How ‘Hazbin Hotel’ Appropriates Christian Values For A Different Kind Of Message
(REVIEW) “Hazbin Hotel” is a dementedly heartwarming show that surprisingly promotes many deeply Christian values — but somehow ultimately ends up leading audiences to the very hell it claims it wants them to escape.
Created by famed YouTube animator Vivienne Medrano with A24 and Amazon MGM Studios, “Hazbin Hotel” is an adult musical dark comedy that centers on Charlie Morningstar (voiced by Erika Henningsen), daughter of Lucifer Morningstar, who starts a hotel (called Hazbin Hotel) to rehabilitate damned souls in hell so they can go to heaven and avoid the yearly genocidal purge that angels commit against citizens to keep the demons from becoming too numerous and powerful. With a cast that includes Keith David (“Gargoyles”), Stephanie Beatriz (“Brooklyn Nine-Nine”) and Jeremy Jordan (“Supergirl”) as Lucifer Morningstar.
The series is highly touching and entertaining if you have a high tolerance for crudity and blasphemy. (My tolerance for such things is mid). The show mixes charming animation and old-school Broadway music with liberal uses of profanity, sex talk and occasional gory murder of just-not-human-looking enough people to give an endearingly unsettling vibe, crossing a hellish location and characters with its more hopeful values of redemption. The characters are both twisted and lovable, which fits its theme of showing how even the worst people can find redemption.
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There are a lot of positive — dare I say “Christian” — values in the show. So much that I’d say anyone with a beating heart will find themselves weeping as they watch them play out — even if only despite themselves. Observing the cynical, broken Hellians that Charlie Morningstar finds and helps to reform, seeing them learn to overcome their brokenness and embrace being their better selves, can’t help but bring tears to your eyes. Seeing them come to the point where they are willing to sacrifice their lives for others who they’ve come to love will wreck you unless you’re totally dead inside.
Christians will even recognize this as exactly how they understand Jesus’ project of redemption for humanity. Jesus said to the Pharisees who rebuked him for hanging out with sinners: “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” (Mark 2:17) Jesus said, “For the Son of man is not come to destroy men's lives, but to save them” (Luke 9:56) to his disciples when they asked if they could destroy the people who rejected them. Rabbi Shaid Held argues in his book “Judaism is About Love” that one of the primarily unique features of Christianity — even distinct from Judaism — is that at the center of the Christian faith is the willingness to love (and work for the redemption of) one’s enemies.
And yet, there are also deep problems with “Hazbin Hotel.” The first and most obvious one is that the show appropriates the values of Christianity while giving credit to demons, making them the good guys and angels bad. For those who believe God, heaven, angels and demons exist, this is the equivalent of making a show where Nazis are the good guys. I wonder how many fans of “Hazbin Hotel” would also show the same level of tolerance to a film like “The Birth of a Nation.”
Historian Tom Holland has shown through his work (most notably his book “Dominion”) how values such as mercy, redemption and care for the marginalized were invented by the Jews and spread throughout Christianity, which saw the devil as actively opposing those things. One might argue that “Hazbin Hotel” is engaging in a kind of gross cosmic cultural appropriation.
Many people will argue that it’s the church’s own fault that most people feel this way about God — especially given that the American church today is primarily in the business of oppressing and excluding marginalized groups. This is anti-factual. Most people today don’t feel this way about the church, nor is this view accurate. “The Great Dechurching” found most people who stopped going to church had a very positive view of church. They just were too busy doing other things to go (much like how people talk about going to the gym). Studies show that people who go to church and engage with religious practices are more generous, more likely to support economic and racial justice (as well as traditional sexuality and gender norms) and less likely to divorce. Men who fall under this category are the most likely to be loving husbands and engaged fathers with happy wives and least likely to be abusive.
But there is a deeper and more basic problem with how “Hazbin Hotel” sets up its world. The cosmos it sets up is that reality is bad — that its badness is baked into creation itself — and rebellion against this reality is good. Angels, who created the world, set it up without free will. Lucifer, with his creativity, brings free will into the mix. Angels set things up with Adam in charge over Lilith, and she rebels to choose Lucifer as a result, which brings the birth of Charlie, our protagonist. Throughout the series, the good people and the people willing to work toward redemption for others are the rebels against authority, and the angels, who are the ultimate authority who created reality, are engaged in oppression and genocide.
Everyone knows that authority figures are often bad and rebelling against them is often good. Typically, Christians and those living in the West have understood such oppressive authorities as being cosmically in rebellion against an even higher authority: God, natural law or truth. Martin Luther King Jr. used this very argument in his “Letters from Birmingham Jail” to explain why he was right to defy local authorities — because doing so was in obedience to higher authorities.
The Bible, such as in the Book of Proverbs, makes clear that God expects us to see his values as baked into reality and that to be a good person means to conform yourself to the reality that he’s baked into the world. The biblical heroes' rebellions against tyrants all fall under this category. Moses defies Pharaoh to free the Israelites based on God’s higher authority. Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego defy Nebuchadnezzar II based on higher loyalty to God. Jesus and his disciples defy the authority of the religious leaders of the time based on their higher loyalty to God.
The postmodern world has flipped this. As Gilles Lipovetsky writes in “Hypermodern Times,” the modern project was to weaken institutions of authority like the government and the church that limited people’s freedom so that those institutions could be less oppressive and therefore give people more freedom to directly obey God or their conscience without interference by earthly oppressors. This was so successful that it led to the “postmodern era,” where people lived primarily as their own gods, determining their own happiness according to individual values rather than common values. And yet, as Lipovetsky notes, the “postmodern era” has been replaced with the “hypermodern era,” where our inability to create our own values — now that we are responsible for making them — creates misery.
The problem with flipping from “reality determines good” to “my desires determine good” is that it ultimately kills anyone who lives by it and those around them. Dr. Jean Twenge, author of “Generations,” has written about how society has gotten more individualized, moving away from our tight-knit extended families to the nuclear family to higher divorce rates and people mostly living among friends and acquaintances in large cities. The result is that people more time on social media and have higher rates of depression, anxiety and suicide. Conspiracy theorists have evolved from using facts to justify their beliefs to using their assertions to justify their theories, which has led to the breakdown of social communications and an increase in tribalism.
Likewise, there’s growing evidence that changing your gender, for example, to conform your body to your inner felt identity (the ultimate expression of asserting your will over external reality) increases rates of self-harm. C.S. Lewis (whom I’ve written about before was a staunch proponent of conforming to God’s ultimate authority) predicted this in his book “The Abolition of Man,” arguing that rejecting “The Tao” — God’s created order in the world — would lead to the destruction of humankind itself.
Within the show itself, there are hints at this breakdown. Throughout the series, Charlie Morningstar uses the standards of heaven as the ruler by which she decides if her fellow residents in hell have been “redeemed.” But when heaven rejects her friends even when they pass those standards, she admits to her followers she doesn’t know what redemption means and that they should “live the way they want” the night before they are going to fight the angels. What will she use as her standards of “redemption” in Season 2 now that her value system has been deconstructed? And how, if she has no standard other than her own values, will she not simply be one more warlord imposing her values on others?
“Hazbin Hotel” is heartwarming when it portrays the deeply Christian ideas of compassion and redemption of sinners that Christ came to bring. But it says you get to that compassion and redemption not by conforming your will to God’s will, but by pursuing your own will. That is a lie that’s — fittingly — as much from the pit of hell as the Hazbin Hotel itself.
Joseph Holmes is an award-nominated filmmaker and culture critic living in New York City. He is co-host of the podcast “The Overthinkers” and its companion website theoverthinkersjournal.world, where he discusses art, culture and faith with his fellow overthinkers. His other work and contact info can be found at his website josephholmesstudios.com.