The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 21: Historical Atrocities

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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The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 20: Religious Abuse

Abuse is unfortunately common. It affects every type of community and family. I have seen numerous cases in which religious texts or elements of religious faith were used as tools to abuse innocent children. (To protect privacy, identifying details have been altered, and some examples are composites.)

This includes one of the worst cases of emotional abuse I have seen in my career.

In this case, a teenager with a gentle, intelligent, altruistic personality—living in an affluent household—was subjected to forced “family sessions” late at night. She would be made to sit for hours in her bedroom while various family members recited Bible passages in a formal, prosecutorial tone, directed by a brutal, controlling father. The purpose was not moral guidance; it was humiliation and intimidation.

The teenager was, in fact, actively involved in altruistic leadership at a church. But the family accused her of hypocrisy and of being a “false disciple,” citing passages such as Matthew 7:21–23 and Matthew 23:13–20, and repeatedly telling her, “God has abandoned you,” alongside threats that she would go to hell.   The profound irony, of course, is that the parents were weaponizing orthodox theology in order to exert brutal control, which is exactly the hypocritical, performative arrogance that these scripture passages warn against.  

Then the family would pivot to the Old Testament, including Deuteronomy 21:18–21, which describes a “stubborn and rebellious child” being stoned to death by the community. Because she was religious herself, this experience was not merely frightening; it was  torturous—permanently traumatizing—especially in combination with the family’s other abuse and neglect.

These episodes were interspersed with the family’s evangelical outreach efforts in the community, “to spread the word.” As is often the case, the parents were seen as pious and respectable by others. Of course, abusive behavior has complex causes, and in the absence of religion these parents might have weaponized something else. But in this family, the abuse worsened as religious involvement intensified. Congregants who were aware of what was happening were horrified, but they did little to intervene beyond offering prayer.

In another example, children of a very religious mother experienced profound daily neglect and emotional abuse for years. Once again, members of the religious community did little to change the situation other than pray. When one of these children later lived in a different environment with the other non-religious parent, her quality of life improved dramatically. She grew into an intelligent, kind, outstanding young woman—though she still carries post-traumatic symptoms from that earlier phase of life.

In another, a family had previously been happy and well-integrated with the extended family, but as they became more involved in extreme fundamentalist religion, their personalities seemed to change. They became dark, angry, and suspicious, eventually estranging themselves from the rest of the family. Threatening posters appeared on their property with scriptural warnings about hell. Attempts to reach out with kindness were met with scolding condemnations about religious differences. A particular low point was an angry, rambling religious rant delivered during the funeral service of a family elder. These changes tracked with the family becoming more insular and more committed to extreme beliefs and practices. To this day, I feel for the children who had to grow up in that environment.

I have seen numerous examples of estrangement: religious parents ostracizing, shaming, or shunning children over lifestyle or belief differences—sometimes with these actions encouraged and applauded by the religious community. In other cases, religious adults shunned their aging parents, depriving them of access to grandchildren, again with some pious explanation. As always, there are contributing factors beyond religiosity—personality traits, trauma histories, rigid family systems—but it is hard to deny that dogmatic belief, combined with community endorsement, can make these problems deeper and more entrenched.

One phrase I have heard from abusive religious parents is: “turn or burn.” I find this a concise epitome of a belief that often lurks in the background: if you don’t follow my belief, you deserve to be tortured forever. It is offered as an “invitation,” but it functions as a threat. It may even be well‑meant in some warped way, yet it violates the moral foundations the religion claims to represent. Surely, if a way of life is divinely inspired, it should be compelling because it is beautiful and ethically coherent—not because it terrifies people into compliance.

It can be clarifying to hear accounts from people who have escaped abusive religious communities. Megan Phelps‑Roper is one example. One of her most useful insights is not a clever argument against dogma, but a relational one: what helped her most was sustained contact with outsiders who treated her with compassion and respect—people who were willing to build a human connection before trying to debate her beliefs.

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The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 19: Object Relations

Humans have a far more richly developed capacity for imagination than other animals. We can carry internalized representations of important relationships inside the mind. In a loose way, this resembles having an “imaginary friend,” but the point is not childish fantasy—it is a normal developmental achievement: the capacity to hold another person in mind when they are not physically present. This is one of the foundations of object relations theory, one of the more insightful and useful branches of psychoanalysis.

Developmentally, we are initially comforted by a literal parent. Over time, we can also carry in memory an internalized representation of the parent—something like an inner sense of their presence, values, and voice—which can be comforting and stabilizing even when we are alone. This helps us develop confidence and emotional continuity, and it helps us cope with separation and, eventually, grief if a loved one dies.

For many people, religious life includes an internalized relationship with an idealized figure they call God. In much Western Christian imagery (and often in people’s mental pictures), this figure is imagined in human form—often as a bearded man, sometimes portrayed as white—despite the Middle Eastern Biblical setting of the “Holy Land” and the diversity of human appearance worldwide. Many people experience this internal figure as gentle, kind, fatherly, all-knowing, loving, wise, consistent, coach-like, or even therapist-like. Others internalize a divine figure who feels stern or frightening, poised to punish wrongdoing. Often these images reflect what people have learned to associate with authority, safety, and love in their own families and communities—whether authority is experienced as warm and reassuring, or strict and punitive.

Just like relationships with living humans, people can become fiercely loyal to these internal relationship figures—sometimes to extremes, including willingness to suffer or die in service of what they experience as sacred. And because this relationship is experienced as profoundly real, it is unsurprising that many believers feel anger or grief when someone frames it as “imaginary,” or as an internal construct rather than an external reality.

Many traditions also include a personified concept of ultimate evil—often described in devil-like terms. Psychologically, this can make moral struggle more vivid and narratively coherent: it reframes temptation, cruelty, or regretful behavior as a battle against an external force rather than as a confrontation with one’s own capacity for harm. In a tight-knit community, shared belief in external evil can sometimes make reintegration easier: if wrongdoing can be attributed to “the Devil” rather than to the person’s character, the community may find it easier to forgive—especially if a ritual of repentance, prayer, or “deliverance” has been performed. But there is a downside as well: externalizing evil can blunt accountability, and it can also encourage projection—seeing “the Devil” in outsiders, dissenters, or scapegoats—fueling fear, prejudice, or moral panic.

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The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 18: Prayer

Prayer may mean different things to different people. For many, it is a meditative act: a type of philosophical reflection with existential themes, a kind of relaxation therapy, a “grounding” moment. The praying person may believe they are having a conversation with God. The manner in which God is understood to speak back is often taken in a broad, figurative way—for example, if the person subsequently has a new idea, an inclination, a redoubling of confidence, or a wave of emotion that feels like guidance. Other people may not expect that God will “speak back” at all; they may be content simply to vent, confess, grieve, or reflect within a reverent framework. In some ways this resembles classical psychoanalysis: the listener is largely silent, and the act of speaking—slowly, honestly, repeatedly—becomes the mechanism.

For many people, prayer is simply reflective or meditative: a grounding moment, a way to name fears and hopes, a way to feel less alone. But many people also pray for things—for an outcome to change, for an illness to heal, for a surgery to go well, for a war to end, for a relationship to mend. That kind of prayer is different. If it is literally effective, it would mean that events in the physical world are being altered—something in the normal chain of causation is being nudged off course. And if this were happening in a consistent, repeatable way, you would expect to see clear clusters of unusually good outcomes in places where people pray the most, or where the “right” kind of prayer is supposedly most common. You would expect the world to look, especially in more religious areas, as though the ordinary rules of physics are being bent on request. I am not aware of any such pattern.

When researchers have tried to test this carefully—especially with “praying for someone else” (intercessory prayer)—the results have not produced a solid, repeatable signal. A well-known example is the STEP trial in cardiac bypass patients: people were randomized to receive or not receive intercessory prayer, and another group was told with certainty that they were being prayed for. Overall, prayer did not reduce medical complications. Interestingly, the group who knew they were being prayed for actually did a bit worse: complications were reported in 59% of those certain they were receiving prayer versus 52% in a comparison group. One plausible explanation is psychological: once a person is told “people are praying for you,” it can quietly raise the pressure. What if I don’t get better? What does that mean about me? About God? About my faith? For someone already frightened and vulnerable, that extra layer—expectation, scrutiny, the sense that a spiritual “test” is underway—can add stress rather than comfort.


It is not hard to consider other thought experiments: if prayer were an instrumental force capable of altering physical reality, we would expect to see distinct epidemiological advantages in highly religious regions. We would expect higher rates of spontaneous remission from illness, fewer natural disasters, and lower mortality rates in areas where people pray more often or hold the supposedly correct beliefs. Yet, when comparing regions with similar socioeconomic and demographic baselines, this supernatural dividend is entirely absent; in fact, highly secular democracies consistently boast the best objective markers of societal health. While religion undeniably provides robust psychological comfort, social cohesion, and subjective well-being to its practitioners, the data reveals a strictly secular mechanism at play. This resilience is not derived from the literal truth of dogmatic claims or divine intervention. Rather, it emerges from the profound social capital of a supportive community and the stabilizing architecture of a shared belief system—even a fundamentally fictional one. Such overarching frameworks equip individuals with a coherent narrative, allowing them to intellectually and emotionally process adversity, uncertainty, and loss more efficiently. But as a mechanism for changing the external, physical world, prayer demonstrates no measurable effect.

Spatial Language

One small point about human religious behaviour, deriving from ancient practice, is the spatial language: “God above.” People sometimes literally look upward when praying. But “up” points in different directions depending on where you are on Earth; and it changes minute by minute as the Earth rotates, orbits the sun, and as the solar system moves through the galaxy. A person in Australia looking up towards Heaven is looking in the same direction as someone in North America looking downwards into the ground. It is a pre-Copernican spatial metaphor, entangled with the older intuition that “up is good, down is bad.”

Of course, “looking upward” is often figurative—but many people do take it quite literally. If one were going to take the gesture literally, it would be just as “valid” to look downward, or inward into one’s own body. If God is omnipresent, shouldn’t God be as present in the depths of the planet—or in our own bodies—as in the sky? The gesture tells us less about the geography of a deity than about the structure of the human imagination.

A related embodied metaphor shows up in some fundamentalist worship styles: people in an entranced state reach forward with their hands during songs or prayer—eyes half-closed, rocking, repeating sacred phrases, emotional intensity magnified by the synchrony of peers. This can be understood as a normal human ecstatic gesture, an ability present in all cultures with or without religion. But the gesture still implies a spatial location of God—reaching out to take God’s warmth with one’s hands, as though God were physically located just ahead, perhaps in the front of the building. Again, the scene tells us much about embodied human longing, and very little about the actual location of a deity.

Prayer & Empathy

The moral structure of prayer often mirrors the moral structure of empathy. Many people’s prayers are genuinely compassionate: they think of struggling friends or family members, or of terrible world events, and they ask for comfort, protection, and healing. But if prayer is believed to cause divine comfort to arrive, this raises an uncomfortable counterfactual: if the prayer had not occurred, would comfort have been withheld? Shouldn’t a loving deity comfort suffering people regardless of whether someone happens to pray for them—especially since some of the worst suffering on earth occurs in isolation, unnoticed, with no one else even aware enough to pray? It suggests a troubling arrangement where God’s help isn’t based on who is suffering the most, but on who is lucky enough to be noticed.

This is also where it helps to remember Paul Bloom’s critique of empathy (see my review of his book, Against Empathy). Empathy is often biased and therefore unjust: it is pulled toward people who resemble us, toward vivid stories, toward those whose suffering is emotionally dramatic, while neglecting the quiet, the distant, the stigmatized, and the statistically larger tragedies that do not come with a single tear-streaked face. Prayer often inherits this same distortion. We pray intensely for the salient and familiar, and far less for abstract fairness, or for the invisible victims who never make it into our attention.

Many prayers are not about others at all; they are about wishing something for oneself. There are battlefield prayers. Prayers before a medical procedure. Prayers for money, for a job, for the return of an ex-partner, for relief from chronic pain, for the outcome of a baseball pitch or a hockey game. As a meditative act, this is deeply understandable. But psychologically it can set up a reinforcement loop: if the prayer is followed by a good outcome, the person will naturally feel it “worked,” and will be bolstered to pray again. If the outcome is bad, the person may conclude they didn’t pray sincerely enough, or long enough, or correctly enough—or that God was busy, or displeased, or testing them. Either way, the practice becomes insulated from disconfirmation.

This helps explain why prayer works psychologically, even if the supernatural claims aren't true. As a form of meditation or reflection, it can be calming and help organize our thoughts. But as a way to change the laws of physics or alter the course of events, it has no effect but still functions as a self-reinforcing loop. When a prayer is followed by a desired outcome, it is taken as proof of God’s power. When it isn't, the failure is easily explained away—either God said 'no,' or we didn't pray with enough faith. This dynamic validates the belief system regardless of the result, but it places a burden on the believer—creating the illusion that their personal spiritual effort is the decisive factor in changing reality.


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The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 17: Shepherding

A related religious metaphor is shepherding. Jesus is called the “Good Shepherd,” and there are many other biblical passages that liken God to a shepherd. It is a beautiful image, and as a child I absorbed it in exactly that spirit: kindly pastoral artwork, a gentle man with a hooked staff, sunny hills, a flock of woolly friends, perhaps one little sheep who has wandered off and needs to be carried back to safety.

But it is worth pausing to remember what shepherding actually meant in that time and place. Sheep were not kept as pets. They were livestock: valued for wool and milk, yes, but also raised for meat—and sometimes for sacrifice. Sacrifice would involve securing the animal using iron rings in front of an altar, cutting the animal's throat, collecting its blood in a special container, the blood then splashed against the altar; next, the animal would be hung from a hook, skinned, then various organs would be removed and burned.


A shepherd’s role was not only protection and guidance; it also involved ownership, control, and (eventually) decisions about which animals would be killed, sacrificed, or eaten. In that light, “being shepherded” contains an unsettling double meaning: you are kept from straying, guarded from wolves, and held within the safety of the flock—but you are also being managed toward ends that are not your own.

And if we push the image just one step closer to lived reality, it gets darker in a way the children’s illustrations never hinted at. Imagine being a sheep in the flock: every so often the younger males—your cousins, in a sense—are taken away. Perhaps they are led toward a little shed at the edge of the field, or down a path behind a stand of trees, and they are simply never seen again. The flock goes on grazing. The shepherd is still “protecting” the flock. But the protection is inseparable from a system in which some members are quietly designated for disappearance.

To be fair, the Christian image in particular tries to invert the usual arrangement: the “Good Shepherd” is portrayed as laying down his life for the sheep. That is morally striking. Still, the metaphor does something psychologically and socially important: it trains us to admire a certain kind of relationship—one in which docility is a virtue, “straying” is a moral failure, and the authority to define what counts as straying belongs to the shepherd.

The phrase “sheep gone astray” appears repeatedly in scripture, usually as a metaphor for human misbehavior. But actual sheep that never “go astray” do not graduate into freedom; they remain in the flock under management. As a child I never thought of this. Now I think the metaphor is revealing, because it quietly captures a profoundly unsettling moral posture: the idealization of a passive, domesticated existence where total subjugation is rebranded as pastoral care, and where the ultimate reward for perfect obedience is to remain in a community where you and your peers are quietly led to a brutal end, dictated entirely by the whims of the shepherd.

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