Why Do Religious Institutions Do So Many Wicked Things?
If the case against God’s goodness almost always references the Holocaust, this argument almost always references the Inquisition. Whatever the notional benefits of religious membership, how can one reasonably subject one’s life and choices to institutions that are responsible for so much intolerance and bloodshed, so many benighted centuries of repression and persecution?
It is certainly true that the history of organized religion is steeped in wickedness and sin. It is also true that the history of every organized human activity is steeped in crimes and cruelties. The history of the family, the history of business and commerce, the history of politics and government, are all replete with dramas of cruelty and subjugation and abuse.
One might look at this history and conclude that human beings should therefore live somehow without families, without trade, without political relations—but this is a view for adolescents, hermits, and misanthropes. The normal view is to recognize the needs met by these institutions, the necessary work they do, the progress to which they can contribute, the truths they convey, and get on with the business of trying to make them better, less corrupt, the best version of themselves.
Thus the most radical critic of the many crimes committed by the government of the United States of America can tear up at “This Land Is Your Land” and feel a swell of patriotic hope when she casts a vote for Bernie Sanders for president. The most disillusioned child of a broken home can still fall in love and vow perpetual devotion. The person failed most by the medical system can still aspire to find a healer who can help them. And similarly, the most convinced critic of institutional religion’s historical sins, even the person wounded in some deep way by a specific pastor or congregation, can still hope to find in the diversity of religious institutions a place of support and a ladder to transcendence.
But surely, comes the rejoinder, organized religion is in a special category of evil, for all the utterly pointless wars that it has started, all the senseless killing over minute metaphysical disputes that defined the world before secularism arrived?
“The most detestable wickedness,” wrote Thomas Paine, “the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries, that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion.” So why not let the institutions responsible for all that misery simply die off, and if we have spiritual needs seek some new means to satisfy them?
Here, I am afraid, we are entering the realm of atheistic self-deception. There is no good evidence that religion has been a special source of violence in human history, as compared to the entirely worldly and secular aims of conquest or resource control that drive most warfare between countries and peoples. Nor is there evidence that religious belief generally makes wars bloodier or crueler than they otherwise might be. Certainly in specific cases the fanaticism of the devout has that effect, but it is easy enough to find examples where the pattern runs the other way, with religion fostering or influencing attempts to gentle war and restrain its participants.
Any society that takes religion seriously will, of course, look for theological justifications for its political decisions. But that is no different than noting that democratic countries tend to justify their wars as valiant struggles for liberty—sometimes credibly, sometimes cynically, often somewhere in between. Religious impulses, like other loves—home, family, freedom—are often exploited or suborned by worldly powers. But this is just as likely to reflect the unfortunate captivity of religious institutions to kings and would-be conquerors than the captivity of some kind of otherwise-peaceable secular politics to the bloodlust of religious zeal.
All attempts to measure the true causes of conflict are inherently a bit arbitrary, but a couple of figures are worth citing here, both drawn from an essay by the historian Andrew Holt on “The Myth of Religion as the Cause of Most Wars.” Holt first cites Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod’s three-volume Encyclopedia of Wars, an analysis of 1,763 wars spanning most of human history, where they attempt to categorize different kinds of conflicts based on their primary motivation; just 121 fall under the category of “religious wars.” No doubt if you handed the same list to Thomas Paine he would categorize things rather differently, but at the very least it should sow some doubt about treating religion as a unique cause of bloodshed.
Likewise, an effort by Matthew White to compile a list of the one hundred worst atrocities in human history—a book described by Steven Pinker, by no means a great friend of religion, as offering “the most comprehensive, disinterested and statistically nuanced estimates available”—ascribes eleven of the great horribles on his list primarily to religion. As Holt notes in his essay, White somewhat mystifyingly places Aztec human sacrifice, one of the most Satanic of religious customs, in a different category, “human sacrifice,” so 12 percent rather than 11 percent seems like the more appropriate takeaway from his research. But the general point is clear: conflicts like the Thirty Years’ War or China’s Taiping Rebellion that have religion as a primary cause, such that you can argue that they would not have happened absent some doctrinal dispute or messianic proclamation, are the exceptions in the history of human warfare, not the rule.
This should be especially clear from the history that followed after Paine’s confident pronouncement, which undermined his sweeping condemnation of religion much as subsequent history undermined David Hume’s pontifications on the mystical and supernatural. When Paine published his pamphlet blaming the Bible and Christianity for all the bloody wars of Europe, Napoleon Bonaparte was three years away from his accession as First Consul. Over the next two decades a set of wars fought (depending on your perspective) for the sake of his ambitions, France’s interests, or the cause of political enlightenment left as many as five million Europeans dead. This was just a warm-up act for the great power wars and political persecutions of the twentieth century, which piled up tens of millions of casualties in the name of nationalism, Communism, and fascism—all causes untainted by the dogmas of revealed religion, and yet somehow, despite Paine’s expectations, much more pitiless than the Christendom they overthrew.
This should be entirely unsurprising when you realize that the very idea of Christendom—a supranational entity making specific, detailed moral claims on all its members—is an example of how the great religious traditions have attempted to transcend the local, familial, and national loyalties that actually drive most human conflict. This was true in the Axial Age when the great religions began to take their modern shape, it was true when the Christian revolution overtook the Roman Empire, and it has been true for most of American history—in which Christianity, usually Protestant Christianity, has been the basis for the most insistent demands for racial equality and universal citizenship.
Indeed it is extremely strange for anyone who inhabits the current liberal order, with its framework of universal rights, its humanitarian ideals, its missionary impulses that sometimes work and sometimes come to grief, and think of themselves as lucky escapees from a world of religiously motivated politics. The entire order we inhabit is built upon many centuries worth of attempts by people with religious impulses—often strong and strange ones—to gentle the great powers of the world, to force moral absolutes upon statesmen who preferred to deal in machtpolitik, to impose rules that were often, if not always, justified with appeals to a higher law, to heaven itself, to nature’s God.
The idea of international law emerged from the work of Spanish Catholics and Dutch Protestants; the abolitionist movement was a work of Quakers and evangelicals; the Universal Declaration on Human Rights was written mostly by a Catholic. Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. were not secular figures, whatever else they may have been; Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address is not a secular document; William Wilberforce and Bartolomé de las Casas invoked the Bible, rather than rejecting it, when they railed against the evils permitted by their supposedly Christian governments. Perhaps the structures of peacemaking built upon all of those religious efforts no longer need religious ideas to remain standing (though you know I think they do). But the idea that the modern world has been built simply in bold secular defiance of religious violence is more mythological than Zeus.
Let me make one concession, however, which might be useful to thinking about your own religious choices. If all the great religious traditions tend to see themselves, in some way, as gentling the evils of the world, restoring harmony between God and humans or human beings and each other, some are more likely to see that obligation as an inherently institutional and political one—requiring the use of worldly power, sometimes comprehensive legal power, for the sake of their good ends. This is true of Roman Catholicism relative to much of Protestantism; it is true of Lutheranism or Presbyterianism or Anglicanism relative to Anabaptist forms of Protestant belief; it is true of Islam in both its Sunni and Shi’a forms.
Leaning into the political and legal is a good way to achieve real things in the world, and these faiths often tend to think especially deeply about questions of political order. But because they are more likely to allow themselves to become intertwined with governments or assume political power in their own right, they are inevitably more tempted to abuse or misuse power. Most of the very real cruelties perpetrated in the name of religion emerge from this temptation, this comprehensivist impulse, whereas there has not been (to my knowledge) an Anabaptist inquisition. So if you have a special horror of the evils of persecution or theocracy, you may find it more natural to seek out religious traditions that define their own rules and boundaries in ways that rule those temptations out.
This refusal of power, this quietism, can overlap with the more liberal forms of religion, but it is not exactly the same thing, since often the liberal religious project also assumes an intensive political project, even as it tries to avoid granting much power to religious institutions themselves. Indeed, much of liberal religion sees itself in clear continuity with the political projects I have just described, the long attempt to force kings and politicians to conform to religious moral codes. And its most important separation from traditional forms of faith is not in an attitude toward politics, but an attitude toward the last of our stumbling blocks, which I consider in my new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.
EDITORIAL NOTE: Taken from Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious by Ross Douthat. Copyright © (February 2025) by Zondervan. Used by permission of Zondervan, HTTP://www.zondervan.com.