Jen Hatmaker Says She No Longer Believes In Literal Hell ‘it’s the best thing that ever happened to me’

A year after Queen Bee of pagan mommy bloggers and apostate influencers, Jen Hatmaker, announced that she’s left the church, she shared on her substack that after “a couple years of investigation” she’s “quietly laid down” her belief in a literal hell, and it’s been “best thing that ever happened” to her.

This is no surprise, as Hatmaker is not a Christian and hasn’t been for a long time. We’ve covered her decline into apostasy in our posts:

Hatmaker elaborated on her depature on her Substack, writing:

I can’t remember doing anything out of spiritual joy. My “faith walk” was a weighted orchestration to keep myself out of hell, get (or try to stay) on God’s good side, and rescue all my classmates and everyone on earth from a fiery eternity that God was eager to sentence them to because they weren’t born in evangelical Kansas. He would gladly set them all on actual fire and let them burn for the rest of time. God was mad. God was offended. God was punitive. God was vengeful.

I was terrorized by an arbitrary, blood-thirsty God. We all were.

She continues:

“Ten years ago, I was having lunch with a friend who is verrrryyyyy prominent in evangelicalism. We were having yet another debate about reformed theology (her: for, me: against), and she told me this: “I was talking to ______” – the teaching pastor at her reformed megachurch – “and I asked him what to think about my beloved family members who weren’t Christian. He looked me squarely in the eye and said: ‘One day in heaven, you will look at them burning in hell and say AMEN.’”

W-T-actual-F.

This is so deranged. With a God like this, who needs the devil?? This cold calculation of human worth in a sacred context is genuinely deluded. That one normal human could find another normal human worthy of eternal torture while he is worthy of eternal glory frankly helps us make sense of the Christian nationalism destroying our country like a wildfire.”

Hatmaker reveals that around eight years ago, one of her “most respected faith leaders casually said while knitting that no, of course she didn’t believe in a literal hell.” and that that one sentence “reached an interior truth I’d carried for a decade but never allowed myself to consider.”

I won’t go into the scholarship, which is massive, or the exegesis, which is thorough and serious. I won’t list the endless theologians who have interpreted the few scriptures on “hell” through a rigorous cultural and linguistic lens and come to a totally different conclusion….but I will tell you that after a couple of years of investigation, I quietly laid down my belief in a literal hell, and it is the best thing that ever happened to me.

Tellingly, she notes that “No singular growth point has changed my faith more than this. Rather than the crushing fear you might think I’d experience, I felt ten million pounds roll immediately off my shoulders. My head and heart came back into alignment, and my belief in God was rescued.” I said to God: “There you are.”

As soon as she gave up her belief in a literal hell, “Now love made sense. Everything about God made sense. I was no longer trying to maintain allegiance to a tyrant who willingly sent most of the world he created to an eternal fiery torment. I knew that didn’t make sense. This opened up a whole new world to get to know God, really, for the first time, because if this whole life wasn’t a terrifying test to stay out of hell, then maybe it was a sacred experience meant for love and joy, peace and patience, kindness and goodness, faithfulness and gentleness, and self-control that led to a truly abundant life.”

She adds:

“If God wasn’t watching over his glasses keeping a record of my wrongs, maybe he just loved me. Perhaps he understood that living on this fluctuating earth full of sorrow and trauma and pain and injustice is often its own hell, and Jesus meant it when he said, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

Hatmaker concludes: “What if instead of assigning the darkest, cruelest, most murderous human traits to God, we understood he was the absolute best of every good trait times a million? No darkness in him, only light. Embodying a love and patience and compassion we can’t even conceive of, more than we could imagine receiving and more than we want for our enemies. No shadow side. No setting people on fire for millenia, which is pretty dark.”

What does that faith look like walking around this earth? First off, it would be purged of judgment, since we no longer get to be excited about sneering at people from heaven while they scream and burn and saying AMEN.

Take out every condescending spiritual authority terrorizing people into behavior modification. “Us” and “them” is over. Self-importance and self-righteousness don’t make sense anymore. We’d have to purge our faith instruction of fear and shame-based threats. We could finally hang up our very embarrassing tools of evangelizing and proselytizing, and just be good, normal neighbors.

Then we’d have to learn to settle into a new relationship with God, one where he just really, really loves us, all of us…..Doesn’t that sound like heaven?

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