Does religion cause more harm than good?
A net-ledger debate over religion's historical and present record: wars, repression, and dogma weighed against charity, art, community, and moral motivation.
Overview
Closely related to the question of religion's social value, this framing asks for an overall verdict on the historical balance sheet. It is unusually hard because the relevant effects are vast, entangled with politics and economics, and resist clean measurement.
A serious answer resists both the triumphalist history that credits religion with every good and the polemical history that blames it for every atrocity. The interesting disagreement is about how to attribute causes when religion is one factor among many.
The strongest arguments on each side
The case for More harm
- Sanctified violence. Religious justification has fueled crusades, inquisitions, and sectarian wars, lending absolute conviction to conflict and making compromise feel like betrayal.
- Repression of inquiry and rights. Doctrinal authority has suppressed science, free expression, and the rights of women, minorities, and dissenters in many times and places.
- Resistance to moral progress. On slavery, gender, and sexuality, religious institutions have often defended the status quo long after reformers made the moral case for change.
- Faith over evidence. Elevating belief without evidence as a virtue can normalize credulity that travels into health and politics.
The case for More good
- Foundational institutions. Religious traditions seeded universities, hospitals, and charities, and underwrote much of the world's art, music, and architecture.
- Engine of reform too. Abolition, civil rights, and humanitarian movements drew leaders and language from religious conviction as often as opposition did.
- Misattributed causes. Many 'religious' wars were driven by territory, ethnicity, and power; the bloodiest twentieth-century regimes were explicitly secular, complicating the blame.
- Measurable individual goods. Studies link participation to charitable giving, volunteering, and resilience, benefits that scale across whole communities.
Key thinkers
- Christopher HitchensMade the prosecutorial case in 'God Is Not Great'.
- Steven PinkerArgued moral progress owes much to secular Enlightenment reason.
- Martin Luther King Jr.Grounded civil-rights activism in religious conviction.
- Charles TaylorTraced the complex emergence of 'A Secular Age'.
Common fallacies to avoid
- Selective body counts. Tallying only the atrocities (or only the charities) that fit one's conclusion.
- Single-cause history. Reducing complex wars or reforms to religion alone, ignoring economics and politics.
- Survivorship bias. Crediting religion with cultural goods that survived while ignoring what it suppressed.
A short history of the debate
The accusatory case has roots in Enlightenment anticlericalism and was sharpened by twentieth-century secularists. The defense draws on a longer apologetic tradition and, more recently, on social-science findings about religion's individual benefits.
The 2000s 'New Atheist' bestsellers reframed the question for a mass audience, prompting historians and sociologists to insist on disaggregating 'religion' into specific institutions, doctrines, and eras before any net verdict can be reached.