The New Indian Express First Published : 29 Apr 2011 10:26:00 PM ISTLast Updated : 29 Apr 2011 11:21:13 PM IST
Are Christians required to believe that Gandhi is in hell for being Hindu? The rhetorical question posited by a US priest has triggered an intense debate over hell, eternal damnation and the nature of god among evangelical Christians. “The Mahatma is a distinctive case,” Rob Bell hastens to add in his book Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived, “but swap in ‘my Hindu/Jewish/Buddhist neighbor’ for Gandhi, and you can see why many religious Americans find the idea of eternal punishment for wrong belief increasingly unpalatable.” Bell disavows the belief that a select number of Christians will live in paradise while everyone else will torment in hell as “misguided and toxic”.
Such a heretical proposition would have invoked persecution in the days of medieval Inquisition. Today, it is confined to a polemical contestation among theologians. While orthodox Christians maintain that the concept of hell is central to Western humanism, liberals have lauded Bell as a modern-day prophet. For them, the proposition that Gandhi could be in hell should puncture religious chauvinism and unsettle fundamentalists of every stripe. To treat people differently based on who believes what is to fail to respect the image of god in everyone.
A look at Amazon’s religion and spirituality best-seller list suggests an interesting line of thought. Bell’s book figures among the top three. The other, Heaven Is for Real: A Little Boy’s Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back, is an account of a 4-year-old’s near-death experience. Down the list, there is another book on a similar experience. But the list contains no title that reads like ‘The Investment Banker Who Came Back From Hell’. It goes to show that while most of us continue to believe in god and heaven even in this age of disenchantment, hell’s grip on the religious imagination is weakening.
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