The Queer Ear

I was listening to an old This American Life (episode 213, which originally aired in 2002) and was absolutely horrified by their story about Hell House.  Hell House is a haunted hous/performance piece created by the Trinity Assembly of God Church in Texas, in which teenagers enact scenes of intense violence--rape, school shootings, suicide.  A girl undergoes a gruesome botched abortion.  A gay man dies of AIDS.  Audiences ultimately arrive in Hell, where they see the dead characters suffering in eternal torment, before attending the "decision room," where they must publically display whether they are headed toward Heaven or Hell.  The idea has spread to a variety of Pentacostal and other Protestant churches since its conception at Trinity in the early 1990s.  Their intended audiences are teenagers and their objective (besides raising money for the church--they charge for admission) is obviously to scare young people into a particular form of Christianity.

In 2002, Director/Producer George Ratliff created a documentary dealing with the production, reception, and motivation underlying Hell Houses (you can read a good review of it from OffOffOff).  Here is the trailer:

I honestly think that many people who espouse fundamentalist Christian philosophies truly believe them.  But there is something troubling and telling about a movement that derives the majority of its power from commodifying terror and manipulating young people's uncertainty and confusion.  When I was a teenager, I would have been all over acting in a Hell House, and I certainly would have felt great about it because I was "saving souls."  Now that I am an adult, the moral vapidity, capitalist cynicism, and blatant abusiveness of such a philosophy, and particularly this kind of manifestation of that philosophy, is painfully obvious.