Republican Christians Make Me Hope Hell Exists

As a child raised in the Catholic Church, I was brought up believing that hell was real, though as I got older, I began to grow skeptical. The idea seemed incompatible with a God who was love, and so I gradually discarded it.

These days, although I’m pretty sure hell doesn’t exist, I’m beginning to hope I’m wrong.

Watching Republican Christians attempting to steamroll their ‘Big, Beautiful Bill” through Congress, one that will bring generational sorrow and suffering to hundreds of millions of human beings in poverty and lack while further elevating the wealthy, I cling to the hope that somewhere beyond this life, there is a place where horrible people pay for the atrocities.

My mind contemplates an afterworld where the anguish that human beings have unleashed upon others in this world is returned to them in kind, a place where they feel the pain they have inflicted while here.

If there's a hell, it will be filled with people who claimed faith in Jesus, while trying to strip the sick of care, the terrified of refuge, and the vulnerable of protection, and reveled in it as if it were a righteous victory.

If eternal damnation exists, it should be the wages of men and women who coordinated, participated in, and applauded the vilifications of immigrants and refugees, whose only crime was their nation of birth or the color of their skin.

If there's a forever place of suffering saved for people with cancerous hearts, it will surely house those who crucified strangers for their sexuality, who persecuted them over pronouns, who willfully trafficked in a dehumanization that was deadly.

And if there's a hell, it should be packed to the rafters with professed Christians who chose to celebrate, turn the other way, or be silent as they watched it all happen.

If there is an afterlife reckoning, Donald Trump, JD Vance, Mike Johnson, and all those who conspired to perpetrate this “Big Beautiful Bill” horror upon our most vulnerable and at-risk might actually come to the humility and repentance that they seem incapable of here.

If God does torment the sinful, they might have to be accountable there for their willful hatred here, and I want them to be accountable.

Honestly, I'm not at all proud of this admission. As a follower of Jesus, I suppose it's a fairly terrible confession of faith, and that is something I'm wrestling with and praying through. I simply know that right now, things aren't panning out the way Jesus said they would, and that self-identified followers of Jesus are largely responsible:

The meek are not inheriting the earth, they're getting the shit kicked out of them.
The mourners are not being comforted; they're being given more grief.
The peacemakers are not being blessed but bloodied.
The least are not being loved, they're being further minimized, silenced, and erased.

And yes, I know I'm supposed to believe that love wins and that it conquers all and that it is all you need—but honestly, that's all a tough sell these days. Right now, it all just feels like empty religious platitudes and pop songs.

And platitudes and pop songs won't keep a bedridden man from being denied life-sustaining care.
They won't protect transgender teenagers from being driven to self-harm or worse.
They won’t prevent immigrants from being violated by our government.
They won’t release children of color from generational poverty.
They won't save a dying infant forced to be born into scarcity and then penalized for it.
They won't keep families of gay children from harassment in their neighborhoods and churches.
They won't provide food for an elderly widow at the end of her life.

And so love alone feels tragically insufficient.

Tomorrow I'll be standing again in the trenches alongside my like-hearted brothers and sisters who believe that good people can alter the planet, but today that doesn't feel like enough. That doesn't feel like the story unfolding.

The story unfolding is that hateful people do hateful things to other people, and they do it all believing God is good with it.

The story unfolding is that people of unthinkable cruelty and malice seem to be rewarded for it.

The story unfolding is that the sick and the poor and the different and the vulnerable are being trodden upon.

And I hate this story, because too many innocent people are suffering in real time because of it. Too many people are enduring a living hell in their earthly lives.

And so yes, right now I look at this day and this life and this world, and it feels like the bad people are winning, and I want those people to understand how much hurt they are causing. And since they don't seem to care very much at all, I want to believe that they will one day face their Maker and the mirror and the blood upon their hands.

And so as much as it pains me to say it, today I'm kinda hoping there is a hell.