A curious reader might slog through all 234 pages of Rebecca Price Janney's book
Who Goes There? A Cultural History of Heaven and Hell, but I recommend the curious reader pick up a different book, almost any book, except
The Shack or
Blue Like Jazz. I'm going to tell you in fourteen words what Janney takes 234 pages to say: people used to believe in heaven and hell; now they don't, and that's bad.
There are two great flaws in Janney's book: no clear audience, and she uses Peter Marshall for her history citations. Let's take care of the second first. If you are going to talk about history, use a historian, not a revisionist ideologue popular with fundamentalist home-schoolers. Marshall's revisionist history is a joke, and no one needs a degree in history to know it. Ms. Janney, if you must use a Christian historian, try Mark Noll (or George Marsden). He's so good that Notre Dame hired him even though he's an evangelical. You'll also find his writings about the myth of Christian America very informative, as well as scrupulously annotated and researched, unlike Marshall's use of selective quotations and bizarre speculation.
Second, who is this book for? Do Christians not know that people used to believe in heaven and hell more than they do now? Is anyone surprised that 150 years ago there was more belief in the fiery torments of hell? More to the point though is the question Janney never answers: why does it matter if people believed that 150 or 200 years ago? If you established that every Christian in America believed in hell in 1850, it would not get you one inch closer to demonstrating that hell is a real place. Hell, if you established that every heathen believed it, it wouldn't help your case one iota. If the book is for non-Christians, what sort of argument does the author advance? That is her purpose, after all. In the introduction she makes a point of writing: "Death and what comes next are crucial aspects of life, and we take a huge risk if we cannot support what we believe, especially if exclusive religious claims are true" (pg. 12).
The mind collapses on itself trying to understand what she means by that statement. You cannot support what you believe with any sort of non-speculative argument. Period. You can point to the Bible. You can point to surveys of what people believe. You can listen to the bizarre stories of NDE survivors. You can read about the man who died, saw a vision of hell and felt compelled by an angel to write it all down. None of that constitutes a viable argument. As for exclusive religious claims, she seems not to understand that people of other faiths make the same argument. If a Muslim in Saudi Arabia wrote a book alleging that Muslims believed in hell with greater frequency 100 years ago (a non-eternal hell, by the way), he would have the same sorts of arguments Janney makes here. This book suffers from philosophical and theological insularity to such a degree that Janney doesn't recognize the special and restricted nature of the claims she's making. Exit her community of reference as I have, and all the claims about the afterlife are equally true and equally absurd because we simply don't know. Can't know. Won't know 'til we're dead, assuming knowing continues after death.
Janney does find time to do what conservative (near fundamentalist) Christians who write for Moody, the book's publisher, and similar publishers have been doing for the past several years: she picks on postmodernity. And she does it so badly that I have to point something out because postmoderns (whatever that means, and I assume I am one of them) are so much more right about their perspective on this than Janney. Janney writes: "A philosophy known as 'postmodernism' began to take hold in mainstream American culture in the early 1970's, and it quickly began to replace time-honored Christian values" (189). She then goes one to make outrageous claims that demonstrate she knows virtually nothing about postmodernity or the two whipping boys she chooses: Derrida and Foucault. I'm going to go out on a limb and accuse her of having read neither. What Janney fails to recognize is that the rebellion of the 1960's and 1970's was largely in response to the utter hypocrisy of America's political and religious hierarchies. The "time-honored Christian values" had endured slavery, subjugation of women, slaughter of Native Americans, Jim Crow and segregation, and a military buildup that was at that time dumping napalm on children in Vietnam. Time-honored indeed. At nearly every step, good Christians were helping the hegemony to flourish because they were so deceived by their upbringing in an incredibly powerful civil religion based on the myths of America's divine favor. It was thanks in part to men like Foucault and Derrida that people were finally able to see through the referential meaning of language to the political and power uses of language, peeling back the illusion of truth and the pretense of speaking truth without hidden motives. This, again, demonstrates that Janney has no idea who her audience is, unless she just wants to sell books to uber-conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists. No non-Christian with a basic understanding of history, philosophy, linguistics, or rational argument can take Janney seriously.
I would love to move through each section of the book and review the horrific job of history and argument Janney presents, but what would be the purpose? I've outlined the argument for you in 14 words. I will say that her treatment of Mark Twain is particularly egregious. Were he alive today to read her book, I can only imagine the writing he would do in response. (I'm thinking something along the lines of the treatment James Fenimore Cooper received, only Cooper's exaggerations were creative license and hyperbole, not assertions of fact concerning things that can't be known.) He would surely point out that if millions of people believe a lie, it's still a lie. And he might even say that Allah is kinder than Jesus because hell in Islam is not eternal. An irony lost on most Christians, I'm sure, including Janney. And I hope he would say that if you're going to base what you believe today on the opinions of people 200 or 2000 years ago and not solid argumentation, he'd prefer you not write books.
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