I only know what hell has utility for in authoritarian religion. It is a fulcrum of control, a way to threaten horrible consequences for failure to conform. This is important in fundamentalism, in part because they believe in corporate guilt – that I am not responsible just for my own actions, but subject to be held responsible for the actions of my family, city, church, tribe, or nation – if I do not sufficiently “oppose” or if I by my lack of opposition “condone” the misdeeds of others.
If you believe in such nonsense, then controlling others – including people outside your group – becomes terribly important. And hellthreat is a tool in the toolbox to accomplish that.
In the Christian fundamentalism I left some thirty years ago, this is pumped up in ways that have more to do with Milton and Dante than with the Bible. Through (potentially deliberate) mistranslation of certain terms and a long tradition, a lot of florid descriptions of eternal perdition exist that can’t really be supported from the scriptures, particularly if you are any sort of student of the original languages.
Back in the day, I regarded hell as a solved problem with the solution open to all via the grace of God. The combination of that plus my parents coming to fundamentalism late in life and already having been socialized to be decent human beings (they spared the rod, for example), plus being in a “relatively mild” and quasi-intellectual form of fundagelicalism, means that hellthreat was never an issue for me, then or now. But I have met plenty of people who were very damaged by such doctrines, to the point of PTSD symptoms. My pastor once confessed to me that people who obsessively “go forward” at every altar call “just in case” were in fact the bane of his existence. Of course – he did not dogfood this information into an objective assessment of whether the doctrine was actually helping anyone. After all, he didn’t have the OPTION to question it or to teach something different.
Apart from who teaches it and why, hell is of course another alleged, conveniently invisible, non-verifiable supernatural place or state, for which, definitionally, no evidence can be had. It is just another article of religious faith. It can be dismissed out of hand on the same basis that anything supernatural must be dismissed – it not only isn’t, but CAN’T be evidenced in any way.