“Ten Times the Size of Germany” and “As Real as Los Angeles”: American Christians Map Heaven

In early childhood I was taught that heaven meant forever, but since eternity was a concept beyond human understanding, we could only dimly comprehend the meaning of time in paradise; it was akin to forever: plus. That was the good if mystifying news to the mind of a first grader at Pittsburgh’s Saints Simon & Jude School in autumn 1962. The bad news—especially to a severely hyperactive miscreant—was that the same post-temporal dynamic obtained in the precincts of Heaven’s infernal opposite number.

Before reading Gary Scott Smith’s highly informative, prodigiously researched Heaven in the American Imagination, I assumed middle-aged and older evangelical Protestants were as likely as aging Catholics—or ex-Catholics—to remember a time when the prospect of eternal damnation remained an all-too live option. But according to Smith, no subsequent “group of believers stressed the horrors of hell” (p. 27) with an ardor to match that of the colonial-era Puritans. Enter the declension, quickly: as early as the mid-eighteenth century, hell “was no longer the source of terror it had been” (p.45); for no less an authority than Jonathan Edwards, fruitful contemplation on the fate of the eternally forsaken, far from terrifying the elect, should “excite them to joyful praises” of God’s grace and love (p. 44).

With hell reduced to a relatively minor role in the drama of salvation by the early national period, evangelical American Christians speculated buoyantly over an ever more accessible, even assured, final destination, a celestial territory crafted, not surprisingly, in their own idealized image: “a majestic realm characterized by holiness, perfection, love, and phenomenal blessedness.” Since, as Smith notes, the Bible’s “few descriptions of heaven are vague and veiled” (p. 237), evangelicals limned expectations of paradise with an imaginative ardor—and certitude—rarely witnessed in more earthbound forms of theologizing.

This lavishly speculative, rather brazenly self-assured tradition endured well into the late twentieth century. While theologians might debate over whether heaven’s dimensions “covered ‘almost 65% of the continental U.S.’” or measured in at “ten times the size of Germany” (p.188), nearly all agreed they were talking about a place—in Billy Graham’s words—“as real as Los Angeles” (p. 163). In the absence of imagination-curbing scriptural counter-weights, well-furnished and companionable afterlife triggered no Christian schisms, heresy trials, or banishments.

Smith argues that evangelicals’ views of heaven “were more widely embraced” (p. viii) nationally than those of liberal Protestants, though the boundaries he sets between these groups are exceptionally porous. Unitarian and Deist claims that “dogmas and creeds were unimportant and sometimes detrimental” gave no scandal to most nineteenth-century evangelicals when pondering humankind’s eternal destiny (p. 57). The Arminian “stress on man’s role in responding to God’s offer of salvation” represented common sense, not heresy, to Smith’s subjects: the inhabitant of heaven, promised Lyman Beecher in 1819, will find “his knowledge is growing, his mind is expanding, and his holiness and joy will increase forever” (p. 55).

The Second Great Awakening’s brief re-flirtation with hell and “the purposes it served” (p. 69) only further highlighted, by contrast, “the progress in knowledge, love, and power and heavenly rewards” promised to those who simply made the right choices (p. 69). The mass migration of European Catholics to the U.S. fostered a vast devotional subculture far too enamored—for flintier Protestant tastes—of purgatory as a kind of disagreeable, uncomfortable anteroom to heaven. But when it came to paradise eternal, the most popular twentieth-century Catholic preachers and theologians spoke in the vernacular, and none more effectively than the international celebrity and star of the early television age, Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen. Citizens of heaven, Sheen assured millions of viewers of all faiths at mid-century, will find “constant enjoyment without satiety,” “peace and quiet without idleness,” and perhaps, most glorious of all...