Does Rejecting Hell Really Set You Free?

If I were the devil and I knew hell was real, I’d want you to believe it wasn’t. 

I’d nudge you toward the idea that taking eternal punishment off the table would make you less anxious and less judgmental, leaving you with a friendlier faith and a fuller life.

I’d whisper, “You can spare your daughter from all the anxiety you felt at her age,” and I’d encourage you to pass on a faith without all the fears you had to overcome. 

I wouldn’t ask you to abandon your beliefs, just to reshape them. Then, little by little, I’d rewrite your understanding of God.

The Doctrines We’d Rather Discard 

Earlier this summer, I took a train ninety minutes east of Lisbon, Portugal, to the city of Évora. In the early 1600s, local Franciscan monks were concerned about society’s values. To make people ponder the transience of life and prepare for the afterlife, they relocated bodies from nearby cemeteries and used them to decorate the historic Chapel of Bones, which to this day holds the remains of five thousand people. Two full skeletons—one adult and one child—hang in the room. 

I felt unsettled as soon as I walked inside, stepping around families holding out their phones to take selfies with their children and wondering what kind of macabre backdrop the bones of the dead formed behind them. 

Around the room, placards asked questions such as, “Where are you going in such a hurry, traveler?” They urged visitors to consider how many had already passed from this world—and that one day they would follow. The message wasn’t unbiblical, but the presentation was hard to stomach. As I walked out, haunted by what I’d seen, I wondered about the kids inside—whether they’d be able to close their eyes that night without seeing those rows of empty sockets staring back at them.

Many Christian women today are looking back on their childhoods and finding similarly frightening pictures lodged in their minds—not from historic chapels, but from weekly gatherings in their local churches. They remember sitting in church pews or youth-group rooms where images of death, judgment, and the afterlife proved difficult to forget. The promise of eternal life became entangled with the threat of eternal death, fears that followed them into womanhood and shaped how they imagined God. 

Now, as women and mothers, they are reevaluating what spiritual legacy they will pass down. They don’t want their daughters lying awake, scared of hell, or their sons wondering whether God is waiting to condemn them. They don’t want fear to be the foundation upon which their children know God. 

Truth can be taught poorly, but that doesn’t make it untrue. The corpses in the Chapel of Bones were real. The monks had not manufactured the idea of death: our bodies will one day decay and little will remain but bone. What they did was pull death from its ordinary context and use it to provoke an emotional response.

Christians have sometimes done the same with hell. We’ve separated eternal judgment from the larger story of Scripture and held it up in isolation, sometimes with devastating results. But the misuse of a doctrine does not make it false, and reshaping reality to ease our discomfort won’t bring us peace or freedom.

It may not seem like a big deal to pull out one bone from the pile, but soon the whole structure shifts. Removing hell from our belief system shifts our understanding of justice, holiness, and grace until the God we’re left with is the God we want rather than the God who is. 

Removing what makes us uncomfortable changes our picture of God in deeply personal ways—and our enemy knows it. This is why his lies are often so persuasive. Consider the following ideas and what they ultimately cost us.

Lie: “Without hell, you’ll be less afraid.” 

If you’re a woman who grew up afraid of hell, letting go can feel like exhaling—perhaps for the first time in decades. You may remember lying awake, wondering if you were truly saved. Maybe you prayed the sinner’s prayer again and again, afraid you hadn’t meant it enough. Now, as a mother, you look at your daughter and think, I never want her to carry those fears.

But you don’t need to give your daughter a softer God to give her a safer faith. Give her—and your own heart—something better: the whole truth about a holy God who can be trusted completely. 

The whole truth includes frightening realities, and Scripture doesn’t sanitize them. Hebrews 10:31 says, “It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” Jesus Himself doesn’t free us from fear by making God less fearsome. In Matthew 10, Jesus says, “Don’t fear those who kill the body but are not able to kill the soul; rather, fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell,” before He shares the Father’s tender care:

Aren’t two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them falls to the ground without your Father’s consent. But even the hairs of your head have all been counted. So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows. (Matthew 10:29–31)

Notice that the Bible says “don’t be afraid,” not “there is nothing to fear.” The same God who has infinite power cares intimately about the people He made, and the One who holds eternity is the Father who numbered the hairs on your head. His sovereign power is not at odds with His care; it makes it all the more meaningful that He is our shelter. 

As a woman whose salvation rests in Jesus, your peace doesn’t come because there is nothing to fear but because you belong to Christ. The safest place is not a world without God’s judgment but in the arms of the Savior who bore it (1 Thess. 5:9–10). He is your refuge. 

Lie: “Without hell, you’ll feel less shame.” 

Maybe you’ve never been able to shake the feeling of all that’s wrong with you. You’ve spent years thinking about what you’ve messed up and all the ways you need to try harder, do better, and remain on God’s good side. Maybe shame has produced a lifetime of religious striving. 

There are two ways we can escape the weight of our sin. The first says, “Maybe I was never as bad as I thought,” or “I was never actually deserving of judgment.” We lessen sin’s seriousness until there’s little left to feel guilty about, believing that if there is no threat of eternal consequences, we’ll no longer feel bad about ourselves. But “If we say, ‘We have no sin,’ we are deceiving ourselves” (1 John 1:8). 

The second way declares: “I was deserving of judgment, and Jesus bore it for me,” and “I can be free because Jesus took my condemnation.” We get gut-level honest about who we are and then throw ourselves upon the mercy of Christ (2 Cor. 5:21). 

The key to experiencing less shame feels counterintuitive: freedom comes not by minimizing our sin but by magnifying what Christ has done. It’s when we understand the condemnation we deserved that we can begin to grasp the wonder of the condemnation Jesus carried. Because of Him, you don’t have to prove your innocence or strive for perfection. He is your righteousness.

Lie: “Without hell, you’ll be less judgmental.” 

Doesn’t erasing hell make it easier to sit across the table from your atheist brother, Muslim neighbor, or unbelieving child? If you no longer believe eternal judgment hangs in the balance, can’t you love your neighbors better? 

The truth (though Christians have not always lived it out perfectly) is that hell should dismantle our judgmental attitudes, not deepen them. We know we are not innately wiser, worthier, or more deserving of rescue than anyone else. We’re merely recipients of God’s mercy (Titus 3:5). This reality should drive us toward humility and gratitude—and help us love our neighbors with a greater desire for them to know that same grace.

It’s not loving to act as though eternity is not at stake. Your neighbors and coworkers may be kinder, more generous, or more compassionate than many Christians you know. But goodness cannot reconcile us to God. Like us, they need the mercy and salvation of the God who made and loves them. 

What we long for them to receive is not merely escape from hell, but God Himself. “This is eternal life,” Jesus said in John 17:3, “that they may know you, the only true God, and the one you have sent—Jesus Christ.” Eternal life is not simply something that begins after death. It is knowing Jesus now. He is the way, the truth, and the life. Love should make us humbly want that life for others.

Lie: “Without hell, God is more loving.” 

Is God cruel? Is He a tyrant demanding allegiance? Wouldn’t a God who ultimately forgives everyone be more loving than one who judges some forever? 

God’s justice isn’t a contradiction of His goodness. It’s part of it. We understand this instinctively when confronted by terrible evil. We want a God who sees the trafficked woman, murdered family, or abused child—and He does. “‘Vengeance belongs to me; I will repay,’ says the Lord” (Rom. 12:19). 

No one ultimately gets away with evil, but Scripture presses that truth closer to home than we’d like. Romans 3:23 says, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” We want the wicked punished, but hell becomes personally offensive when God tells us that we, too, deserve His wrath. 

God is utterly holy—without corruption of any kind. A perfect God who looked at rebellion, deceit, and evil and said, “It doesn’t matter,” would not be loving. He would be unjust. His holiness requires Him to judge sin. 

Yet if all we knew of God was His blazing holiness and righteous judgment, we might imagine Him as distant or unkind. But we have the cross. “God proves his own love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8).

Removing hell may give us a God who feels easier to love, but it loses sight of who He is: holy in His judgments, just in ensuring no evil is overlooked, merciful in saving the guilty, and kind in bearing the cost. Oh, how He loves you. 

Look Beyond the Bones

One of the enemy’s most effective distortions is making us believe Christianity is a chapel of bones rather than an empty tomb. He wants to keep you staring at death and judgment until they become the way you view God. 

But the gospel leads us through sin to the cross where our judgment was carried and forgiven by Christ—and then to His tomb where there is no body left to find. Jesus is alive. Hell is real, yes, but so is the Savior who descended into death and rose victorious over it. 

The answer to your fear and to the anxiety you don’t want to pass on to your children is not to pull apart your faith, erasing until only what’s comfortable remains. It’s to remember that Christianity is not a religion of death but of resurrection. 

Teach that to your daughters, and when the enemy points them toward the bones, turn their eyes to the empty tomb.