Easy Road to Hell

"Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat; Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it." —Matthew 7:13-14 (KJV)

The road to hell is sometimes defined to be so wide that people with basically slight or even no sin will go to hell anyway. This is typically done to make sure that people stick to very straight and very narrow path. Some of authors have taken this ease of entry into hell Up to Eleven, making it not just easier, but almost automatic entry into hell for everyone. This tends to lead into It Gets Easier as once one is doomed already, doing some of worse things will not change anything.

In other words...

• Cursed once... HELL!
• Spit on road... HELL!
• Leer at lady... HELL!
• Have someone damn you to hell... HELL!
• Damning someone to hell... HELL!

This is related with Moral Event Horizon only with bar set so high that nearly everyone has already fallen into irredeemably evil. Compare with All Crimes Are Equal. Failure Is the Only Option is related to this trope. Usually a form of Disproportionate Retribution.

If in-universe example basically sends everyone to hell, it belongs to this trope.

Examples of Easy Road to Hell include:

Anime and Manga

• All that's needed to go to Hell in Hell Girl is for someone to dislike you enough to be willing to make a deal to send you there--or to make that deal yourself. People have been sent to Hell for spilling coffee on someone on that show.
• Literally going to Hell seems to be pretty rare in Bleach, but since your other options for afterlives are a desert where monsters hunt you until you become one of them and a depressing slum where you will live poverty while ruled over by unquestionable overlords (unless said overlords recruit you, in which case you will serve as a soldier until the aforementioned monsters manage to brutally kill you), going figuratively to Hell (that is, being sent to an awful and inescapable afterlife is, to the best of our knowledge, a complete certainty.

Comics

• Chick Tracts simultaneously play this straight and invert it: everyone is going to hell for the slightest, and least objectionable, of sins. However all you have to do is accept religion as defined in it and you'll spend eternity in heaven, no matter how horrible your previous actions. Some older tracts which pushed this "logic" far past the breaking point were pulled out of circulation by Chick himself when he realized that the massive Moral Dissonance was too much for virtually anyone not as extreme in their beliefs.
• In both the DC and Marvel 'verses there have been examples of people getting sent to Hell with magic, rather than through any fault of their own. Granted, in most such cases they were able to get out later.

Film

• Apparently, being sent to hell is so easy that a single curse can do it in Drag Me to Hell, regardless of how good you've lived your life or what you've done.
• The Bible verse at the top of the page is quoted directly by William Somerset (Morgan Freeman) in Se7en, and the sentiment is central to the motivation of the film's Poetic Serial Killer antagonist.

Literature

• The Bible, as quoted above. It repeatedly states that all men are sinners, cannot overcome this, and are therefore unworthy of Heaven. Thankfully, God was merciful enough to provide an out; sending Jesus to Take The Heat on our behalf. (He does however ask that we at least try our darndest to live up to His standards, and to recognize that He's the one saving our asses.)
• Unsurprisingly, this structures much of the characters' journey in the 17th-century Christian allegory The Pilgrims Progress.

Live-Action TV

• In The Good Place, it's stated that most people end up going to the analogue of Hell, the Bad Place, because getting into the analogue of Heaven, the eponymous Good Place, requires an unbelievably high final score. Season 3 finally answers why: The system that tallies humanity's points hasn't been updated since it was conceived. As the world becomes ever more interconnected and complicated, every action can have a long list of unintended consequences that acts against people, leading to tons of people, like Florence Nightingale, William Shakespeare and Abraham Lincoln, to suffer in eternal damnation that they didn't deserve.

Music

• Thomas The Rhymer has been around since some point in the 13th century. Text taken from a Child Ballad version, though.

"O see ye not that narrow road, So thick beset with thorns and briers? That is the path of righteousness, Tho after it but few enquires. "And see not ye that braid braid road, That lies across that lily leven? That is the path to wickedness, Tho some call it the road to heaven.

• There's a cover of Thomas The Rhymer by Steeleye Span with similar lyrics.

Video Games

• The Void, kind of, though it has more of an emphasis on "going to Heaven is hard". Ascending to a higher Limit is extraordinarily difficult and requires massive amounts of Color, while descending to a lower Limit is dangerously easy. Master Color even says, "All the easy routes only lead down."

Web Comics

• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: There was one strip about a priest being sent to hell... for this reason..
• College Roomies from Hell: Satan plucks out Dave's soul, for no sin at all, essentially just to show he can. Some supernatural force saves him through Margaret and Roger, but that wasn't the author's original plan. And then there's this exchange:

Satan: Now let's say I put you in a situation where you have to kill someone to save [Margaret's] life. Then you die and go to Hell. And once you're there, your ass is mine... Dave: God would never allow that to happen! Satan: Sssss. That's what you think. The Other Guy doesn't care if you live or die. You're supposed to settle for eternal life.

• In YU+ME: dream, Sister Mary routinely informs the students of things that will send them to hell. These include jumping on the bed, wearing striped socks to school, and running red lights.
  • Then again Sister Mary is all part of the Dream World of an angst filled teenager in a coma so she's rather overblown.
• No matter how hard he tries to make up for his actions, Darwin Carmichael Is Going to Hell. Inverted, however, with a character who has so much good karma that she can get away with almost anything.
• Sinfest isn't quite as extreme as some examples, but it's hard to say what Slick did to really deserve his various trips to Hell. (And then there are the people who fall into hellpits by not looking where they're going, or the guy who mistook the Devil for a T-shirt salesman and now burns while wearing a shirt that says "I made fun of the Devil" . . .)

Web Original

• A common urban legend about a paper made on Snopes site: whether hell is endothermic or exothermic states that hell must be really hot and getting worse because everyone has been cursed to go to hell by at least someone else in the world.
• Bartleby Tales. The title character went to Hell for being gay, despite barely being pubescent and never having acted on his feelings.
  • and the number of people that made it to heaven that year? Six. Yeah God is a dick in this universe.

Western Animation

• A definite example in the movie of South Park. Kenny has been killed (again) and his soul drifts up towards heaven. However, as soon as he touches it, he gets an "Access Denied" message and tumbles straight down to Hell, which has a "Population" sign showing a huge and ever-increasing number, whilst the equivalent sign for Heaven revealed a tiny population. And it's not as if Kenny has exactly had time to sin much. All Played for Laughs of course.
  • In the South Park Verse the only people who can get into heaven are Mormons. Everybody else goes to hell.
    • Which is why Hell is presented as way more fun, and getting stuck with the Mormons is at one point presented as A Fate Worse Than Death.
• Futurama: There's one robot church that has an easy condemnation to Robot Hell for robots. According to his agreement with his new church, all Bender has to do is sin once to be dragged off to Robot Hell.
  • Ironically, they never mention robots who never joined that church going to Robot Hell, so Bender may have been better off if he had never converted.
  • Robot Santa's naughty setting kind of falls under this trope. He condemns Scruffy to the naughty/death list just for picking his nose. Apparently Zoidberg is the only one who meets his standards.
• The Simpsons:
  • Parodied and subverted in "Bart Gets Hit by a Car" as Bart is on his way to Heaven on an escalator after being hit by a car, but gets sent to Hell for not holding onto the handrail and for spitting over the side (though Satan says it's more for his lifetime of evil deeds, and that the spitting over the side was the straw that broke the camel's back), then gets let back to Earth as the devil realizes it's not his time yet.
  • Discussed but ultimately inverted in "My Way or the Highway to Heaven". Though St. Peter wishes for this trope, God ultimately decides to loosen the restrictions and make the road to Heaven an easier one.
• Largely inverted in American Dad!. It's quite easy to get into Heaven and, aside from being truly heinous, it seems that a Deal with the Devil is the only way to get into Hell.
• Discussed in "Welcome to Heaven" in Hazbin Hotel. No one, not even the Seraphim, knows what qualifies a soul for Heaven or Hell. It just seems that the bar for Hell is much lower than whatever qualifies someone for Heaven. That said, it's not impossible for a soul to ascend into Heaven from Hell.
• Averted in the Rick and Morty episode "Mort: Ragnarick". To get into Heaven, all someone has to do is really believe in it. Even getting killed and resuscitated eight times within a manner of minutes won't disqualify you.