Jordan Wood did not think he had shared his views on hell that widely. An academic and Catholic convert, he had appeared on some podcasts and participated in a couple online debates. Apparently that was enough to strike a deeply resonant chord with some people and touch an especially raw nerve with others.
“I was getting all kinds of messages from all kinds of people, Catholic and non-Catholic,” he says. “I had monks, I had some priests, but a lot of laypeople, mostly.” Over months, even years, he would regularly hear about it from people he did not even know. “That was really something I didn’t expect,” he says.
Wood is a Catholic universalist, someone who believes that all human beings eventually enjoy union with God in heaven. Many of the people who wrote to him said they had never heard this idea presented as a possibility and that it was transformative. Now an assistant professor at Belmont University in Nashville, he sees the same dynamic with his students.
For Wood, learning how many believers—and ex-believers—carry “hell trauma” has been revelatory. In many cases, the result is a lifelong warping of their faith. This is especially true for individuals raised in fundamentalist, “hellfire and brimstone” sects of Christianity.
Not only is hell trauma widespread, but many people who reexamine and deconstruct some of their beliefs realize how the teaching is weaponized to promote certain identities in faith communities, usually at the expense of marginalized groups.
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300258486/that-all-shall-be-saved/The resulting questioning, or even outright rejection, of hell as a doctrine by many people has coincided with a public reevaluation of the teaching, such as in Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart’s 2019 book That All Shall Be Saved (Yale University Press), which affirms universalism. So too Catholic understandings of hell have developed radically during the last half century in ways that are both far-reaching and unresolved—and which take into account the inequities wrapped up in preaching eternal damnation.
Scared as hell
“I learned about God at the same time that I learned about hell,” says Brian Recker, a Protestant and author of the book Hell Bent (Tarcher) on how the concept of hell negatively impacts how Christians relate to a loving God.
“For a lot of us,” says Recker, “that relationship with God began with hell, began with fear of what would happen to us if we weren’t in a relationship with God.” He learned around age 5 that unless he changed something in his identity, by default he would deserve hell. “And as a child, that’s a visceral reason to become a Christian. It’s very foundational,” he says.
Roberto De La Noval, who grew up fundamentalist Baptist, also recalls hell as a major part of his upbringing, one presented as a risk in almost every sermon.
“You never know when death is just around the corner, and even the smallest, slightest sin is enough to land you in hell,” he says. “That had serious psychological effects on me and definitely created a image of a punitive, angry God who was just kind of waiting for the right moment to seal my fate eternally.”
As a result, De La Noval developed an interest in religious questions. This led him into the Catholic Church. Now an assistant professor at Boston College, he is also a Catholic universalist, working on a book with Wood.
Hellbound
Recker acknowledges that, despite his traumatic Christian formation, he still came up through a system meant to benefit people like him—a white male.
“Religious boundaries are used to oppress marginal identities,” he says. And hell reinforces structures of who can speak for God—usually white men—and who is at risk of hell when they step out of line. He says the belief that people different from you are going to hell “increases your separateness and your superiority from them.”
Consultant, educator, and Protestant theologian Ciarra Jones, a queer Black woman, does not hesitate to call hell part of a white supremacist framework.
“We say some people innately have spiritual value and other people don’t. For example, for queer people, they have no innate spiritual value under hell theology. They only have spiritual value if they deny their queerness themselves,” she says. “That itself means that we deny the genius of the divinity that exists in these folks.”
She connects this to slavery and the myth that all Black people were cursed. “We were already marked for damnation. Therefore using our bodies for labor was the best we could ever hope for,” she says.
Recker adds that part of his journey to embrace a less narrow, more loving God has come, as it has for many deconstructing Christians, through encounters with LGBTQ+, Black, and other marginalized communities—reckoning with the harm that has been done, but also learning from the wisdom of their perspectives.
“Our mental models for God are very white and very male,” he says, which cuts off massive swaths of human experience, especially that of Black women, “who are kind of the furthest from who we’ve . . . allowed to speak for God.”
Even though confronting and rejecting beliefs about hell generally come early in a believer’s deconstruction process, Recker says that changing one’s image of God can be a daunting task. When a Black woman says that the kingdom of God is a loving family where all will be embraced, while a white man says it’s a place where all who step out of line will go to hell, we’re conditioned to believe the white man more readily. “It’s scary to step outside those boundaries,” he says.
To hell with it
When believers reject the concept of hell, one justification that surfaces time and again is the presence of love—whether love of neighbor, love of self, or love of God.
When our relationship with God begins with a fear of hell, “it really robs us of a meaningful, loving relationship,” Recker says. “It really has a way of making the whole spirituality toxic.”
This has spread through churches, society, and even politics, he notes, resulting in a culture of fear and apathy toward others, from the LGBTQ+ community to immigrants. He asks, “Why is our gospel smaller than our actual love for humanity?”
“I have found God in all the places I was told God wasn’t,” Jones says of her own escape from “corrosive, small theologies.” When she realized in college that she was queer, it was her own sister who told her, “I believe in a God that does not require your fissuring and your fracturing for you to belong. I believe in a God that is expansive enough to hold all of you.”
The way Wood viewed God and God’s character was central for his ability to have faith. “Faith is kind of perceiving that something is worth fidelity,” he says. “The way God actually appears is inherently tied up with whether or not that’s going to elicit faith.”
This meant a loving God and not a punitive one. This distinction has been transformative not only for him but also for his students.
“They can see a thousand reasons not to believe,” he says. “There’s constant hypocrisy and co-opting of Christianity explicitly now in American politics. Add on top of that this absolute threat [of hell] that kind of rules and warps everything else.”
So when Wood introduces the concept of universalism—which does not require belief in a Dantesque inferno—“it’s like a moment of conversion,” he says, “a profoundly new hope that gives them a new path.”
Wood characterizes their reaction as, “Wow, this actually sounds like good news, like for the first time. That is, it’s good not just in being saved from danger, but good as in ‘there can be no better thing.’ ”
For a Catholic, this might evoke how the church, in the decades since the Second Vatican Council, has sought to present its doctrine not as a threat but as a positive invitation and affirmative choice. Examples of this include the “universal call to holiness,” proclaimed at Vatican II and echoed by St. Pope John Paul II, as well as an emphasis on truth, beauty, and other positive attributes of the divine.
To hell and back
When De La Noval started grad school at Notre Dame, he was surprised to find a community of faith that did not emphasize hell in the way it had been for him as a child.
“It was interesting to see that the doctrine of hell was still operative,” he says. “But it didn’t seem to be a doctrine that was exerting very much force in the lived spirituality of the people that I was engaging with.”
This relates in part to a widespread misunderstanding of the Catholic view of hell.
Kevin Considine, an assistant professor at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, says, “I’m convinced the little things matter, like the small habits matter, the small movements matter, and they matter a lot.”
He means this not in the sense that one tiny slip-up could result in damnation, but rather that little choices over a lifetime could lead to separation from God. This is the current definition of hell per the Catholic Church. The goal is not to threaten or oppress but to acknowledge that humans have free will and God respects their agency, even if that means complete rejection of God.
“The possibility might be that my habits of choosing have led me into a place where I can no longer recognize good from evil, can no longer recognize God from nothingness, might even have lost the love of myself and the love of others, so that it’s easier to choose into nothingness and annihilation as opposed to choosing into repentance, truth-telling, and the courage of what it might take to atone for any sins that I’ve committed,” says Considine.
However, he adds to this scenario a big note of hope: “God’s more persistent than we are.”
But De La Noval, whose early experiences at Notre Dame led him to delve into church history, says early Christians did not think in terms of a God who offers two choices, one of embracing the Good News and enjoying eternal union with God and the other of rejecting God and being condemned to eternal torment.
“I was very surprised to learn that there were Christians who didn’t think that hell was eternal or had very different understandings of hell,” he says.
Origen of Alexandria, who wrote the first systematic Christian theology, was a devout universalist who argued that all punishment must be restorative, even if that restoration occurs after death. Athanasius of Alexandria, a father of Christology, said the incarnation was part of God’s creative design to draw all people into eternal union with the divine.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church affirms this view today. Citing 1 Timothy, the catechism states, “God wills the salvation of everyone.” Later, it affirms the teaching of an eternal hell whose chief punishment is “eternal separation from God,” referencing Matthew 13.
Wood asks, if God wills all to be saved, what would it mean then for even a single soul to be lost? “Is God thwarted? Does God not know what to do? Or does he know what to do, but he doesn’t have the power to do it? Is he not smart enough? Is he not good enough?” he says.
And if hell is about a person’s freedom to choose against God, Wood cites 20th-century philosopher and theologian Jacques Maritain, who said anyone who could eternally best God in such a battle of wills would be like a “god from below.”
If it seems that the church is trapped in the contradiction of saying God isn’t all-powerful enough to save everyone or isn’t all-good enough to will everyone’s salvation, Wood offers another teaching to avoid this: The doctrine of purgatory, which acknowledges that God will work to purify the souls of the dead and ultimately bring them into heaven.
“Purgatory is just heaven experienced by those who are not yet ready for it . . . and yet there’s a process that still needs to work with your own will to get you there,” he says. “The question is just scope. How wide does that go?”
So universalism and belief in the existence of hell are two threads in Catholic tradition that exist in tension with each other, similar to pacifism and just war theory. Throughout history, the church has moved closer to one and farther from the other. In recent decades, that has meant movement in the direction of universalism and an emphasis on mercy—often rejecting the oppression and othering of whole groups of people.
What fresh hell?
In Sunday school as a child, Recker asked whether people who never heard the gospel would go to hell.
“We ask these questions, and we get answers that don’t make a lot of sense,” he says. “As children, we’re naturally empathic,” which leads to the realization that “I’m more loving than the God we’re talking about.”
What Recker did not know was that a few decades earlier, Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner—one of the architects of Vatican II’s theological framework—asked the same question and proposed the idea of an “anonymous Christian,” a virtuous person who never hears the gospel but is saved by a “baptism of desire,” whether consciously or not.
A few years after Rahner, Pope Paul VI expressed hope for atheists to be saved, because they almost certainly rejected someone else’s distortion of Christ’s love, not Christ himself. More recently, Pope Francis mused that he liked to think hell is empty.
Considine notes how people’s circumstances can majorly impact their ability to choose good over evil.
“Whether we’re born rich or poor and no matter our skin color, gender, sexual orientation, adverse childhood experiences,” he says, “does everyone really have the same possibility of having agency when so many people are influenced and shaped by our context? How then do we choose the good, the true, the beautiful, the life-giving within that particular context?”
Recker appreciates that line of thought, but asks, “Why have this exclusionary belief in the first place?” Although, he says, “When Christians do things to mitigate it, like Pope Francis, they’re moving toward love.”
De La Noval affirms that the church is moving in that direction and cites Pope Francis in the encyclical Fratelli Tutti (On Fraternity and Social Friendship) that the death penalty is “inadmissible” because it is an attack on human dignity, not just for prudential reasons.
“You see clearly universalist logic. Punishment must be restorative. If punishment is not restorative, it is not Christian,” De La Noval says.
That the Catholic Church would go from “no salvation outside the church” to a “hopeful universalism” reflects a major development in doctrine, and De La Noval and Wood have seen firsthand the pushback. Some people think that if the church gets rid of hell, “all hell would break loose” in that people would no longer have a reason to go to Mass, do good works, or even believe in God.
“The long-term sustainability of one’s spirituality can’t be just simply a perpetual threat,” Wood says. He also readily admits that what he asserts is not the current magisterial teaching.
“I’m trying to go further, and in the direction of mercy and love and a God that we can actually believe in in this time and place,” he says. “And I have seen the psychological and spiritual fruit of that firsthand.”
Hell on Earth
If doctrinal developments are one way of refining understandings of hell, another is to return to the creeds and scripture. These can be major sources of misunderstanding among believers, sometimes hidden in plain sight. One example is that the Apostles’ Creed and Nicene Creed make reference to the resurrection of the body and an everlasting life of the world to come, but not heaven or hell as popularly understood.
Jones notes that the separation of body and soul, as understood by many, is ripe for abuse.
“Fundamentalist Christianity can set up a system that takes us away from empathizing with people’s corporeal suffering,” she says. The rationale is, “Well, it doesn’t really matter that this person is experiencing violence, because they’ll transcend their body.”
In Eastern Christian art, a popular depiction of Holy Saturday finds Jesus breaking Adam and Eve out of their tombs, representing the idea that resurrection does not happen alone.
“When we get very individualized on salvation, we kind of miss the point that salvation is a communal, social understanding,” says Considine. God the Trinity is a community, and humans are meant to reflect that love. It means that the saving work of Jesus and the church involves looking out for one another, not oppressing one another. And while salvation is a free gift from God, it also “invites us to participate in what God is doing,” he says.
Considine also points to the scriptural example of God making clothes for Adam and Eve, offering continued care, even after they sin in the Garden of Eden.
“God is constantly with them even though there’s all these other things going on,” he says. “God’s love is boundless, and that love is always entering in all kinds of different forms.”
De La Noval has had choice Bible verses thrown in his face as a sort of “gotcha” against his universalist views, but he says the same mindset is never applied to biblical passages that are clearly universalist.
“We simply do not notice” these verses, he says, since Christians are so trained to read the Bible through a lens of belief in hell. Yet Paul says in Romans 5 that the gift (salvation) is greater than the trespass (original sin) and in Philippians 2 that all will confess that Christ is Lord.
Another distinction often lost in discussions of hell is between punishment and consequences. Punishment is to be restorative, and sin carries with it its own harms, which are its consequences. Considine likens this to the pain that comes from a child disobeying a parent’s directive not to touch a hot stove.
It’s in the realm of trespass and consequences that Recker—who rejects hell in the traditionally understood sense—sees a version of hell on Earth playing out in real time. The key for him is to understand that the Gospel of Matthew, written around the year 70, has Jesus pronouncing judgment against a Temple that has already been destroyed when the gospel is written.
The early Jewish Christians, for whom the Gospel of Matthew was written, were living through cataclysmic events, Recker says, and the author of Matthew was giving their audience language to make sense of their world.
“It’s almost comical to think that he was talking about some kind of afterlife,” he says. “There were actual bodies in the valley of Gehenna in 70 CE. The Roman soldiers created such a slaughter that the valley of Gehenna was piled with bodies. And so when Jesus is talking about that if you don’t repent, you’ll be thrown into Gehenna, I believe Matthew’s Jewish listeners knew exactly what he was talking about.”
As an aside, Recker points out that in John, the most sophisticated and theological of the gospels, Jesus makes no reference to hell. But by using apocalyptic hyperbole in Matthew, a practice common for the Jewish prophets, Jesus was speaking to the consequences of “failures to love in this life, not in the next life.”
“I think that becomes incredibly relevant to us when we talk about: Where are our actions leading us?” he says. “I think of things like climate change. If we just continue to act like the Earth is a commodity to be exploited rather than a gift to be received and stewarded, then the natural consequence is going to be hell on Earth, not in the afterlife. And that hell is already being experienced by the most vulnerable.”
Recker says Gehenna is simply “when we ignore God’s dream for the world and we create the world that empires want—a world of dominance and control, where there’s powerful people on the top and vulnerable people being crushed at the bottom.
“At any point in history,” he says, “the world is always ending for somebody, wherever God’s ways are being neglected.”
This article also appears in the June 2026 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 91, No. 6, pages 10-15). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Image: Unsplash
