What Christians Believe About Hell: From Gehenna to Eternal Torment
Why "the Bible clearly says" rarely tells the whole story
Growing up Catholic, I assumed my version of Hell — tangled up with Purgatory, confession, and the quiet reassurance that grace could cover almost anything at the last minute — was simply what Christians believed. It wasn't until years later, coming face to face with the very specific, very vivid picture of Hell taught inside the high-control group that my daughter had been recruited into, that I realised how wrong that assumption was.
Two people can both call themselves Christian and hold almost opposite ideas about what happens after death — one taught that even a deathbed confession is enough, the other taught that a single wrong belief could mean eternal, conscious torment. That gap is worth understanding properly, especially if you were raised to believe your version was the only one that ever existed.
Jesus didn't speak English
Part of the confusion starts with translation. The English word "Hell" gets used as though it represents one single concept throughout the Bible. It doesn't. The original texts use several different words — Sheol, Hades, Gehenna — and they don't all mean the same thing.
Sheol, in the Hebrew Scriptures, is generally the realm of the dead or the grave — not the fiery torture chamber of later Christian imagination.
Hades, in the New Testament, is the Greek term for the realm of the dead, drawing on Greek ideas about the underworld.
Gehenna — the word Jesus actually uses in some of his warnings — refers to the Valley of Hinnom outside Jerusalem, a site with a horrific history in Israel's past, which became a symbol of judgement in Jewish thought.
So when an English Bible says "Hell," it can be easy to assume Jesus meant exactly what a modern preacher means when describing an eternal lake of fire. That's not necessarily what's happening in the text. Language, history and centuries of theological development all sit between the original words and the picture many of us grew up with.
One label, but many doctrines about what Christians believe Hell is
Here's the part that surprises a lot of people: Christianity has never had a single, agreed position on Hell. Even in the earliest centuries of the church, theologians argued about whether punishment after death was permanent, corrective, or ultimately reconciling — a debate that has never fully closed.
A few examples of how differently this plays out today:
Catholicism teaches Hell as eternal separation from God, but also teaches Purgatory — a temporary purification for those who die in God's friendship and are already assured of salvation. Sin, repentance and grace all sit inside that framework.
Eastern Orthodox theology tends to frame Hell not as active torture inflicted by God, but as the same divine presence experienced differently — as paradise by those who love God, as torment by those who reject him.
Pentecostal and many evangelical traditions — the Assemblies of God is a clear example — teach final judgement and everlasting, conscious punishment, and explicitly reject both universalism and annihilation.
Seventh-day Adventists teach conditional immortality: the wicked are not tortured forever, they eventually cease to exist — a "second death" rather than eternal consciousness.
Jehovah's Witnesses reject the idea of a fiery Hell altogether, teaching that the dead are unconscious and that the irredeemably wicked are ultimately destroyed, not tormented.
Christian universalists, a tradition stretching from early theologians like Origen through to thinkers today, have long argued that God's purpose is the eventual reconciliation of everyone.
That's not a fringe list. These are mainstream traditions, genuinely disagreeing, about one of the most consequential questions a belief system can raise.
Where the vivid imagery actually comes from
If your mental picture of Hell includes circles of punishment, demons and specific torments matched to specific sins, you're probably picturing Dante. Dante Alighieri's Inferno, written in the early 1300s, is a staggering piece of literature — but it's a poem, not scripture. It drew on earlier Christian apocalyptic writing and, more than any single theologian, shaped the West's visual imagination of what Hell "looks like." A theological claim is one thing. A vivid, detailed picture of suffering is another — and it's the picture, not the abstract claim, that tends to stay lodged in a child's memory.
If you know your Christian history well, you'll notice what might seem to be an anomaly here. Dante was Catholic — at least, he was until he was exiled from Florence following a bitter political and religious conflict. He spent the rest of his life away from his home, separated from much of his family and deeply resentful of those he believed had betrayed him. And he certainly didn't hold back in Inferno.
Drawing on Scripture, earlier Christian writings, classical philosophy and particularly Aristotelian ideas, Dante created a highly imaginative vision of the afterlife in which he placed real people — including political enemies and figures he despised — among the damned. But this wasn't simply a description of official Catholic teaching. It was poetry, allegory and creative interpretation, heavily influenced by the world in which Dante lived. In other words, Dante wasn't handing down a divine blueprint of Hell. He was writing a poem. Heaven forbid anyone should mistake a medieval poet's imagination for Scripture...
When theology becomes imagery — and imagery becomes a threat
This is where the history matters for recovery. There's a real difference between:
"There will be a final judgement," and
a detailed description of people burning while a leader narrates their screams.
The second version isn't really transmitting theology anymore. It's generating fear — and fear is a highly effective way to make sure information gets remembered and obeyed.
Picture a composite, ordinary scenario: a parent tells their six-year-old, repeatedly, "if you don't obey us, when you die, you'll be tortured forever." The child cries at night. They ask, "will that really happen to me?" Most people would immediately call that psychologically harmful — regardless of whether the parent "really meant it." Now change one detail: instead of "we will torture you," the message becomes "God will torture you if you don't obey us." The mechanism doesn't disappear just because the threatened event has been moved beyond death. It's still threat, fear, uncertainty, dependence on the authority who can offer relief, and compliance — the same loop that shows up in coercive control and undue influence more broadly, just wearing theological clothing.
Why a child can't independently weigh this up
An adult encountering competing religious claims can, in theory, go and read some history, compare denominations, or sit with the uncertainty. A child generally can't. They don't have access to Koine Greek, church history, comparative theology or textual criticism — they have their parents, and their parents' interpreters of reality. When a trusted adult says "this is what God says," a young child isn't in a position to respond "I'd like to compare that against five other Christian traditions first." Trusting the adults keeping you alive is developmentally normal. It's also exactly what makes fear taught in childhood so powerful, and so hard to simply reason your way out of later.
So is teaching Hell to children automatically abusive?
No — and it's worth being careful here. Parents are entitled to raise children within their own religious tradition, and plenty of children are taught about judgement, death and an afterlife without being traumatised by it. The useful question isn't "was Hell ever mentioned?" It's:
How was it communicated — as an idea to think about, or a threat to fear?
How often was it reinforced, and how vivid was the imagery?
What was the child expected to feel in that moment — comfort, curiosity, or terror?
What happened when the child questioned it, or disobeyed?
What function did the threat actually serve — understanding, or behavioural control?
There's a real difference between "our tradition believes in a final judgement, and we can talk about what that means" and "if you disobey me, God will burn you forever." Context, intensity, frequency and the child's developmental stage all matter. So does the honest answer to the last question on that list.
What the diversity actually tells survivors
If one child is taught eternal conscious torment, another is taught annihilation, another is taught that Hell is simply the experience of God's presence by those who reject it, and another is taught that everyone will eventually be reconciled — then a survivor's fear wasn't produced by "religion" in the abstract. It was produced by one particular interpretation, taught in one particular way. That distinction changes the question worth asking. Not "what does religion do to people," but: what exactly were you taught, by whom, how often, and what happened when you doubted it?
Investigating this can be freeing — and unsettling
Discovering how much Christians have genuinely disagreed about Hell, for close to two thousand years, is often both a relief and a source of anger for people leaving high-control religious environments. Relief, because there were other ways of understanding this all along. Anger, because you may have spent childhood terrified over a question your own tradition's founders never fully agreed on.
You don't need to resolve any of it immediately. Recovery doesn't require replacing one rigid certainty with another — it can mean learning to sit with "I don't know yet" without that uncertainty feeling dangerous. If fear of judgement, death or eternal punishment is still something you carry, a counsellor who understands both religious trauma and coercive control can help you separate what you were taught from what you actually think — without pushing you toward any particular belief, including no belief at all. You're allowed to investigate this at your own pace. For more on how that fear can outlast the belief itself, our piece on Hell anxiety goes into the psychology in more depth.
References
Assemblies of God. (2024). The final judgment. https://ag.org/en/Beliefs/Position-Papers/Final-Judgment
Catholic Church. (1994). Catechism of the Catholic Church. Libreria Editrice Vaticana. https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/_INDEX.HTM
Collins, J. J. (2014). What is apocalyptic literature? In J. J. Collins (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of apocalyptic literature (pp. 1–16). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199856497.013.001
Elliott, J. K. (1996). Heaven and hell. In The apocryphal Jesus: Legends of the early church (pp. 189–204). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198263845.003.0016
Elliott, J. K. (Ed.). (1993). The Apocalypse of Paul (Visio Pauli). In The apocryphal New Testament: A collection of apocryphal Christian literature in an English translation (pp. 616–644). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/0198261829.003.0033
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