Holy Hell by Vyrse

In 1587 the pope made castration excommunicable. In 1589 the same pope hired four castrati for St Peter's. For three centuries the church bought the voices of boys cut at eight years old — each one legally required to...

A local historian bought 796 death certificates with her own money and found no graves. The state confirmed "significant quantities of human remains" in the chambers of a disused sewage system at a Catholic...

On July 22, 1209, a crusading army massacred the Catholic town of Béziers for sheltering 222 accused heretics. The famous quote is a legend no eyewitness recorded. The legate's own letter to the Pope is worse: "neither...

For 20 years America's largest Protestant denomination told abuse survivors that tracking predators was impossible. Its own commissioned investigation found the Executive Committee had been keeping a secret list the...

In 1543 the father of the Reformation published a numbered program: burn the synagogues, raze the homes, seize the books, expel the people. In 1938 a Lutheran bishop celebrated Kristallnacht as its birthday fulfillment...

A religious industry sold orientation change to 700,000 Americans. The APA found no evidence it works; its own flagship president admitted a 99.9% failure rate and shut it down with an apology; and in 2015 a unanimous...

On May 20, 1631, the Catholic League's army stormed Protestant Magdeburg. Four in five inhabitants died and the city burned to its stones. The soldiers nicknamed the massacre a wedding, and Catholic Europe sang...

In Duplessis-era Quebec, an orphan brought $1.25 a day in subsidy; a psychiatric patient brought $2.75. So church-run institutions certified thousands of healthy children insane and converted orphanages into asylums...

In 1941 a fascist state made Catholicism the price of survival: it outlawed a faith by decree, forcibly converted 200,000 people, and murdered tens of thousands at a camp commanded, for a time, by a Franciscan friar. A...

In most of America, a 1974 rule written under church lobbying made it legal to pray instead of calling a doctor while a child died. Oregon repealed its shield and convicted the parents. Idaho kept its shield, and a...

Leopold II seized the Congo as his private property and sold it to the world as a Christian "civilizing mission." Behind the cross was a rubber regime that cut off hands by the basket and killed on a scale we still...

In the 1980s, evangelical spiritual-warfare theology convinced America that satanic cults were abusing children in its daycares. There was no conspiracy. But the trials were real, and innocent people served decades. The...

For four hundred years, the enslavement of Africans leaned on the "Curse of Ham" in Genesis 9. The catch: the text curses Canaan, not Ham, is about servitude, and never mentions race or skin color at all. Read the full...

Uganda's Anti-Homosexuality Act quotes no verse, but for "aggravated" cases it hands down the sentence Leviticus 20:13 does: death. The panic that produced it was fanned by American evangelicals. The same literal...

In 1493, a Pope drew a line across an ocean and gave away the Western Hemisphere. The Doctrine of Discovery didn’t just authorize colonization. It became U.S. law. The Vatican repudiated it in 2023. American courts have...