Amazon Prime’s Second Season Of ‘Hazbin Hotel’ Reinvents Christian Redemption for the Worse
(REVIEW) To understand post-Christian Western culture, watch “Hazbin Hotel.” As America continues to secularize and divide along religious and political lines, our culture is rewriting how we think about human nature and redemption. With its second season, “Hazbin” encapsulates our evolving post-Christian imagination — and the ways we’re worse off for it.
The adult animated musical series that follows the daughter of Lucifer, Charlie Morningstar (Erika Henninsen), who runs a hotel with the seemingly impossible goal of rehabilitating sinners and getting them into heaven as redeemed souls.
Season 2 follows on the heels of last season’s explosive finale, where the citizens of hell fought back against heaven’s invasion and learned angels can be killed. As both heaven and hell escalate to open war with this news, Charlie discovers proof that sinners from Hell can be redeemed and go to heaven – meaning her hotel officially works. So she must work with her friends in heaven and hell to prevent the two sides from dooming both their realms with a war none of them can take back.
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Everything good about the first season is also good about Season 2. The characters are endearing and compelling, the jokes typically land and the songs are spine-tingling bangers. It balances its heartwarming and irreverent tones well, where a sex joke, blood splatter or an f-bomb can appear immediately next to an example of tear-jerking redemption, which makes sense when that redemption is taking place in hell.
While the hotel’s goal is Christlike, “Hazbin” rejects the worldview that traditionally undergirds it. Christians historically viewed the world in terms of God’s good creation, man’s sinful rebellion, and God’s work through human history to redeem mankind and restore creation. But the show flips this script on its head. In “Hazbin,” the rulers of heaven are oppressive beings who want to control creation without free will.
This fits with how many modern people see human history and the church. They see history as one where the powerful used their power to oppress. The church — those who claimed to represent God, like Hazbin’s angels — were among the worst offenders. Therefore, the heroes of history are individuals who rebel against the day’s social norms, traditions, and institutions, particularly when those norms come from Christianity.
Of course, Christian history has its own story of battling traditional institutions, with movements like the Protestant Reformation, where Christian reformers used their individual reason to interpret the Bible differently from the church institutions of their day, and then fought to reform them in defiance of their authorities.
But even the protestant traditions see their work as restoring tradition rather than breaking away from it. “Hazbin” rejects any weight given to tradition’s voice. When the high angel Sera admits she doesn’t know what to do about the upcoming war. Another character says the only way to know the right thing is to shut out all voices but your own — that we only stray when we’re not listening to our own inner voice.
This leads to the show’s other big difference to traditional Christianity: Its view of salvation. How does the show claim his redemption was possible? Doing good deeds that cancel out the bad deeds.
This is the exact opposite of how Christianity typically articulates salvation works. While the details of how one is “saved” are often a source of contention, most agree that what saves you is accepting Jesus, and the process of character growth happens while you’re already inside the faith. In Christian-ese, “Hazbin” affirms a “works-based” model of salvation while Christianity affirms a “grace-based” model.
Some might argue that this “Hazbin” view of salvation also doesn’t reflect modern secular salvation. After all, radical acceptance of people “just as they are” is one of the core ways modern secular Westerners define love.
“Gentle” or “permissive parenting”, the parenting style that says to kids, “I will love you just as you are and not expect better from you,” is an increasingly dominant style among secular parents. Likewise, millennial and Gen Z generations increasingly define being loved as having their beliefs and choices affirmed.
But this radical acceptance is not applied consistently. While kids may demand radical acceptance from their parents, they do not respond in kind. Millennials and Gen Z are increasingly going “no contact” with their parents over increasingly small violations of the radical acceptance model of loving them. It’s becoming more common to cut off relationships for political differences and demand that these people “put in the work” before they are allowed back into a relationship with them. Modern secular culture has simply switched around which sins are worthy of banishment.
This is one reason the series’ rejection of traditional Christianity is so sad. Most of what the show is looking for is found most in the faith it rejects.
“Hazbin Hotel” insists that one's own “inner voice” about what’s right and wrong is the only one that matters. Fittingly, that’s also what Christian author C.S. Lewis wrote the people in hell thought as well. In “The Great Divorce,” people in hell all lived further and further apart from each other in total isolation because they couldn’t compromise their own personal values. As Lewis said, hell is God saying to man, “Thy will be done”.
For all the virtues of “Hazbin Hotel”, it still ultimately says the same thing — and will likely lead its fans to the same place.
Joseph Holmes is an award-nominated filmmaker and culture critic living in New York. 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 josephholmesstudios.com.