Christianity with no afterlife

[Jenny A]

This thread will pretty much be one of pure speculation, but I got thinking about it and wanted to ask all of you.

Imagine when Christianity was founded that there was no heaven or hell attached to the belief system. Either, when everyone died, there was no afterlife or they all got the same afterlife (picture Hades or Sheol). This would remove the biggest carrot and stick associated with religion. It would also make the idea of salvation quite different, as Jesus would only be absolving people of earthy punishment. That, of course, is quite a bit more testable than notions of eternal salvation. It's pretty obvious that not every wicked person dies or suffers in this life, and plenty of righteous people do suffer.

So, to get to my question: What do you think Christianity would look like in the modern age if there were no heaven or hell taught in the religion? How would that affect the number of believers? How would it affect those that do believe and how they preach?


My guess is there would be far fewer Christians, as it's be a harder sales pitch. For the ones that do believe, I'd imagine a lot of lax believers, as they don't have a constant threat of hell to coerce them into being better. That being said, I could also see a contingent of stronger "true believers" who feel a need to be right just to be right.

For further speculation, it's possible the religion (if it survived) would have morphed to keep itself alive. So, absent of any eternal salvation and any obvious divine intervention, they might take it upon themselves to police the sinners in this world. So, if a Christian punishes a sinner, would that be divine retribution? I mean, this type of thing does exist to this day, and that's with people already believing that God will judge them, anyway.

I don't think it's any accident that both Islam and Christianity promise an afterlife for believers. I don't think hell is an accident either. That, and not much else, are why those two particular religions have succeeded. Without that particular carrot and stick, we'd probably all be pagan except the Jews. And maybe without Islam and Christianity to persecute them into cultural identity, there wouldn't be any Jews either.

The other 21st century survivors like Buddhism and Hinduism have a rather more lifelong philosophical bent than Christianity or Islam that separates them from pagan religions.