Religion and societal harm in Christianity

The harm-critique of Christianity is the longest-standing in the Western literature. The arsenal runs from the Crusades (1095–1291, with their massacres en route to and within the Levant), through the Albigensian Crusade and the Inquisition, the European witch hunts (perhaps 40,000–60,000 executions, overwhelmingly women), the Wars of Religion following the Reformation, the theological endorsement of slavery by mainstream American churches until the mid-nineteenth century, the role of Christian institutions in Indigenous residential schools in Canada, the US, and Australia, and twentieth- and twenty-first-century sexual abuse crises documented across Catholic, Protestant, and Evangelical contexts. Hitchens, Sam Harris, and others have marshaled these facts into a cumulative case that Christianity has been, on balance, historically destructive.

Christian apologists and many historians push back. David Bentley Hart, Rodney Stark, and Tom Holland have argued that the moral vocabulary by which Christianity's historical failures are condemned — human dignity, equality before God, concern for the vulnerable — is itself a Christian inheritance, not a neutral Enlightenment ground. Abolitionism, much of modern medicine and hospitals, the earliest universities, substantial humanitarian work, and the legal category of universal human rights all trace significant influence to Christian movements. The historiographical debate over numbers (how many died in which crusade, how many in which witch hunt) is substantive; so is the philosophical question of the counterfactual (would a non-Christian Europe have produced more or less violence?).

More refined versions of the critique narrow the charge. John Loftus and David Silverman argue not that Christianity caused all these harms but that the tradition has no reliable mechanism for self-correction that would avoid them in the future. Steven Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature documents long-run declines in violence but locates much of the moral progress in secular Enlightenment reasoning rather than in church teaching. What almost all serious parties agree on is that crude versions of the argument — 'religion causes war' in general, or its denial — do not survive contact with the historical literature; what is left is a harder question about institutional incentives, theological content, and political circumstance.