What Was The Hell House? (A pre-ramble)

Programming Note: I am delaying my next installment in my series explaining how I wound up with this bookstore, to preview our First Friday Art Walk show for this week.

For our October 3 First Friday Art Walk, Bookmarx will have a brief history of the “Hell House”, the mostly short-lived Evangelical phenomenon of haunted houses intended to scare visitors straight (into heaven).

The following is my attempt to contextualize the exhibition:

At a certain point in my life, doing public cultural criticism of Hell Houses or, really, anything to do with Evangelicalism would have given me pause. Despite whatever I felt that I believed about God, the Universe, and the rest of it, in the back of my mind was still the nagging suspicion that to voice any kind of doubt could lead to damnation.  

When I first went to a therapist sometime around 2015, asked what I bought me to therapy, I gave the obvious answer I assumed all people offer, “I have felt like I’m going to hell for the last 30 years and I would like to not feel that way”. A tall order for a counselor, perhaps! 

Despite maintaining the feeling that I was damned, by that time the entire concept of thinking about anything to do with American Evangelicalism felt boring. What was there even to say really that so many of my peers who had left the church (often filled with bitterness) were shouting, but more than anything it felt boring! Thinking about the ways that youth pastors messed with my head wasn’t something I was avoiding, it was something that had nothing left to offer me in ways of insight. I had been surrounded by Evangelicals my entire life. I went to Christian private school, my father was an Assemblies of God minister, I went to church every time the doors were open, I attended BIBLE COLLEGE for some reason, and spending any more time batting around these concepts offered nothing. 

I spent so much time in my adolescence and college years both controlled by and wrestling with someone else’s concept of God, that it was a relief to just stop worrying about it. In my writing, I’ve never wanted to spend a lot of time on my Christian upbringing or the hypocrisy of American Evangelicalism (Oh Joel Osteen is a hypocrite? YAWN) because it feels boring and trite and as much as anything hack! And because, and don’t let my friends on the left here me say this, hypocrisy is just human.  

Beyond anything, all of this noise and clutter and nonsense infected my entire conception of God in a way that, for so long, made it impossible to see a possibility of God beyond the one I had been told was ready to damn whoever just happened to make the wrong choice at the wrong moment. I don’t know if hell exists. And neither does Jerry Falwell or Bill Maher or John Lindell.  

So I have spent the last month or so, forcing myself to reenter the mindset of my youth. I listened to the Tooth and Nail Records Christian bands and watched clips of Gospel Bill to try to recall what exactly The Hell House meant. And what comes to mind, for me, in revisiting these thoughts is a passage from Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions, the first Vonnegut novel I read came to mind.  

“I think I am trying to clear my head of all the junk in there... 
I think I am trying to make my head as empty as it was when I was born onto this damaged planet fifty years ago. I suspect that this is something most white Americans, and nonwhite Americans who imitate white Americans, should do. The things other people have put into my head, at any rate, do not fit together nicely, are often useless and ugly, are out of proportion with one another, are out of proportion with life as it really is outside my head. I have no culture, no humane harmony in my brains. I can´t live without a culture anymore.” 

I see why Vonnegut meant so much to me my freshman year at Evangel as I tore through his novels as fast as I could find them (hiding a copy of Jailbird behind my Intro to Communications textbook) at Well Fed Head and Half Price Books.  

And now I too want to empty out the things that have cluttered my brain. All of the things that have made me coarser, meaner, the things that have made me give into my least human instincts—the hell houses, every second I spent listening to AM talk radio to purposely make myself mad, everything that floods into my eyes and brain when I look at social media, the impulse to lash out at someone who sees the world through a different lens, the sludge thrown at me by the algorithm, the laziness, every ounce of alcohol I ever consumed—I want to push it all out and replace it with monologues from Tony Kushner, the ability to recall whatever happened in the Punic Wars, and every thought I have had that I want to tell Harvey but slips away because of all the junk up there.   

What is there to learn from the Hell House other than “BRO THE EARLY AUGHTS WERE CRAZY” or “That’s pretty screwed up honestly”. But the hell house is also fascinating to me in the ways that while attempting to condemn the culture, the Church was borrowing the elements of the same horror it condemned. In the same way that the hip Christian churches of the 2010s were showing The Dark Knight in an attempt to appeal to younger audiences who were exited the church. If you are just going to sell me the same thing, I’ll just go watch The Dark Knight at the theater and save 10% of my money. 

George Ratliff’s fascinating 2001 fly-on-the-wall documentary Hell House, coming soon for rent at Mr Googorium’s Movie Emporium!

I made it out of my relatively unscarred. That can’t be said for many others. I had parents whom I believe were doing the best they knew how to do, and that’s not a luxury that all others had, so this is my check your privilege moment because I realize while I don’t feel any kind of trauma from this and can look back with a kind of fond eyeroll, that would not likely be the case had I been born gay or if I got disowned for listening to Black Flag records. Sure, my dad SMASHED my records, but he didn’t kick me out of the house, even if I maybe should have for having that GG Allin record. (My brother DID get kicked out but he was 20 and he probably should have been out way earlier). 

So I will say this for the practioners of Hell Houses, I think it’s just great that church youth groups want to put on costumes and do a little show. Let me know if you need to borrow my Cryptkeeper costume and break a leg! Oh and don’t skimp on the projectile vomit in the watching an episode of Stranger Things leads to demonic possession scene!