Nearly every evangelical Christian I know embraces several conflicting notions. Almost all white evangelicals unequivocally oppose abortion. And nearly every one of them also obstinately believes in a place of hideous eternal torment for “the lost”—a term that always refers to others, not to themselves. Finally, most of the evangelicals I know also believe in a doctrine commonly referred to as “the age of accountability,” an age—typically seen as about seven—when a person becomes sufficiently discerning to decide whether Jesus truly is “my Savior.”
If hell is real, then evangelical Christians should be the world’s most passionate abortion supporters. If it is true that the lost—those who have not professed faith in Jesus Christ as their Savior—will spend eternity burning mercilessly in a lake of fire, and if it is true that prior to age seven a person is not responsible for making that choice about Jesus—though the Bible nowhere says such a thing explicitly—then the best thing that could happen to that person would be to die before age seven and get a free pass to heaven.
Some are likely already tuning out because everything I wrote above appears to them to be time-wasting irrational nonsense. But for those still curious, I’ll give some background.
Evangelical Opposition to Abortion
Searching for even one passage in the Bible that explicitly addresses the topic of abortion is a futile endeavor. The biblical argument against abortion evangelicals typically cite comes from verses referring to God “calling” people to some sort of ministry while they were still in the womb (Isaiah 49:1; Jeremiah 1:5; Galatians 1:15). The reasoning behind this argument is that God would not be calling them if they were not yet true human beings.
Historically, only a relative minority of evangelicals fervently and overtly opposed abortion. It wasn’t until conservative luminaries such as Paul Weyrich and Jerry Falwell began using the topic as a forceful wedge issue in the late 1970s that abortion opposition became a litmus test for membership in the evangelical movement. By 1980, abortion had become such a hot topic—and anathema for white evangelicals—that it played a significant role in Ronald Reagan’s trouncing of the pro-choice Jimmy Carter in that year’s presidential election.
Now, 43 years later, 74 percent of white evangelicals oppose abortion. With white evangelicals making up 14 percent of the U.S. population of 333 million, that means that 34.5 million Americans oppose abortion based on their evangelical religious beliefs.
Meanwhile, 87 percent (about 30 million) of the 34.5 million evangelical abortion opposers also believe in a literal hell—a literal lake of fire where unbelievers will burn for eternity. Those 30 million Americans are, somehow, coping with a serious case of cognitive dissonance. They believe that no baby should be aborted, but at the same time, they also believe that unbelievers past the age of seven will spend eternity in inconceivable agony. If they truly cling to both of those beliefs, then they are monsters—or they choose not to follow those two contradictory beliefs to their logical and diabolical conclusion. That inevitable conclusion is that they—evangelical abortion opposers—are, theoretically, sentencing millions of human beings to an unspeakable eternal torture.
In 2021, 3.6 million babies were born in the USA. If the typical statistics carry forward among those 3.6 million, only about 500,000 of them will become evangelical Christians. The other 3.1 million will—according to evangelical belief—burn in hell for eternity—and that’s just one year’s worth of unbelievers. Why would it not be better for those babies to be aborted and go to be with Jesus than for them live on and for most of them to eventually end up in the perpetual flames of hell?
Disclaimer: I am not advocating for abortion. I am pro-life. But my opposition to abortion is consistent with my belief about what Christian theologians refer to as eschatology, the biblical study of “the end times.” I am absolutely convinced that the common evangelical view of eschatology is wrong and is harming evangelicals’ psyche—as well as their efforts to evangelize (that is, to win unbelievers to their belief system).
The common evangelical belief about “hell” is abominable. If it were true, then the vast majority of human beings—billions from the past, present, and future—will endure an unending, unimaginable torture. Most evangelicals stubbornly cleave to this view despite the patently obvious Bible passages that say otherwise.
Bible Passages that Contradict Belief in Hell
Each of the following passages is pretty straightforward, but I’ll go from least to most obvious:
Matthew 5:44: “But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, …” Jesus wants His followers to do the noble thing, forgive. But according to the common evangelical belief, ultimately, He will not forgive; He will condemn billions to eternal torture. Do evangelicals really want to worship a Savior who asks more of them than He asks of Himself?
John 6:50-51: “But here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which anyone may eat and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.” In this passage, Jesus metaphorically refers to Himself as bread and says that the gift for eating this “bread”—communing with Him—is life. He says nothing about avoiding hell.
James 5:20: “Whoever turns a sinner from the error of their way will save them from death and cover over a multitude of sins.” Again, the contrast is between life and death, not heaven and hell.
John 3:36: “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God’s wrath remains on them.” Here, God’s wrath is equated with death, not eternal punishment in a lake of fire.
James 1:15: “Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.” Sin leads to death, not eternal punishment.
1 Peter 3:18: “For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God. He was put to death in the body but made alive in the Spirit.” If sin were to lead to eternal torture, then equitable punishment would have required Jesus to be tortured eternally.
Romans 6:23: “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” The wages of sin is death, not eternal punishment.
John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” In this, the most frequently quoted Bible verse, the choice is between life and death, not heaven and hell.
Revelation 20:14b-15: “The lake of fire is the second death. Anyone whose name was not found written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire.” The second death means exactly that. The Bible does not teach that unbelievers burn in hell for eternity; it teaches that unbelievers will die a second death and that will be the end of them.
These are but a few of the obvious passages disproving the belief that the Bible teaches that unbelievers will be tortured for eternity. I can’t imagine the evidence being any more obvious and compelling, yet for most evangelicals, tradition eclipses evidence—even when that evidence comes directly from the Bible they claim as the authoritative text for their lives.
Apparently, living with—or suppressing—a heavy dose of cognitive dissonance is not too big a price to pay for holding to a tradition that says tens of billions of people—many as young as eight years old—will be tortured mercilessly for eternity. Nor does that cognitive dissonance influence evangelicals’ views on the issue of abortion.
In many ways, today’s evangelicals are not unlike the Israelites of old whom God referred to as “obstinate” and “stubborn” (Exodus 34:9; Deuteronomy 9:6-13; Nehemiah 9:16-18; and many more). American evangelicals should not be surprised that our numbers are declining.
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