"Hell houses," which Evangelistic churches throughout the United States organize every fall, are an expanding phenomenon in recent years. At the typical hell house, volunteers dressed as demons lead groups of visitors through a maze of rooms set up in or around a church. In each of the rooms, a different shocking anecdote is presented, in which a sinner loses his or her life. At the end of the maze is the hell room, where these same sinners are seen in their eternal suffering, and from there the spectators are led into a light-filled room. Here other volunteers encourage them to ponder their own sins and declare their faith in Jesus Christ before they step outside.

Hell houses are in fact an alternative to another American tradition. At the end of every October, "haunted houses" appear throughout the United States. These offer scary experiences to young people that reflect the mood of Halloween, which is celebrated around that time. The experience of a visit to a haunted house of this sort is like riding the "ghost train" at the Fair Grounds in Tel Aviv. Junior high-school couples on dates walk around there, among long-fingered vampires and skulls covered with cobwebs. The screams of the ghosts in the commercial haunted houses do not involve any political, religious or moral messages. However, this is not the case in the church version.

Religious circles in the U.S. have long had reservations about Halloween traditions, which everyone agrees have pagan roots, but this does not prevent the churches from adopting and adapting them. Reverend Jerry Falwell was the first to propose an evening of morality plays as an alternative to the haunted houses and began to work on this back in 1972, but hell houses as such are the fruit of a daring invention by Colorado preacher Reverend Keenan Roberts.

In 1992 Roberts produced for the first time, at a Pentecostal church in New Mexico, an evening focusing on homosexuals, suicides and women who have chosen abortion - on their way to hell. He also began to produce a kit for people who want to produce an evening of this sort, which includes among other things a disc with screams of agony, sirens rushing to the crime scene and ghoulish laughter. To date, it has been reported that about 550 kits have been sold to churches throughout the U.S., at a price of $208 each.

Last year the phenomenon earned extensive coverage after the documentary film "Hell House" by George Ratliff was released. It was filmed at the Trinity Church south of Dallas, Texas. It depicts, without using explicitly critical words, the process of producing such a night of horror, from the selection of the subjects and the screen tests, through an argument the set designers have over the symbols of the cult of Satan (the pentagram is drawn by mistake, or perhaps on purpose, as a Star of David instead of a regular five-pointed star), to the catharsis of finding comfort and faith on the part of the shocked viewers. The members of the congregation are seen getting excited before their parts are handed out, joking as the background noises are being recorded and debating pleasantly with liberal demonstrators from the neighboring city.

New York Times writer Lewis Beale called the film "a fascinating and nonjudgmental look at a religious community that is almost totally isolated from mainstream culture." But possibly a community that looks extreme and alienated from the perspective of New York is seen as more acceptable from a Southern perspective. Geoffrey Gibbs, a writer from Florida whose interest in the South has led him to extensive research into the hell house phenomenon, calls the language used by Beale "dangerously naive."

Gibbs explains: "While Pentecostals are unusually extreme, their beliefs govern most of the South. Every year my nephew visits a hell house that is sponsored by a Baptist Church. And Methodists who are considered to be some of the most open-minded, also do it."

Gibbs describes poor communities where the American dream as it is reflected on the television screen confuses people and pushes them to the pews of extremist churches, where they are promised eternal wealth and happiness after death. He tells of the frustration that springs from an inability to prevent the legislation of liberal laws that are passed in the North, among them the most recent rulings on the matter of homosexual marriages. "I am convinced that we will see this issue reflected in the hell houses this coming year. My nephews believe that homosexuals are satanic and are plotting to conquer the world, and it turns out that the churches are encouraging these perceptions in very creative ways," he notes.

Keenan Roberts, the initiator of the first hell house, understands why his project disturbs the homosexual communities:"American society today is very obsequious to homosexuals," he says from his home in Colorado. "Everybody acknowledges that murder is a sin and that stealing is a sin, but in the case of homosexuality - which I don't need to research for 10 years in order to know that, according to Scripture, is a sin - society treats the sinners gently. Everyone has to be politically correct, and I absolutely acknowledge that hell houses are the least politically correct thing around. Our message is: Just like murderers and liars, the people who live their lives outside the framework of holy matrimony are living in error. We do not hate them, but we regret the over-sensitivity with which they are treated by society."

But it is not only the question of homosexuality that is gaining opponents of the hell houses. American society is made up of groups so varied that some of the contents that are presented at the hell houses offends at least one of them. For example, the "rape scene" as it is staged at the Trinity Church in Texas.

A girl is shown going out to a rave party. She is lured into popping drugs, raped by the fellow who gives her the pill and, in the end, commits suicide in her room. The spectators meet her again in the hell room, where she is seen illuminated in red, trapped behind a transparent plastic screen, her face distorted in pain from the fires of hell. The boy who raped her is nowhere around.

Even among those in favor of drawing the multitudes closer to religion, there are many who are opposed to such scenes. Thea Keith- Lucas, a student at the religious seminary of the Episcopalian Church near Boston, frowns upon hearing the description of the rape scene.

"Hell is an important symbol for Christians because it reminds us that we have the power to make choices that separate us from God,"she says. "But it is often misused, to frighten people into obedience or to play out petty revenge fantasies."

Keith-Lucas' church, like that of Keenan Roberts, is Protestant, but its perception of religion is very different: The Episcopalians in the U.S. recently appointed a homosexual bishop, and Keith-Lucas, a woman in her fifth month of pregnancy, is on her way to becoming a priest.

Her criticism of the hell houses is simple and derives in fact from her love of religion: "I don't believe that faith can be bought with fear,"she says. "In my community, we don't want our young people to think that God is an angry judge waiting to punish them with eternal torment. We want them to make good choices because they've felt God's unconditional love and they want to show that love to others."

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/396324.html