For all too many Christians, nothing is scary as the mere idea of death. They’re terrified of dying. There’s a reason for that, of course. They seem absolutely dumbfounded when they encounter people who don’t believe Christian claims and aren’t afraid of death. Today, let’s dive into this fear and see why Christianity cannot ease it.
(You’ll notice I’m not linking the blog entry forming our OP. I don’t want to draw attention to the writer that she might consider unwanted. She’s got a lot to deal with right now, and I’m largely sympathetic to those caught up in the wake of her whirlwind drama. If you find her, please don’t give her or her fanbase any reason to yell at me or the Roll to Disbelieve community.)
(From introduction: Logan’s Run. Also, WOW this page is great. Another big L for Creationists. This post first went live on Patreon on 3/5/2024. Its audio ‘cast lives there too!)
When death looms, Christians start to feel the burn
Sometimes, someone can tell that their lifetime is drawing to a close. For a 30something woman we’ll call Esther, that knowledge came to her last month.
Though Esther was young, she’d reached the kind of weight that makes any minor injury to her legs and feet the beginning of a cascade failure. And just over a year ago she’d broken an ankle by “stepping on it funny,” as she put it. As a result, she’d been wheelchair-bound for a year, housebound for about six months, and bedbound in her boyfriend’s home since the holidays. Her voice had even begun to take on that wet quality indicating end-stage heart trouble.
So yes, Esther knew. And she was terrified. In a blog she updates regularly, she wrote:
I do not like growing old yet I do not want to move on either. In fact, death scares me to no end. As-long-as I remember I have been terrified of dying. Even when I felt spiritually right.
“Spiritually right” is evangelical Christianese. It means being right with God/Jesus, which means in turn to be in a state of temporary grace. In Southern parlance, being right with someone means having no arguments or drama with that other person. They call the resolution of disputes making things right. If an evangelical dies while being right with God/Jesus, evangelicals believe that person will go to Heaven without any doubt. (They have varying opinions regarding what happens if someone dies without being right.)
To enter this state, evangelicals must psychically apologize to Jesus for any offenses they’ve committed against him. They call this process repentance. Generally, they think every person must repent of their offenses, which they call sins, or risk going to Hell.
Esther’s use of “spiritually right,” plus her obvious hypocrisy in cohabiting with a man who isn’t her husband, marks her pretty solidly as an evangelical. (In the post, she elaborates further: Yep. She’s also an evangelical pastor’s kid.) I’m not surprised, therefore, to learn that she’s terrified of dying and always has been.
Evangelicals love to say that their belief system takes all the fear out of death.
But Esther still feared death. Not Hell in particular, but death itself.
An evangelical dumbfounded to hear someone else say they’re not afraid of death
As I mentioned, Esther lived in her boyfriend’s home. It turns out that he is not Christian at all. In fact, he sounds like an atheist. And to her astonishment, he does not share her lifelong fear of death. You can discern just how shocking she finds this notion in her writing:
My boyfriend and I was speaking about death one day and he says he is not scared to die. This amazes me because He does not believe in God or heaven. He believes in just dying and poof. This scares me for him.
She’s not capitalizing “He” because she’s in some a lifestyle BDSM thing. It’s an accident. The words and emotions spilling out of her likely distracted her from fixing the error.
So now, she’s scared of her own looming death—and now she’s got this additional fear of her boyfriend dying. He has no concern for what might happen after death, but her faith teaches that nonbelievers like him have a lot to fear. So now she’s afraid on his behalf. She’s scared that Jesus might torture her boyfriend’s ghost forever after he dies, and there’s nothing she can do about it!
Worse still, her faith teaches her that she won’t even remember him after she dies. As she puts it:
Another taboo thing about my faith, I was taught that when someone dies, they go to heaven and are united with loved ones. However, those love ones (as we will also) will have no memory of those family and friends that has not made it to heaven. [. . .] I was told that there is no sadness and no sorrow in heaven. IF people could see down from heaven or remember those that did not make it, they would be forever sad.
This contrasts with the Calvinist evangelical belief that in Heaven, TRUE CHRISTIANS™ will gloat and lick their lips as they joyfully observe the suffering of those in Hell—especially those who had rejected their control-grabs in life. That one’s been a Low Christian belief since Tertullian’s writing in the 2nd-3rd centuries CE. Thomas Aquinas developed the idea further in his own day (archive). It’s more hardliner Catholic than evangelical, but considering the four-hour boner Calvinists nowadays have over the guy (archive), I’m not surprised.
Esther doesn’t go that route, though. Her denomination’s quirky li’l take on Christianity avoids all that confusion by just declaring by fiat that she won’t remember her godless boyfriend in Heaven.
Cognitive dissonance about death
Alas, Esther’s strong faith has not eased her fears at all, either:
If you have followed me for any amount of time you know that I am a Christian by faith and while my life has been a poor excuse of an example of a Christian person, I still really try to obtain the peace that comes with being a true Christian. My faith reminds me that my dear Grandparents are in heaven and one day If I live the correct way, I will be joined with them.
She’s carefully compartmentalized this terror she’s always felt away from her belief that she should never be afraid of death.
The belief is false, as she demonstrates by being terrified of death despite having a firm identity as a true-blue evangelical. Her belief about the fear of death collides up against the obvious fact of her fear of death. But she can’t face that truth. Nor is she willing to amend her beliefs.
This violent collision of beliefs into reality produces cognitive dissonance, which must be soothed away. So Esther pushes her terror away to dwell at the fringes of her psyche. It only becomes a serious problem if she starts thinking too much about death.
Like now, when it looms in front of her and is as inexorable and inescapable as tomorrow’s sunrise.
Esther is not alone in her fear of death, however. I’d reckon that most evangelicals share it with her, whether they’re the very most hardline of Calvinists or the most loosey-goosey hypocrites occasionally warming church pews.
In the Wild: The evangelical party line about fearing death
To hear evangelicals tell it, no evangelical who is right with Jesus should ever fear death. In fact, their religion offers them magical aid that disperses that fear like mist on a summer morning. Here’s what Leah Hall wrote in 2022 about death (archive):
While fear is a common human experience, the Scripture’s promise that God walks with the faithful at all times has heartened us to overcome our fears through the ages [. . .] After reflecting on these [Bible] passages, you may find that the winds have calmed and the clouds have parted. The strength you needed to move past fear was with you all along.
And then, as any Magic: The Gathering player might slam down cards on a gaming table, she offered a list of Bible verses about fearing death that she promised would magically cure readers of their fear.
In 2020 amid the first days of the pandemic, Dennis Fritz offered readers much the same blahblah (archive). After sneering at atheists who reject the idea of an afterlife, he declares:
The truth is God placed in the hearts and consciences of all people a natural knowledge of His existence and the fear of death is part of that knowledge. [. . .]
Is there a remedy for this fear? Thankfully the answer is “Yes!” The remedy is faith in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior. God’s Word confirms, “The wages of sin is death, but the undeserved gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 6:23). For those with faith in Christ, Jesus’ death is not the end, but for the believer it is merely the door to eternity.
He doesn’t offer nearly as many magical Bible verses. But I bet his unilateral declaration will come as some surprise to atheists who reject the idea of an afterlife.
(Guess what, atheists? According to King Dennis over there, you all totally fear death regardless of what you say! Ain’t we lucky to have King Dennis as the self-designated arbiter of humanity’s emotions?)
In 2009 and 2013, Billy Graham’s website covered the fear of death. The 2009 question (archive) sounds like it was written specifically to chastise evangelicals who fear death:
I think I can honestly say that I’m not afraid of death, because I’ve committed my life to Jesus and I know I’ll go to be with Him in heaven. But I have to admit I’m afraid of the process of dying [. . .]
In 2013, the question writer admits to fearing death (archive):
I’ve wonder sometimes if I’m going to make it [survive cancer]. I’m afraid to die. How can I get over this fear?
Both responses from the site’s writers advise Jesusing harder to defeat these fears. Here’s the 2013 advice:
[N]o matter what the future holds, ask Christ to come into your life today. Then God will take away your fears [. . .]
So evangelicals either officially lose their fear of death through studying lists of Bible verses or through Jesusing super-duper-hard.
Evangelicals learn to protect the tribe’s image over and above themselves
Unfortunately, evangelicals still massively fear death despite these two promised cures. What makes their fear worse is having no real street-legal way of discussing it or finding help for it. If other evangelicals notice their fear, things get even tougher.
Evangelicals have two very good reasons to lie about having any fear of death.
Firstly, no evangelical is allowed to be afraid if they’re right with Jesus. So admitting to the fear of death is like waving a big flag to the rest of the flocks: HI! I’M JESUSING WRONG SOMEHOW! YOU NEED TO COME FIX ME! Make no mistakes here: Evangelicals won’t hesitate to jump right into that fix-it project. They love to quote Proverbs 27:17, which they think gives them complete divine permission to fix other people’s perceived flaws.
Second, evangelicals sell a product that they swear cures the fear of death. They’re not going to broadcast their product’s ineffectiveness where any potential marks might hear it. From infancy, evangelicals learn to grant first priority to protecting their tribe’s image. Nothing can tarnish it, because tarnishing makes recruitment more difficult. This is why sex and abuse scandals pour out of evangelical churches: this focus on protecting evangelicals’ image means that evangelicals can be counted upon to keep abuse and predation quiet.
Discerning evangelicals’ fear of death can be difficult
Most evangelicals won’t come right out as Esther has to talk about their fear of death. Instead, you must read between the lines—or catch them talking about it through anonymous social-media accounts.
Numerous healthcare professionals have told me and written that their evangelical patients have always feared death the most and done every single thing they possibly can to stave it off. By contrast, their heathen patients seem much more at peace about their oncoming deaths. Speaking of the one Christian I’ve known closely who died, my mother wasn’t evangelical, of course; she was Catholic. But when she realized she wasn’t leaving the hospital that last go-round, she became extremely distressed in the same way I’ve heard these professionals describe.
And, too, I’ve personally seen a hospital chapel’s visitors’ logbook filled top to bottom with evangelicals’ demands for healing and cures for their loved ones. Some of the situations they described were obviously fatal, but none of them asked for a peaceful passing. I did, for my mother, and she got one. Nobody else made any request like that.
It’s like they thought if they didn’t say the D-word, it couldn’t happen. None of them even asked their god to work his will in the situation. They all wrote out their demands as if their god obviously wanted the exact same thing they did.
(In a way, I suppose that’s true. Christians always build for themselves a god who suits them best.)
I understand why they wrote what they did, though.
Evangelicals can’t easily discuss real fears
When Christians post under their real names, they tend to present their fear of death as something that the party line’s non-solutions fixed forever. Their fear is done. It’s finished forever. They’ve found the magic cheat code to escape it! Indeed, we see exactly this dynamic on a Life Church blog (archive):
Even though I’m a Christian, I’ve always been scared of death. I’m scared to die and scared for others to die too. Don’t get me wrong, I want to be with Jesus. I genuinely want to know Jesus and to see Him face-to-face. But I’ve always battled a fear of death. [. . .]
I cried out, “God, I’m scared. I’m scared of death. I love You, but I’m scared. Why am I scared?” I think the first step to overcoming the fear of death was admitting I was scared out loud. I arrived back home and walked into Zach’s family home and in the middle of what could easily feel like the world falling apart, I heard God’s whisper, “I’m here. I’m not leaving. I will never leave you.” Looking around the room, His peace was everywhere, in the tears, the smiles, in the silence, through it all. God was there.
And then she offers the usual listicle of Bible verses that will totally negate any evangelicals’ fear of death. It wasn’t Bible verses that helped her, however, as we can tell from her own testimony.
Very, very seldom will you encounter evangelicals writing under their own name to admit a fear of death that the party line hasn’t soothed and cured. I did find an example of this rare bird (archive):
Can I be a Christian and be afraid of dying? I hope so. Can I be afraid of pain, illness, hurt and disappointment? Again, I hope so. God is supposed to be my strength in my weakness. [But he sure af isn’t.]
In this post and others, he reveals that his faith doesn’t dispel his fear of death at all. Like Esther, his faith might only be making his fears worse. I think he might benefit from real therapy (as opposed to the terrible facsimile of help that “Christian counseling” is) for anxiety. When I was Pentecostal, I felt a lot like him—and it wasn’t until I deconverted and got real therapy that things improved.
This is why I don’t trust studies about how evangelicals respond to death as a subject, like this one from 2020 (archive). In it, researchers found that a nonzero number of religious people in general feared death. They also mention a bunch of meta-studies saying the same thing. To me, these studies are generally more reflective of what religious people tell researchers more than of their actual feelings about death.
Anonymity helps evangelicals who want real talk about death—but it usually doesn’t help much
When they can cloak themselves in anonymity, people feel safer to discuss taboo topics. In particular, evangelicals also grow emboldened to talk about their fear after leaving evangelicalism itself. Like this exvangelical Christian, who wrote in 2021:
I am a lifelong Christian and so, so terrified of death/eternity.
I tell myself that I simply can’t comprehend these things yet and try not to worry, but the fear and anxiety comes back every day despite my prayers and attempts to reassure myself. I’ve googled and read so many different posts here as well, but the fear always returns.
She seems thankful for the reassurances the subreddit offered, but I doubt they could do much to allay her fear. She didn’t acquire it through reason and rationality, so a reasonable and rational reassurance wouldn’t help her even if she could get one from that subreddit. Ultimately, her fellow Redditors might be progressive, but they still labor under false beliefs that do not tether to reality. They’re offering their quirky li’l take on Christianity to compete with the scary one she learned as a child. Neither interpretation tethers to reality, so it’s just a matter of which one emotionally manipulates her the most.
Around 2012, I got into a Disqus argument with a big-name progressive pastor on Patheos over this exact point. I told him that his take on Hell sounded a lot nicer than anything evangelicals offered. I was sure he liked it better, and in my Pentecostal days I would have as well! But if he couldn’t do more to validate his take over and above the evangelical interpretation, he wouldn’t win many evangelicals over. Evangelicals don’t care what sounds better. They need to be absolutely positive before switching beliefs.
Oooh, that guy got so very tetchy!
But that’s why evangelicals and exvangelicals find it so hard to shake their fear of death. None of them can be certain of their beliefs. They can’t show any objective support for any of those beliefs. None exists. The evidence points in another direction entirely—as Esther puts it, to “just dying and poof.”
Evangelicals’ product simply doesn’t work
It may vary from group to group, but the general evangelical take on Christianity is authoritarian and control-based. It’s also escapist. Its leaders and teachers assure their followers that through faith and Jesusing, they can cure diseases and mental illness of all kinds, magically heal injuries, escape natural disasters and avoid injury from conflicts, and ensure harmonious and happy relationships of every kind.
All of this stuff is very scary to authoritarians in particular. And humans in general have distressingly little power over misfortune. Christianity, in particular evangelicalism with its wowie zowie miracles and special effects, gives its followers a false and misplaced sense of agency and power over the sort of things that have scared humans for millennia. They are part of the human situation. Countless philosophers and religious leaders have sought to take the sting out of pain and fear.
Evangelicalism offers a more recent non-solution, but it’s hardly the only one. One of the earliest attempts to deal with this fear might be The Epic of Gilgamesh, written some 4000 years ago (archive). It’s the oldest surviving written story we have, so I’m guessing humans were flinging themselves against the fear of death for much longer than that.
So in a lot of ways, evangelicals consider faith and fervent Jesusing as guaranteed tickets out of the entire human situation. Without a real god at its center to make evangelicals’ promises work, however, they simply don’t. They’re Dumbo’s black feather (archive), convincing evangelicals they can fly—except in this case, evangelicals can’t actually fly, either. If they take their misplaced faith in their lucky feather too far, they’ll only come to harm.
There is no escaping death, the pain of death, or the human situation at large
Evangelicals sure do kick up a fuss to avoid the fear and pain of death. But there’s no escaping it. Every person who has ever lived is going to die or has died. And some die who have never really lived. Nobody escapes this world alive.
False claims about the afterlife and about what Jesusing and Bible study can do for followers only make matters worse for evangelicals.
In truth, the harder someone works to avoid the human situation, the harder reality will pecker-slap that person across the face. And the more it’ll hurt when it does.
As Esther has discovered, when evangelicals face their own death they have not only death itself to deal with, but the distress of powerful cognitive dissonance as well. Not only that, but they come face to face with their utter helplessness to reshape reality to their liking with divine magic.
This experience humbles some people. It draws them closer to other people and makes them feel like they’re a real part of the human situation. But if evangelicals could feel true humility, they wouldn’t be involved in evangelicalism in the first place.
The Vast and Benevolent Society of Them What Have Lost Someone
When my mom died, I sure had that experience. As my then-boyfriend and I left the hospital that morning, I caught sight of a man and woman putting cartloads of vases of flowers and childhood accoutrement into their car near the entranceway. They had very drawn faces. The absence of their child shot through every slow, numbed movement they made. It was a visceral absence, as obvious as cutting a chunk out of a piece of paper, and one I felt to my marrow. I felt I could almost discern what the child had looked like from the spaces left between these two.
When the woman looked up to see me, sensing me perhaps, our gazes locked. Right then, I suddenly felt swept from my own internal despair and mourning to feeling like in that despair and mourning I was part of the biggest family conceivable: The Vast and Benevolent Society of Them What Have Lost Someone. She was like me. She had lost someone dear to her, just as I had. And now she had to figure out some way to live without that person, just as I did. Our grief united us in a way nothing else could. It connected us to each other and to billions of humans alive and dead over the eons.
I wish I could tell you in words how this feeling soothed me in the first throes of my grief. Maybe that’s why grief displays at funerals are part of so many cultures. Sharing our losses makes enduring them somewhat easier. There’s no magic to it.
But evangelicals want to escape the human situation, not to make peace with it or share it. They want to deny it and reject it and control it, not learn how to cope with its darker moments and celebrate its lighter ones. Their beliefs don’t work, but they’d rather have the false certainty their beliefs provide than anything reality offers.
At times like these, I’m just so glad to be out of that entire religion.
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