The Gallup Poll gives us the most reliable information since the census is forbidden to ask religious questions while most networks and magazines have limited resources for such complicated opinion polls. This is largely taken as a symptom of the loss of religious belief but it may not mean this. It may mean, instead, that our views of the afterlife are adjusting to our more complicated and interesting culturally plural and multicultural society. It is harder to condemn Jewish, Catholic, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist neighbors to hell, if you have found out that they are good and loyal neighborhood friends.

Even more interesting is how Americans describe heaven. We have given up old notions of sitting on clouds playing harps, cartoon versions of singing the praises of God, which was so much more eloquently visualized by Dante in the Middle Ages. Instead we seem to want to go to an eternal retirement village. We want strong bodies and whole limbs and robust health, which we intend to use to full potential in sports and games, as well as theater, concerts, and even humor. Apparently, we fear boredom in heaven just as much as we do on earth.

The evangelical and fundamentalist community is obviously an outlier in this vision. They normally know exactly what the Bible says awaits the sinners and faithful. Bodily resurrection means the literal re-clothing of bodies with flesh and living on a renewed earth while for a “normative” Christian it is usually equivalent with immortality of the soul. The more fundamentalist we are, the more literal is our understanding of resurrection. At the very extreme is the extremist Muslim who has reversed the normal Christian view: he gets the sensual pleasures of a rich garden upon death, where he spends the time left before the resurrection.

Throughout history, humans have always wanted the rewards of the rich in heaven. What is interesting now is that we seem to want a continuation of what the middle class has achieved as well. It is interesting that what we want becomes a kind of national Rorshach test for what we think is most important and most transcendent in our lives. But when we put these descriptions in the history of all descriptions of heaven and hell in the West, it seems unlikely that we will get exactly what we envision but it seems to adequately describe what we want for this life.