Sincere belief passed down with love, or terrifying a child into obedience before they can reason? Where's the line between raising a child and frightening one?
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Add your commentMy grandmother told me my dad was in hell because he died before converting back. I was nine. Nine years old sitting at a funeral being told my father is burning. You tell me what to call that.
That's genuinely awful and I'm so sorry. But that's a specific cruelty, not an argument about doctrine itself. Some people use any tool to wound.
I'm a pastor and I'll say something that might surprise people here: I changed how I talk about hell to children in my congregation after two families came to me with kids showing real distress. I still believe what I believe. But there is a difference between planting a seed and dropping a boulder. Some of us in ministry have been bad at knowing the difference and that deserves honest accounting.
I'm going to say the uncomfortable thing: consent. A four-year-old cannot consent to a belief system. A four-year-old cannot evaluate evidence, weigh alternatives, or push back. You are, by definition, installing software in a brain that cannot reject it. That's not faith. That's something else.
By that logic you cannot teach children ANYTHING because they can't consent to it. Can't teach them the earth is round. Can't teach them their history. Can't teach them manners or nutrition. All 'installing software.' You've just argued against education itself.
There's a categorical difference between teaching factual claims about the physical world and teaching a child that they are personally sinful, watched by a supernatural judge, and at risk of eternal pain. The fact that both count as 'teaching things' doesn't make them equivalent. One of these has unique emotional loading.
To answer the genuine question asked earlier in this thread — I was the most anxious, rule-following, joyless little kid you ever met. Straight A's, never broke a rule, never mouthed off. Adults thought I was so well-behaved. I was just in constant low-grade terror. Didn't feel moral. Felt hunted.
Telling a 6-year-old they or their friends will burn forever isn't theology to a child, it's terror they can't yet argue with. The intent may be love, but the impact is fear.
I work in child psychology. The most damaging element isn't even hell itself — it's the unresolvable nature of the fear. You can comfort a child afraid of dogs by helping them avoid dogs. You cannot help a child avoid an omnipresent judgmental God watching every thought. That's what makes it uniquely destabilizing.
I don't have a dog in the religion fight but I find it genuinely strange that we have laws about what physical harm you can inflict on a child but essentially no framework for psychological inputs. You cannot hit a child. You can apparently install chronic anxiety disorders through systematic fear-teaching from birth. The legal philosophy there is incoherent.
You want the state deciding what ideas parents are allowed to teach? I need you to think about what you're actually proposing here. The precedent that creates is terrifying in a way that has nothing to do with religion.
The state already regulates what ideas parents can teach in some contexts — you cannot teach a child that a certain race is subhuman, or that child marriage is acceptable, without legal consequences if it reaches certain expressions. 'The state can never be involved in what is taught to children' is not actually the law anywhere. The question is where the line is, not whether a line exists.
I teach elementary school. I have had students cry — genuinely inconsolable — because they were afraid I was going to hell since I didn't go to their church. Eight years old, sobbing, worried about their teacher's eternal soul. I don't think the parents are monsters. I think they have no idea what their words sound like inside a small person's head.
grew up evangelical. spent my 20s in therapy. not blaming my parents because they genuinely believed they were saving me. but the scrupulosity, the constant self-monitoring, the feeling that every thought was sin — that came directly from how hell was taught. im not calling it abuse. i dont know what to call it.
I'm a pastor and I'll be honest with you: I've watched parents weaponize hell in Sunday school settings in ways that made even ME uncomfortable. That's not faith formation. That's crowd control. God forgive us for what we've done in his name to little kids.
Respectfully, the pastor commenting here is doing the thing where the nice version of your religion gets to represent it and the scary version is a corruption. But statistically speaking more children grew up with the scary version. The nice version doesn't get to own the branding for everyone.
my therapist asked me once to describe the earliest feeling i associated with prayer and i said 'trying not to get caught' and she just looked at me for a long time. i was thirty four years old before i understood that was not a normal relationship with God or with anything
nobody's asking the question that actually matters to me which is: what do WE do now? like sure, debate the philosophy. but I have a sibling with severe OCD that her therapist directly traces to religious scrupulosity. our parents are still alive. still religious. they genuinely love her. how do you even begin to have that conversation at thanksgiving
The answer nobody in this comment section wants to give you is: carefully, slowly, probably with a therapist present, and with the genuine possibility that it goes badly. I'm sorry. Truly.
teacher here. I have students who arrive in kindergarten already showing anxiety symptoms related to supernatural punishment beliefs. Five years old, convinced they're going to be destroyed for bad thoughts. Parents have no idea because to them it's normal. This is real. I see it.
How would a kindergarten teacher even know that's the origin of anxiety symptoms in a five-year-old? Kids that age have anxiety for a thousand reasons. This feels like confirmation bias.
Because five-year-olds tell you things. They talk constantly. 'I had a bad thought about my sister and now God is going to send me to the fire.' Children are not subtle. I didn't have to deduce anything.
I'll be honest — I'm a pastor and even I have changed how I talk to children about hell. Not because I don't believe in consequences but because the picture of literal fire that I grew up with serves fear more than it serves understanding. There's a difference between accountability and horror.
so basically you're admitting the traditional teaching was wrong? wild for a pastor to say publicly lol
Children also can't consent to being taught evolution, democracy, or that meat comes from animals. We teach children things before they can evaluate them. That's... just parenting.
The question assumes 'abuse' requires malice. It doesn't. Abuse is defined by harm caused, not intent behind it. A parent can love their child deeply and still cause psychological damage. Those two things are not mutually exclusive and the sooner people accept that, the more honest this conversation gets.
I have a theology degree and spent a decade in youth ministry and the honest answer is: we didn't think about any of this. We were so focused on 'saving souls' that the psychological experience of the child in front of us was basically invisible. That's a failure I carry.
Genuine question for people who went through this: did the fear actually make you MORE moral as a child or just more anxious? Because if the goal was ethical behavior and the outcome was anxiety disorder, that seems like a policy failure even on its own terms.
Thirty-four years old. Still can't hear thunderstorms without a spike of something that isn't quite fear but isn't quite not fear either. Was taught that storms were God's anger. Nobody in that church thought they were doing anything wrong. They weren't doing nothing wrong, either.
man. that thunderstorm thing just hit me. I had something similar with silence — was taught that silence meant God was disappointed in me, so I'd pray frantically to fill it. decades later I still find deep quiet slightly threatening. wild what sticks
Exvangelical here. What I find most interesting about this debate is how quickly the people who went through it without apparent trauma rush to defend the practice. Almost defensively so. As if acknowledging it could be harmful would retroactively threaten something they need to remain intact. I understand that. I used to do it too.
Or — and hear me out — some of us just genuinely had fine experiences and don't enjoy being told we must be in denial about them. Not everyone who disagrees with you is defending a wound.
The thing that gets me is the unfalsifiability of the threat. If I tell my kid the stove is hot and they touch it, reality confirms the lesson and they update their behavior. If I tell my kid they'll burn forever after death, they can never test it, never disprove it, and the fear has no natural expiration date. It lives in them until they dismantle it consciously. That's not education. That's installation.
okay but who decided eternal conscious torment was even the orthodox position?? Eastern Orthodoxy leans heavily annihilationist. Many serious theologians hold universalist positions. The hellfire version is a specific tradition within Christianity, not THE Christian position. Most of this debate is actually about one slice of Western Protestant theology.
The framing of this entire debate drives me insane. 'Faith or abuse' presents it as binary. Most harmful parenting practices exist on a spectrum and get evaluated on severity, frequency, and impact — not on whether we personally find the underlying belief system valid. We don't get to exempt religion from that framework just because the intent was loving.
One thing I genuinely don't understand: why does a loving God NEED children to be afraid? Like what's the theological argument that fear is the right foundation? Even within Christianity, 'perfect love casts out fear' is literally in the text.
Child psychologists, developmental researchers, and trauma therapists have actually studied this at length. We're not guessing. The literature on religiously-induced childhood anxiety is substantial. The answer to 'who arbitrates' is: people who study childhood psychology for a living, not the adults who survived their own upbringing and retroactively decided they were fine.
I spent three years doing fieldwork in communities with very high rates of religious childhood anxiety. What I found was that the variable wasn't really the theology — it was the emotional temperature of the home. A loving secure family could teach even harsh doctrine without inducing the worst outcomes. A cold, controlling home amplified everything. Attachment matters more than content.
okay this is actually the most interesting take so far. so you're saying it's less about WHAT they taught and more about whether the child felt safe enough with the people teaching it? that actually tracks with my experience. my parents believed the same things my aunt did but my aunt's kids were terrified and we weren't. different homes, same doctrine.
What strikes me reading this entire thread is that even the people defending the practice are mostly arguing it CAN be done without harm — not that harm never happens. That's actually a significant concession. At that point you've already agreed the implementation matters enormously, which means you've agreed the stakes are high enough to warrant serious scrutiny. We're closer to consensus than it looks.
Nope. Hard disagree. If a secular ideology used fear of eternal suffering to control children we'd call it a cult.
Every major religion has scholars who argue hell is metaphorical, conditional, or nonexistent. Parents who present it as a literal furnace waiting for their kid's unbaptized classmates aren't just passing on 'the faith' — they're selecting the most terrifying interpretation available and feeding it to a child. That's a choice. Own it.
I genuinely want someone to explain how 'infinite punishment for finite acts committed during a finite lifespan' is a moral framework rather than a horror story. And then explain why we're teaching it to five-year-olds before they've learned long division.
The 'if you believe it's true you have to warn them' argument has always bothered me and I finally figured out why. We also believe lots of statistically real threats exist — predators, car accidents, home invasions — and we deliberately calibrate HOW MUCH fear we install in children about those things because we understand that drowning a child in fear does not produce a safer or better child. Why does the logic suddenly disappear when the threat is supernatural?
Look I left the church 15 years ago and I still have to consciously tell myself that a bad thought doesn't make me a bad person. That's not theology, that's conditioning. Call it what you want.
Someone finally said it. The parents are victims too. Punishing them without addressing the institution that created the pattern changes nothing.
"Moral seriousness" and "anxiety disorder" can look identical from the outside in a child. That's kind of the problem.
I think 'abuse' is the wrong word and 'just faith' is also the wrong framing. Both of those let us skip the harder question which is: should we be teaching children to hold beliefs that create fear states they have no cognitive tools to process? That's a specific developmental harm question and it doesn't require us to call parents monsters or dismiss religion to ask it.
The issue I keep coming back to: children cannot consent to their own belief formation. They are, by definition, captive audiences. That power asymmetry demands more restraint from adults, not less.
There is a meaningful moral difference between teaching a child factual or civic content and teaching them they are personally under threat of eternal damnation. The emotional loading is completely different.
Scrupulosity. Yes. Nobody ever talks about this specific thing and it ruins lives quietly. Thank you for naming it.
Okay someone needs to push back on the secular fear equivalency argument that keeps coming up. 'Don't talk to strangers' is a one-time behavioral warning about a concrete, escapable danger. Hell is a metaphysical state of permanent conscious torment that follows you into sleep, dreams, and every private thought. These are not the same category of fear and pretending they are is just rhetoric.
Why is no one talking about the fact that different denominations are wildly different here? My Catholic upbringing barely mentioned hell. My friend's Pentecostal childhood was apparently an ongoing horror film. These aren't the same religion in practice.
Hot take incoming: atheist parents who raise kids terrified of death, meaninglessness, and the void do just as much damage and nobody's writing think-pieces about THAT.
Raising a kid to understand mortality isn't the same as raising them to believe a specific entity has judged them worthy of infinite torture. Come on.
The framing of 'sincere belief passed down with love' vs 'terrifying children' creates a false binary. Most parents doing this aren't cackling villains. They are deeply sincere people operating inside a system that they themselves were terrified into as children. Generational trauma with a theological wrapper.
False equivalence. There's a categorical difference between teaching a child to fear a real-world outcome they can take concrete steps to avoid and teaching them to fear infinite eternal torment for thought crimes they may have already committed. The scale is not comparable. One is risk awareness. The other is existential inescapability.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions, literally. Parents who do this aren't monsters — they're terrified themselves. That's the real tragedy. The fear gets inherited like a disease.
my grandmother told me satan lived under my bed and watched me sin at night. i was FOUR. i didnt sleep properly until i was like eleven. but sure, love language.
The word 'abuse' has a legal and clinical meaning. Using it here rhetorically cheapens it and makes actual abuse survivors feel erased. You can think something causes harm without calling it abuse. Words matter.
I was the kid who converted three classmates at age eight because I was so terrified of them going to hell I could barely sleep. I was EIGHT. I thought I was responsible for the eternal fate of my friends. Nobody put that on me deliberately but it got there anyway. The theology had internal logic that children run to its extreme conclusions because children DO that.
My kids will be raised knowing we believe hell is real. They will also be raised knowing grace is real, that God is not looking for reasons to condemn them, that love came down and chose them. The whole gospel. Not just the terrifying part ripped out of context and wielded as a cudgel. The parents who traumatized their kids preached half a gospel.
my kids are being raised Muslim. the concept of accountability before God is absolutely part of what we teach. but the emphasis in our household is mercy, not terror. Allah is Al-Rahman, Al-Raheem — The Compassionate, The Merciful. that comes first. always. the framing matters enormously.
I grew up in a household where hell was discussed matter-of-factly, not weaponized. I'm 38, psychologically fine, still practice my faith. The delivery matters enormously. A doctrine whispered with love hits different than one screamed as punishment.
A child sobbing in fear over something they cannot control or fix is not 'kind of beautiful.' That's just a child suffering. Please don't romanticize it.
I was a deeply religious child who believed in hell fully and completely and I was not anxious, I was COMFORTED. The universe had order and I was loved within it and the same God who made the rules also died to fulfill them on my behalf. That was not a fearful theology for me as a child. Please don't generalize my experience away.
This is exactly why the debate is hard. Your experience is real. The experiences of traumatized kids are also real. A practice that has dramatically different outcomes depending on delivery, home environment, specific theology, and individual child temperament probably needs more nuanced evaluation than 'abuse yes or no.'
Can we also talk about how the fear isn't just abstract? My church taught us to REPORT on each other. Tell the pastor if a friend said something wrong. Tell your parents if a classmate at school was leading you astray. I was informing on my friends at age nine because I was scared for their souls and mine. That kind of social control doesn't just fade.
Nobody framing this as 'just faith' is actually engaging with the word 'just.' Faith is enormous. Calling this 'just' faith minimizes faith itself. What you mean is 'it's not abuse, it's faith.' Then say that. Own the claim instead of softening it.
ok but can we talk about the sibling at thanksgiving situation someone mentioned above because THAT is the real-world version of this debate and philosophy isn't helping me figure it out at all
There's 'we believe in consequences' and there's using eternal torture to control a kid who can't fight back. Plenty of faithful people raise kids without the nightmares. The fear is a choice, not the faith.
The psychological literature on this is actually pretty clear. Early childhood exposure to concepts of divine punishment correlates with higher rates of anxiety disorders in adults. This isn't culture war stuff — it's in the peer-reviewed journals. We can acknowledge that and still respect religious freedom.
"correlates" is doing a LOT of work in that sentence. Children in war zones have anxiety. Poverty causes anxiety. Attributing adult mental health outcomes to Sunday school lessons is incredibly simplistic.
Here's what nobody wants to sit with: children from these backgrounds often grow up to report their faith as the MOST meaningful thing in their lives. You will not find a clean correlation between 'was taught hell' and 'wishes they hadn't been.' Human beings are complicated. Trauma and meaning can coexist.
That doesn't actually vindicate the method though. Plenty of people raised in abusive households report their family as the most meaningful relationship in their life. We don't cite that as evidence the abuse was fine. The fact that humans make meaning from difficult experiences is a feature of human resilience, not a defense of what caused the difficulty.
Every major religion has some concept of consequence, afterlife judgment, karma — pick your tradition. The question isn't whether to teach consequences but whether you're using them as a control mechanism or as genuine moral formation. Those are different projects with different outcomes.
The argument is that fear of consequences is the beginning of wisdom, not the destination. But I take your point — a lot of churches stop at the beginning and call it a complete education.
Fine. Lets call it 'childhood religious trauma.' CRT is a documented psychological phenomenon. Does the label matter if the harm is real?
The problem is you THINK you've communicated unconditional love but children interpret things through their own lens. They may hear 'God loves you unless you sin' and the 'unless' is a very loud word to a seven-year-old.
This is such an important point. Lumping all Christian parenting together is intellectually lazy. Hell is not equally emphasized across traditions and the outcomes differ accordingly.
This is the most useful comment in this thread. The inescapability is the key variable.
The escape hatch being 'believe the right things perfectly or you burn forever' is not exactly a comfort. Also those secular fears are based on real documented phenomena. Just saying.
Bold of everyone here to decide that their emotional experience of religious upbringing is the universal template. I was raised with full knowledge of hell and I found it clarifying, not traumatic. Stakes matter. Knowing actions have eternal weight gave me a moral seriousness I see lacking in a lot of adults raised in consequence-free environments.
If you genuinely believe hell is real, NOT warning your child would be the cruelty. You can't call it abuse to teach what you believe is literally true and at stake.
My kids know what I believe about the afterlife. They also know I love them unconditionally regardless of their choices. If I've done my job right, they feel safety first and theology second. That's a teachable thing.
I genuinely don't know where I stand on this. Raised Catholic, feared hell, left at 22, don't practice anymore. But I also have a deep moral framework, a strong sense of accountability, and real gratitude that someone thought my soul was worth fighting for even if their method was clumsy. I'm not traumatized. I'm also not recommending the approach. Both things.
The entire frame of this debate is individualistic and Western. In many cultures, embedding children in cosmological frameworks — including ones with serious consequences — is considered protective, grounding, and identity-forming. The assumption that this is inherently harmful is itself a culturally-situated position dressed up as universal psychology.
There's a meaningful difference between a cosmological framework that situates the child within a meaningful universe and a framework that places the child under constant threat of catastrophic punishment. Both can be 'cultural.' Not both have the same psychological architecture.
ok but where do we draw the line then? scary movies give kids nightmares. stranger danger talks scare kids. bedtime stories have wolves eating grandmas. why is hell specifically the thing we're calling abuse
Because wolves aren't eternal and omniscient and specifically watching YOU, child. That's why.
Lay awake at 7 years old terrified my unbaptized friends were doomed. Took decades to untangle that fear from God. Whatever that was, it wasn't comfort.
raised methodist, hell was barely a concept. raised my own kids methodist. they're fine, well-adjusted, not traumatized. why does the loudest voice in every conversation like this get to define the whole religion for everyone
respectfully disagree with the commenter saying they felt comforted. not because your experience is wrong — it's yours — but because what you're describing sounds like a very specific, grace-centered theology that a lot of denominations don't teach. where I grew up the math was: God loves you BUT. there was always a but. and the but was enormous.
Counterpoint nobody wants to hear: plenty of secular parenting also uses fear as a control mechanism. 'Don't talk to strangers or you'll get kidnapped.' 'Eat your vegetables or you'll get sick and die.' 'Be nice or nobody will like you.' We're all terrifying our children in different dialects. The religious version just has better production values.
Calling it 'abuse' legally and ethically requires meeting a specific threshold. Uncomfortable, scary, damaging — yes. Abuse in the legal sense? For most cases, no. Let's be precise with words or we lose the argument entirely.
Where exactly IS the line though? Because I think most people in this comment section are drawing it at their own experience and calling it universal. Someone traumatized draws it at any mention of hell. Someone who came through fine draws it at graphic graphic descriptions. Who arbitrates?
lol the 'abuse' crowd is very quiet when it comes to, I don't know, video games where children spend hours watching graphic violence. but yeah tell me more about how Sunday school is the real threat to children's mental health
That comparison doesn't hold. A child watching a video game knows it's not real and isn't personally targeted by the violence. A child taught about hell is told THEY SPECIFICALLY, their actual soul, is at risk of that outcome. The personalization is the whole point and it's what makes it uniquely potent as a fear mechanism.
Look I'll be the villain here. If we decide that teaching children things that cause anxiety is abuse, then roughly half of all parenting throughout human history qualifies and the concept stops being useful. 'Abuse' is a word that should cost something. Reserve it for things that actually meet the clinical and legal threshold or watch it become meaningless.
The comment above saying 'abuse should cost something' is doing a lot of heavy lifting for people who don't want to examine what was done to them or their kids. Abuse absolutely can be psychological, absolutely can be unintentional, and absolutely can be administered by people who love you. The courts and the DSM both agree with me on this. The word has a definition that doesn't require your approval.
Nobody asks if teaching kids that climate change will end civilization is traumatizing. Nobody asks about teaching them about nuclear war or school shooters. We terrify children with secular fears constantly. At least religious fear comes with a potential escape hatch.
That story is heartbreaking but also kind of beautiful? That kid loved you enough to be devastated. I don't know. There's something in there that isn't only bad.
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