THE CASE AGAINST CHRISTIANITY

This isn't a stretch or a bad reading. It comes straight from the text. Leviticus (18:22, 20:13) calls sex between men an "abomination." Paul's letter to the Romans (1:26–27) calls it "unnatural." First Corinthians (6:9) says men who sleep with men won't "inherit the kingdom of god." These lines get quoted from pulpits and in court, over and over, to justify keeping gay people out of marriage, out of the clergy, and out of basic respect.

The Catholic Church still calls gay sex "intrinsically disordered." Many evangelical churches won't ordain openly gay clergy at all. This didn't stay inside church walls — it became policy, and in dozens of countries, that policy is still the law.

Then there's what churches built to "fix" it. Exodus International spent 37 years telling gay people their orientation was a disorder that prayer and discipline could cure. In 2013 the ministry shut down — and its own president, Alan Chambers, publicly said sorry, admitting the program almost never worked and left lasting damage instead.

Ephesians (5:22–24) tells wives to submit to their husbands "as to the Lord." Timothy (2:11–12) doesn't hedge: women shouldn't teach, shouldn't hold authority over a man, and should stay quiet in church. First Corinthians (14:34–35) says the same — if a woman has a question, she should ask her husband at home. These aren't obscure lines. They're still used today to keep women out of the pulpit.

The Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church won't ordain women at all — that's doctrine, not custom. In 2023, the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant group in America, expelled churches for having women pastors, including Saddleback, one of the best-known megachurches in the country. This isn't ancient history. It happened three years ago.

Then there's purity culture: virginity pledges, purity rings, and "purity balls" where girls promise to stay sexually pure to their own fathers until marriage. Almost all of this is aimed at girls, tying their worth to their sex life. People who grew up in it have spent years since writing and speaking about the shame and anxiety it left behind.

You don't need to dig for obscure examples here. This is one long, connected record — from the Rhine valley in 1096 to a Canadian schoolyard in 1996 — of violence carried out with the church's blessing, paid for by dioceses, and preached as righteous at the time it happened.

Scroll through nine centuries of it below.

In 2004, the John Jay College of Criminal Justice finished the biggest study ever done on child sexual abuse by Catholic clergy in the U.S. — paid for by the Catholic bishops themselves. It found real allegations against 4,392 priests, about 4% of all clergy active between 1950 and 2002, involving 10,667 victims. By that point the church had already paid $572.5 million in settlements and related costs. That number has only grown since.

This wasn't just an American problem. Australia's national inquiry found that 7% of Catholic priests there were accused of child sexual abuse between 1950 and 2010. Ireland's own investigations found the same pattern across church-run institutions for most of the last century.

The real problem wasn't just the abuse — every kind of institution has abusers in it somewhere. It was the cover-up: priests who were credibly accused kept getting moved to new parishes and new schools with fresh access to children, instead of being reported to police. When the Boston Globe broke this story in 2002, they didn't find one scandal. They found a system.

In 1633, the Roman Inquisition put Galileo on trial for teaching that the Earth orbits the sun. He was forced to publicly take it back and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. The church didn't admit it was wrong quietly, either — it took until 1992, 359 years later, for the Vatican to say so.

That instinct never went away. A 2024 Gallup poll found that 37% of Americans — more than one in three — believe god made humans in their current form within the last 10,000 years. That flatly contradicts fossils, genetics, and geology. It's the lowest that number has ever been in Gallup's decades of tracking. It's still over a third of the country.

It's not just belief, either. The Catholic Church's 1968 rule, Humanae Vitae, still officially bans birth control. Catholic-run hospitals, which make up a large and growing share of hospital beds in the U.S., follow religious rules that limit tubal ligation, IVF, the morning-after pill, and abortion care — no matter what the patient believes, just because of who owns the building.

A secular government exists to settle disputes between people who don't all share one religion — or share none at all. The second a law's only real reason is "because scripture says so," it stops being a law for everyone and becomes a law for one church, forced on people who never signed up for it. That's not a small detail. That's the whole reason church and state are supposed to be separate.

Christian nationalism isn't a scare word. It's a real, growing movement you can measure. PRRI's polling finds roughly three in ten Americans count as believers or supporters of the idea that the U.S. should be an officially Christian nation. Among white evangelical Protestants alone, that number is over 60%.

The mixing goes back further than any one law. "In god We Trust" only became the U.S. motto in 1956. "Under god" was added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954. Both came from a Cold War push against "godless communism" — proof that the line between church and state here has always been more talk than fact. And the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade wasn't some random legal shift. It was the finish line of a decades-long legal campaign, funded and run by religious advocacy groups who say so themselves.

Leviticus (25:44–46) openly allows buying slaves "from the nations around you," to be held "as property" and passed down like an inheritance. The New Testament doesn't end the practice — it tells slaves to obey their masters "with fear and trembling" (Ephesians 6:5) and "in everything" (Titus 2:9). American slaveholders didn't need to twist scripture to defend it. They could just read it.

The Southern Baptist Convention was founded in 1845 over exactly this fight: a split with northern Baptists over whether missionaries could own slaves. It took 150 years, until 1995, for the SBC to formally apologize for defending slavery and its part in racism.

Christian antisemitism has its own long paper trail. In 1215, the church ordered Jews to wear clothing that marked them apart. The blood libel — a made-up medieval story that Jews murdered Christian children for rituals — set off massacres across Europe for centuries. In 1543, Martin Luther wrote a pamphlet calling for synagogues to be burned. And the idea that Jews were collectively guilty for the death of Christ — used for almost 2,000 years to justify persecuting them — wasn't formally taken back by the Catholic Church until 1965.

Hell isn't a small detail in mainstream Christian belief — it's central to it. Teaching children that endless, conscious torture awaits the wrong belief, before they're even old enough to think it through, only works because the fear is way bigger than anything a child could reason their way out of. Jonathan Edwards' 1741 sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," is still taught in American literature classes as a classic of the style — and at the time, it was preached completely seriously, as a lesson for the congregation.

There's also a basic fairness problem here. A god who supposedly knows exactly what it would take to convince every single person on Earth — and still lets the unconvinced burn forever — isn't handing out justice. That's not a new complaint. As one commentator, Richard Lael Lillard, has put it, a deity that already knows exactly what proof each person needs, and withholds it anyway, doesn't get to call the resulting punishment fair.

Psychologist Marlene Winell coined the term "religious trauma syndrome" in 2011 to describe a pattern she kept seeing in people who left high-control religious groups: constant anxiety, trouble making their own decisions, and a shaky sense of who they are, built around a fear of hell that doesn't just switch off once the belief does.

Shunning makes it worse. Some fundamentalist and separatist religious groups formally cut off all contact with members who leave or disagree — not by accident, but as an actual rule, built to make leaving as painful as possible.

The prosperity gospel makes a simple, testable promise: give money to the ministry, and god will multiply it back to you. This has actually been tested. It fails, constantly, for the people giving — and pays off big for the people collecting.

Jim Bakker's PTL ministry fell apart in 1987 in a fraud scandal that sent him to prison. Faith healer Peter Popoff got caught on live TV in 1986 after investigator James Randi proved his "divine" knowledge of people's illnesses actually came from a hidden earpiece, fed by his wife backstage — and he rebuilt an even bigger ministry afterward anyway. In 2007, the U.S. Senate opened a formal investigation into six major televangelist ministries over their lack of financial transparency.

The private jets are real, not a rumor. In 2015, televangelist Creflo Dollar publicly asked his followers to fund a $65 million private jet. Kenneth Copeland Ministries has owned several private planes, paid for largely through donations — and none of it taxed.

Ask someone to prove god is real, and sooner or later, they point to the bible. Ask how we know the bible is true, and the answer is usually: because it's god's word. That's the whole argument, and it just goes in a circle. A book can't prove itself true by saying so. No court, no scientist, and no bank would accept that kind of proof for anything else in life.

People also point to nature, or a strong feeling, or say "you can't prove god doesn't exist." None of that gets you very far. A vague sense that "something is out there" isn't the same as the specific god of the bible — one who wrote one book, sent one son, and will judge every person who has ever lived. For a claim that specific, the bible is still the only source anyone can point to. And a claim that can only be checked against itself isn't a fact. It's a belief, wearing a fact's clothes.

Most christians never picked their religion as adults after weighing the evidence. They were born into it. Babies get baptized before they can talk. Small kids learn about hell before they learn long division. By the time someone is old enough to actually question any of it, they've usually already been taught that doubt itself is dangerous — a sin, a trick from the devil, a sign something is wrong with them. That's not persuasion. That's just getting there first, before the other side of the argument is even allowed in the room.

This is part of why religion doesn't spread the way a good idea spreads on its own merit. It spreads the way a first language spreads: you get the one your parents speak, and by the time you're old enough to learn a different one, this one already feels like home.