Jason Kirk’s “Hell Is A World Without You” Proclaims “Hope Is Our Only Hope”

Jason Kirk wears many caps on. He is a senior editor at the Athletic, co-host of the internet’s only college football podcast, “Shutdown Fullcast,” and co-host of the Vacation Bible School podcast with his wife Emily Kirk. He is also the author of “Hell is a World Without You,” a coming-of-age story set in the early 2000s. The book centers around a group of kids struggling to grow up within the Evangelical church and the joys and sorrows they experience along the way.

“Hell is a World Without You” carves out a unique space in the emerging literary scene of ex-vangelical literature. Many popular books, such as Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s “Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation,” tell the history of Evangelicalism. While these historical narratives have been revelatory for many, Kirk offers a new lens by approaching Evangelicalism from a more personal perspective.

The author grew up in the 90s and 2000s, attending many conservative churches around the Metro Atlanta area. However, he gained greater clarity about his world in college and he left the church as many Evangelicals have in recent years. 

For Kirk, it was specifically the rise of Islamophobia, homophobia towards his friends, and other personal doubts and shame that culminated in his leaving the church. This led to a season where he didn’t care about religion at all.

The novel is a way for Kirk to reckon with that world and the trauma of leaving it. This includes navigating the political impacts, personal effects, and long process of deconstruction. 

In “Hell is a World Without You,” every step of the deconstruction process is complex. I recently spoke with Kirk about his writing process. He clearly wanted to emphasize the constant role of change in growth in a person’s life. 

Specifically, regarding deconstruction, he says, “I wanted to show that you don’t leave indoctrination by just taking two steps outside the building.” This is hammered home in the novel as the characters grow up as the narrative unfolds.

Over four years, the characters change drastically in ways that should feel intimately familiar to anyone undertaking this journey. Dissonance is infused into every line of the novel.

The novel opens with the line, “I didn’t know whether my dad had spent the past 2,360 days in eternal conscious torment, but I knew I wanted to play pickup football.” That dissonance is essential to the novel. For someone indoctrinated into this world, where fear of eternal damnation permeates all activities, and for a 13.9-year-old such as the main character, Isaac Siena, this is all congruent with the general social anxiety of being a teenager.

For Kirk, this dissonance is also at the center of his experience of church. Dissonance runs rampant throughout the Bible and, of course, through church life.

Kirk grew up in a complex evangelical world, full of good and bad memories. As he puts it, “There’s stuff we all want to hang on to because it was ours, but it’s tainted.”

One of the book’s primary themes is working through dissonance toward something beautiful. Although the book is dark and terribly sad at times, the overarching narrative is one of moving from darkness to light.

The book will pull on your heartstrings, regardless of whether you see yourself in these kids or just want to give them a big hug. As Kirk puts it, “Here’s this weird world, and here’s these kids who somehow have fun in it.”

While the novel captures an often-untold story of dissonance, horror and love, its true resounding message is one of empathy. The call for empathy is inherent in every sentence and explicit on the final page, which ends in one of my favorite bits of theology I’ve heard: “If Hell is a world without God, and if we are all breaths of the Spirit, then do you know what I know? Then, beloved, Hell is a world without you. You will be born good. The same goes for everyone—yes, even James Dobson. Treat them accordingly.”

This call to action, to see everyone as made in God’s image, is backed up by the wonderful work Kirk has done with the book’s sales. He has raised over $50,000 for The Trevor Project, a wonderful organization that focuses on suicide prevention for young trans kids.

I asked Kirk what it meant to have his words put so clearly into action. He replied, “I guess it kind of felt like just a tiny bit of revenge. To say, I remember the things that those men in charge said about my friends when we were 16-17 years old, and I’ve been mad about it my whole life. So, here’s what we’re going to do with this money. We’re going to give it to this, this charity that takes care of LGBTQ kids.”

“Hell is a World Without You” is an incisive look at a complex world full of hatred and bigotry that is disgusting to look at. It is also a hilarious book with absurd pop culture references that, if you know them, you will drop the book and shout at the nearest person about Training for Utopia and if not you will marvel at the sprawling lore within this community. 

It is also a profoundly empathetic book that attempts to make you see the God-breathedness in every individual around you, especially those who are told daily that they are worthless. And last of all, it is a book that calls the reader to action.