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Many Christians just assume that innocent children go to Heaven when they die. The Roman Catholic Church traditionally taught that unbaptized infants go to a place called Limbo, until they found no scriptural or other justification for this belief. Today Roman Catholics seem to accept (with no small amount of discomfort) that something or other happens. The Roman Catholic Church itself seems to not know what happens to unbaptized infants, and Popes have detailed at least four different positions supposedly "clarifying" the situation, but in reality generally contradicting each other.

In many Protestant sects, the belief is that all children below a certain age automatically go to heaven if they die. In Left Behind, for example, all children under age 8 are raptured, regardless of their religious affiliation or the religious bent of the family they were born into. They are considered too young to be able to decide for themselves whether Jesus really is their Lord and Savior or not. The age at which the switch over from "innocent" to "guilty" occurs is known as the "Age of Reason" (no relation to the Thomas Paine monograph).

Catholicism has an Age of Reason too (age 7), but in Catholic doctrine its only benefit is that no venial sins committed before reaching the Age of Reason count toward your time in Purgatory -- you'll still be barred from Heaven forever if you die unbaptized. Some fundamentalist or traditionalist Catholics still hold the belief that unbaptized infants go to Hell.