Humans have engaged in all manner of atrocities, and despite the horrors of the past century, we see repeatedly—across earlier centuries as well—how easily cruelty can be normalized, ritualized, and justified. The human capacity for harm is ancient. What is especially sobering, though, is how often major institutions—including major religions—can make cruelty feel righteous.
Many historical atrocities have occurred under the banner of religion, especially when religious identity fused with conquest, state power, or tribal domination. Charlemagne’s campaigns against the Saxons (772–804 CE), for example, fused military conquest with forced Christianization. Saxon resistance was treated not only as political rebellion but also as resistance to Christian rule. Forced conversion was backed by severe legal penalties, including death for refusal of baptism, and there were episodes of mass killing in the course of suppressing Saxon resistance, most notably the Massacre of Verden in 782, where 4,500 Saxons were reportedly executed in a single day.
The Crusades (1095–1291) likewise included mass killing justified in explicitly religious terms. The Rhineland massacres of 1096 saw crusader mobs attack Jewish communities in Speyer, Worms, Mainz, and Cologne, forcing conversion or death. And when Jerusalem fell in 1099, the city was taken amid large-scale slaughter of Muslims and Jews.
The Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648)—which began as a struggle between Catholic and Protestant rulers within the Holy Roman Empire before widening into a broader fight over power, territory, and dynastic advantage—became one of the most devastating catastrophes in European history. Ending with the Peace of Westphalia, the conflict killed millions and devastated wide stretches of central Europe, with some German territories losing a third or more of their population and the worst-hit areas suffering even more.
The Spanish Inquisition (established in 1478 and lasting until 1834) created a machinery of coercion and intimidation, with religious motives explicitly invoked. It targeted conversos—Jews who had converted to Christianity, often under intense pressure—and later Moriscos, Muslims who had likewise been baptized, as well as Protestants. Exact numbers are debated, but the core point is not: it was a system designed to enforce conformity through fear, punishment, and, in many cases, execution.
Other episodes fit the same pattern. The witch hunts of early modern Europe and the European colonies, spanning the 15th to the 18th centuries, led to nearly 100,000 prosecutions and roughly 40,000 to 60,000 executions, most of them women. These persecutions were not merely random superstition. They were tied to a specifically Christian demonology that linked witchcraft to heresy, Satan, and a cosmic struggle against evil. The same logic also appeared in campaigns against peoples classified as pagan or heathen. In the Baltic Crusades, military orders such as the Brothers of the Sword and later the Teutonic Knights pursued conquest together with Christianization, and forced conversion was part of the program. In Muslim history, the language of jihad was also at times used to frame warfare, though that point should be stated carefully: jihad does not simply mean “holy war,” and in Islamic thought it has long included moral and spiritual struggle as well.
Colonial movements in later centuries often used religious language—“civilization,” “salvation,” missionary uplift—as moral cover for extraction and domination. Leopold II’s Congo Free State (1885–1908) was not simply a Belgian colony but effectively Leopold’s personal state. It was presented as a humanitarian venture that would end slavery and bring religion and modern life to the Congolese. In practice it became a regime of forced labour, hostage-taking, mutilation, and terror, likely causing millions of deaths, though exact numbers are disputed. It was surrounded by Christian and “civilizing” rhetoric, and missionaries were part of that colonial world, though many later helped expose the abuses.
The transatlantic slave trade and slavery (spanning roughly the 16th to the 19th centuries) were likewise defended by many religious leaders and institutions, often through distorted readings of scripture. One recurring example was the so-called “Curse of Ham”—actually Noah’s curse on Canaan, later twisted into a supposed justification for African slavery—even as other religious figures, especially Quakers, became central to abolitionist movements. The point is not that religion uniquely caused exploitation, but that it was repeatedly available to sanctify it.
The same pattern appears in Canadian history. “Christianization” was one motive—alongside state assimilationist policy—behind the Residential School system. Church-run schools began earlier, but by the 1880s the federal government had adopted an official policy of funding residential schools across Canada, and the last school closed in 1996. More than 150,000 First Nations, Inuit, and Métis children passed through these church-run, state-funded institutions, which were designed to separate children from their families and cultures and were marked by widespread abuse. Thousands died, and the records remain incomplete.
The Spanish conquest of the Americas, beginning with Columbus in 1492 and intensifying with Cortés’s overthrow of the Aztec empire in 1519–1521, likewise brought catastrophic Indigenous death and cultural devastation. Disease accounted for much of the mortality, but religious institutions were deeply entangled with the colonial project. Conquerors often invoked the Requerimiento—an official legal demand drafted by Spanish authorities and read aloud before conquest. It asserted the Pope’s authority and Spain’s claim to the land, demanded submission to the Crown and acceptance of Christian preaching, and threatened war, enslavement, and dispossession for refusal. In practice it was often read to people who could not understand it, sometimes with no real translation at all. To be fair, some clergy, most famously Bartolomé de las Casas, later fought publicly against the abuse of Indigenous peoples.
Of course, violence and atrocity have also occurred outside religion, and secular ideologies have justified horrors of their own. But religion has plainly not been a reliable protection against humanity’s worst impulses.
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