Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “Hell and Gone,” on American belief in damnation and doomsday, with Lindsay DiCuirci, associate professor of English at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and scholar of nineteenth-century spiritualism.
On highways across the American Midwest are giant billboards meant to inspire soul-searching. They carry messages such as “HELL IS REAL” and “If you died today, where would you spend eternity?” Although the share of Americans of people who believe in hell has been slipping for two decades, 59 percent of respondents to a 2023 Gallup poll still believed in its existence. On a related note, 55 percent of respondents to a 2022 Pew Research poll expressed the belief that Jesus Christ will return to earth someday as part of the earth’s apocalyptic ending.
Speculation about the afterlife and the world’s end has been the pastime of theologians, laypeople and charlatans for millennia. The enduring concepts of hell and the apocalypse have served as cultural barometers, measuring the status of all kinds of beliefs and behaviors far beyond those associated with organized religion.
Join Professor Lindsay DiCuirci, a scholar of early American literature and print culture and of the spiritualist movement of the nineteenth century, for a fascinating discussion of American beliefs about doom and damnation and their connection with broader worldviews.
We’ll start by looking at early colonial America, when Protestant Christianity predominated. You’ll learn how back then questions related to the end times and our fates after death were not simply personal or abstract, but factored into major societal conversations about art and literature, social reform, criminal justice, and foreign and domestic policy. We’ll discuss Puritan poet Michael Wigglesworth’s famous 1666 work “Day of Doom,” which scared generations of young Christians with its graphic depiction of fire and brimstone. Moving across the centuries, we'll look at abolitionist David Walker’s 1829 treatise “Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World,” which called America itself “hell upon earth!!!” for people of color. You’ll gain an appreciation of how the rhetoric–if not the reality–of hell and the end times activated people’s conscience.
We’ll also examine how the concept of hell has always had its detractors, even among self-identified Christians. Some of its most vocal opponents were nineteenth-century spiritualists, a diverse and diffuse group of people who believed that they could speak with the dead. For spiritualists, the elimination of hell was a balm for those who are mourning but it also had great political potential. Many spiritualists were also radical reformers, working on issues like the abolition of slavery, women’s liberation, capital punishment reform, and indigenous rights. The idea that the soul not only lived forever but continued to learn and progress even after it was “disrobed of the body” invigorated their quest for social justice on earth.
Today, beliefs about hell and the end of the world remain entangled with questions about human suffering, the nature of justice, and the future of the planet. You’ll emerge from the talk with a richer understanding of how your views on various questions of our day are shaped by your assumptions about how it all will end. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Talk begins at 4:30. Attendees may arrive any time after 3 pm.)
Image: From “Pandemonium,” an 1841 John Martin painting of the capital of hell as described in John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” (Louvre Museum/Wikimedia).