(Genuine question) Is teaching children about hell abuse?

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Emily3

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Hello everyone, this is my first post on this forum. I recently watched a video from an atheist who grew up catholic and still suffers with the effects of fearing hell irrationally. He said it wasn’t an abusive household or a hell fire and brimstone church he went to, he just realised that for Jesus to save us, we need to be saved from something and thats hell. He describes teaching children that they were born as sinners and leaving them with the emotional scar of a fear of hell should be classed as child abuse. I am currently converting to Catholicism. I’ve been searching for truth and during lockdown I found Catholicism to be far more true than protestantism (what I was before). But I didn’t really take atheism into account. I obviously looked at the arguments for Gods existence on the way and agreed, but this point that this person has made has left me in doubt. Please pray for me and if anyone has any kind of answer to whether or not it’s ethical to teach these things to children, please tell me. God bless you all and thank you
 
No, teaching children the truth about the real world is not abuse.

The real world includes harmful things that out of love, we must tell our children about and teach them how to avoid.

Naturally, this must be done in an age-appropriate manner.

But children need to be taught to develop a healthy fear of: hot stoves, running into traffic, angry bears in the woods, and hell.

These things all exist. It would be unloving and child neglect to fail to teach our children the truth about them, because if not taught, our ‘fearless’ children might touch the hot stove, run into traffic, try to pet an angry bear, or commit sins without repentance.

That doesn’t mean teaching children in a way that makes them hysterical or anxious about traffic or hell. Jesus tells us not to be anxious. But we do need to teach each other the truth about things, including dangerous things, so that we can avoid dangerous things. Because of love.
 
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Emily3 said:
… He describes teaching children that they were born as sinners and leaving them with the emotional scar of a fear of hell should be classed as child abuse. … Please pray for me and if anyone has any kind of answer to whether or not it’s ethical to teach these things to children, please tell me. God bless you all and thank you
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Even children before age seven may be taught the Apostles Creed which includes “he descended into hell” and “he ascended into heaven” so certainly they will need some basic information on heaven and hell.
 
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I just want to add:

Some children are naturally anxious (some have medical problems that make them so). Anxiety and hysterical inability to cope with small challenges seems particularly widespread today, and statistics say that’s certainly not because we’re becoming more religious (since the phenomenon is happening in places that are becoming less religious). I know one person with clinical anxiety who literally cannot engage in a conversation if someone disagrees with her position on something; she has to ask them to stop speaking, or she will leave the room, because it’s too distressing for her when the outside world doesn’t agree with her internal preference for how she’d like the outside world to be.

I can’t speak to the atheist whose video you watched, and why he, as a specific individual, considers himself emotionally scarred by having once believed in hell. Especially considering he claims that this belief wasn’t pressed upon him from the outside, but he logic’d it out himself. (Perhaps that’s part of it, actually; if no adult framed it for him in a healthy way, maybe he was left wrestling with thoughts of hell alone, which isn’t good.)

But honestly, learned fragility is a thing. And most humans are actually more naturally resilient than modern western culture teaches us to think we are. It makes our problems worse to tell ourselves that what frightens us “scars” us; it’s honestly, literally, a matter of how we frame things for ourselves.

So again, no. Hell is real, just like traffic and hot stoves and bears, so it’s loving to teach our children the truth about these things, in a gentle, well-framed, and age-appropriate way. It would be child abuse (by neglect) to not tell children the truth about these things. And I reckon the important thing will be making sure to help frame each topic for your children, at an age-appropriate level each time; don’t leave them alone to try to figure out such serious topics for themselves. Educate yourself about the truths of the faith, and about how to communicate these truths lovingly to children, and then lovingly teach your children.

And ideally, for your children’s sake, keep them as far as possible away from cultural influences that teach them to feel “scarred” by things that children coped with perfectly easily for many generations past. Teach your kids their own resilience, don’t teach your kids that they are weak and helpless and grievously injured by exposure to uncomfortable or difficult realities.
 
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It wouldn’t be inherently abusive for an irreligious parent to teach his children about prisons and courts, so why would it be abusive for Catholics parents to teach their children about Hell?

Both are places of suffering that people are sent to for doing evil, with the only difference being that children and repentant criminals aren’t spared from prison.
 
How old was the person in the video and where did they grow up?

AFAIK children in the US are not taught to fear hell in any sort of way that would scare them. But before Vll it was much more common for bad religion teachers to scare kids. But like I said, that doesn’t happen anymore.
 
My grandfather was a preacher, my dad is an evangelist, I grew up knowing about heaven and hell the same as I knew about Mars and Ohio. They were real, how to get there, etc.
 
Teaching your children about hell is not abuse. It is loving. Scripture speaks to the urgency of the gospel because we are currently in the last days and judgment over sin, death, and the devil are coming. The topics of sin and of hell are important doctrines. They should not be the core focus of our teaching, neither should they be ignored or avoided. In order to understand the gospel, and the need for a savior, we must understand what it is that we are being saved from, namely the power of sin, death, and the devil.
 
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It has to do with the way little children are taught. There are ways to teach young children about hell without suggesting that they or their mother or father or best friends etc are going to end up there. Also, to be honest, many young children are kind of “into” things that are a little scary and macabre, such as monster movies or ghost stories. Many kids just see devils and Hell as being another similar thing to that, and they don’t find it traumatic - in fact they’re probably secretly looking through books to find stuff on Hell that their parents avoid telling them for fear of scaring the children.

I grew up in an era (the late 60s/ early 70s) when many Catholic teachers did not want to teach young children about hell or the Devil at all for fear of traumatizing them. However, I learned enough about Hell from my mother, who was old school pre-Vatican II, and did not feel traumatized or like I was going there because I loved and trusted God and tried to live a good life. My parents and teachers, including the nuns, didn’t punish me by saying, “You did this bad thing and now you’re going to Hell” when I was little. (My mother did do some of that when I was an older teen but by then I was not scared or traumatized by it, mostly I was just mad that my mother, who was under a lot of life stress at that time, didn’t seem to understand me and I figured God understood a lot better.)

So no, I don’t think it’s abusive to teach children about Hell in an age-appropriate manner and tailoring it to what that particular child can handle.

St. Jacinta Marto was 7 years old and did not go around feeling traumatized because she had learned about Hell.
 
They were roughly in their mid-twenties and in the UK, he did say that his up bringing wasnt very scrupulos but he kind of pondered on hell and maybe scared himself? I’m not sure.
 
In teaching children about faith, hope, and love, I would not rely on fear of punishment/pain. Isn’t it possible to teach them the attractiveness and goodness of a right relationship with God? With that as a start, they might be able to understand that choosing to turn away, and being left out of that joy and peace forever, would be very sorrowful, even painful.
 
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I can point out that of the many atheists I know, those that had a tough time getting over the hell issues were almost all from fundamentalist churches. I think the catholic teaching that one chooses hell, not just sent there is probably all the difference. What some fundamentalist churches teach about hell and use it in their sermons is bordering on child abuse.
 
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The current Catholic teaching also puts a great emphasis on God’s mercy towards sinners. People who have some kind of “You sinned, now you’re going to hell” mentality usually were either catechized wrong or else they suffer from scrupulosity, which is a mental condition not unlike OCD.
 
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Emily3 said:
I recently watched a video from an atheist who grew up catholic and still suffers with the effects of fearing hell irrationally.
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I agree. Hell is a very scary place. If a person commits one mortal sin and does not repent, she will go to hell and suffer eternal fire with no chance of ever getting out. You cannot repent if you are already in hell and the prayers of your relatives or anyone else won’t help because you are damned forever to be punished by everlasting fire. Adultery for example is grave matter which if performed with full knowledge and deliberate consent could be a mortal sin and according to Scripture if a man lusts after a woman he has already committed adultery? Suppose for example that a man is driving a car and after seeing a sexy woman on the sidewalk and with full knowledge and deliberate consent he lusts after her and then loses control of his car and dies without having a chance at repentance. Then he will burn forever in hell even though he had led a good life up until that time. JW coming to my door said that they do not believe in hell. But eternal damnation in hell is part of Catholic teaching, is it not? Missing Mass on Sunday without excuse, artificial birth control, coveting or lusting after a neighbor’s wife, and others are grave matter which if performed with full knowledge and deliberate consent could constitute a mortal sin.
Once in hell, there is no way to escape from the eternal fire, is that correct?
 
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AlNg said:
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AINg, just for the OP’s sake (@Emily3 seems to be a brand new poster), and to explain what a dramatic tone shift took place between the previous commenters, and your comment, could you clarify for the OP that you are not Catholic and your comment is made from a non-Catholic perspective?

Just making sure to underline this for the OP. There’s a reason for the dramatic tone shift between comments. AINg is not Catholic, so please don’t be confused as if their comment is a good faith effort to communicate Catholic teaching in a Catholic way. It isn’t.
 
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Those of us who were raised with this would definitely say it is abusive. That and teaching children about original sin fall into the same category (emotional abuse), as far as I am concerned. Of course no two children are exactly the same.
 
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