The Price Paid in Gods Name!

By Warwick Dunnett   ·  3 min 45 sec read  ·  May 15, 2026

How much injustice has really occurred in the name of religion over the years?

 Let's start with people who have died fighting religious wars. I'll then move on to the number of children who have been abused.

Sadly, millions of people have been killed in holy wars. During the nine Christian Crusades against Muslims, over 1.5 million people died (Historians debate the exact figure.) That number of deaths represents a percentage of the world population at the time, which in today’s terms would equal around 30 million people or more dead. That is a huge loss of life.

 Even without considering the tragic historical loss of life in religious wars, it is impossible to ignore more recent atrocities in the form of the thousands of children who’ve been abused by God’s representatives just in our lifetime. In 2021, an independent French commission recently released a 2,500-page report indicating that as many as 330,000 children may have been abused in France alone over the last 70 years.^[1]

 The Conference of Catholic Bishops in the USA also released its own report in 2004, stating that at least 5.9% of its priests (nearly 7,800) had been credibly accused of sexual abuse of children since 1950, with well over 20,000 survivors of that abuse. Studies suggest that generally, only 12% to 33% of child sexual abuse in the USA is reported, so it doesn’t take a high level of math to assume that the number of children abused by clergy in the USA could easily exceed 100,000 during those 70-odd years (My personal extrapolation).

 Obviously, throughout the centuries, hundreds of millions of people worldwide have been murdered or endured horrific suffering visited upon them by believers using religious texts to justify their actions. Nevertheless, denouncing religion outright as a fallacy having terrible consequences wouldn’t be fair. Organised religions do serve a valuable purpose—bringing people together and providing a set of moral guidelines needed to create civilised communities. Also, and most importantly, we all benefit from something to believe in during dark times.

If being a follower of one of the significant religions gives you comfort, go for it! Dive in and believe. Fill your heart with that belief and start the road to recovery in whatever way feels best for you. However, I hope that those who read Dance with Angels will follow their chosen faith without ignoring the past and will advocate for the prevention of similar atrocities in the future.

Although I enjoy the community from church, unfortunately I don’t currently feel that I can dismiss all the past injustices and wholeheartedly jump headfirst into one of the major religions without some significant reservations. But that's a personal decision and everybody should decide this for themselves of course.