When Kathryn Gin Lum was finishing her bachelor’s degree at Stanford, she wanted to write a senior thesis exploring beliefs and concepts about the afterlife. But her faculty mentors dissuaded her with an ominous admonition: “You’ll never get out of here.”
Lum, ’04, who switched her thesis topic to missionaries in gold-rush California, went on to earn a PhD in history at Yale. By then she had narrowed her academic focus emphatically: Her dissertation was devoted to American ideas about hell and damnation. That work has become a book—Damned Nation: Hell in America from the
Revolution to Reconstruction—and Lum is now an assistant professor in the religious studies department, having returned to the Farm from a position at Princeton in 2012.
Damned Nation is scholarly throughout, often drawing on sermons, journals and other texts from the 18th and 19th centuries. But Lum’s style has a crisp and almost punchy accessibility, as signaled in her introductory comments about early American views: “Hell was never distant. It underlay conceptions of justice and equality. It haunted dreams and waking visions.”
The book also has personal roots for Lum, who grew up in the Bay Area. She began her undergraduate studies at Harvard, gravitating toward East Asian history and immigration issues. When her father became ill, she came home; when he died a short time later, she was affected in ways that made her rethink her direction in life. “I was 19,” she says. “No one close to me had ever passed away before. That had to change what interested me.”
Lum transferred to Stanford with new motivation: Filled with introspective questions, she realized she could pursue an academic path in parallel with her private contemplation. Death remained on her mind, but that was partly because she made it a matter of formal research. “When you study death,” she says, “the next logical step is asking what comes next—will I see the person again, and in what way?”
Separate from any personal considerations, hell seemed to offer the best intellectual grist. “People in the academy,” says Lum, tend to dismiss the notion that any consideration of hell could drive “how rational people think.” That ceded her a vast historical realm to explore. Hell also took a philosophical pummeling during the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment, but as Lum’s book points out as early as page 3, the concept “did not just survive in antebellum America: it thrived.” In the next 233 pages, her narrative spans everything from the doomsaying aimed at sinful children—whose sudden death would relegate them to “the world of woe”—to the way the moral trauma of the Civil War “muted the rhetoric of fire and brimstone.”
Does hell have contemporary relevance, despite its lousy reputation in higher education? Strongly, thinks Lum. Much of her analysis highlights the connection between “people who believe in hell” and their impulse “to damn other people to it.” It’s that sensibility about calling out the world’s evils, says Lum, that suffuses today’s hot-button issues, including abortion and same-sex marriage.
Writing about hell’s pertinence, Lum notes in her epilogue, “is to invite raised eyebrows.” Her interest in the subject, she adds, has stirred reactions like “But you look so well-adjusted!” Personally, she’s still looking for answers and won’t say whether she believes in hell. A couple of hundred years ago, she says with a smile, she would have been reviled for questioning it at all.
