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Why A World Without “The Concept of Hell” Becomes A World Without Mercy
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Kirk Cameron’s “Comfortable Theology” Will Build A More Brutal Society
Most people don’t reject Hell because they’ve really studied it biblically and found it false. Many, like Kirk, claim to be studying it. But my guess is that there’s an emotive filter governing their study.
Peel that away, and you’ll find they reject it because it makes them deeply uncomfortable, and comfort has quietly become the highest moral good. So Hell gets dismissed as primitive, unloving, unbiblical, and unnecessary.
Now, if you’re coming in late on this issue, please know that Kirk Cameron is a fine Christian. He’s demonstrated this over and over: How he loves his wife. How he’s raised his family. His church life and his remarkable efforts to bring Christ into culture. He’s given up a lot of Hollywood money and has chosen a calling of Christian teaching and ministry. His life is a testimony.
But here’s Kirk’s problem…
The moment you erase the biblical aspect of hell, something far worse takes its place. The truth is… judgment doesn’t vanish; it metastasizes. It slips out of eternity and into politics, street mobs, internet ideologies, and everyday life.
And suddenly the world becomes less forgiving, less humane, and more vicious… because when no one believes God will judge in the end, many people feel entitled to judge right now. (From hell in eternity to hell existentially). Seriously, this is extremely important. Please keep reading…
The Comfortable Lie That Turns Mercy Into a Weapon
When eternal judgment is dismissed, temporal powers set themselves in God’s place.
For most of Christian history, Hell wasn’t optional. You didn’t have to like it or understand it, but you couldn’t pretend it wasn’t there. It sat in the background of sermons, laws, conscience, and common sense… quiet, heavy, unavoidable. And when Jesus spoke of it, He didn’t hedge or soften the blow.
“It is better for you to enter life crippled than with two hands to go into Hell, where the worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.” (Mark 9:42–44)
Those words once stopped folks cold. Today, they make people squirm. And that squirming… the discomfort, the urge to change the subject… may be the last thin barrier between a humane society and a brutal one. Because when a culture loses Hell, it doesn’t become kinder.
It actually becomes more cruel.
Erase Hell, and Justice Goes With It
This isn’t just a preacher’s talking point. Even secular thinkers have stumbled into the same conclusion. One Marxist scholar… no friend of Christianity… admitted that removing Hell from a society produces serious social breakdown.
Rushdoony put it more bluntly: when Hell disappears from religion, justice disappears from politics. Judging by the world we’re living in, that’s not theory. It’s a diagnosis.
At first glance, denying the biblical concept of Hell feels enlightened… humane, progressive, merciful. Eternal punishment sounds harsh in an age trained to confuse comfort with goodness. But history keeps exposing the same truth: when societies abolish Hell, they don’t abolish judgment.
They relocate it, dragging final reckoning out of eternity and forcing it into the present world. And once humans seize the judge’s bench, mercy collapses fast.
The Three Escape Routes… and Why None of Them Work
The historian D. P. Walker noticed something unsettling. When people reject eternal punishment, they’re left with only three options. Each sounds reasonable. Each ends badly.
Exit #1: Death Ends Everything
This is the cleanest escape: no Heaven, no Hell, no judgment… just darkness. At first, that sounds like relief. No moral audit. No ultimate reckoning. But follow it through, and the emptiness sets in.
If death ends everything, then nothing ultimately matters. Justice is a myth. Evil is a chemical reaction. Love is simply chemicals firing in meat. Murder and mercy dissolve into molecules… and the universe doesn’t care. And yet many people prefer that emptiness to a living God who demands accountability. For them, “salvation” doesn’t mean forgiveness; it means escape… from judgment, from meaning, from God Himself.
They’re like fugitives who see the arrival of a police officer not as protection but as a threat. Judgment feels oppressive. Death feels like freedom. That’s not clever. It’s revealing. In fact, many atheists desperately want meaning to die. Why? So God can be buried with it.
That’s not enlightenment. It’s cosmic nihilism with a grin.
Exit #2: Everyone Gets Saved
The second escape keeps eternity but removes consequences. Everyone lives forever. Everyone gets in. Karl Barth’s view.
Hell then becomes temporary… corrective, therapeutic, curable. It sounds compassionate, but when no one can truly be lost, nothing truly matters.
Right and wrong lose weight. Justice becomes symbolic. Evil becomes a minor inconvenience. Forgiveness stops healing and starts trivializing. History shows what follows. As belief in Hell faded in 17th- and 18th-century England, religion slid into antinomianism… no lasting law, no final consequence. God became endlessly loving and simultaneously… endlessly toothless.
But something strange happened. Those same movements turned feral. Groups like the followers of Richard Roach turned Hell into a cosmic idea and almost immediately replaced it with their own judgments. “Revelations” multiplied. Threats were issued in God’s name. Worship services turned violent. Rivals were branded enemies of God.
Bottom line: Deny divine judgment, and human arrogance rushes in to replace it.
When Humans Take God’s Job
This pattern never changes. Once Hell is removed from eternity, judgment doesn’t vanish… it gets reassigned. Authority once attributed to God gets handed to ideologues, bureaucrats, revolutionaries, and mobs. As Alasdair MacIntyre explains, when societies lose shared moral frameworks, they invent new moral languages to justify power. Someone must decide who is pure and who is damned.
In fact, history’s bloodiest regimes are always the most convinced of their moral superiority. When Marx rejected Heaven and Hell, he didn’t erase them… he rebuilt them on earth. The proletariat became the saints. The capitalists became the devils. History itself became the final judgment. On and on.
The result was predictable. Prisons that mirrored the torments they claimed to abolish. Richard Wurmbrand’s accounts from former Communist prisons… torture, mock crucifixions, guards sneering…
“Look at your Christ!”— are Hell by another name. Mao’s China followed suit: public shaming, re-education, generational guilt. All this still gets practiced by the Chinese government, though less overtly. Think digital ID.
Hell didn’t disappear.
It got bureaucratized.
No God, No Restraint
Remove divine judgment, and restraint collapses. Sin becomes “freedom.” Virtue becomes “oppression.” Any desire crowns itself king. Fausto Sozzini, the father of modern annihilationism, also rejected original sin, denied the Trinity, and substitutionary atonement.
What he pioneered looks uncomfortably like a modern trend.
But the rule never breaks down. Get rid of God’s authority and judgment doesn’t go away… it lands in human hands. That’s why every totalitarian system looks like a warped religion: rituals, sacred language, heresy, blasphemy laws, public confessions, and punishment.
Hell is exiled from theology and installed in policy. All the things you can’t say on social media. In many countries, you can’t say that a woman isn’t a man. Cops show if you post that. We see it everywhere today.
What Hell Actually Is
Strip away the caricatures, and Hell isn’t sadism… it’s separation. Scripture calls it Gehenna, a burning refuse dump outside Jerusalem. Rot, fire, discarded things smoldering without end. Hell is not merely punishment; it’s much worse… a life finally cut loose from God, truth, love, and meaning.
Nothing connects. Nothing heals. Nothing belongs, and it’s actually “community” that gets annihilated.
That is why Hell matters. It tells us choices are real, evil is real, love can be rejected, and justice is not a social construct. God takes human dignity seriously enough to allow refusal… even when it destroys us.
Why Hell Makes Mercy Possible
Here’s the paradox modern minds miss: belief in Hell restrains cruelty. It keeps final judgment out of human hands. Mercy becomes possible because justice is deferred. Forgiveness has weight because evil has consequences.
But remove Hell, and everything turns urgent and absolute. Every disagreement becomes existential and a seeming hill to die on. Every enemy becomes irredeemable. Every cause becomes a holy war. And cruelty always finds a moral excuse.
Deny Hell, and you don’t become nice. You become dangerous.
The Hell We Pretend Isn’t There
Modern culture can’t escape Hell. It temporalizes it and manifests it. Torture. Brutality. Cancel mobs. Permanent stigma. High octane polarity. Systems with no forgiveness. Ideologies that divide the world into the pure and the damned. We abolished eternal judgment and replaced it with endless temporal punishment. Again, social media proves this if nothing else. That said…
Christ’s warning still stands… not because God delights in fire, but because reality doesn’t bend to emotional comfort. And the most frightening truth of all is this:
When Hell disappears from theology… It doesn’t disappear from society.
Life on Earth becomes a temporary hell.
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