“He threatened excommunication and hell fire in my last moments, if I continued obdurate.” (77)

This is one of the first incidences in the book that directly talks about religion’s role in the life of the Frankensteins, and yet it proves the importance of God to them. For Justine to be willing to submit herself to death for a crime she has not committed, simply because she is worried about excommunication for telling the truth, shows that religion was significant in her life – logical, given the time period and setting of the novel. This is ironic because Frankenstein’s efforts to be god-like in his creation of a new species through science are undoubtedly sacrilegious and yet he faces no such threat or moral conflict as that of excommunication and hell, which Shelley portrays to been seen as a fate far worse than death.