Hell Is Empty; All The Devils Are Here
On Genocidal Rhetoric, Fanaticism, and the Loss of Tenderness
“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.” ~ Shakespeare, The Tempest
“Religious fanaticism is the most dangerous form of insanity.” ~ Robert Graves1
“Give [US soldiers] … overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.” ~ Pete Hegseth, ‘praying’ at a worship service at the Pentagon, 19 March 20262
“… a whole civilization will die tonight,” ~ Donald J. Trump, 7 April 20263
“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.” ~ Blaise Pascal
It is ironic that the religions that invented the devil are also most skilled at generating devilish behavior.
The devils are among us.
It is ironic also that the literalizing of myth leads inevitably toward becoming the evil we most fear and abhor because it allows us to externalize and project it onto our enemies. If we only see evil as “out there” we can delude ourselves into believing that our most violent actions are holy and in-service to the battle with the evil we have projected somewhere out there.
How has it happened that we the recipients of violent religious fanaticism radically manifest more than 20 years ago on 9/11, have become a nation hell bent on returning the same nightmare on Iran?
We forget, I think, that the whole idea of holy war is rooted in the imperial takeover of the Christian religion very early in its history. I do not believe Christianity has ever truly reckoned with that imperial infection. I do not believe we have truly faced it in this culture.
There have been some valiant attempts. The work of John Dominic Crossan is one example.4 I think of the work of my graduate school professor, Warren Carter.5 I also think of the work of Matthew Fox who at age 85 is still trying to bring Christianity back to its pre-imperial roots.6
Unfortunately, most of that effort has fallen on def ears.
Christianity needs a “come to Jesus” moment. Perhaps this current mess is going to force one. We can only hope.
I grew up evangelical. I deconstructed via graduate school and war exposure. I served as a career Army chaplain with a Christian endorsement, albeit from a progressive church which would accept my deep ecumenism and affiliation with Zen. Sometimes I say that the Buddha restored Jesus for me.
Because of Christianity’s long failure to acknowledge and formally renounce and work to heal the imperial infection I no longer call myself Christian. I stand outside the camp. I know some, like Matthew Fox, Brian McLaren, and Richard Rohr, choose to stay and fight for change from within.
I struggled with the problem of identity my entire active duty Army career. There were many times I wanted to take off the Christian cross because what it represents to most people is so at odds with my values and understanding. I got tired of trying to explain. It felt like beating my head against a brick wall.
Now, especially, what is going on with Christian Nationalism is so antithetical to what I stand for that I no longer want to associate with a tradition that has so failed to examine itself.
When I was on active duty I often felt spiritually closer to nonchristian chaplains than to the Christian ones because in the Army they are predominantly conservative evangelicals.
Jesus is still an important revelatory source for me. But, so is the Buddha, Rumi, the spirit of Ayahuasca, Rainer Rilke and Emily Dickenson. It is the institution that I feel a need to distance myself from.
And I hope that my leaving can play a small part in the reckoning that Christianity so badly needs.
And I don’t want any of my friends who have chosen to stay and fight within to take this as a criticism. We all have to find our own way to resist.
I feel a solidarity with Matthew Fox even though he made a different choice. He did choose to leave the Roman Catholic Church. He just stayed within the broader Christian tradition by becoming Episcopalian.
And so, here we are, with a Christian Nationalist administration threatening genocide.7
“… you’ll be living in hell,” Trump threatened Iran in a Tweet this last Sunday.
Someone said if he carries through with his threats he will be destroying our civilization as well as that of Iran. It seems like he and his movement are working hard to destroy it now.
It does feel like we are living in hell.
Joy Reid joked this morning in a conversation with Dean Obeidallah about whether we might in fact be dead right now and in hell.8
And yes, Trump, hasn’t to this date followed through with his threats. Still, the threat itself is a moral stain and a deep indicator of his willingness to do so. And the toleration of these kinds of statements are themselves a mark of the deterioration of our civilization.
“America is in even greater danger because of its cult of toughness, its hatred of sensitivity, and someday it may have to pay a price for this, because atrophy of feeling creates criminals.” ~ Anais Nin’s diary, 1939-1944
Sounds prescient, doesn’t it?
Adrienne Rich notes that in 1991 a bookstore in the San Francisco airport sold a book called A Gulf War Feelings Workbook for Children.9
“An out of date commodity, soon, no doubt, supplanted by yellow ribbons, which like flags, are static emblems; they leave no doubt, no questions open, they keep at bay doubt, confusion, bitterness, fear and mourning.”
Do they? We don’t have to allow them to do so.
And out of date? Hardly. All you have to do is change the word “Gulf” and paste in current one.
Your dress waving in the wind
This
Is the only flag I love. ~ Garrous Abdolmalekian
Sometimes it takes a poet to help us get our heads straight.
Religion has become evil when it empties out its hell and lets lose all the devils among us.
“They’re animals,” Donald said in response to questions about whether his threat constituted intentions of war crimes.
Dehumanizing rhetoric has routinely preceded and helped justify genocide in Nazi Germany, Rwanda, Cambodia and Bosnia.
And the war is just the tip of the spear.
Cynthia Bourgeault says in her view the Darwin Award should go to the US. Congress for its decision to repeal landmark environmental protections in favor of the procurement of fossil fuels.10
The war against Iran is a gross expression of a larger war against nature itself.
If the long arc of the universe bends toward consciousness, our current situation is a devolution away from consciousness that is leading toward our own extinction.
Bourgeault says,
“Cancer cells are driven by one thing only, their own insatiable impulse to multiply, until in the blindly aggressive pursuit of that impulse, they wind up destroying their host.”11
Doesn’t that analogy sound apt?
Bourgeault quotes Leonard Cohen: “You want it darker, we kill the light.”
Do we need to feel the weight of darkness?
Albert Einstein once said “The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.”
Einstein also said that two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity.
And it has always been so. It’s just that now human stupidity has access to weapons of mass destruction and utter lack of moral restraint about using them.
So, here is where my religious roots still have value for me.
There is something in the mythologies of the world about the creative origins of life and its penchant for renewal.
This is an old intuition and one I encountered when I went on my Ayahuasca and Psilocybin journeys.
There is something bigger than human stupidity, something ancient and deep, something the poets and the mystics know.
This is why Buddhists speak of the laughter of the wise.
Here is Rumi:
“For safe keeping, gold is hidden in a desolate place where no one ever goes, not in a familiar, easy-to-get spot. The old proverb says, joy is concealed inside grief.
The mind puzzles with this, but the soul, always a lively animal, will break such a tether. Listen, love burns away difficulties just as the daylight does the night’s phantoms. So look for the answers inside your question.
Cornered in the edgeless regions of love, you’ll see the opening that leads neither east nor west nor in any direction. For you are a mountain searching for its own echo, and whenever you hurt, you say, Lord God, please help. And the answer lives in that which bends you low and makes you cry out.
Pain and the threat of death, for instance, will do this. They can make you clear. And when they’re gone, you can lose your purpose.
You wonder what to do, where to go. And this is because you’re uneven in your opening. Sometimes you’re closed, unreachable.
Sometimes your torn shirt symbolizes your longing. And most of the time, your discursive intellect dominates you. And then sometimes the universal, beyond time intelligence comes again.
“And so friends, sell your questioning talents and buy more bewildering surrender. Live simply and even helpfully in that, and don’t worry any else’s curriculum.”
Michael Meade reminds us that the human longing for redemption is innate and universal.12 And there is this old archetype of collapse and renewal that is related to this longing. Carl Jung saw it as the archetype of apocalypse. It is a creative / recreative archetype and in times of collapse and crisis, it wants to activate.
This is why Rumi held up pain and the threat of death as potentially a helpful catalyst. “They can make you clear.”
And you might say something in these times is calling us to look deeply, to bear witness and to respond creatively.
“If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much that you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.” ~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes
We can get caught for a while staring at the car wreck before us. And who could blame us for feeling overwhelmed with shock and grief. But that grief can be a door.
And the advice of the poet is to allow the threat of death to make us clear.
The “world offers itself to your imagination,” said Mary Oliver.
That we have arrived at war driven by so much glee is perhaps what bothers me most.
I take solace in that this glee has fueled so much recklessness that it might very well eventually lead to the Hague.
But, I also think of the folly that is so glaringly obvious.
I think of that poem “The Baghdad Zoo” by Brian Turner where he juxtaposes the brutality of war with the scattering of animals in a war torn zoo, the wildness of the animals next to the wildness of human created war, the confusion of the baboon with the confusion which caused the confusion of war.13
I thought of this Baghdad poem today as I happened upon a poem by Sophie Klar and another by Michael DuBois which I will give the final word.
“Tender”
by Sophie Klar14
I spend late morning weeping with the news.
a black bear with burnt paws is euthanized
along the latest wildfire’s newest edge.
It was crawling on its forearms, seeking
a place to rest. I Googled more; reports
leak out; the bear had bedded down behind
a house, below a pine, to lick its paws.
In hours before its end, officials named
it Tenderfoot, though some of the reports report
just Tender. Later, I will teach a class
where we’ll discuss the lengths of lines in poems.
I’ll say a sonnet is a little song
to hold a thing that otherwise cannot
be held: a lonely thing: a death; a bear.
A Whole Civilization Will Die Tonight
By Michael DuBois15
My son needs lunch, and I have
to put his backpack together,
But a whole civilization will
die tonight, so I’m wondering
if they’ve closed their schools.
Like, a snow day, maybe,
except instead of snow, it’s
‘keep your children home so
if you die, you die together’ –
instead of ‘we’ll open back up
once the plows have cleared’ it’s
‘we don’t know if we’ll be here
tomorrow, hold your babies tight.’
It’s just ‘talk’ I’m told,
which I’ve been told before.
‘It’s how the president makes his deals.’
but I’ve never heard anyone talk about
other human beings this way, and I’m
not certain I can look my son in the eyes
if we all agree to stomach it one more time.
A civilization will die tonight,
but as I zip up his backpack and
kiss him off to school I think:
If this is what we call leadership
then I’m not entirely sure ours
isn’t already dead.
Robert Graves, Claudias the God: and His Wife Messalina, (Vintage, 1989).
Jeet Heer, “Pete Hegseth’s Holy War Is An Unholy Nightmare,” The Nation, 30 March 2026.
Robert Reich, “Trump Threatens a “whole civilization will die tonight,” Substack, 7 April 2026.
See John Dominic Crossan, The Birth of Christianity: Discovering What Must Have Happened in the Years Immediately After the Execution of Jesus, (HarperOne, 1999); God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, (HarperOne, 2008); Render Unto Caesar: The Struggle Over Christ and Culture in the New Testament, (HarperOne, 2022).
Warren Carter, The Roman Empire and the New Testament, (Abingdon Press, 2010); Jesus and the Empire of God: Reading the Gospels in the Roman Empire, (Cascade Books, 2021).
See the resent interview, “From Original Sin to Original Blessing with Matthew Fox,” Holy Heretics: Losing Religion and Finding Jesus podcast, 6 April 2026.
Paul Blumenthal, “This Would Be Genocide,” Huffington Post, 7 April 2026.
“Joy Reid: Impeachment is not enough: Trump Must Be Tried at the Hague,” The Dead Obeidallah Show, Substack, 8 April 2026.
Adrienne Rich, What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics, (W. W. Norton & Company, 1993).
Cynthia Bourgeault, “The Long Arc of Evolution Bends Toward Consciousness: A Teilhardian view of our present turmoil,” Substack, 1 March 2026.
Cynthia Bourgeault, “And the darkness has not vanquished it…”, Substack, 5 March 2026
Michael Meade, “The Redemptive Power of Soul,” Living Myth, episode 175, 2 April 2026.
See George R. W. Wallace, “Only Myth Will Save Us Now,” Substack, 20 September 2025.
Sophie Klar, “Tender,” in Poetry is Not a Luxury,” (Atria, 2025), 28. Originally published in The Theepenny Review, (Issue 171, Fall 2022).
Posted on Instagram, 7 April 2026, www.instagram.com/p/DW2nFihjGw5/.