Religion and Societal Harm

The argument, stated fairly

The societal harm argument against religion is not a claim that every religious person is dangerous or that every religious institution is corrupt. It is a narrower, more defensible claim: that religious belief, when given institutional power and cultural authority, has produced specific, recurring patterns of harm that secular alternatives do not. These harms are not aberrations. They are features of systems that claim divine warrant for human decisions — systems that place obedience to God above the welfare of people.

The argument does not require showing that religion is the onlycause of these harms, or even the primary one. It requires showing that religion provides unique mechanisms — divine authority, moral certainty, promises of eternal reward and punishment — that amplify harm in ways that secular ideologies typically cannot. A political leader who orders atrocities can be voted out. A god who commands them cannot be questioned.

Religious violence

The historical record is extensive. The Crusades, launched in 1095 and continuing for two centuries, killed hundreds of thousands in wars explicitly sanctioned by papal authority. The Inquisition tortured and executed thousands for the crime of holding incorrect beliefs. The European Wars of Religion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries devastated the continent, with the Thirty Years’ War alone killing an estimated eight million people — roughly a third of the population of the affected regions.

This is not ancient history. Sectarian violence between Protestants and Catholics shaped Northern Ireland for decades. Hindu-Muslim violence has claimed thousands of lives on the Indian subcontinent. Sunni-Shia conflict continues to fuel wars and terrorism across the Middle East. The September 11 attacks were carried out by men who believed, sincerely and devoutly, that they were serving God. Boko Haram kidnaps schoolgirls in the name of Islam. Buddhist monks in Myanmar have incited genocide against the Rohingya.

The standard religious response is that these actors misrepresent the true faith. But this defense proves too much. If the “true” version of a religion is always the peaceful one, and every violent manifestation is a distortion, then the religion is curiously impotent at preventing its own distortion. A system of belief that can be so easily weaponized bears some responsibility for the weapons it provides.

Institutional abuse

The Catholic Church sexual abuse scandal is not a story of a few bad priests. It is the story of a global institution that systematically protected abusers, silenced victims, and transferred known predators to new parishes where they could offend again. Investigations in Ireland, Australia, the United States, Germany, France, and dozens of other countries have revealed abuse spanning decades, involving thousands of clergy and tens of thousands of victims.

What made this possible was not merely the presence of predators — every large institution has them. What made it possible was the structure of religious authority itself. Priests were treated as representatives of God. Questioning them was tantamount to questioning the divine. Victims who spoke up were told they were endangering their own salvation. The confessional seal was used to absorb admissions of abuse without any obligation to report them. The church’s claim to moral authority became the very mechanism by which it evaded moral accountability.

This pattern is not unique to Catholicism. Sexual abuse scandals have emerged in evangelical churches, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Orthodox Jewish communities, and numerous other religious institutions. The common thread is not denomination but structure: closed systems with unaccountable leaders, divine justification for hierarchy, and intense social pressure to protect the institution at the expense of individuals.

The suppression of science and progress

Galileo’s persecution by the Catholic Church in 1633 is the most famous example, but it is far from the only one. The church’s resistance to heliocentrism was not an isolated mistake — it was the predictable outcome of a system that treats ancient texts as inerrant descriptions of physical reality. When scripture says the sun stood still for Joshua, and astronomy says the sun never moved in the first place, something has to give. For centuries, it was astronomy that gave way.

The pattern continues today. In the United States, religious lobbying has restricted stem cell research that could alleviate enormous human suffering. Creationism and its rebranded cousin “intelligent design” have been repeatedly pushed into public school science curricula, undermining science education for millions of children. Climate change denial finds a comfortable home in religious communities that believe God would not allow his creation to be destroyed by human activity, or that the end times make long-term environmental planning irrelevant.

The deeper issue is epistemological. Religion teaches that faith — belief without sufficient evidence — is a virtue. Science teaches that evidence is the only reliable path to knowledge. These are not complementary approaches. They are fundamentally opposed methods of understanding reality, and where religion has the power to enforce its epistemology, science suffers.

Social harm

The opposition to LGBTQ+ rights is overwhelmingly religious in origin. Every major campaign against same-sex marriage, every effort to criminalize homosexuality, every conversion therapy program that has tortured teenagers into despair draws its justification from religious texts and religious authority. In dozens of countries, homosexuality remains illegal, punishable by imprisonment or death, with religious law cited as the basis.

Women’s autonomy has been systematically curtailed by religious institutions across traditions. The Catholic Church’s prohibition of contraception has contributed to poverty, overpopulation, and maternal death in the developing world. Evangelical opposition to abortion rights treats women’s bodies as instruments of divine will rather than their own. Islamic law in its conservative interpretations restricts women’s freedom of movement, dress, education, and legal standing. Orthodox Judaism segregates women in worship and limits their roles in religious life.

These are not fringe positions. They are mainstream doctrines of major world religions, affecting billions of people. The harm is not theoretical — it is measured in lives constrained, opportunities denied, and suffering imposed in the name of holiness.

Psychological harm

The concept of hell — eternal, conscious torment for finite transgressions — has inflicted incalculable psychological damage. Children raised in traditions that teach the reality of hell often develop anxiety disorders, intrusive thoughts, and lasting trauma. The fear does not always fade with deconversion; many former believers report decades of residual terror, nightmares, and panic attacks long after they have intellectually rejected the doctrine.

Purity culture, prevalent in evangelical Christianity, teaches that sexual desire is inherently shameful and that a person’s moral worth is tied to their sexual “purity.” The consequences are well-documented: sexual dysfunction, shame spirals, inability to form healthy intimate relationships, and a pervasive sense that one is fundamentally broken. Women bear the brunt of this harm, as purity culture disproportionately burdens them with the responsibility for male desire.

Psychologists have identified a pattern now called Religious Trauma Syndrome — a cluster of symptoms resembling PTSD that emerges from authoritarian religious environments. Symptoms include difficulty with critical thinking and decision-making, anxiety about divine punishment, social isolation after leaving a religious community, and a pervasive sense of grief for the worldview one has lost. This is not the experience of a few fragile individuals. It is a recognizable clinical pattern produced by specific, identifiable religious practices.

The “religion does good too” response

The most common defense is that religion also produces enormous good: charity, community, meaning, comfort in suffering, motivation for social justice. This is true. Religious organizations run hospitals, feed the hungry, and provide social services in communities that secular institutions have neglected. Many of history’s great moral movements — abolitionism, the civil rights movement — drew strength from religious conviction.

But the “net good vs. net harm” framing is itself the wrong framework. The question is not whether religion produces more good than harm on balance. The question is whether the good it produces requiresthe mechanisms that also produce the harm. Can you have the charity without the authoritarianism? The community without the exclusion? The meaning without the false certainty? If so, then the harms are not the price of the benefits — they are unnecessary costs imposed by a particular delivery system.

Christopher Hitchens posed a related challenge that remains unanswered: name a moral action performed by a believer that could not have been performed by a nonbeliever. No one has produced a convincing example. But the reverse challenge is easy: name an immoral action performed because of religious belief. The list is long, specific, and continuing to grow.

Secular alternatives

The evidence from the most secular societies on Earth undermines the claim that religion is necessary for social well-being. The Scandinavian countries — Denmark, Sweden, Norway — are among the least religious nations in the world and consistently rank among the highest in happiness, social trust, life expectancy, educational attainment, and low crime. They have robust welfare states, strong communities, and a sense of shared purpose that does not require supernatural belief.

Secular institutions can and do provide the goods that religion claims as its exclusive domain. Community can be built around shared values rather than shared metaphysics. Meaning can be found in human relationships, creative work, and contributions to the common good. Moral frameworks grounded in empathy, reason, and human flourishing are not only possible — they are arguably more stable than frameworks that depend on the interpreted will of an invisible being.

None of this means that every religious person would be better off without faith, or that deconversion is easy, or that secular societies have solved every problem. It means that the harms uniquely produced by religious belief and religious institutions are not the inevitable price of human community. They are the specific costs of a specific kind of system — one that humanity is slowly, unevenly, and with great difficulty learning to outgrow.