Thanks Caleb Your thoughts are excellent and well worth a ponder. And yes I think Tom writes very well on the matter of belief in hell and how it can correlate to religious intolerance (I also hectored Tom recently – and I hope he too has forgiven me because it was only hectoring and I really have loved Tom’s books and articles– but hey ho I’m sure he; hasn’t had to forgive me because he doesn’t know me and therefore has just forgotten my comments and me too ). It doesn’t have to. Funnily enough I’ve recently been reading an essay by an Islamic scholar who is a Muslim exclusivist and a strong believer in hell in a symposium of Islamic wide hopers and Universalists ( I find it fascinating that these debates should be taking place now amongst Muslims and think the fact should be of interest to Christian universalists – at least those who can handle it. This very erudite scholar begins his essay with the thoughts of the eighteenth century Deist philosopher and political theorist John Jacques Rousseau.
Well I need to give a bit of background here. Now Rousseau was raised a Calvinist and learnt his politics in the Canton councils of Geneva. He developed the most authoritarian notion of democracy out of his experiences in the Cantons by which the people’s council come together and deliberate on whatever issues are troubling the body politic. After deliberation they arrive at a consensus about this issue – and this consensus has absolute biding authority. The voice of the people now is the voice of God and those who dissent from the consensus must be ‘forced to be free’ – this is the social contract. So in this most illiberal idea of democracy there is no room for continuing loyal opposition and the state must make windows into souls to see that all agree with the consensus of the voice of the people. This idea inspired the Terror in the French Revolution and indirectly the terror of later Marxist regimes.
Rousseau was also what Pog would call an ‘anti hellist’ - he was appalled by the doctrine of hell and Marie Huber the female Swiss Calvinist universalist theologian had been a cousin of his grandmother. But unlike Marie he was not a Christian Universalist. He thought the idea of people believing in hell was inimical to the body politic. How could people be loyal to the general will if they thought so many of their fellow citizens were to be tormented eternally in hell. So his view was that people who believe in hell should not be tolerated in a democracy that functioned as he thought ad democracy should and as he thought was the only way of ensuring liberty and the good of the people.
The Islamic exclusivist argues rightly that Rousseau’s ideas are illiberal – as the French philosopher Albert Camus observed they resulted in slave camps under the flag of freedom and all manner of topsy turvydom. He acknowledges that strong belief in hell can also lead to intolerance and iliberalism (‘liberal’ being used here in the broad sense of love of freedom here – freedom from oppression rather than freedom to do as we wish no matter how harmful it is to our neighbours). But he says that strong belief in hell (rather than notional belief in hell) doesn’t have to result in these consequences. It can make people redouble efforts to do good to others to impress them so that these convert to the ‘true’ faith. Well fair enough – but good done to coerce others even in what seems to be the best of all possible causes - often has unintended consequences in my experience. And also the competitive purveyors of goodness to the end of rescuing as many as possible from the eternal fires may function well in a time of relative peace and social harmony; but it’s when there is a breakdown of order that strong believers in hell tend to turn tyrants if history is anything to go by.
The Anabaptists are hard to generalise abbot – because the movement was so disparate, But in the and IMHO they made a significant contribution to the emergence of tolerant pluralistic democracy during the seventeenth century – and they had scripture on their side (there is no record of people begin forced to be Christians in the Apostolic Church). The central idea behind their belief in believer baptism was that there should be no compulsion in religion. This was also central to those who fought for religious freedom in the seventeenth century - often inspired, at least indirectly, by the writings of the Anabaptist Spiritual which was in turn inspired by indirectly by Erasmus. Universalists played a big part in this struggle for freedom.
The Islamic scholar of whom I speak, towards the end of his essay, does concede that in a pluralistic democracy, belief in hell tends to be eroded gradually because democratic pluralism fosters respect across divides in politics and belief.