An interview with Jason Kirk, author of "Hell Is a World Without You"

The millennial/exvangelical coming-of-age novel that should be next on your reading list

Hello, friends! Today, I’m pleased to share my interview with

Jason Kirk

, author of the excellent new novel Hell Is a World Without You, a coming-of-age story that reflects Kirk’s own upbringing in the evangelical church.

“During the time of Pizza Hut buffets, 9/11, and all-night Mario Kart parties, a grieving teenager faces a mortal crossroads: fire-and-brimstone certainty vs. forbidden love. And whether or not you’ve ever begged God to delay the Rapture (so you could have time to lose your virginity), that kid’s story is about you.”

This interview was automatically transcribed from a live video chat conversation and has been lightly edited for clarity.

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Jason, for the portion of my readership that’s not already familiar with you, can you give a brief bit of introduction as to who you are?

I am a sports media person, for a while now—I’ve mostly written and covered college football, and I'm currently a newsletter editor for The Athletic. I cohost the Shutdown Fullcast as well as the Vacation Bible School podcast with my wife Emily, and I have written a novel that was heavily inspired by the adolescent experiences of me and lots of people like me.

The book—which I read and really enjoyed—is a coming-of-age story set in the early aughts in the world of evangelical youth groups. That's a lived experience that’s going to be intensely familiar for some readers and almost completely foreign for others. In looking at early reactions on social media, I've seen it cleave quite neatly between “Oh god, you've captured my life”, and “Oh god, I had no idea.” 

If you're in that latter group—like me—there's some elements of the story that might seem completely outlandish, while the former group is probably nodding along somberly. I'm thinking specifically of a scene where a youth group is terrorized by masked gunmen who burst in and tell them to renounce their faith or be killed, only to later be revealed as dads and uncles from a neighboring church brought in to test the children's faith.

Yes. 

Now, if you're from a non-evangelical background like I am, you might think this is just a wild plot contrivance, something that would never happen. But I understand this is something that actually does happen–and something that I think you experienced first hand?

It was an event at a middle school youth group, a very similar version that I witnessed. Personally, I was a kid in that room. The weird thing was that I didn't say anything about it. Not that day. Not that year. Not ever, until on the Shutdown Fullcast about a decade ago, it just popped into my head and I told the story and [co-hosts] Spencer and Ryan reacted with amazement.

I kind of didn't think much of it after that either, except this weird thing happened where I started to hear from other people who had had similar experiences in various states around the country—similar experiences of this just Nightmare Theater designed to test our faith. It happened in a lot of places.

That surprised even me geographically, because in my mind, this is a Southern Baptist thing, and oh no—it's a global thing. It's a natural conclusion of a certain theology, a theology that hell is literally real, there is literally only one way out of it, and that is to agree with whatever denomination is reaching that conclusion. Therefore, to keep people from that outcome, any means are justified—and so many Christian traditions have come to that conclusion.

Once I realized how really universal it was, it started to break through for me—like oh, that really was a weird experience. It really is as weird as people are telling me it is, but for me—someone who grew up in this world of just constant threats of hell and constant threats of missing the rapture, and there are demons around every corner and there are demons in my brain and just all this stuff—it didn't register for me as a big deal until I started hearing reactions from people after talking about it publicly, 

Everything in the book is at very least inspired by something real.

All the setting stuff—some of it is basically transcript. All the weird stuff the adults are saying to the young people, all the stunts and gimmicks, all the Christian pop culture, a lot of that stuff is basically verbatim. The invention comes in in the reactions of the younger characters to those things, and even those things are often inspired by things I heard from my friends at the time or, you know, things that people who grew up like me have said about their experiences.

So yeah, I get at once how it seems completely foreign and alien and impossible, and at the same time when I read it, I'm like, yeah, this is basically glorified journalism.

It was interesting for me to recontextualize. We're close in age, and I grew up in Ohio. You talked about the geography of this—the cover art of your book strongly references a sign that has long been on the side of I-71 in southern Ohio that says “HELL IS REAL”. 

I've driven by that sign hundreds of times—my family lives in Columbus, I went to school in Cincinnati—I could reference where I was when driving home by saying “yeah, I just passed Hell Is Real.” 

But for me not growing up in this background, that was just this silly thing, like “oh, yeah some guy who lives by the highway has this billboard”, and it was a completely foreign thing to me.

Similarly in the book, a lot of the pop cultural references—they weren't things that I was familiar with, but I caught enough glimpses from the outside. There's a point in the book where the kids have the ‘meeting at the pole’, where they’d gather at the flagpole outside the high school to pray before the day. I remember kids doing that, but it was from a completely outside perspective.

Yes. 

Your protagonist, Isaac Siena, is an evangelical kid, but he attends public school while many of his friends attend private Christian school. Was that your experience?

I attended a private grade school, was homeschooled in middle school and went to public high school, so I got the complete range of experience there, and I have characters in each of those settings within the book. Isaac is in public school, and I chose public school for him in part because it's familiar for me, but also because it's just so fruitful—so many conflicts that I think are completely invisible for normal people.

I wanted to not only, you know, show people who grew up like me, like “hey, yes, I see you, I get you, I am this kid who thinks the things you thought at the time.” I also wanted to show people who were regular public schoolers—this is why we were so weird in the cafeteria. This is why we were doing all that stuff by the flagpole. This is why we told you to listen to this band you didn’t want to listen to instead of the band that you did want to listen to. It’s because we thought our souls depended on it.

Also, public school is just fun to write about.

Writing about Christian private school, it’s really not that exciting. Public school is just so universal that any tweak to the regular public school scene, it just feels so wildly off. Like a kid telling an English class teacher that he's being persecuted for Christ when she's just trying to teach Siddhartha is just so weird and often it's the thing you would expect to see in, like a Christian private school, right?

But in a public school, someone being that obnoxious—and also knowing why they're that obnoxious—felt like the thing that could set those scenes apart from like the usual high school scene.

I remember sitting at that lunch room table and thinking “why is this guy being like this?”, and you know, it definitely humanized those kids for me retrospectively. Like, oh gosh, I was probably kind of a dick to them.

Well, we deserved someone to be annoying to us, even though the reasons that we deserve that could be blamed on a system and not just us. Let's put it that way.

You mentioned the alternate pop culture and I wanted to dig in on that a bit. There's a lot of mentions in the book of Christian bands, a lot of them being the alternative to secular ones—like, “if you like Limp Bizkit, you should listen to this instead, if you like Eminem, you should listen to this instead.”

Are there any of them that hold up today? What are your artists of that era that you still listen to, that are still good?

First of all, the two alternatives to those acts would be, respectively, Thousand Foot Krutch and KJ-52.

The ones that still hold up for me were the ones that were less derivative, that are playing a popular genre that lots of artists play, but they're doing it in their own way. I'm wearing an Underoath hoodie in my author photo because I still like Underoath. My wife listens to Reliant K all the time. There's honestly lots of that stuff that holds up fine as long as it's not preachy or judgy, or advancing only one view of religion or one of the many, many, many songs about like physical purity culture.

Underoath's biggest song to this day—which I use for a chapter title in there—is this bitter, resentful song about two people who have broken some sort of a purity pledge. Those songs are fascinating time capsules, and they're the rare, honest expression from within evangelicalism of how much that shit sucks. But they're not fun to listen to by any means, and Underoath even years later they said they regretted some of the language in that song as they moved far away from that religious tradition.

But yeah, the stuff that holds up is the stuff where it’s just songs.

Ultimately so much of that music is just nineteen-year-olds making songs as they're figuring their lives out, and then so many of them moved away from the religious house that they had been packed into and then spent the next thirty years trying to distance themselves from that reputation. “We’re not a Christian band”, or “we used to be a Christian band, now we’re just a band”, or “we were just signed to a Christian label.” It’s a suffocating little market and if you're ever an artist in that world, you were expected to be basically VeggieTales forever.

No shade to VeggieTales. VeggieTales holds up.

But yeah, I would say more than you think holds up fine, even if most of it sucks, because most music sucks.

You and I became acquainted through the world of college football media. The book only has some passing mentions of college football—though I I did appreciate a scene where one character watches the 2001 Outback Bowl that was the nail in the coffin for John Cooper at Ohio State, because I remember watching that game—but I’ve seen you note elsewhere that there are a lot of similar cultural elements going on between college sports and the evangelical / megachurch world.

Could you elaborate on that a bit?

You can probably see it most clearly, I think, in Clemson.

There’s this particular moment I think of after Clemson won a national title a few years ago—their players are on stage, and in that moment they are openly recruiting other players. It’s a mid-’90s rap beef, giving a pitch, “if you don’t want your coach doing this and that, come to Clemson, come to Death Row,” right?

Those young men had been trained to bring other young people into this world, this world powered by charisma and confidence, and we do things differently and we are the good guys and it's just different here and all that stuff, right? That's Dabo Swinney's entire business model, “we're just better because we are different in some way.”

For me, when it really clicks is when you see the players buying in and themselves doing it because young people in evangelicalism are told constantly—you are the next generation, you are the ones who are gonna save this world and change this country and you are the ones who are going to seize the White House. It's all on you. I've done all I can. You are the world changers now. It's my job to make sure you don't stop going to church, right?

So recruiting, especially to a school like Clemson, or now Hugh Freeze’s Auburn, or schools like that where there's so much emphasis on love and family—that always activates the Spidey sense a little bit.

That's just one element of it.

The tribalism in general in college football reminds me so much of religion, where you have all these groups that are like, 1% different and they treat it like they're 99% different, right? Fundamentally, so many things about any Western Christian tradition are really, really, really similar. Like, in the book I have Thomas Aquinas saying a couple things that you would think some fire and brimstone preacher made up a hundred years ago. No, like it's all the same horrible stuff that descends from, like, Augustine hating himself and therefore everyone else has to.

Ultimately, all of these subgroups that feel totally far apart, they all say the same shit.

That's how college football works, and that's how all of these specific kinds of Christian traditions work, where if guilt and shame and punishment are what it's all about, you're gonna get outcomes like youth pastors waving guns or like the Crusades or something in between.

Those are just two examples of college football and religion—there are so many connections there. The emphasis on militant muscular Christianity in both of them literally is foundational to college football like the first fifty years of college football. That is the story of it. That's why it started. That’s why it survived the 1900s. Teddy Roosevelt, Walter Camp, Amos Alonzo Stagg, you can find all of them talking about how “we’re making boys tought for God.”

It’s inextricable, really.

You've been a writer for many years, obviously, but this is your first novel. Did you have any particular challenges in adapting to the medium?

It’s funny, on one hand it was a big pivot going from, like, writing about sports, writing non-fiction to writing fiction. But another thing that I didn't really talk about a whole lot publicly for a long time was like, I've been writing fiction about religious people since middle school.

So for me it was just sort of surfacing something that had always been there. Writing fiction and thinking about religion? I've been doing both of those things for a lot longer than I've been a sports media member.

I think the fun thing is how covering sports sort of developed fiction muscles. There are some world-building chapters—Chapter 2 is the main one—where it’s like, “okay, we have to really, really efficiently walk people into this thing that they might not understand and make it feel like it has history and all that.” And so much of that feels the same as explaining a college football thing that is so niche and so arcane and so much weirder than it needs to be.

Explaining the NCAA to a normal person? If you can do that, you can explain just about anything about religion. 

Any time an NCAA lawyer gets in front of a judge and the judge is like, “seriously? This is how March Madness works?” It’s the exact same reaction as if I tell someone about I Kissed Dating Goodbye and they’re like “seriously? That’s why the Christian couple at my high school was so weird?”

Just explaining these weird things in a completely face value way, it’s often the funniest and weirdest way to do it, and it's the most honest—just stripping away all of the things that the institution wants to say about itself and just describing it plainly—that feels like a thing I translated from writing about sports.

The book officially releases on February 12th, but preorders have been open since December, and many people—myself included—have received those pre-orders well ahead of the official release date. One thing I wanted to highlight—you’ve pledged to donate all of the proceeds from pre-sales to The Trevor Project.

Can you tell us a bit about that organization and about how much the book has raised to date?

So they are a charity that seeks to eliminate self-harm among LGBTQ youth. To this point, we have donated $39,000. Ater expenses, we'll see how much more we'll be able to donate in February and possibly later—there might be a combination of accounting to figure out and possibly other add on donation events.

At this point we can definitely say over $40,000, which is a really great number for any novel, especially a debut novel, and one not on a large publisher.

I chose that organization because it feels related to not only the book's contents—there are LGBTQ characters, and my protagonist has to learn to become an ally to them—it's also related to my life, because when I was that age, I had friends coming out and I saw the way that they felt about themselves because of the world we grew up in, and I have resented that my entire life, that they felt bad about themselves and threatened to do bad things to themselves.

Ultimately, I think about what Jesus said, that the way to show you get it is to stand with the people who are being most mistreated in society. I constantly go back to the example of a trans kid in Florida. If Jesus was here right now, that is who Jesus would stand with.

So, I didn’t need this project to benefit me, because the writing of it alone benefited me more than I ever expected it to. I wanted it to benefit somebody else, and in a really funny way, to try to do the Christian thing.

You know, I wrote this whole book about how angry I am at so much of Christianity, but ultimately, Jesus is my hero.

So, that's one small way I'm going to choose to try to emulate him a little bit.

You’ve got a launch party scheduled in Atlanta on February 16th, which I understand is already sold out, and just saw you’ve announced an event in Madison, Wisconsin as well. Are you planning on any more stops on a book tour?

We're gonna try to do as many as we can, which will hopefully be quite a few over the next however many years, while also pacing ourselves because of logistics.

But yeah, there are other steps. We would definitely love to get to Cincinnati. Maybe we could go to the sign.

Do you plan to write another book in the future?

Yes. There is a nonfiction project that my nonfiction agent and I are preparing to propose, and the fictional universe of this novel is one that I plan to keep expanding, probably wildly jumping from genre to genre as I go.

I feel like I got at least two more in me.

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—Scott Hines (@actioncookbook)

You can read more about—or just order and read—Hell Is A World Without You at Jason Kirk’s newsletter,

Jason Kirk's newsletter

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