Don’t Fear The Rapture

A pivotal scene in Jason Kirk’s debut novel Hell Is A World Without You occurs at Wednesday night youth group where masked gunmen barge into a sanctuary and tell the kids to renounce their Christianity, or the gunmen will kill them. They pick a kid out of the group and bring him out in the hall. The kid renounces his faith, but the rest of the youth group hears a gunshot and a loud thud. The kid is presumably dead. Moments later, the masked gunmen reveal themselves to be members of a neighboring church. The guns were blank. The thud was a potato sack and the kid is still alive. It was a shocking prank (that Kirk says actually happened to him in real life) to to make a point about standing firm in your beliefs.

Anyone who grew up in evangelical churches at the turn of the millennium will see themselves in this wise, graceful and often laugh-out-loud debut novel.

Kirk takes us through the high school years of Isaac Siena, Jr., an average kid who comes of age from 1999-2003 in Y2Kwhite American Evangelicalism. Isaac likes football, screamo Christian music, video games, church and trying to talk to girls (even though he worries about if he should talk to them at all, lest he lead them to sin). His internal monologue, which often quotes Bible verses at him or interjects Christianese phrases (GUARD YOUR HEART!) sounds like a combination of his pastor and Rush Limbaugh. He fears the Rapture. He is constantly weighing his own sins. Going to Hell terrifies him, but not as much as the thought that his dead dad may be in Hell.

Despite all of that heavy evangelical guilt, this book is funny as hell, with a Righteous Gemstones-level of knowing winks. (“I couldn’t watch ‘Free Willy.’ That movie’s environmentalist propaganda,” one chracter says.) For every heavy discussion about Hell, Kirk inserts a biting commentary on the absurdity of the early 2000s youth group experience.

Readers who didn’t grow up in that bubble might find themselves lost in  the novel’s cultural reference points (Kirk uses songs from dc Talk, Relient K, Switchfoot, Further Seems Forever and Veggie Tales as chapter titles; there’s even an accompanying Spotify playlist), but Kirk’s in-depth knowledge of that time period is almost anthropological. For all its inside-baseball specifics, Hell Is A World Without You is a story of deconstructing belief–a tale as old as time.

Like Siddhartha, or Pi, or Margaret, Isaac slowly begins to question his environment. This is where the book shines the most. Sometimes exvangelicals talk about deconstruction One Great Event caused it, when in reality, it’s a hundred different moments that accumulate over time. Kirk, a former youth group kid who grew up in Atlanta attending Wednesday night church and See You At The Pole prayers, understands that.

Isaac’s journey isn’t a straightforward narrative; much like the Bible itself, it is a series of vignettes that build to make a larger point. Isaac’s best friend is outed as gay. A pastor abuses one of his other friends. He witnesses hypocrisy in the pulpit and can’t square Jesus’ ministry with his church’s fervent Christian nationalism in the wake of 9/11. He finds more community with his misfit friends than he does with “normal” church members; he tires of his church judging his single mom.

Isaac’s eventual conclusion is that there is no Hell, and Jesus wants the whole world to go to Heaven. (There is no specific setting mentioned for this book, but the HELL IS REAL sign in Chenoweth, Ohio is the basis for the book’s cover.)

This theological difference puts Isaac at odds with his older brother Eli. Without spoiling too much, this disagreement eventually leads to a moment of Old Testament violence between them. It’s the most shocking moment in the book, and the event that makes Isaac finally leave the church.

But leaving church doesn’t simply mean leaving everything the church taught you.

“Life doesn’t end when you’re 16,” Isaac’s mom tells him. “Life is pieces that come and go. We decide which pieces we hope to keep.”

By the novel’s end, Isaac does just that, finally reaching a state of grace about his childhood. And, by extension, so does Kirk, and so does the reader, no matter their faith tradition. Kirk pulls off a miracle by making such an insular part of American culture so universal.

Reading this novel transported me back in time in a way I didn’t know was possible anymore, and helped me find a little more grace for the teenage, church-going me.

Hell Is A World Without You rightfully earns a spot among the likes of Saved!, Yes, God, Yes, and Kelsey McKinney’s novel God Spare the Girls as part of the canon of exvangelical literature.

(Shutdown Fullbooks, Feb. 12, 2024)