Chapter 31 — When Hell Becomes a Threat

Hell, damnation and Satan as ideas encountered by a child not as abstract theology, but as threats carrying the authority of adults.

I Did Not Meet Hell as Theology

I did not first encounter Hell as theology.

I encountered it as a threat.

Adults already knew what the word meant.

They had sermons.

They had scripture.

They had doctrine.

They had centuries of argument about sin, punishment, salvation and damnation.

I was a child.

I did not possess an alternative theology.

I did not know that there were Christians who understood Hell differently.

I did not know that there were people who rejected the idea entirely.

I did not know enough about other religions to compare one supernatural claim with another.

I did not know that adults could be sincerely convinced of something and still be wrong.

The people telling me about Hell were adults in positions of authority.

Some were nuns.

Some were priests.

They were connected with school, church, discipline, confession and the world which was supposed to explain what was right and what was wrong.

When those adults told me that Hell was real, I had very little with which to challenge them.

A Child Cannot Check Eternity

There is an enormous difference between an adult voluntarily considering a proposition about an afterlife and a small child being told that eternal punishment awaits.

An adult can read.

An adult can compare religions.

An adult can investigate history.

An adult can ask whether the evidence is sufficient.

An adult can walk away from a church.

A child usually cannot.

A child cannot investigate Hell.

A child cannot travel beyond death and report back.

A child cannot independently test whether Satan exists.

A child cannot verify whether an adult really possesses knowledge of eternal punishment.

The child is therefore being asked to respond to a claim which is both enormous and impossible for the child to examine.

If the claim is attached to fear, obedience or punishment, it becomes something more than religious education.

Forever

The word which makes Hell different from ordinary punishment is forever.

Children understand punishment.

A punishment ends.

Being sent to a room ends.

A school day ends.

A beating ends.

An adult eventually stops shouting.

Even severe pain eventually changes.

Hell was presented differently.

There was no tomorrow after Hell.

There was no adult who would eventually decide that the punishment had gone on long enough.

There was no escape because the whole point of the threat was that it never ended.

For a young child that is an extraordinary idea to introduce into the world.

The Authority Behind the Threat

The threat did not arrive from another child in a playground.

It came through adults whose authority was reinforced by the institution around them.

The church building was there.

The convent was there.

The school was there.

The presbytery was there.

The priest wore clothing which identified his authority.

The nuns did the same.

There were rituals, statues, confession, Mass, prayers and rules.

Everything around the child said that these adults knew something important about God.

If one of them said that a child was destined for Hell, the claim did not arrive alone.

It arrived carrying the apparent authority of the entire religious world surrounding the child.

When the Child Becomes the Problem

One of the most damaging effects of that religious language was the way it could reverse responsibility.

An adult could hurt a child.

The child could protest.

Then the protest itself could become evidence that something was wrong with the child.

The child was disobedient.

The child was sinful.

The child was wicked.

The child belonged to Satan.

The child was destined for Hell.

Once those ideas entered the relationship, the question could cease to be:

“What is happening to this child?”

and become:

“What is wrong with this child?”

That is not a small change.

It moves scrutiny away from the adult.

The Child of Satan

There were times in my childhood when religious descriptions of me became extreme.

I remember being described in terms which associated me with Satan and Hell.

I remember the idea that punishment could be justified because of what I was supposed to become or where I was supposedly destined to go.

Those memories will need their own chapter.

For now, what matters is the effect of the concept.

If adults believe that a child is connected with evil, then normal limits can begin to move.

Punishment can become spiritual correction.

Fear can become instruction.

Restraint can become protection.

Pain can become necessary.

An exorcism can become an act which the adult believes is being performed for the child's own good.

The religious explanation can transform the meaning of the adult's own conduct.

What Did I Have to Say?

I sometimes ask myself what response could have worked.

If I said I did not believe them, disbelief itself could become another offence.

If I was frightened, the fear could be treated as evidence that the threat was working.

If I resisted, resistance could be interpreted as defiance.

If I became quiet, silence could be interpreted as submission or repentance.

There was no obvious answer available to the child which could disprove the premise.

That is one of the characteristics of a closed belief system.

Every response can be absorbed into the explanation.

Fear Is Not Belief

There is another distinction which I did not understand until much later.

A frightened child may comply with a religious demand without believing the religious proposition behind it.

Fear can produce obedience.

Fear can produce silence.

Fear can produce ritual behaviour.

Fear can produce an apology.

None of those things necessarily demonstrates belief.

A child who says the required prayer because an adult has threatened Hell may be demonstrating only that the threat succeeded.

That distinction becomes important whenever adults describe religious participation by children as voluntary.

What Does Voluntary Mean for a Child?

The word voluntary can conceal a great deal.

A child may technically repeat a prayer voluntarily.

The child's mouth moves without being physically forced.

But what preceded the prayer?

Was the child told that refusal was sinful?

Was Hell threatened?

Was Satan invoked?

Was the child told that something terrible would happen to a parent?

Was the child frightened of punishment from the adult standing nearby?

Was the child old enough to understand that the supernatural claim might not be true?

Those questions change the meaning of consent.

A choice made beneath an infinite threat is not the same kind of choice as one made without it.

The Threat Does Not Need to Be Carried Out

Hell has another unusual feature as a threat.

The adult never has to demonstrate it.

A threat of ordinary punishment can eventually be tested.

If somebody says:

“I will hit you if you do that,”

the child may discover whether the threat is real.

Hell is different.

The threatened consequence lies beyond the child's lifetime.

The adult can therefore make the threat with absolute certainty while never being required to produce evidence that the threatened place exists.

For the child, however, the fear can be entirely real in the present.

The Fear Can Outlive the Belief

Another thing I learned much later is that fear can survive after belief has gone.

An adult may intellectually reject Hell.

That does not necessarily mean that every childhood response associated with Hell disappears at the same moment.

The adult mind may say:

“I no longer believe this.”

The body may still react to the language, image or authority associated with the original threat.

That separation between intellectual belief and learned fear became important in understanding my own reactions.

I did not need to believe in Hell as an adult for the childhood use of Hell to have mattered.

A Threat Can Become an Environment

Hell did not need to be mentioned every hour.

Once the idea had been established, it could sit behind other things.

Confession.

Sin.

Obedience.

Sexual behaviour.

Disobedience.

Questioning authority.

Death.

Satan.

What began as a specific threat could become part of the atmosphere in which the child interpreted the world.

It supplied an invisible consequence behind visible authority.

Religion and Evidence

As an adult I eventually developed a very different relationship with claims about reality.

I became interested in evidence.

I wanted to know how somebody knew something.

What could be observed?

What could be tested?

What was documented?

What was inference?

What was belief?

Those distinctions now seem natural to me.

They were not available to the small child being told about Hell.

A theological proposition was being presented as though it had the same status as the ground beneath my feet.

I was not told:

“Some people believe this.”

The message was:

“This is what will happen.”

The Difference Between Teaching and Threatening

This is where I now think an important distinction has to be made.

Adults will inevitably teach children about beliefs.

Parents teach values.

Communities teach traditions.

Religious families teach religion.

The fact that a child is taught a belief does not automatically make the teaching abusive.

The difficult question begins when belief is enforced through terror, humiliation, coercion or threats of catastrophic supernatural punishment.

There is a difference between saying:

“Our religion teaches that there is a Hell,”

and telling a frightened child:

“You will go there.”

There is a difference between describing Satan as part of a religious tradition and telling a child that Satan owns him.

There is a difference between teaching a doctrine and using that doctrine as an instrument of control.

The Adult's Freedom and the Child's Freedom

Religious freedom is usually discussed from the perspective of adults.

Adults have beliefs.

Adults establish churches.

Adults teach religion.

Adults claim the freedom to practise their faith.

There is another person in that relationship whose freedom receives much less attention.

The child.

What is the child's freedom of thought?

At what point does an adult's freedom to teach belief collide with a child's right not to be terrorised into accepting it?

How old must a child be before religious participation can meaningfully be called voluntary?

What protection should exist when supernatural punishment is used as a behavioural weapon?

Those questions became increasingly important to me as I learned that other countries and safeguarding systems had begun asking versions of them as well.

Japan

One development which particularly caught my attention came from Japan.

I learned that official child-protection guidance there had begun specifically addressing harmful religious pressures upon children, including threats associated with damnation and similar religious fear.

That interested me because it changed the frame.

The question was no longer simply:

“Does the religion teach Hell?”

The safeguarding question became:

“How is that belief being used with a child?”

That is a much more useful question.

It does not require government to decide whether Hell exists.

It asks what adults are doing to children in the name of that belief.

I will return to that distinction later in this block when examining religious abuse and child protection more directly.

Australia

That inevitably raises the same question in Australia.

What protections exist for a child who is frightened through religious teaching?

When did those protections develop?

How would the practices of my childhood be viewed now?

What is still permitted?

What is still being taught?

And how clearly do child-protection systems distinguish between freedom of religion and freedom to frighten a child into religious compliance?

Those questions need evidence rather than assumption.

Later chapters will examine the laws, guidance and teaching materials more closely.

I Am Not Asking Government to Decide Whether God Exists

This distinction matters to me.

Protecting children from religious coercion does not require government to decide whether Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism or any other religion is true or false.

It does not require government to declare that there is no God.

It does not require banning religious education.

The question can remain much narrower.

What may an adult do to a child?

May fear of eternal torture be deliberately used to compel obedience?

May a child be described as evil?

May adults threaten supernatural punishment for disbelief?

May religious authority be used to override a child's ability to refuse?

Those are questions about conduct.

They do not require a court to settle theology.

The God Behind the Threat

Eventually another question emerged for me.

What kind of God had I actually been taught to fear?

The God presented to me was not merely a creator.

He watched.

He judged.

He punished.

He demanded obedience.

He could condemn.

He permitted eternal suffering.

He was associated with sacrifice, blood, death and the destruction of those who disobeyed.

That conception of God would eventually become something I examined separately from the simpler philosophical question of whether some form of creator might exist.

Those are not the same question.

They were presented to me as though they were.

What Happened to the Threat

Eventually I stopped believing in Hell.

That did not make the childhood threat disappear retrospectively.

A threat can be false and still cause harm.

A child can be terrified by something which does not exist.

The effect belongs to the child whether or not the threatened consequence was ever real.

That may be the simplest point in this chapter.

Adults do not need supernatural claims to be true in order for the way they use those claims to have consequences.

The Question I Ask Now

I am no longer particularly interested in arguing with the child I was about whether he should have believed the adults.

He did not have their education.

He did not have their power.

He did not have access to competing ideas.

He did not even possess the vocabulary required to formulate the problem.

The better question is directed at the adults.

What responsibility does an adult carry when introducing a child to an idea capable of producing extreme fear?

What responsibility does an institution carry when that idea is taught under its authority?

And at what point does religious instruction cease to be the transmission of belief and become coercion?

When Hell Becomes a Threat

I cannot prevent adults from believing in Hell.

Nor would I want a government deciding which supernatural beliefs adults are permitted to hold.

Belief is one question.

What an adult does to a child because of that belief is another.

That is where my interest now lies.

Hell became important in my life not because I eventually discovered whether it existed.

It became important because adults used it while I was still too young to ask the question.

The theology belonged to them.

The fear belonged to me.