I promise this is the only post I will make on the topic of Jerry Falwell's death. Really.
My partner and I sometiems talk about the afterlife. We were both raised Catholic during a time when, during the post-Vatican II pendulum swing away from the kind of hellfire-heavy indoctrination you can read about in the retreat chapter of Joyce's _Portrait of the Artist_, hell was kind of, as it were, on the back burner. My partner says her parents always told her that because God was merciful there was virtually nobody in hell, "except maybe Hitler." For me, hell is more a literary construct than a spiritual one; I can't get to the concept of hell without going through Milton, Dante, and of course Sartre. His play _No Exit_ is probably the first literary depiction of hell that I encountered which was actually convincing (and frightening). It was, of course, also one of the first literary texts I encountered with an identified lesbian character in it. Ines, one of the three characters trapped in the Bourgeois Living Room of the Damned, is expiating her manipulations of her lover and her lover's husband through an eternity of being the third party of the underworld's most agonizing and least enjoyable menage a trois. What must have appealed to me even then about this play is that as unattractive and unsympathetic as she is, Ines is the closest thing the play has to a hero. Unlike Estelle and Garcin--the heterosexual pair she's doomed to triangulate for all eternity--Ines doesn't make excuses, lie about her past misdeeds, or angle for redemption. She's the only character who has what Sartre considered the cardinal virtue of an existentialist life, which is authenticity. Ines knows who she is, owns that, and doesn't apologize. And even though she was in hell, that was something I could admire about her.
An online friend of mine named Gillian Spraggs once published a very good essay, whose title I unfortunately cannot recall, about a novel by Jane Rule called _Desert of the Heart_ (later the inspiration for a Godawful lesbian film "classic" called _Desert Hearts_). It begins with a description of her decision, at a young age, to go to hell. She was raised by fundamentalist parents (they belonged to an English sect called the Brethren) who had always made it clear where those who were not saved would go. Gill figured out early on that she was not one of the saved, and made the decision at some point that instead of spending her life in a futile attempt to get into a heaven that she knew was not made for her, she would go to hell, where all the people like her already were. I was struck by this opening because although I didn't put it in those particular terms, her decision to walk into hell rather than be cast out of heaven is something that resonated with my own coming out story. All of us have to find ways of understanding why falling in love also means being cast out of the world we thought was ours, and of responding to that explusion. For those of us raised inside the Christian worldview, going to hell is one of the strongest metaphors that suggests itself. There is after all a long literary tradition of lovers declaring that if they won't meet the beloved in heaven, then they're not going. So, and this was Gill's point in her article, there is also a tradition of writing by gay and lesbian authors in which characters enter hell and, like Milton's Satan, decide to make a heaven of it. (You know, don't you, that in the romantic poet William Blake's reading of Milton's _Paradise Lost_, Satan is the hero? Well, now you do.) And unlike Milton's Satan, often these protagonists actually succeed. Or, more often, they discover that the heaven/hell dichotomy is false, that both places interpenetrate, that demons can protect you and that the angels have their own dark secrets. Reclaiming hell is one way for us to imagine reclaiming ourselves--since after all, we're always the ones who are damned.
My point is that the hell built by the fundamentalists comes out of a religious and literary tradition so powerful that it exerts considerable force even on those who don't actually believe in God, or in an afterlife, or in hell as a real (though metaphysical) place. Sartre certainly didn't believe in any of those things, for instance. I've never been able to believe in a hell where God does the tormenting. I see plenty of evidence, on the other hand, of humans making life hell for each other--which was probably why I found _No Exit_ so interesting. But the only hell I can really believe in is the hell that people make for themselves out of their own wrongdoing. I think it must be hell to be someone like, say, Dick Cheney. Maybe he doesn't _realize_ that; but surely it is.
Anyway. Having myself been consigned to hell by so many people--including Falwell himself--I would never wish it on anyone else, even those who have wished it on me. But not all of Falwell's partisans are that kind. And so it is with a sense of, I don't know, the opposite of irony that I note that Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church have announced their intention to
protest Falwell's funeral.Phelps, you may remember, got himself on the map in the 1980s by protesting the funerals of gay men who had died of AIDS, and attained national prominence by protesting the funeral of Matthew Sheppard in the 1990s. In reality, he is a hateful, spiteful, sonofabitch whose only goal in life is to feed off the rage and hatred that he provokes in grieving people; but because of the climate of right-wing Christian hatemongering generated and sustained by Falwell and his brethren, Phelps has been able to dress up his personal hatreds in the clothing of Christianity and pretend that what he's doing at these funerals is "preaching." Phelps's screed about Falwell and his fitness for hell makes exactly as much and as little sense as the various pronouncements Falwell has made about how this or that terribly cataclysmic event is a judgment on America for tolerating people like me. So, Falwell will go into his grave with Phelps spitting venom at him from the safe distance at which he will undoubtedly be kept.
Wherever Phelps goes when it's his turn to cross over, he'll probably see Falwell there. If my ideas about God and the afterlife are right, they won't be in hell--at least not the kind of hell they always imagined. But they'll probably be thrown together, being so much alike and all. And really, no matter how vindictive I was, I could not possibly wish anything worse on either of them.
C ya,
The Plaid Adder
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