Belief in hell dips, but some say they’ve already been there
By Charles Honey

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. -- Ernie Long believes he has been to hell. He can even narrow it down to a particular moment.

His mother was dying of cancer. As she lay on her death bed, he swiped her last $5 and the car keys from her purse, went out and got high. When he returned, she was dead.

Long goes quiet, thinking about it in the chapel of Guiding Light Mission in Grand Rapids, Mich. When he first moved to the homeless shelter, he recalls, he would wake up in the night haunted by what he'd done.

"The shame and guilt engulfed me," he says quietly. "I couldn't stop crying."

Today, Long is an intake supervisor for Guiding Light's recovery program. He believes Jesus saved him from the pit of hell and wants other men to be saved too, here and hereafter.

"I think hell is being in the absence of purpose," says Long, 64, who was addicted to crack cocaine before coming to Guiding Light two years ago. "When I had no purpose, no direction, I actually felt like I was living in hell."

For Long, hell is all too real -- a temporary torment in this life, an endless agony in the next. But for more and more Americans, hell is a myth.

In a survey released this summer by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, just 59 percent of 35,000 respondents said they believe in a hell "where people who have led bad lives, and die without being sorry, are eternally punished."

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