Theology and Secular Music Part 1: “Hell’s Coming With Me”
When we think of Heaven and Hell, we often think of places. We’ve seen Hell depicted in stories, movies, TV shows, paintings, even video games. It is a place of terrible torture and punishment. A blood-red sky reflects the heat of the burning ground, while the acrid air is filled with the screams and cries of the damned. It’s a place of unimaginable horror, where reality itself seems to be built around causing extreme pain and suffering. Meanwhile, Heaven is a place from our most saccharine dreams. It could be beautiful rolling fields, cultivated with perfectly healthy crops. It could be a spiritual place on some particularly comfortable looking clouds. Often it is portrayed as a sort of city with stunningly beautiful architecture. We most commonly see Heaven and Hell as places.
Some of the more theologically imaginative among us may see Heaven and Hell as states of being that we can approach to some degree in our lifetimes. Certainly, this understanding fits into our metaphorical uses of the words. When telling the story of the greatest day in your life, a happy celebration with family after a life-changing accomplishment or something similar, you may say that you were “in Heaven” that day. Meanwhile, someone who has just gone through the pain of losing a loved one, may say they are in Hell, imprisoned by their grief and their inability to really communicate what it means to them. Even worse, someone who has become addicted to harmful drugs and has fallen into a brutal spiral that leaves them homeless and without close friends they can trust may be living in their own Hell for a long time. So Heaven and Hell can be both places beyond the grave and states of being, but perhaps we can get even more creative.
In December of 2019, the California based folk band, Poor Man’s Poison, released a single called “Hell’s Coming With Me.” While the title, and a major theme of the song, may be a reference to the movie Tombstone, the song tells a story of its own. What that story is isn’t really clear. A drifter returns to a town that had beaten and driven him out before. That is simple enough, but the description of the town is strange, either it is rich in metaphor or the story is telling a sort of dark fantasy. The town is located at the bottom of a hill where “all the poor souls go when they die.” The town protects a “black-magic preacher” who seems to be doing something evil. The drifter returns and lays waste to the town and kills the preacher. The music itself is catchy and interesting, even featuring a clear reference to the hymn “When Peace Like A River” here recontextualized to be strikingly violent compared with the peaceful, sad, and hopeful song from which it is taken.
What is perhaps most interesting about the story in this song is that the drifter doesn’t see himself as seeking revenge for his own sake, and though he is the one who says, “Hell’s coming with me,” he isn’t portrayed as evil. Rather, he declares himself “the righteous hand of God.” In his return, he targets the evil preacher, presumably the one who had done him wrong. The people beg for mercy, and though the song doesn’t say what happened to them after his final speech, the refrain indicates that his interest was just the one man: the one who had stolen money from the poor, the preacher. His path of destruction was an undoing of corrupt power, perhaps even a journey of liberation, freeing the people from the poisonous teaching of the preacher and the poor dead souls on the hill behind them.
Now, this song is a little scary for me, being a preacher myself. Fortunately, I haven’t practiced any black-magic, and I think I will do my best to avoid it, but I think the fantastical elements of the story serve to reveal the reality of our world. We could all point to examples of extremely rich preachers and other church leaders, using their power and authority, along with some marketing magic, to make them excessively rich, while trapping the poor in their poverty. They don’t actually do anything to help the people who help them. Their theology gives little, if any, comfort to their own impoverished supporters, let alone the starving masses of people around the world seeking a better life.
Of course, it isn’t just preachers who do this. Politicians, business leaders, celebrities, and others establish cults of personality around themselves or simply use their power and influence to make money without many people even realizing it. Whatever the case, poor souls are trapped and anyone who speaks out is beaten and turned away. We may say that the poor, trapped under systems of oppression, are going through Hell now, but the song talks about Hell coming with this strange drifter. Though brutally beaten and rejected when he first arrived, his second visit to the town brings the wrath of God that undoes the corruption of the powerful.
At this point, you might be wondering if the drifter is Jesus. That is certainly an interesting conclusion to draw. Surely, the second coming of Christ will bring God’s wrath that will change the world. Certainly, Revelation speaks about Hell following after the four horsemen. Christ’s return is associated with God’s wrath and Hell falling on the earth. However, I don’t want to take this analogy too far. The drifter could represent Jesus or he could not. What is important is that in this song, Hell is neither a place, nor a state of being. In this song, Hell is the wrath of God poured out upon those wrongdoers who use their power to oppress the poor and vulnerable, those who beat and cast out strangers. Hell isn’t a place we go when we die. Hell is the action of God, working to destroy corruption in a cruel world. Hell is God’s violence against the violent with the aim of peace in the end.
As we look at a world that seems so filled with corruption, cruelty, and evil that there is nothing we can do about it, we can trust that God is powerful enough to change things. Certainly, we don’t hope that God will literally kill people, raining fireballs from the sky and striking people with lightning, but the collapse of those systems that hurt and destroy will be a form of violence to those who are closely tied to them for their own lives. If we look hard enough, we will see ourselves also tied into these things. We will see ourselves benefiting from things that hurt the most vulnerable. We must ask ourselves, would we rather stand with the evil preacher and be comfortable with what we have, or do we side with the drifter, doing what is right even if it means our world collapsing around us? Either way, we can be certain that God is coming to change the world, and when God comes, Hell will be coming with.
