non-Catholic) Christians in the world’s most powerful country are expected to believe in: an astonishing menagerie of Halloween ghouls and fairies at the bottom of the garden.
“To those who are the least bit spiritually oriented,” he writes, “that demons exist is indisputable.” Heaven and hell are not distant, abstract places but parallel realms whose minions are among us. “Complete bodily possession generally is rare”, apparently – but we are advised nonetheless to be on our guard. Luckily, the cavalry is on hand: “I have no doubt that honest-to-goodness, God-sent angels do indeed exist and participate in our lives, probably far more than we realise.”
Europeans reading this may be surprised that such medieval imaginings are seriously propagated by best-selling (and well-educated) pastors. Americans, however, would be surprised by the surprise: according to recent surveys, more than two-thirds of US citizens believe that angels are active in this world, and half believe they have a personal angel looking out for them. At a time when supernatural beings – vampires, wizards etc – dominate popular culture, there is clearly a great deal of crossover between the domains of fantasy and faith.
The success of Garlow’s vision of a hot dog heaven tells us much about those who are filling the pews. Ours is a generation used to getting what it wants; we expect to be entertained – a harp, a halo and a cloud just won’t cut it. Not even freedom from worldly suffering excites us now that we live in unprecedented ease. Why take the thorny path if heaven is not even as good as Disneyland?
As another American religious writer, Jason Boyett, reminds us, this thoroughly modern vision would have been unrecognisable to Garlow’s early predecessors. Throughout the Old Testament, “heaven” is merely a synonym for the sky; it may be the thunderous abode of a wrathful and jealous God, but He isn’t issuing any invitations. Mortals are consigned instead to Sheol, the Hebrew term for the grave; “for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return,” as Genesis tells us.
How this gloomy vision transformed into the shopping mall in the sky is a story that Boyett attempts to capture in his jaunty Pocket Guide to the Afterlife. Although hindered by a list-based style and goofy jokes, it makes some interesting points. For example: it was contact with the Persian Zoroastrians that gave the Hebrews the idea of a day of judgment on which the wicked will be punished and the deserving rewarded with eternal life. This innovation was subsequently adopted with enthusiasm by the followers of Jesus, who made it central to their mission.
The further development from apocalyptic vision to celestial comfort-blanket is the theme of popular historian Rebecca Price Janney’s Who Goes There? A Cultural History of Heaven and Hell. Her history is confined to the US, though this God-fearing country gives her ample material. For the early American settlers, sin and salvation were very real concerns, as the preacher Jonathan Edwards made clear in a famous 1741 sermon describing how “the God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you”. The terrified congregation were said to have “actually caught hold of the benches to save themselves from slipping into hell”.
Such fire and brimstone was intended to terrify the folks of the lawless frontiers back to the path of righteousness. This was the essence of America’s “old-time religion”. But all that changed with the civil war, explains Janney. In this time of great suffering – 620,000 soldiers died – people looked to religion as a source of comfort and solace; no one wanted to hear that their son, fallen in battle, was now on his way to a fiery hell. Heaven’s gates were widened, and its focus shifted from praising God towards reunion with lost loved ones. This was the beginning of the wish-fulfilment heaven that persists today.
Though an excellent idea, there is little in Janney’s cultural history of the hereafter that is new. But her motivation seems to be more ideological than analytic: she is concerned to show that the doctrine of universalism – the belief that everyone will go to heaven regardless of their deeds on earth – is out of step with historical Christianity.
Universalism has spread as theologians increasingly question whether a truly good God would mete out infinite torture for finite sins. Even Pope John Paul II cast doubt on the reality of hell, in an address in 1999. It has also, argues Janney, become a cliché of modern mourning that the departed have gone to a better place and are up there looking down on us. But what qualities, she asks, justify the widely shared belief that Princess Diana was immediately welcomed into heaven? Her beauty? Her fame? Scripture does not suggest that these are the qualities that earn a place through the Pearly Gates.
Without the threat of hell, argue both Janney and Garlow, there is no “moral deterrent”. There would be no incentive to upstanding behaviour if it were not the currency that bought a ticket out of the fiery pit and into paradise. And the enforcement of upstanding behaviour is very much their concern.
So the modern Christian vision is of a worldly heaven with all the pleasures – Garlow’s “goods, services and major events” – of earth and a similarly carnal hell. Ironically, this is just the kind of vision for which Christians long denounced Islam. Medieval theologians, who looked forward to an eternity spent contemplating the beatific vision of God, mocked the sensuality of the Koran. But the Muslim vision of paradise, described in rich detail in the historian Nerina Rustomji’s scholarly book The Garden and the Fire: Heaven and Hell in Islamic Culture, is very much a product of its earthly origins.
Islam is a religion of the desert. In the vast expanse of Arabia, where Mohammed spent his life, there is not a single permanent river. It is therefore understandable that the word used for paradise in the Koran – al-janna – means “the Garden”. It is a land of plenty, with abundant fruit and rivers of wine, milk, honey and water. And unlike Christianity, which transfers its taboos from this life into the next (Garlow, for example, rules out sex in heaven), the Islamic paradise promises indulgence in all those things that were scarce or forbidden on earth.
For men, anyway. As Rustomji highlights, the role of women in the Islamic paradise is problematic. Firstly, Mohammed is reported to have said that the majority of hell’s occupants will be female because women “are ungrateful to their husbands”. Secondly, each man in heaven is promised, according to tradition, 72 houris or heavenly female companions, plus, in order to cope with the demand, the virility of a hundred men. There is no mention of their earthly wives – perhaps because they are all in hell for their ingratitude.
The explanation for this one-sidedness most likely lies in the original purpose of these heavenly visions – to give Muslim men courage in battle. From the beginning, Islam had to fight for its survival and, as Rustomji explains, in return for martyrdom Muslim soldiers were promised the wide-eyed houris and a first-class ticket to “the highest Garden”.
This use – or abuse – of afterlife rhetoric to persuade people to kill and die permeates history. Janney describes how soldiers on both sides of the US civil war went to battle believing God was on their side. During the 1980-1989 Iran-Iraq war, Rustomji writes, Iranian children were given jackets imprinted with the phrase, “with permission given to enter heaven by the imam” and “keys of paradise” were hung round their necks; they were then sent out to detonate land mines using wooden sticks.
The overriding impression from these books is that behind the grand promises of eternal bliss or torment stand very worldly powers who exploit these carefully crafted fantasies in order to secure compliance in the here and now. There is nothing noble in this mix of heavenly bribes and hellish threats. The lesson is: beware of angels bearing gifts.
Stephen Cave is writing a book on immortality
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