I’m Deeply Afraid of Hell

This past week has been an incredibly hard one, and my deepest fears have begun to manifest in me. It started last Monday, with a run I went on with my oldest daughter and a conversation we had about my childhood. The fear it stirred up is so powerful it makes me want to scrap this whole Substack project and the book I’m writing.

To give context to this story and to our relationship, last year I told her that I am no longer sure about Jesus and who he is. I knew telling her would be painful, that she would cry and be afraid. I withheld it for over two years. But if I was going to keep being a part of my family and stay married to my Christian wife, I needed to be more honest, because living a double life was destroying me on the inside, to the point of suicidal ideation.

My oldest daughter feels everything deeply. She cries with an ease that I honestly have never seen. She weeps over the ants outside being washed away in a rainstorm. She worries about the snails that come out around our house after it rains, afraid they will be accidentally crushed on the steps, and spends an hour relocating them into the surrounding vegetation. My daughter loves every living thing with a passion that honestly annoys me. Not because it isn’t beautiful, but because I hate to see her in pain, and I can’t shield her from it. I can’t stop the world from being an unsafe place for all the creatures she loves. And if I’m honest, that’s one of the most painful things I still feel about the world we live in, a world that is deeply unsafe, where death is constantly threatening everything we love, at all times.

After I told her I was no longer sure what I believed about Jesus, she began to weep and said she was afraid she wouldn’t be with me in heaven after I died. Mary was there to hold her and comfort her. I was able to sit with it for a few minutes before I had to stand up and leave the room. Offering her comfort on this without challenging her belief, and my wife’s belief, was a fine line. I didn’t want to challenge her faith in that conversation. It would only have made things worse. So I left, because the pain was too great and my protector was beginning to turn it into anger, his oldest method of coping with a pain this powerful.

Ever since that day, my oldest daughter has been afraid of what will happen to me when I die. She has written me cards with Bible verses, hoping to “help me believe in God.”

Here is the irony. I am afraid too. Maybe even more than she is.

This week that fear manifested in a new way I didn’t see coming. On that run, we were able to talk more about the book I’m writing. The book is my life story, told from two angles. One angle is how I grew up without a consistently present father, and what that did to my psyche. The other is how I projected that absent father onto a version of God I came to believe had set me on fire after I denounced his existence, smoking pot for the first time as a twelve-year-old.

I told my daughter a small, age-appropriate version of this story. She has only ever heard snippets of how painful and hard my childhood was. Many of the things that happened would crush her sensitive soul and be too hard for her to make sense of. But I wanted to begin connecting with her about it. In many ways, this book is a manifestation of that same hope, the hope of connecting with people still inside the evangelical church.

After our run, I felt really good about our conversation and about connecting with my daughter around my story. I felt hopeful about the book and what it could do for my relationship with an institution I still feel deeply rejected by.

Then reality hit me.

On Wednesday morning, my wife told me, in the kindest way, what my oldest daughter had said to her. She had told her that dad was “trying to get her to not believe in God.” Mary was not accusing me. She knew that wasn’t what I was doing, and she was telling me gently, hoping to help me go back and clarify things with our daughter. It was a kind and generous prompting.

I was crushed.

How could she have taken that away from the conversation? I was so precise with what I said. I intentionally didn’t say anything about God not being real. In fact, I argued the opposite. I told her about the view of God I had built as a nine-year-old crying out for him to stop my father from being harmful to me, and how I had wrongly internalized his silence as apathy and distance. (Again, I used language simple enough for an eleven-year-old.)

But then my fear came raging back. If my own daughter can’t understand me, maybe this whole project is a waste of time. Maybe the people who read my work will take the wrong message from it too. Maybe this is a lost cause, and none of it is worth doing. Maybe releasing this would just be me putting myself out to be rejected, over and over, by the institution I so deeply want to show up for me.

Instead of receiving Mary’s help, my fear overpowered me and I rejected her sweet prompting. It turned into a fight with my wife that triggered my aggression, a destructive response that created a deep rift in our marriage. I was grumpy and sullen and frustrated, not someone who felt safe to be around. Because the reality is that I didn’t feel safe, and I was manifesting my internal state in my actions. I became what I felt inside. And even when I did manage to calm down, my calm came with a caveat. More than once I told her I would be peaceful and kind, but only while we waited for her to be ready to return to the real fight, whether she would keep believing in a version of hell I could not accept. My peace was a holding pattern, not a gift. Each time, I created a false sense of safety with a string attached to it, the exact opposite of what I am arguing for in my book.

That Thursday morning she told me, plainly, that I become an unsafe person to her when I change like this, and how deeply it triggered her own need to retreat and protect herself. That she has flashes of needing to escape, and that I don’t understand how I come across.

Her message set off the deepest fear I have, the one I have carried my whole life: that I am unloved, and that I will be abandoned by the people I love the most. In that moment it was Mary, the person closest to me, my most secure attachment figure, telling me I had become unsafe, and underneath her words all I could hear was that she might leave.

I did not respond well.

I dismissed her feelings and went harder on the attack. I blamed the whole disconnect, and my internal state, on the one target I felt was safe to attack, the institution of evangelicalism. The institution that created this division between me and my family, with its us-versus-them idea of belief. Accept Jesus and you’re saved, reject him and you’re separated from God, and from them.

But here is the truth. I am deeply afraid that this is actually true, and that I’m wrong.

This is what I believed about God when I was burned at the age of twelve. I was afraid he was an unsafe person who threatened me with hellfire for rejecting him. I felt that fear as true torture in my body, through the debridement procedure to remove the dead flesh from my burn. I know the physical fear of torture, and the threat of God, in my body in a way that almost no evangelical I have ever met does.

I lived on the other side of the evangelical story for the first fifteen years of my life, before I became a Christian. And now, after leaving the faith, I am back on that other side again, standing right where I started. I felt the fear of hell in a way that most evangelicals born into the faith never have and never can. My wife became a Christian at the age of four. She has never known what it means to be on the opposing end of the faith. My daughter is the same. She has believed in God and Jesus since she was old enough to understand it. She has never been afraid of God, or worried about being separated from him. She only knows that fear now, through her fear for me.

This fear of God that I still carry produces a miniature version of hell, not just in me, but on earth. And it is the antithesis of my book’s argument. My book is my life story, and the hope of it is that people can understand that the most loving thing we can do with those we disagree with is to sit with them in their pain and care for them, even if they can’t change what they believe.

I want so badly to be understood by evangelicals, for them to remain present in my life without needing me to accept the metaphysical claims I no longer can. I want them to see the pain I feel, the struggle I carry, and to not leave me. To love me without the expectation that their love will change my thinking.

I want love that doesn’t have a caveat.

Here is the reality, though. This fight, this whole week, was me being unwilling to give the evangelicals in my life the very thing I was asking of them. I was aggressive and demanding toward my wife because I wanted her to change her theology about hell and separation from God. I withdrew my love, my kindness, my closeness, and used my anger to try to change what she believed before I would offer any of it back.

And I owe Mary more honesty than that. Her own understanding of God and of hell has been evolving for a long time. She is not the fixed, certain believer my fear needs her to be. But this week I gave her no time to sit with the wound in me. Instead of asking her to be present with me in my pain, I came at her aggressively and demanded that she change. I wanted her to have already arrived somewhere it has taken me years of my own suffering to reach, and I withdrew from her for not being there yet.

I dreamt all night about hell, not about being in it, but about arguing aggressively about its absurdity with pastors.

After sitting with the dream, I was able to let the true grief surface, and I cried this morning.

I realized that the pain I’m really feeling is still about God and Jesus. It’s the pain of a God I still desperately want to be real and present in my life, the way I wanted my biological father present, rejecting me, and rejecting the love I want, because I cannot assent to a metaphysical reality I cannot verify.

So I wept about this version of God I am still so deeply afraid of, and about how the fear is retriggered by my daughter’s fear that I’m “making her not believe in God.” That same fear of being abandoned is resurrected by my daughter’s childlike fear, which is a mirror of the God I felt at twelve. The God who set me on fire because I told him I didn’t believe in him, the first night I smoked pot.

What I need from Mary, from my daughter, from any evangelical, is for them to stop believing in a God who would punish people for their unbelief, whether by Hellfire or by annihilation. And needing that from them is a deeply wounding thing to carry. At the same time, it’s my own fear about God being manifested in another person.

That is the wound my daughter activates, and that Mary’s inability to abandon her deeply nurturing and sacred beliefs about God activates. It’s the wound that says you will be forever separated from everyone you love, because you refused to believe in this specific version of the hell game. It’s the fear that God really is that vindictive, that he would destroy me, and their subtle acknowledgment of hell feels like they are joining in on making my deepest fear come true.

I still carry that fear with me to this day. A part of me is still afraid that when I die, I will be wrong, and God will send me into eternal punishment, away from the people I love and from my family. That even though I’d be open to accepting him after my death, it will be too late, and everyone who warned me will have been vindicated.

But my realization this morning was that as long as I keep looking for Mary, or my daughter, or any evangelical to reject that interpretation, to reassure me that I’m not the one who will be cast out, I will always be anxious, because my validation is being outsourced to other people. If I can’t feel secure in my own relationship to God and to this fear of hell, people will always trigger me, I will always be reactive, and I will ironically demand that they change their beliefs so that I can sit with them.

So my goal is to genuinely cry, to let that pain surface, and to turn toward that scared twelve-year-old boy, for the adult me to reassure him that he is safe. That if God is real, and if the incarnation is real (something I will never be able to prove), then he is standing on solid ground. He wouldn’t reject that love. He would accept the love of Jesus, and Jesus would accept him. He doesn’t have to be afraid.

The only route that lets me heal is the one where I am simply honest about the pain and the fear, and cry, without trying to change the people around me so that I can feel okay about myself.

The moment it turns to anger, I’ve lost. I’ve lost the people who still hold that belief, because now their nervous system is activated. And I’ve lost to myself, because I’ve started playing a game I can’t win, against them, and against me.

I’ve created my own miniature version of hell by generating my own isolation, cutting myself off from the people I love, refusing to be with them unless they change what they believe.

And ironically, what I actually want is to choose the way of Jesus over my own anger and need for self-preservation. I am not sure Jesus was divine, and I may never be sure. But I am sure of his example. I want to emulate the beauty I see in his story, to sit in the idea of a love that doesn’t reject or refuse even the people who are killing him. He is not a pushover, not someone who submits to abuse for its own sake. He is someone entirely secure in the love of God, and willing to give his life for that belief.

If Jesus had become angry and refused the people killing him, it would have been based on fear, fear of what their judgment meant about God’s approval of him. It would have been his wound externalized, demanding that they confirm from the outside the truth he already felt about God on the inside.

But he refused that path. He chose to operate from a secure, loving place.

That is the path I want to choose, to be secure in my relationship with a God I can’t truly talk to, and that I’m still deeply afraid of. But I know my own heart. I am open to a relationship with that being, and if he is there, he knows that about me.

For now, though, my only hope is to sit with that twelve-year-old boy and hold him. Because he is still so deeply afraid.