The dehumanization of hell, Part 1

If anyone is in hell, I, too, am partly in hell.

“It’s been hell,” he told me. In his thirties, Amadou had been living with multiple, expanding masses in his neck for a decade. They were firm, rubbery, painful, large, and they’d scattered themselves across both sides of his neck.

This story doesn’t have a happy ending.

No surgeon’s knife could have saved him from the hell he was living in. He had a type of cancer that wasn’t amenable to surgical resection, and the chemo-plus-radiation regimen he needed didn’t exist in Liberia.

I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I occasionally think about Amadou in a slightly dehumanizing way—thankful that I grew up in a country where I have access to care.

But most of the time, across the decade and a half that separates us, I can still see his lips tense as he’s told that there’s nothing we can do, his shoulders weaken under the knowledge that he’s never getting out of his hell.

Today, I want to talk about this interconnectedness—and about the dehumanization that is its opposite.

Before I do, a disclaimer and some background.

The disclaimer: in this post, I discuss Evangelical Christian responses to current events. In doing so, I necessarily have to paint with a broad brush, so I focus on public statements from prominent Evangelical sources.