This essay considers how the development of hell and the devil in the early Christian tradition influenced their history in the specific context of the region that would become the United States. The essay argues that, while hell and the devil have often reflected the nation’s open cultural wounds and political sores, the concepts also carry real moral weight for believers as ways of addressing the problem of evil. The essay surveys the range of American engagements with hell and the devil, from deep moral anxiety and the politics of fear to popular entertainment. It also looks at how moral anxiety, political fear, and pop culture could become entangled, as in nineteenth-century temperance tracts and contemporary evangelical graphic tracts and hell houses.
