George Pell on Religion and societal harm
Pell vigorously defended Christianity's positive role in building Western civilisation and dismissed the 'religion poisons everything' narrative as historically illiterate.
George Pell was a forceful defender of Christianity's civilisational contributions. He argued that the claim that religion causes net harm to society is historically ignorant, pointing to the Church's role in founding universities, hospitals, and charitable institutions; in preserving classical learning through the Dark Ages; and in developing the philosophical foundations of human rights, the rule of law, and the scientific method.
Pell did not deny that the Church had a troubled history — he acknowledged the Inquisition, the Crusades, and clerical abuse scandals — but he argued that these were failures to live up to Christian teaching, not consequences of it. The secular alternatives, he contended, had an even worse track record: the twentieth century's atheistic regimes produced human suffering on a scale that dwarfs anything in the history of organised religion.
In his debate with Dawkins, Pell was characteristically blunt: the claim that the world would be better off without religion is not supported by the evidence. The most violent century in human history was the one in which secularism achieved political power on the largest scale. Religion, in Pell's view, is not the problem — it is the indispensable source of the moral vision that makes civilised life possible.
“The idea that religion is the great source of violence and oppression is a myth. The bloodiest century in human history was the twentieth — and the worst atrocities were committed by regimes that explicitly rejected God.”