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TASTELESS AS HELL: COMMUNITY PERFORMANCE, DISTINCTION, AND COUNTERTASTE IN HELL HOUSE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 October 2007

John Fletcher
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Extract

It's 10∶30 at night, the day after Halloween 2003. I'm standing in line outside of the Freedom Assembly of God Church in Tallahassee, Florida, to watch their first annual Hell House. Every October, hundreds of congregations across America mount religious dramas conceived as Christian Halloween alternatives. Such productions typically invoke and alter haunted-house conventions, replacing ghosts and monsters with demons and sin—all designed to confront unsaved audience members with the reality of spiritual warfare and the necessity of being born again. Whereas the Tallahassee version promised to be relatively modest, many other Hell House events boast huge production budgets and attract thousands of visitors annually. In recent years, these shows have garnered considerable media attention for their shocking, graphically staged scenes of “sin” and its consequences. Infamous images include gay people dying of AIDS and burning in hell, black-clad, Columbine-style gunmen mowing down Christians in schools, and blood-soaked abortions featuring vacuum-cleaner noises and bowls of raw meat meant to resemble fetuses. Criticism pours in from both left-wing advocacy groups and other evangelical Christians. It's “pornography for the soul,” it's “simplistic theology,” it's “spiritual violence.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 48 , Issue 2 , November 2007 , pp. 313 - 330
Copyright
Copyright © The American Society for Theatre Research, Inc. 2007

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References

ENDNOTES

1. Shelley, Bruce L. and Shelley, Marshall, The Consumer Church: Can Evangelicals Win the World without Losing Their Souls? (Downer's Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1992), 49Google Scholar.

2. Cited by Bob Allen, “Popular ‘Hell Houses’ Draw Praise, Criticism,” Associated Baptist Press News, 19 October 2000, www.abpnews.com/ (accessed 9 December 2003); Mary Hunt, quoted in National Gay and Lesbian Taskforce, “New Report Titled ‘Homophobia at Hell House’ Reveals How Right Wing Fuels Homophobia, Demonizes Lesbian and Gay Youth,” 27 October 2006, www.thetaskforce.org/press/releases/pr996_102706 (accessed 13 March 2007).

3. For a similar (though ultimately divergent) reading of Hell House as a performance aimed primarily at the producing community, see Hendershot, Heather, Review of Hell House (2001 documentary film directed by George Ratliff), Cineaste 28.2 (Spring 2003): 43–4Google Scholar.

4. Liberty University, “Scare Mare Homepage,” 2006, www.scaremare.com (accessed 9 September 2006).

5. New Creation Evangelism, Inc., “Judgement House Website,” 2006, www.judgementhouse.org (accessed 9 September 2006).

6. New Destiny Christian Center, 2005. http://www.godestiny.org/hell_house/HH_menu.cfm (accessed 28 August 2007).

7. Smith, Christian, Christian America? What Evangelicals Really Want (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

8. Ibid., 15–16.

9. In addition to Shelley and Shelley, see also Bloesch, Donald G., Essentials of Evangelical Theology, 2 vols. (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979)Google Scholar; and Volf, Miroslav, “Materiality of Salvation: An Investigation in the Soteriologies of Liberation and Pentecostal Theologies,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 26.3 (1989): 447–67Google Scholar.

10. Volf, 448.

11. Shelley and Shelley, 16.

12. Kim Kozlowski, “Churches Use Pagan Day to Send Message,” Detroit News, 30 October 2002, Section: Front; Page: 01A; Edition: “Two Dot.” www.detnews.com/ (accessed 20 March 2004). Some version of “showing reality” nearly always appears in the rationales for Hell House producers.

13. Ibid.

14. Data Lounge, “Denver ‘Hell House’ Features Gay Wedding,” 30 September 1999, www.datalounge.com/ (accessed 20 March 2004). Intriguingly, the “gay wedding” featured a heterosexual couple dressed as two grooms. “They kiss at the end of the ceremony, and I'm just not going to have two guys kissing,” explains Roberts.

15. Northside Assembly of God Church (Biloxi, MS), “Hell House Page,” www.hellhouse.ms/information.html (accessed 22 March 2004).

16. New Destiny Christian Center, “Hell House Kit Page,” 2005, www.godestiny.org/ministries/hell-house/kit.php (accessed 28 January 2006) [and found 5 August 2007 as “The Hell House Outreach Kit” at www.godestiny.org/hell_house/HH_kit.cfm].

17. Hard-and-fast definitions of community-based theatre (CBT) are difficult to come by. I rely here, however, on Richard Owen Geer's rule-of-thumb definition that CBT is theatre of, by, and for a particular community, as well as on his caveat that performances that completely fit this rule probably do not exist. See Geer, , “Of the People, By the People, and For the People: The Field of Community Performance,” in The Citizen Artist: 20 Years of Art in the Public Arena, vol. 1, ed. Burnham, Linda Frye and Durland, Stephen (New York: Critical Press, 1998), xxv–xxxiiiGoogle Scholar. I reiterate that individual Hell House productions, though based on a core scenario, encourage and rely upon a great deal of community-specific adaptation and dramaturgy.

18. Lance Meche (Youth Pastor), personal communication, Tallahassee, FL, 22 March 2004.

19. Ratliff, George (director), Hell House, DVD (Brooklyn: Plexifilm, 2001)Google Scholar.

20. Greg Hartman, “Welcome to Hell,” Focus on the Family, www.family.org/pplace/youandteens/a0018086.cfm (accessed 9 December 2003).

21. Ratliff film. The raw number of people who decide, after the show, to pray with counselors can give a misleading account of Hell House's effectiveness in “winning people to the Lord.” Many of those who indicate a need for prayer do so simply to pray about a personal problem. It should also be mentioned that many evangelical traditions stress the possibility of falling from grace, effectively becoming “unsaved.” “Recommitment” thus holds a meaningful place alongside “initial conversion.” See Bloesch, vol. I, 247, for an explanation of impermanent grace from a theologically evangelical point of view.

22. Kershaw, Baz, The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention (New York: Routledge, 1992), 25–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23. See Adam B. Vary, “Hell House of the Stars,” Advocate (12 October 2004): 80–2; and Richard Rushfield, “Raising Hell,” New York Times, 29 August 2004, sec. 2–3. How closely or sincerely the “Youth Group” actually attempted to live into the spirit of Roberts's Hell House is, of course, questionable. Newspaper reports suggest that Maher's portrayal of the demon guide included a great deal of tongue-in-cheek commentary. Jill Soloway, one of the codirectors, insists that their aim was “really about the literalism—not against religion, against Christianity” (Vary, 82).

24. Ben Brantley, “A Guided Tour of Hell, with an Appearance by Satan,” New York Times, 14 October 2006, sec. B; Howard Kissel, “Scaring Up a Scene: Brooklyn Theatrical Haunt Stages a Halloween Horror,” New York Daily News, 8 October 2006.

25. Kozlowski (see n. 10).

26. Hartman, under “Come One, Come All.”

27. Meche, personal communication (see n. 16).

28. For a solid study on Hybels, Willow Creek, and the seeker-church movement, see Sargeant, Kimon Howland, Seeker Churches: Promoting Traditional Religion in a Non-Traditional Way (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000)Google Scholar. See also Maudlin, Michael G. and Gilbreath, Edward, “Selling Out the House of God? Bill Hybels Answers Critics of the Seeker-Church Movement,” Christianity Today 38.8 (1994): 20–6Google Scholar; and Miller, Donald E., “Postdenominational Christianity in the Twenty-First Century (Americans and Religions in the Twenty-First Century),” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 558 (1998): 196–211Google Scholar.

29. In his best-selling book The Purpose-Driven Church: Growth without Compromising Your Message and Mission (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995), Rick Warren relates the story behind the success of his own congregation, Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, CA. Saddleback's history bears striking resemblance to that of Willow Creek, even relating how the congregation's founders did market research to profile “Saddleback Sam” (169).

30. Seeker churches—congregations that adopt or imitate Hybels's “new paradigm” for worship—are to be distinguished from “megachurches”—congregations that boast at least two thousand attendees every Sunday. For a thorough sociological study, see Scott Thumma, “Megachurches Today 2000: Summary of Data from the Faith Communities Today 2000 Project,” Hartford Institute for Religion Research, 2001, hirr.hartsem.edu/org/faith_megachurches_FACTsummary.html (accessed 31 August 2005). Many of the most famous seeker churches are also megachurches (Willow Creek, for instance), and many megachurches make use of seeker-church–like production values. Not all megachurches, however, adhere to the new paradigm, nor do all seeker services occur in megachurches.

31. Quoted in Kenneson, Phillip K. and Street, James L., Selling Out the Church: The Dangers of Church Marketing (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1997), 72Google Scholar.

32. In the past decade or so, a library of books addressing the material (i.e., financial) rewards of Christianity has sprung up; many of these stem from or directly influence large seeker-church pastors. See, e.g., Wilkonson, Bruce and Kopp, David, The Prayer of Jabez: Breaking Through to the Blessed Life (Sisters, OR: Multnomah Publishers, 2000)Google Scholar; and Osteen, Joel, Your Best Life Now: Seven Steps to Living at Your Full Potential (New York: Time Warner Book Group, 2004)Google Scholar.

33. Those interested in membership are encouraged to attend smaller Wednesday night “believers' ” services and are then more fully inducted into the life of the church through a network of small groups.

34. Sargeant, 96. It is worth noting that Smith's surveys of U.S. evangelicals suggests a widespread conviction that such fire-and-brimstone “hard selling” is at best ineffective and at worst morally inappropriate. See Smith, 83–4.

35. Sargeant, 95.

36. At a seeker service I attended in Baton Rouge (Bethany World Prayer Center), over half the message dealt with “five things men can do to make themselves irresistible to women,” with each point drawn directly from a best-selling self-improvement book by Harley, William Jr., His Needs, Her Needs: Building an Affair-Proof Marriage (Grand Rapids: Fleming H. Revell, 2001)Google Scholar.

37. Sargeant, 96.

38. One of the most famous megachurches currently, and one that borrows heavily from the purpose-driven model, is Houston's Lakewood Church, which recently moved into the Compaq Center, former home to the Houston Rockets, in order to house its more than 16,000 members. See John Leland, “A Church That Packs Them In, 16,000 at a Time,” New York Times, 18 July 2005, sec. A-1.

39. Román, David and Miller, Tim, “Preaching to the Converted,” Theatre Journal 47.2 (1995): 169–88Google Scholar.

40. Dolan, Jill, “Performance, Utopia, and the ‘Utopian Performative,’” Theatre Journal 53 (2001): 455–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar. By “a better world,” Dolan means that utopias suggest a “common future, one that's more just and equitable, one in which we can all participate more equally, with more chances to live fully and contribute to the making of culture” (455).

41. Cohen, Anthony, The Symbolic Construction of Community (New York: Tavistock, 1985), 12CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42. Bourdieu, Pierre, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Nice, Richard (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984)Google Scholar. Specifically, Bourdieu argues, “Taste, the propensity and capacity to appropriate (materially or symbolically) a given class of classified, classifying objects or practices, is the generative formula of life-style, a unitary set of distinctive preferences which express the same expressive intention in the specific logic of each of the symbolic subspaces, furniture, clothing, language, or body hexis” (173).

43. Ibid., 229.

44. Shelley and Shelley, 20.

45. Bourdieu, 170–1.

46. Quoted in Maudlin and Gilbreath, 21.

47. Kenneson and Street, 72.

48. Comfort's statistics are anecdotal. “Hell's Best Kept Secret” is actually Comfort's signature sermon, available for purchase on audiotape, DVD, and/or CD or for free audio or textual download. See Ray Comfort, “Hell's Best Kept Secret,” www.livingwaters.com/learn/hellsbestkeptsecret.htm (accessed 21 March 2006). My citations refer to the transcript.

49. Comfort, 2.

50. Kenneson and Street, 72.

51. Data Lounge (see n. 12).

52. Bourdieu, 56.

53. The actor appears in Ratliff's film.

54. Kozlowski (see n. 10).

55. See, e.g., Joseph, Miranda, Against the Romance of “Community” (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002)Google Scholar. There Joseph points out that multinational corporations can and do effectively mobilize the rhetorical and affective appeal of “community” to cover up basically oppressive and profit-inspired actions. Joseph exemplifies the current trend among many queer theorists in her incorporating class-based analyses into studies of gender and sexuality.

56. See That's Revolting! Queer Strategies to Resist Assimilation, ed. Mattilda (Matt Bernstein Sycamore) (Baltimore: Soft Skull Press, 2004).

57. Meche, personal communication (see n. 16).