Old Enough for Hell, Too Young to Know Themselves

The double standard is the whole argument.

The double standard is the whole argument.

I was confirmed five weeks before my fourteenth birthday. I stood at the front of a Lutheran sanctuary in South Dakota and affirmed, in front of the whole congregation, a faith I was told I now understood well enough to claim as my own. Substitutionary atonement. The resurrection. Eternal life, and its opposite. I had taken two years of confirmation class to get there, and the adults in that room agreed I was ready.

I was thirteen.

Here is the part nobody in that sanctuary thought was strange. The same culture that trusted thirteen-year-old me to comprehend the machinery of eternal salvation, to weigh sin and grace and hell and choose, would have told that same thirteen-year-old, had I said something about my own gender or about a classmate’s, that I was far too young to know anything of the kind. Too young for that. Old enough for this.

The writer Emily Joy Allison put the whole contradiction in a single viral post: it’s “so weird how children are too young to know anything about their own gender or orientation, but old enough to understand eternal conscious torment and substitutionary atonement and make a lifelong permanent commitment to Christianity. Someone should look into that.”

So let’s look into it. Not to score a point on the church I still belong to, but because the contradiction is real, it’s doing real harm to real kids, and the words being thrown around to defend it, grooming and indoctrination, mean something specific. They just don’t mean what the people shouting them think they mean.

The order is backward.

Start with what developmental psychology actually says, because the science doesn’t split the way the slogans need it to.

Children know their own gender early. The cognitive-developmental sequence Lawrence Kohlberg laid out in 1966, and which has held up across cultures since, runs like this: a child labels their own gender at two or three, understands it’s stable over time at four or five, and reaches full gender constancy somewhere between five and seven. Kristina Olson’s TransYouth Project, the largest longitudinal study of socially transitioned trans children, found that their sense of their own gender looks like that of cisgender kids: same strength, same pattern. I didn’t need a study to tell me this. I knew I was a girl in kindergarten. The boys in my class knew they were boys, and nobody asked them to prove it.

Awareness of sexual orientation arrives a little later, around the edge of puberty. Drawing on a national probability sample, Bishop and colleagues (2020) found the average age of first same-sex attraction was 11.75, with some reporting it as early as eight. Pew’s 2013 survey of LGBT adults found a median age of twelve for first feeling something other than straight. Earlier work tied that first spark to the hormonal changes of around age ten.

Now hold that against the cognitive equipment required actually to understand the doctrines I affirmed at confirmation.

Abstract theological reasoning, the kind that can hold a concept with no physical referent and turn it over, is what Jean Piaget called formal operational thought, and it doesn’t even begin to come online until around age eleven or twelve. Plenty of adults never use it consistently. And these aren’t gentle abstractions. Eternal conscious torment. Penal substitution is the idea that an innocent man was punished in the place of the guilty to satisfy divine justice. A child’s understanding of plain death, far more concrete than any of that, isn’t typically complete until ages eight to ten. One study of children’s afterlife beliefs found that by age ten, their explanations mixed contradictory biological and supernatural ideas, and that those beliefs tracked their parents’ beliefs. Which is the tell, and I will come back to it.

Line the ages up, and the double standard inverts itself:

1. A child knows their own gender by five to seven. (some say as early as three)

2. A child becomes aware of their orientation around ten to twelve.

3. A child can’t genuinely comprehend substitutionary atonement or eternal torment until eleven or twelve at the earliest, if ever.

The thing we trust children to understand is the hardest one. The things we tell them they are too young to know are the ones they figure out first. The developmental order is the opposite of the political talking point.

The words mean something.

This is where I want to slow down, because two words are carrying the entire weight of the backlash against LGBTQ kids, and both have real definitions that the shouting has buried.

Grooming isn’t a metaphor. It’s a forensic term for a specific process. The forensic psychiatrist Michael Welner describes it as the way an offender draws a particular child into a sexual relationship and keeps that relationship secret. He is clear that secrecy is the whole point. Child-protection groups break it into stages: an adult selects a specific child, builds trust with the child and often with the parents and the wider community, isolates the child, sexualizes the relationship, and uses secrecy and control to keep it hidden. A targeted child. Concealment. The goal of abuse.

Read that description again and ask what it actually fits. An authority figure, trusted by the community, uses secrecy and emotional pressure to override a child’s developing sense of self. That isn’t a teenager saying I think I’m gay to a school counselor in the open. It’s a much older and more documented pattern, and a great deal of it happened inside churches. Allison knows that world; she helped launch #ChurchToo in 2017 to surface exactly that kind of abuse in Christian institutions.

The word got unhooked from its meaning on purpose, and you can date it. When Florida passed its Parental Rights in Education law in 2022, the governor’s press secretary tweeted that anyone opposing the bill was “probably a groomer.” A report from the Human Rights Campaign and the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that in the month after the bill passed, the average number of tweets per day using slurs like “groomer” against LGBTQ people jumped 406 percent. A year later, an ADL and GLAAD report counted hundreds of anti-LGBTQ incidents, with the false groomer-and-pedophile smear the single most common theme. A precise word for real horror was repurposed as a slur aimed at people for existing .n public.

Indoctrination has a definition, too. In the philosophy of education, it means instilling beliefs in a way that leaves the person unwilling or unable to question them later, beliefs held without regard to evidence and sealed against challenge. Real education, the philosopher Harvey Siegel argues, may plant beliefs in a child before the child can fully justify them, but it does so to equip the child with the tools to question those beliefs down the road. The difference is the door. Indoctrination locks it. Education leaves it open.

By that standard, telling a child she faces unending torment unless she accepts a particular doctrine, and discouraging her from questioning it, sits much closer to the textbook definition of indoctrination than an age-appropriate lesson that gay and trans people exist. Which is the one routinely branded “indoctrination” by people who pair the word, without apparent irony, with “groomer.”

Mostly, it gets handed down.

There is one more piece of evidence that deflates the idea of the freely choosing child believer, and it isn’t subtle.

Religion is inherited far more than it’s chosen. Pew’s analysis of a 2019 survey of parent-teen pairs found that 82 percent of Protestant parents had teens who also identified as Protestant, 81 percent of Catholic parents had Catholic teens, and 86 percent of religiously unaffiliated parents had unaffiliated teens. The single best predictor of a thirteen-year-old’s religion is the religion of the adults who raised them. And the commitment lands early: the evangelical Barna Group has long reported that a large majority of Americans who become Christians do so before they turn eighteen, most of them before thirteen. Their founder summarized that what you believe by thirteen is largely what you will die believing.

I’m not mocking that. I lived it. I was baptized at seven weeks old, before I could hold up my own head, let alone consent to anything. That is simply how my tradition does it, and I will defend its logic in a moment. But let’s not pretend a thirteen-year-old at the front of a sanctuary is a free agent weighing Reformation theology on the merits and independently electing into it. She is, overwhelmingly, doing what the adults she loves and depends on have raised her to do. That’s not a scandal. It’s just true, and any honest account has to say so.

The strongest argument against me, said fairly.

If I am going to argue this, I owe the other side its best case, not a strawman. There are two real objections, and one of them is genuinely good.

The good one is about baptism. In my own Lutheran tradition, and in the Catholic one, infant baptism is precisely not a request for the infant to understand or commit anything. The whole point, as the Augsburg Confession put it back in 1530 and as the ELCA still teaches, is that God is the one doing the work, not the baby. The parents and godparents make the promises. Confessional Lutherans actively reject the idea that salvation hangs on a child’s rational decision. So when Allison says children are made to “make a lifelong permanent commitment,” a Lutheran can fairly answer: not at the font, they aren’t. Nobody asked seven-week-old me to comprehend a thing.

That’s correct. And it doesn’t rescue the contradiction. It relocates it and lands it harder.

Because my tradition doesn’t leave it at infant baptism, it holds the conscious, personal yes in reserve. It asks for it later, at confirmation, which the ELCA formally calls the Affirmation of Baptism. And confirmation in the Lutheran world typically occurs around age fourteen, after a couple of years of catechism. I was thirteen. So the tradition itself locates the moment of genuine religious commitment at roughly fourteen, which is older than the age at which kids become aware of their orientation and well within the age range that the same communities insist is far too young to know anything about gender or sexuality. The baptism objection, followed honestly to its end, doesn’t dissolve the double standard. It dates and confirms it.

The second objection is a category argument: accepting a doctrine taught by an authority and discovering something true about yourself are different kinds of mental acts, so the comparison is unfair. That’s right too, and it also cuts the wrong way for the people who make it. Knowing your own gender or noticing who you are drawn to is something you find, often without wanting to. Allison has described realizing she was attracted to women as a light coming on that she couldn’t switch back off. Discovering a fact about yourself takes less abstract machinery than evaluating a metaphysical claim about a substitute sacrifice, not more. If the two really are different categories, then children are better positioned to know their own hearts than to adjudicate the doctrine of hell, which is the opposite of what the objection needs to be true.

What I actually think is going on

I should be honest about where I stand, since I have been circling it.

My skepticism isn’t aimed at God or the idea of God. It’s aimed at what human beings have done with God. I still belong to my church. I still run the sound booth at a little country congregation outside Sioux Falls, and I trained the teenage girls who run the gear while I roam the building, checking the speakers. I love those people. But I have read too much history to believe that most of what gets handed down from a pulpit fell from the sky. Men built a great deal of it, and much of it was built to keep men in charge.

The faith that once refused to bow to Caesar became, under Constantine and his successors, the official religion of the empire, its creeds hammered out under imperial sponsorship, and its rivals criminalized within a generation. Creed, sword, and empire. The institution learned early that controlling what people believe and starting young are how you hold power over them. Teaching a frightened child that hell waits for the wrong answer isn’t an accident of doctrine. It’s a feature, and it works.

So here’s what I can’t make square. The instinct to protect children is real and good. I share it. But watch where it points. It doesn’t flinch at handing a seven-year-old the concept of eternal conscious torment, or asking a thirteen-year-old to commit her one life to a system she’s developmentally years away from being able to question. It flinches, hard, only when a child says something true and inconvenient about who she is.

That’s not a concern for the child’s mind. If it were, it would worry first about the hardest thing we ask children to swallow, not the easiest thing they figure out on their own. It’s a concern for control. It always was.

I was old enough, at thirteen, to be trusted with hell. A gay kid in that same pew was supposedly too young to be trusted with themself. Someone really should look into that.

I think we just did.

Author Note. Grace Ann Hansen is an independent researcher and writer, and an MBA & PhD graduate student in health informatics and artificial intelligence. She is also a published author, a professional musician, a gymnastics coach, and a queer transgender woman living in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. All interpretation, argument, and prose are her own. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Grace Ann Hansen at grace@graceannhansen.com.