A week ago I wrote a blog post that posed the question "Were you taught as a child that hell was real?" The post was shared in a variety of places and I received SO MANY answers to my question.
I thought you would be interested in hearing some of them. I have made them anonymous since they were shared in private Facebook groups.
Were you taught as a child that hell was real?
My conservative Mennonite grandparents were very vocal that I was on the highway to hell because I wanted to be a Hollywood actor.
I was 10 or 11 when the camp pastor of the summer Bible Camp I attended illustrated hell by saying, "Hold your hand over a lit candle as close to the flame as you can, for as long as you can. Then imagine that pain, all over your body, for all of eternity."
Although my dad used the word hell at times, it seemed he used it more as a travel recommendation for some people. Out of all the great things my parents did for me and my brother, the thing I'm most grateful for today is that they never indoctrinated us into religion.
Yes, hellfire & brimstone, evangelical revival meetings and altar calls...terrified as a child
I was terrified about going to hell as a child. Our Sunday school teachers warned us about how we would go there if we didn't accept Jesus. I prayed every night for salvation so I could go to heaven instead.
We lived in a small town in Kansas with mostly Catholics and Lutherans. I knew that they all would be going to hell. It was hard for me to make friends of my age because I had no idea how to relate to these poor kids who were on the wrong path.
The Mennonite church I went to had a pastor who pounded the pulpit trying to scare everyone about going to hell.
There's a whole museum at Haw Par Villa in Singapore dedicated to the Chinese notion of the 10 Courts of Hell. Parents will take their children to show them what happens if they don't respect their elders or tell lies. As an adult I adored it. It would be pretty terrifying as a child though.
It was an everyday experience at our house. Ernest Manning (Preston's dad), preached hell and damnation every morning on the radio, every supper my Dad read scripture with a sermon, followed by an order to repeat back the sermon, (which usually took one verse out of context to say the opposite of what the whole chapter was saying), spanking if you couldn't, by my dad (the GOD of our household), ending with bedtime stories read by grandma from The Shantyman, where every man who refused to be saved, then fell down the stairs when coming home drunk, dying unsaved, and going to hell.
I am eighty and still trying to deprogram myself from this.
As a child, I went to a fire & brimstone revival where the minister drew pictures with pastels on a large easel of paper! The red and orange flames were pretty but did not scare me. I saw my agnostic mom and her predator-atheist husband sending each other to hell regularly, screaming those very words back and forth. God needs no hell, humans are quite capable of creating it ourselves. I don't know which is worse, living in someone's hell or being threatened with it.
I grew up in Steinbach, so of course I learned about hell and all the other idiotic, judgemental biblical and non-biblical misogynistic BS that goes along with religion. This is why I am an MGB (Mennonite Gone Bad) and no longer adhere to religion.
I grew up in rural Oklahoma and pretty much everyone I knew believed hell was real. It is incredibly damaging to every part of your psyche.
Yes. And that the wages of sin is death. And that humans are predisposed to sinning. And that the fate of our soul is predetermined. And that the only way to escape eternal torment in a lake of fire and brimstone is to accept Jesus as our Lord and Saviour through the act of baptism. I got over it by and by.
I grew up Catholic. I now practice Zen. The idea of hell is a damaging one to instil in children.
Hell was real. And so was the Rapture. I would lie awake until midnight (the Rapture was to occur at midnight according to a song we sang in church) and then check to see if my parents and siblings were still there. I knew I was bad so I was always concerned about being left behind and abandoned. Spiritual abuse and extremely harmful to me as a child.
I was taught about hell as a child. I was terrified. I'd lie in bed at night crying and begging God to forgive me so I could go to heaven. Also very troubled by the unforgivable sin which if I committed it, I'd surely end up in hell.
As a young child, I believed there was a hell, as taught in Sunday School, church, and revival meetings. I told myself I was exempt, though, being a minister's child.
I wasn't always convinced of this exemption, and got scared sometimes, especially at revival meetings. Later in life, I was able to develop a perspective on this hell idea, but I do think, that for many of us, a residual fear remains, even though we know better now.
When I first read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I was delighted at his courageous declaration: "All right then, I'll go to hell." He'd been taught, in Sunday School, that carrying out his plan for freeing a captured slave (his friend Jim) was a sin that would earn eternal punishment. But his moral sense ran deeper.
Those who continue with this cruel teaching of hell have much to account for. They won't go to hell because of it, though.
I was taught at about age 7 in my Mennonite Brethren church that if I didn't get saved I'd go to hell and never see my parents again.
There were only a few comments about my post from people who still believe hell is real and warned about the dangers of not believing that.
Most of the comments seem to reinforce the words from Cindy Wang Brandt I used in the original article. She said teaching children that hell is real is damaging to them. Cindy has a website called Parenting Forward After Religious Trauma which is well worth checking out.
Other posts............
What is Sin?
Blaming Satan is Misguided and Dangerous
A Black and White Religion
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