See yourself for real

on Jason Kirk's exvangelical bildungsroman "Hell is a World Without You"

Longtime readers of this newsletter will know that one of my ongoing obsessions—whether I like it or not—has to do with my evangelical upbringing, and how such base experiences can be transmuted into the gold of art. Can evangelicals see themselves represented? I’ve asked before. Do they even want to?

One of the most interesting responses to this question is the novel Hell is a World Without You, by Jason Kirk. Kirk covers college football for his day job, which shares far more in common with the world of evangelicalism than one might think. He also writes a newsletter of his own on this very platform. He wrote Hell during the pandemic as a means of maintaining his sanity. He attempted to go the traditional route of publishing, finding an agent and sending out the manuscript to various publishers, big and small. None took it. Too niche, they said. Too hard to market. So he published it himself, vowing to donate the royalties to The Trevor Project, an org that helps at-risk LGBTQ youth. So far, he’s donated more than $50,000 dollars. 50K in royalties is very, very good for a debut novel—better, in some cases, than the literary fiction novels that get published instead of this one.

A genuine success story! Author subverts traditional media routes and finds success! You love this stuff, Substack!

So what about the novel itself? There is the temptation, with material like this, to over-praise, to lapse into hyperbole. To call this the exvangelical, or post-evangelical, or whatever-the-hell-we’re-calling-it-this-week, version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I don’t wish to do that. I want to describe Kirk’s achievement with Hell without lapsing into hyperbole.

So, I’ll put it this way. Hell is a World Without You is a kind of comic coming-of-age story, set in the world of evangelicalism in the late 90s and early 2000s, awash in the hyperspecific pop culture of that particular world. Think Scott Pilgrim Vs. Focus on the Family and you start to get an idea of what’s going on here. Teenage angst, that most universal of experiences, refracted through a hyper-specific lens.

Hell is a World Without You follows a teenage boy named Isaac. A devoted youth group kid all his life, Isaac carries his own set of personal baggage. His father died in a car crash a few years ago. His mother is holding down the home as best she can, relying on their church as a means of both emotional and practical support. And his older brother, zealous where Isaac is doubtful, believes that their father was unsaved when he died, and thus is currently burning in the fires of hell for all eternity. And when one of Isaac’s friends tries to come out as gay, and is immediately sent off to a pray-away-the-gay camp, you have all the hurdles formerly-evangelical kids have had to overcome.

I recommend the book to anyone interested in this subculture, whether you grew up in it or are simply interested in it. I do think it sketches out the nuances of that world more effectively than some of the memoirs I’ve read covering the same topics. But it also left me with a more aesthetic question, one I’m still puzzling over.

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I’ve also been slowly working my way through the ouevre of Philip Roth. He’s very funny, of course, and also rife with mores that could correctly be termed misogyinist. All those faceless women laying themselves down for his pleasure. But there is also a sense in which Roth’s world is weirdly familiar to me. Not the particulars, of course. Roth is Jewish, East Coast, worldly; I am Protestant, Midwest, provincial. But the way Roth sketches out certain spheres of Jewish-American experience, where communities can become so tight as to be suffocating, feels familiar to me. And Kirk, in Hell is a World Without You, seems to be drawing on similar moves as Roth, depicting the hothouse world of evangelicalism through the comic bildungsroman mode, much like Roth with Portnoy’s Complaint.

To put it plainly: is evangelicalism, like Jewishness, an ethnicity?

I realize this is an inexact comparison. An ethnicity like Jewishness has a long and complex history; evangelicalism, as we understand is far more recent, and thus far more malleable. And I should also say that I’m talking about white evangelicalism here, as Kristin Kobes Du Mez so helpfully puts it, while also pointing that white evangelicalism can be practiced by people who aren’t, strictly speaking, white. There are evangelical churches in Uganda or Peru that are indistinguishable from similar churches in Overland Park.

Add to that the wrinkle that white evangelicals resist, with every fiber of their being, getting framed as an ethnicity. They are Christians, full stop. Any attempt to bring race into it is just needlessly sowing division!

What makes all of this poignant, and Hell is a World Without You so affecting, is that portraying white evangelicalism as a kind of ethnicity, in a similar way as Philip Roth or the Jersey Italians of The Sopranos or the southern whites of Faulkner, is the very thing that could make them aesthetically compelling to the wider American culture. America loves ethnicities! It’s in our DNA!

This is ultimately what I take away from Hell is a World Without You: that American evangelicalism, which often thinks of itself as unique, sui generis, is far more typical in practice, following patterns of socialization and estrangement familiar from the wider culture. And that offers a path to artists and writers looking to depict such a setting. Forget Understanding the Times; pick up The Ghost Writer.