I have the feeling that over the past years, we’ve started seeing more TV shows that are either sympathetic towards Hell and Satan, or somewhat negative towards Heaven. I just watched “Hazbin Hotel” today, which isn’t too theological, but clearly is fairly negative towards Heaven.
In “The Good Place”,
Spoilers for The Good Place
the people in The Bad Place end up pushing to improve the whole system, whereas The Good Place is happy to spend hundreds of year not letting people in.
“Little Demon” has Satan as a main character, and he’s more or less sympathetic.
“Ugly Americans” shows demons and Satan as relatively normal, and Hell doesn’t seem too bad.
I only watched the first episode of “Lucifer”, but it’s also more or less sympathetic towards Lucifer.
I have a few more examples (Billy Joel: “I’d rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints”, or the very funny German “Ein Münchner im Himmel”, where Heaven is portrayed as fantastically boring), but I won’t list them all here.
My question is: how modern is this? I’ve heard of “Paradise Lost”, and I’ve heard that it portrays Satan somewhat sympathetically, though I found it very difficult to read. And the idea of the snake in the Garden of Eden as having given free will and wisdom to humanity can’t be that modern of a thought, even if it would have been heretical.
Is this something that’s happened in the last 10 years? Are there older examples? Does anyone have a good source I could read?
Note that I don’t claim Satan is always portrayed positively, or Heaven always negatively :).
Displaying nuance in “hell” as pushback against the binary concept of good and evil is arguably one of the oldest tropes in fiction. Both ancient Greek and Norse mythology very specifically depict the underworld as a place of ambiguity or even normality, with “heaven” holding a far more exalted status.
Even in Abrahamic mythology the idea of hell being some kind of default punishment for sinners is a fairly modern idea, arguably stemming from Dante, who absolutely works a good amount of sympathy for sinners into the story. It really only is the most recent take on the concept by evangelical Christians which holds that an otherwise innocent person will be tortured for eternity over a mere lack of faith, and that form of absurd extremism certaintly plays a large role in the modern backlash against the concept.
The Bible does portray hell as the default, such as saying all have sinned and have fallen short of the Glory of God, Jesus saying He is the only way to The Father and saying that you’re saved by grace alone and not by works
Not going to heaven doesn’t mean you automatically go to hell. Do you think the Jews thought all the gentiles were going to hell?
There were different sects. Sheoul was a thing that was mentioned several times as well. Revelation also makes it clear:
Revelation 20:12-15
And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Then another book was opened, which is the book of life. And the dead were judged by what was written in the books, according to what they had done. And the sea gave up the dead who were in it, Death and Hades gave up the dead who were in them, and they were judged, each one of them, according to what they had done. Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire. And if anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.
