While many religions see hell as a physical place of punishment, several mainline Protestant religions take a different view.

Two Lawrence ministers, The Rev. Peter Luckey, senior pastor Plymouth Congregational Church, 925 Vt., and Marcus McFaul, senior pastor of First Baptist Church, 1330 Kasold Dr., both said they tend to see it more as the absence of God.

“I think what’s interesting is you get different perspectives from different communities on what their perspective of hell is,” Luckey said. “What happens in the afterlife does not occupy the minds of most people. People are interested in how God wants them to live here in this life and not necessarily to be focused on the next life.”

McFaul said many mainline Protestant denominations don’t dwell on the concept of hell.

“Hell has kind of been on lean times in Protestant preaching circles, because we tend to talk about the pleasant side of Christianity,” McFaul said. “Hell as eternal punishment after people die, or damnation, etc., is not a popular thing to present to people.”

He tends to teach that hell is the absence of God.

“If we define hell as eternal separation from God, then my choices in this world will impact that in a pretty substantial and significant way,” McFaul said. “The final judgment is the fulfillment of our own choices.”

He said those who choose to serve God by helping others will have a different outcome to their lives than those who have showed no compassion or mercy toward others.

“Judgment is something we pronounce on ourselves,” he said. “This is the risky side of God giving us the freedom of choice.”

McFaul said he’s not a believer of the devil in a red suit, with a pitchfork and flames, “but I do know there is evil.”

He said he believes there is evil that lurks in the bad choices each of us make.

“When we choose to dehumanize other people and choose to dehumanize ourselves, we’re not reflecting the images of God,” he said. “When my choices dehumanize other people, then I am making a choice that over the whole length of my life, what should await me.”

Mainline Protestant perspectives hold that Jesus taught, through parables, that there would be a distinction between sheep and goats.

The criteria for being a sheep, and entering into the kingdom of heaven, is whether that person served others, such as clothing the naked, feeding the hungry or visiting the sick, he said.

“Jesus’s picture of going to hell wasn’t being sent to a place of torment as much as being left out of a place of fellowship,” McFaul said.

Luckey said most of the Christian ideas of heaven and hell are not necessarily based in Scripture, but on later interpretations by the Church.

“I believe that hell is not a place that necessarily we go to when we die, but I believe that hell is a state that’s here on earth when there’s the total absence of God’s love and presence,” Luckey said.

“Whenever we see violence and bloodshed and we see people being persecuted and oppressed and we see people who can’t feed their children and starving children, that’s what hell is.”

Hell is the absence of the presence of God, he said.

Luckey frowned on how some Christian denominations tried to use the fear of hell as a way to motivate people to behave and believe in certain ways.

“From my perspective what Jesus was about was not about using fear to win hearts, but using love,” Luckey said.