Message may be simple, but reception is not just about fear, because the hardware we have to receive the message is quite a mess. And it has upper limits on how frequently it's beliefs can be updated.

Philosophers (and of late Psychologists a much younger field) have been telling us right from the time of Plato(mind = appetite vs spirit vs reason) to Hobbes (reason vs passions) to Freud (id vs ego vs superego) to Kahneman (System 1 vs System 2) to Haidt (Elephant-Rider metaphor) etc that our minds are imperfect machines.

So the simplicity of the message doesn't guarantee reception. The assumption is such unreliable machinery can receive messages perfectly. And that assumption constantly breaks down.

So from Baldwin you get to philosophers like Charles Taylor who tell us - the Church, one of the worlds oldest surviving institutions (not by accident), had to deal head on with this problem, since different minds interpret their messages very differently. Some minds we know in the "name of almighty god" will happily do whatever they feel like. Power has many ways of exploiting Love. So what do you do?

Judge them, label them, name and shame them? That was the first reaction and it was done in public as a large spectacle. But the system then evolves to private spaces where the act confession happens to a trained priest. If well trained, such people don't just put the focus not on shame and guilt but on growth. So until the person feels safe and encouraged to Recognize and talk about harm caused, which is what is supposed to happen in the intentionally architected safe space of a confessional (very similar to therapy), then there is a possibility for growth.

But if you notice the architecture today has totally flipped, the chimps are running around naming and shaming each other full time. So we have lots to learn from what has been tried out in the past. Charles Taylor is a good starting points for people interested in this stuff and how to create such possibilities in the real world.