Raised on Holy Violence: Fear as Childhood Theology
I did not grow up thinking of fear as fear. I grew up thinking of it as wisdom, as seriousness, as spiritual maturity. I thought fear was just being scared of something. In the fundamental, evangelical world of my childhood, graphic martyr stories, rapture warnings and fear-based tracts were not treated as unusual or extreme; they were simply part of the formation process. What I absorbed, long before I had language for it, was that terror could be instructional and that holy people were expected to submit to it. Looking back now, I can see how deeply those messages shaped my body, my imagination, and my understanding of God - and how what was presented as faith formation was often, in practice, an education in holy violence.
Many people are healing from what is now often called Rapture Trauma - the fear of being left behind, separated from family, or forced to endure the tribulation. That fear was not abstract. It was taught through movies, sermon skits, illustrated books and Sunday school lessons designed to make the end of the world feel immediate and personal. The message was simple: believe the right thing about God or face unimaginable suffering. The point was to scare people into heaven. And in many cases, it worked. But fear is a coercive teacher. It is developmentally inappropriate for children, spiritually distorting for adults and deeply wounding for anyone whose body learned to associate God with threat.
One night not long ago, as I was settling into bed, a vivid image flashed into my mind - uninvited, graphic and familiar. My breath caught. My body tightened. And then I realized something I had never fully named before: Foxe’s Book of Martyrs traumatized me more than the theological claims ever did.
Foxe’s Book of Martyrs
Foxe’s Book of Martyrs is a massive sixteenth-century volume compiled by English historian John Foxe and first published in 1563. It told the stories of Protestant suffering, especially in England and Scotland, and became one of the most influential books shaping Protestant imagination for centuries. Blending history, theology and polemic, it presented martyrdom not simply as tragedy but as proof of faith, continuity and spiritual identity.
This book was part of my childhood. At one point, it was required reading. The illustrations were not symbolic or softened for young readers. They were graphic depictions of torture, humiliation, mutilation and death. I cannot remember the exact rationale for placing that material in front of a still-developing, sheltered, early teen, but I know the logic that usually accompanied it: we needed to understand what people suffered for the truth. We needed to be grateful. We needed to be strengthened. We needed to learn that Christianity was the only right way.
But what I remember is this: I was a child looking at images of human beings being burned, torn apart, disembowled, violated and tortured, and I was told this was spiritually formative.
Looking back, I can see how casually the adults around me handled that material. It was treated as normal, even noble. The violence was not questioned. It was folded into discipleship and presented as evidence of seriousness. If you were raising strong Christians, then perhaps children should learn early that suffering is part of the package. Such as Christians being shredded and eaten by lions at the Colosseum, dying for their faith in Christ. What heros!
But there is a difference between honest history and spiritualized brutality. And children should not be asked to absorb the latter in order to prove the former.
Chick Tracts
When I encountered Chick Tracts, my nervous system had already been trained to expect violence in the name of faith. These small black-and-white comic book pamphlets, created by Jack T. Chick in the early 1960s, carried a similar message: the world is dangerous, evil is everywhere and fear is a legitimate tool for keeping people on the right path. What began as evangelistic comics grew into a massive catalog translated into many languages and distributed around the world.
Their dramatic plots, stark moral binaries and conspiratorial worldview shaped entire subcultures. They fed anti-Catholic sentiment, reinforced suspicion and helped normalize a broader Christian culture of fear. For many of us, Chick Tracts, from Chick Publications, were not strange little side artifacts. They were part of the air we breathed. And they were not just something we read. They were something we were taught to distribute.
As a child, I was instructed to leave Gospel tracts in public places - tucked with a receipt at a restaurant, left in a restroom, handed to a stranger, slipped between library books or placed anywhere an unsuspecting person might find it. This was framed as obedience, evangelism, even kindness. We were told we were helping people. We were told we were being faithful.
What strikes me now is the contradiction. Some of the tracts were considered too frightening for children to read, yet children were still expected to distribute them. We could hand out fear, but not necessarily absorb it directly. Or perhaps we were absorbing it all along, just in a more socially acceptable form. The message was consistent either way: violence and terror are acceptable if they serve the right ends.
What Neuroscience Tells Us
From a developmental and neurological perspective, this should not be overlooked. A child’s brain is still wiring its sense of safety, identity and meaning. Repeated exposure to violence - even secondhand, even for God - activates the same stress pathways that are involved in real threat. The amygdala learns to stay on alert. The nervous system learns to brace. The body learns that danger can arrive at any time, even in supposedly safe places.
When children are required to view torture scenes, hear graphic descriptions of suffering or absorb stories where violence is framed as holy, their brains do not file that away as church curriculum. They experience it as threat. And repeated threat becomes part of how the body learns to live.
That kind of formation shapes more than memory. It shapes imagination. It shapes authority. It shapes the internal sense of whether God is safe, whether the world is safe, and whether one’s own body can be trusted to rest.
The Double Standard of Righteous Violence
What still unsettles me is how normalized all of this was. We were told that yucky R-rated movies were dangerous because of their sex and violence. But the violence sanctioned by the church was somehow righteous, such as repeated spankings, aka beatings, by a parent with a belt or strap until a child’s will was broken and their pain and tears showed repentance. Hollywood could corrupt us, but martyr stories could supposedly sanctify us. We were guarded against secular content while being saturated in stories of torture, execution, and divine suffering. Pain was, apparently, sanctification.
Halloween was condemned as satanic because of evil, scary and the threat of harm. Yet we could watch films like The Wilderness Family, where mountain lions and bears attacked children and their parents, because that kind of natural violence was packaged as wholesome. We were taught to admire heroes like William Tyndale, who was burned at the stake for translating and printing the Bible. We were so conditioned, we did not know to ask what it meant to build a faith around repeated images of bodily destruction.
The Chick Tracts. The martyr stories. The threat of torture during the rapture. Graphic crucifixion accounts. Public spanking with wooden spoons as discipline. Verbal threats used to enforce obedience. Open discussion about whether babies go to hell.
All of it was normalized. All of it was spiritualized. All of it was framed as necessary for shaping a faithful child.
And yet, looking back now, I can see that the violence was not incidental. It was formative.
It shaped my imagination. It shaped my nervous system. It shaped my understanding of God. It shaped the way I learned to think about safety, authority, and belonging.
This is the part we rarely name: the violence embedded in fundamentalist evangelical culture was not just in the stories. It was in the pedagogy.
It was in the way fear was used as a teaching tool. It was in the way suffering was held up as proof of righteousness. It was in the way children were expected to absorb brutality as part of spiritual formation.
Many of us are still untangling that. Many of us are still healing from it. And many of us are only now realizing that what we were taught to call faithfulness was, in fact, a steady diet of fear.
Note:I want to be abundantly clear that I am not arguing for shielding children from all sorrow, disappointment, grief or hard realities. Part of healthy development is learning, with support, how to face the inevitabilities of life: loss, conflict, sadness, death and pain. Children do not need to be protected from the fact that suffering exists. They need to be accompanied through it in ways that are age-appropriate, truthful and emotionally safe. This is resilience building. What I am naming here is something different: the deliberate exposure of children and young teens to graphic, explicitly violent material, especially when it is presented as spiritually necessary, can be developmentally harmful. The issue is not whether children should ever encounter difficulty. The issue is whether adults are thoughtfully considering the impact of what they place before them and whether that exposure is serving the child’s well-being or simply the adult system’s agenda.
This article is not intended to treat or diagnose any condition.
Rebekah is not a licensed therapist or clinician. Any thoughts, opinions or resources given on this site are strictly her own observation and insights based on personal experiences and study. It should in no way take the place of professional assistance.