Heaven in the American Imagination

356 Pages·2011·1.92 MB·English

by  Gary Scott Smith

heaven in the american imagination
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Heaven in the American Imagination
Gary Scott Smith
oxford university press
1

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Smith, Gary Scott, 1950–
Heaven in the American imagination / Gary Scott Smith.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-19-973895-3
1. Heaven.—Christianity. 2. Heaven. 3. Future life—Christianity.
4. Future life. 5. United States—Religion. I. Title.
BT846.3.S65 2011
236'.240973—dc22 2010037448
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
To my mother, Arlene Smith, who has embodied the life of heaven on earth.
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A minister concluded his sermon by asking
parishioners to stand up if they wanted to go to
heaven. Everyone except one man rose. “Brother,”
asked the incredulous pastor, “don’t you want to go
to paradise when you die?” Th e holdout declared,
“When I die? Sure! I thought you were getting up a
group to go right now.”
Heaven goes by favor; if it went by merit, you
would stay out and your dog would go in.
—mark twain
Preface During a children’s sermon at an evangelical
church, the director of children’s ministries asked,
“What do you have to do to go to heaven?” She,
like most of the congregation, expected one of the
children to answer, “Accept Jesus as your savior.”
Instead, a little boy responded, “Be dead.”
what is more alluring, intriguing, controversial, and confusing than heaven? Is
heaven a reality or a fantasy? Is it God’s home or a human invention? Is it an inspira-
tion for earthly action or an escape from earthly problems? Is it a helpful source of
comfort and consolation or a harmful opiate that dulls people’s sensitivities to their
actual condition? Is it a place of continuous worship or a perpetual playground? Is it
a realm of eternal rest or of vigorous activity? Is it a site of static perfection or of
everlasting progress? Is it an exhilarating, enchanting paradise or a boring, dull
place?
Americans have described heaven’s wonders as luscious, stunning, spellbinding,
exhilarating, and captivating. We regularly use the adjective h eavenly in literature to
describe life’s most joyful experiences. 1 To the faithful, majestic mountains, cas-
cading waterfalls, breathtaking canyons, magnifi cent cathedrals, pealing organs,
angelic choirs, and sensational symphonies all pale in comparison to the dazzling
beauty and splendor that awaits them in heaven. If God could create such a spectac-
ular earth and endow human beings with such marvelous gift s, the heavenly home,
which He has prepared for them to live in forever, must be even more fantastic.
Th roughout our history, a large percentage of Americans have believed that
heaven exists and have expressed a desire to go there, although most have not been
in a hurry to arrive. Americans’ depictions of heaven have been signifi cantly shaped
by their understanding of biblical teaching (heaven is mentioned about 550 times in
viii Preface
the Bible), but they have also been powerfully aff ected by their cultural settings and
personal needs. 2 Th eir diff ering interpretations of scripture, coupled with dissimilar
cultural trends and people’s diverse life experiences, have contributed to competing
portraits of paradise. Moreover, Americans have proposed confl icting views of how
people gain entry to heaven. While many Christians have claimed that people get to
heaven only by accepting Jesus Christ as their savior, others have contended that
heaven is a reward for righteous conduct.
Th is survey focuses on key aspects of authors’ views of heaven and salvation and
does not present their positions fully or discuss their nuances. Moreover, many
Americans’ understanding of heaven changed over time and involved inconsis-
tencies. Synthetic historical works rarely have the space to analyze such matters in
detail. However, I have tried to represent the views of various authors faithfully and
as fully as space limitations allow.
Although this book is titled Heaven in the American Imagination , I do cite some
non-American authors, primarily British and Canadian, whose works were pub-
lished in the United States and helped shape American perceptions of heaven.
Moreover, I focus considerably more on Protestant than on Catholic, Jewish, and
sectarian authors and on evangelical more than on theologically liberal writers
because their views of heaven were more widely embraced. While Americans have
espoused numerous religious perspectives, Protestant evangelicals have been the
largest and most infl uential group throughout our history. As late as 1850, Catholics
constituted only about 10 percent of the American population, and theological lib-
eralism arose as a signifi cant challenge to biblical orthodoxy only in the 1880s. Since
1970, evangelical denominations and congregations have grown substantially while
most mainline Protestant communions have declined. Today, 40 percent of
Americans claim to be born again or to accept Jesus as their personal savior. 3 I also
pay relatively little attention to Swedenborgianism, Spiritualism, or Native American,
Buddhist, Hindu, or Muslim views of heaven because these groups have relatively
few adherents in the United States and have not had nearly as great an impact upon
American conceptions of heaven as have Christian portraits. 4
Th e vast amount of material on heaven, coupled with space limitations, also led
me to focus on books and printed sermons and to pay much less attention to articles,
diaries, and letters. Arguably, these former works had the greatest infl uence on
American beliefs about what heaven will be like and how people can get there. Only
the chapter on slavery and the Civil War utilizes many letters and diaries. I supple-
ment the views of these books and sermons by discussing hymns and, more recently,
songs, jokes, movies, television shows, and survey data. Lisa Miller argues convinc-
ingly, based on her six years of interviews with dozens of Americans, that many por-
traits of heaven today rely much less on church creeds, sermons, and the writings of
Preface ix
scholars than they do on movies, television, novels, “residual messages from parents,
grandparents, and Sunday school lessons—and especially on their own individual
experiences of transcendence.” 5 However, this is much less true for Americans before
1930 (and even 1960), when mass media played little or no role and church teachings
were more respected and understood. Nevertheless, this book is primarily about
how educated, religiously committed Americans imagined heaven.
Americans have disagreed about the nature of heaven because the sources of
information about it are limited, shrouded in mystery, and amenable to diff erent
interpretations. Heaven is also baffl ing because it entails both a future existence aft er
time ends and the world is either destroyed or recreated and a present realm that
exists somewhere in time and space where God, the angels, and saints dwell.
Refl ecting this perplexity, in their depictions of heaven, Americans have oft en not
clearly distinguished between the life of its residents before and aft er the last judg-
ment and general resurrection. Th erefore, diff erentiating between the intermediate
and postresurrection states is oft en diffi cult, but, whenever possible and appropriate,
distinctions are noted.
For the sake of readability, I have usually modernized spelling and punctuation
and removed italics and some capitalization in quoted materials. Th e pattern for
quotations is that unless there are quotations within a single sentence that refer to
diff erent pages, fi rst quotation, second quotation, and so forth refer to material
quoted in sequential sentences.