By William Sierichs Jr.

As early as 1437, conversos complained they were being discriminated against. Segregation increased in the 1440s in Castile. Despite critics who argued that a Christian was a Christian whatever his or her ancestry, the drive to keep society “pure” of “tainted” Jewish blood increased through the 1400s, leading to the general expulsion order of 1492. The Inquisition was a major force behind this. A 1483 papal edict required inquisitors to be “Old Christians.” The infamous 15th-century Grand Inquisitor Tomas de Torquemada of Spain proposed in 1484 that the children and grandchildren of conversos condemned by the Inquisition should be barred not only from public offices but also from numerous occupations, such as surgeon, shopkeeper, broker and money-changer. Royal decrees in 1501 upheld this discrimination. Some religious organizations rejected Jewish and Moorish conversos. Spanish universities likewise barred converso teachers. The last remnants of “purity of blood” discrimination were not ended until the 19th century. This discrimination constrained marriages by stamping a figurative scarlet letter on conversos’ descendants.

Prominent Protestants also feared mixed marriages. John Calvin warned Protestants against marrying Roman Catholics: “The Lord has many ways of avenging contempt of his Word. In contracting Marriage (seeing that the Lord has hitherto left your liberty in this respect entire) consider in what fetters you entangle yourself, if you take a wife differing from you in religion! … [A Protestant might think he could convert his wife] Do not vainly promise this of yourself, but of the Lord, seeing a good wife is His special gift. (Prov. xix.14.) And how can you expect a good wife from Him whom you will not hear while strictly prohibiting you from being ‘yoked with unbelievers?’ (2 Cor. vi.14.).” Calvin equated Roman Catholics with pagans and “heretics” here.

In a long-running 17th-century debate, John Cotton, a defender of the Massachusetts Puritan theocracy, attacked expelled Baptist leader Roger Williams’ views on religious freedom and tolerance. Cotton was certain that it was dissenters from Puritanism who were a pollution. In one attack on Williams, Cotton also mentioned 2 Cor. 6:14-18 and said: “… it onely requireth comming out from Idolaters in the fellowship of their Idolatry. No marriages were they to make with them …”

A 1658 New Plymouth, Mass., colony law decreed, “… Carnall copulation before or without lawfull [marriage] contract shalbee punished” by whippings, fines and imprisonment. This had a discriminatory effect as the colony did not allow non-Puritan churches or religious rites. So if colony had any Baptists, Quakers or Catholics, they could not wed without violating his/her Christian beliefs, yet couples would be punished if they had non-martial sex.

Also in 1658, English Puritans issued the Savoy Declaration, which asserted their god had ordained marriage for “preventing of uncleanness,” among other reasons. Therefore, “… it is the duty of Christians to marry in the Lord, and therefore such as profess the true Reformed religion, should not marry with Infidels, Papists, or other Idolaters; neither should such as are godly, be unequally yoaked by marrying with such as are wicked in their life, or maintain damnable Heresie.” “Papist” was Protestant slang for Roman Catholic. 2 Cor. 6:14 again.

In a history of French law, Professor of Legal History Jean Brissaud described the Christian nature of its government, and, as a consequence, “The first duty of the prince was to enforce the laws of the Church … [including laws] for the religious marriage.”

In the 16th century, French Catholics and Protestants waged the series of brutal Huguenot Wars, finally reaching a truce with a mandate of toleration in the Edict of Nantes. However, Brissaud explained, Louis XIV revoked the edict in 1685, and among his decrees, “All Protestant ministers were required to leave the kingdom … On the contrary, it was forbidden to ordinary members to depart from France …” All Protestants were forced to “convert” to Catholicism. “The result of this fiction was: 1st, to subject to the penalties prescribed for the offense of relapsing (death, confiscation) all Protestants who exercised their cult; 2d, to render impossible marriage among them except by a Catholic priest; if he refused to perform the ceremony, they could not marry and had no civil status; their children were considered bastards and they themselves were accounted as living in concubinage.”

In Germany, religious freedom was slowly extended in the 19th century, but, “Notwithstanding this, certain restrictions were regarded as still existent, — for example the well-known prohibition in certain States of marriages between Christians and non-Christians …,” German Professor of Legal History Rudolf Huebner said.

As a state, Austria had had an official relationship with the Vatican since at least the 1448 Concordat of Vienna. Although Orthodox Catholics and Protestants eventually gained some protections in the later 18th century, an 1855 Austria-Vatican Concordat expanded Catholic Church power, restricting Jews and Protestants again while giving the church power over marriages and other civic activities.

In the (future) U.S., Christian prejudice against “impurity” with a pagan underlay the prosecution of a man in the Virginia colony: “September 17th, 1630. Hugh Davis to be soundly whipped, before an assembly of Negroes and others for abusing himself to the dishonor of God and shame of Christians, by defiling his body in lying with a negro; which fault he is to acknowledge next Sabbath day.” Another settler, Robert Sweet, was punished in 1640 for impregnating a black slave, who was whipped.

The same sentiment operated in a 1662 Virginia law that “mulatto bastards” held the legal status of the mother — i.e., a slave woman gave birth to a slave child, a free mother a free child — and concluded: “… And that if any christian shall committ Fornication with a negro man or woman, hee or shee soe offending shall pay double the Fines imposed by the former act.” This was the ultimate origin of the law against what later become known as “interracial” marriage or sex that the U.S. Supreme Court overturned in Loving vs. Virginia in 1967. Science says evolutionary theory shows that “race” is pseudoscientific nonsense; its survival in the Western world lies in Christian theology, not in biological science.

That’s why, in sentencing the Lovings, a mixed-race married couple, in 1958 for violating the race law, Caroline County, Va., Circuit Court Judge Leon M. Bazile said: “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intended for the races to mix.” Scientifically, this is nonsense, as skin color and body features evolved in response to local conditions, such as the amount of sunlight available. Gods have nothing to do with it.

The Lovings were expelled from Virginia under threat of prison if they returned; their lawsuit led the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn all interracial marriage bans. The judge’s comment shows the Christian origin of those laws was not forgotten after 300 years.

Other Virginia laws likewise distinguished between “Christian” and “negro,” making clear the religious basis of this bigotry. In the 17th century, all European Christians were “white.” It was only when the modern concept of “race” was developed in the later 18th century that Christians retroactively used it to “explain” why dark-skinned pagans were so “inferior” to white Christians that they either refused to convert, thereby clinging to Satan, or converted in ways that conflicted with traditional Christianity, such as including some pagan beliefs in their practices. “Race” originally was a synonym for ethnicity, such as the English race, the French race, etc.

More interestingly, when Maryland made slavery permanent for blacks and added a marriage ban in September 1664, the Christian-pagan distinction shows up indirectly: “… forasmuch as divers freeborne English women forgettfull of their free Condicion and to the disgrace of our Nation doe intermarry with Negro Slaues by which alsoe diuers suites may arise touching the Issue of such woemen and a great damage doth befall the Masters of such Negros for preuention whereof for deterring such freeborne women from such shamefull Matches Bee itt further Enacted … That whatsoever free borne woman shall inter marry with any slaue from and after the Last day of this present Assembly shall Serue the master of such slaue dureing the life of her husband And that all the Issue of such freeborne woemen soe marryed shall be Slaues as their fathers were And Bee itt further Enacted that all the Issues of English or other freeborne woemen that haue already marryed Negroes shall serve the Masters of their Parents till they be Thirty years of age and noe longer.”

Notice that the law does not distinguish the parties by “race.” By law, “freeborne English women” had to be Christians.

Another 1662 Virginia law required women servants impregnated by a master to be sold into servitude for an additional two years. Initially, this would have affected more white women than black, as black slaves did not become the majority until after this period. A 1691 Virginia law, Act XVI, said that if any free English woman (whites could still be indentured servants) had a child by a “Negro,” she would have to pay 15 pounds to the church wardens; if she could not pay or if she were an indentured servant, the church wardens were to sell her into slavery for five years and the child into slavery until it was 30 years old. The law also banished any “English or other white man or woman, bond or free,” who married a Negro, mulatto or Indian. Here, churches were chief enforcers of a prejudicial law and benefited from slavery. “White” and “mulatto” show color consciousness, but still do not indicate any concept of “race.”

One abolitionist attack on slavery was its destruction of slave marriages. While there was an obvious economic element in disavowing slave marriages, so that a cash-strapped owner could sell any slave he wished, as noted elsewhere in these articles, under Christian theology, marriage was solely a Christian institution, so no non-Christian marriages were legitimate.

While the concept of “race” became the foundation of opposition to freedom for slaves before 1865 or equality and marriages between whites and blacks after the Civil War, the Christian basis of racism surfaced in various ways. Several post-war books put forward religious arguments, based on the Bible — and usually what we would call a literalist, creationist viewpoint today — that declared blacks were inferior by divine mandate and as such could not be allowed to mix with the superior white race. Although these books often were intellectually crude, and their arguments were rejected by liberal Christians, they had audiences among conservative Christians because they echoed popular prejudices, some of which I’ve heard in my lifetime, such as the Africans are “like apes” insult.

One representative expression of this popular bigotry is in the books of Charles Carroll. In “The Negro a Beast” (1900), he claimed Africans were soul-less and that marriages between whites and blacks produced monstrosities: mulattos. Carroll said mulattos were “upon the earth in violation of Divine law. Hence it is not a part of God’s creation. And there can never be any peace between God and man so long as this corrupted flesh is permitted to ‘defile’ the earth with its presence.”

Carroll expanded his argument in “The Tempter of Eve” (1902), claiming the serpent of Gen. 3 was not Satan: “All the circumstances indicate that the beast of the field which tempted Eve was a negress, who served Eve in the capacity of maid servant; that Eve became too confidential and familiar with this negress and was imposed upon by her. … It is evident that this was the initial step in the execution of a cunningly devised scheme to deceive the woman into violating the laws of God.” Carroll claimed the first crime of Adam and Eve was to listen to an “animal,” because God gave them dominion over animals: “… it was the duty of Adam and Eve to control [the negress] in common with the rest of the animals. But instead of controlling this negress, Eve accepted the negress as her counselor … This reveals the startling fact that it was man’s social equality with the negro that brought sin into the world.”

Carroll argued that whites had a natural bond of love and sympathy with God, but blacks (“apes”) and mixed-race individuals could not. Even if they inherited such knowledge of that god from white ancestors, mixed-race peoples “soon lose all confidence in an invisible God” and turned to idolatry. “This reveals the startling truth that the idolatry for which God punished Israel and her neighboring nations, had its origin in amalgamation. When the whites of a nation are absorbed by amalgamation, their mixed-blooded descendants ultimately descend to idolatry …” Carroll claimed that as a result of race-mixing after the flood of Gen. 6-8 “… atheism and idolatry, the twin crimes which owe their birth to amalgamation, increased at the expense of monotheism. This struggle for supremacy between monotheism on the one side and atheism and idolatry on the other, finally culminated in war.” Thus, “the God-believing, God-loving people, widely scattered among the remnant of pure whites, became more and more powerless to withstand the overwhelming tide of atheism, negroism and idolatry that had practically swept monotheism from the globe …” This essentially was thinking of Hitler and many of his supporters, and the basis of their hatred of atheism.

Carroll concluded that Christians had been wrong: “The extension of the gospel to the negroes and mixed-bloods is a plain violation of Divine law, and is due solely to the influence of atheism with its teaching that man is a highly developed species of ape of which the white is the highest, and the negro is the lowest race … Our very existence as a people at once demands that we repudiate the false teachings which have brought us to the verge of ruin …” I must point out that evolution does not say that whites and blacks are either “higher” or “lower,” a concept that is meaningless in evolutionary theory.

Similarly, the 1875 work “The Pre-Adamite, or Who Tempted Eve” by A. Hoyle Lester claimed passages in Genesis showed the violence and immorality of the earlier races, and that Gen. 4:26 “indicates that the evil genius possessed by the pre-adamite family had infused itself into the heart of Adam’s own household, to so great a degree at least that his children had ceased to reverence Jehovah, and had gone abroad amid the groves and mountains to worship the gods of these ancient idolators …,” that is, they had become polytheists. Lester even interpreted Gen. 6:1-4, about the “sons of God” marrying women and breeding a race of giants, as proof that the sons of Adam — who were in the god’s image, his “sons” — married non-Caucasians, and this race-mixing brought on divine vengeance in the Flood. Lester claimed that in race mixing, the offspring of Caucasians and other races “are a weak and enervated cross, and utterly debased in character, sentiment, and practice. Nor is this the only evil perpetrated upon the human family by the abominable practice of miscegenation …” — they caused the Christian god to send natural disasters.

After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned segregation in 1954, Christians strongly denounced race-mixing. Christianity continued to be the primary source of resistance to marriages between the descendants of Europeans and Africans.

Thus, a 1959 Arkansas Baptist resolution claimed, “God in His divine wisdom ordained that man should maintain a pure blood stream in his own race.” A Baptist speaker, Judge Tom Brady, told a San Francisco audience in 1957 that segregation was a “law of God,” and that “As long as we live, so long shall we be segregated, and after death, God willing, thus it will still be!”

Another old argument took a slightly revised form. The Rev. G.T. Gillespie told the Mississippi Synod of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S. that the story of Noah’s three sons implied segregation (apparently stretching the meaning of Noah’s command in Gen. 9:27); and cited the scriptural orders to the Israelites to segregate themselves from their neighbors. A Baptist writer, Dr. Kenneth Kinney, agreed; in a 1956 Baptist Bulletin, he claimed, “Noting that each of these three groups [Noah’s sons] was to keep to its own tongue and family and nation, do we not face the fact that God drew the lines of segregation (or separation) according to His purpose.”

Another scriptural argument was based on a statement in Acts 17:26, in which Paul said the Christian god “allotted the times of [the nations’] existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live …”, apparently considered comparable to Gen. 9:27.

As recently as 1996, a white, Republican, Alabama state senator running for the U.S. Congress, Charles Davidson, declared that the Bible justified slavery: “People who are bitter and hateful about slavery are obviously bitter and hateful against God and his word, because they reject what God says and embrace what mere humans say concerning slavery.” While he is not quoted on the subject of interracial marriage, I have no doubt of his position.

Finally, in 2009, a justice of the peace refused to officiate the marriage of an interracial couple in Tangipahoa Parish, southeastern Louisiana, infamous for its theocratic public officials, on the claim that marriage would be bad for their future children, who would suffer for their parents’ love. As his many critics noted, “mixed-race” children include U.S. President Barack Obama. The justice of the peace paid the price of his bigotry when he was forced to resign his long-held office.

Clearly, for slavery and segregation defenders, religion, racism and creationism justify a hatred of love/sex/marriage between the “wrong” people.

The United States’ Constitution and its First Amendment do not allow the government to enforce bans on marriages between Christians of different sects or Christians and non-Christians. State laws banning marriages between whites (i.e., Christians) and blacks (i.e., pagans or pagans’ descendants) were couched in religious terms in the 17th century but in “racial” terms by the 19th, so technically they did not fall under the First Amendment prohibition on religion having any role in government. This liberalizing attitude on religiously-mixed marriages spread in Europe with church-state separation movements, such as in the French Revolution. Conservative Christians were not happy.

On Dec. 8, 1864, Pope Pius IX’s “Syllabus of Errors” condemned a laundry list of modern, secular ideas, such as church-state separation and the idea that government’s should not enforce Catholic doctrines by law. When it came to marriage, Pius perceived these errors:

“65. The teaching that Christ elevated marriage to the dignity of a sacrament can in no way be admitted. [Pius rejects civil marriage — marriage is valid only in his church]

“ The sacrament of matrimony is but an accessory of the contract and separable from it, and the sacrament consists in the nuptial blessing alone”; “Civil laws can allow divorce, despite Church prohibitions”; “Church restrictions on who can marry whom can be ignored”; “A civil contract can constitute true marriage among Christians; and it is false to affirm either the marriage contract was always sacramental or that there is no contract if the sacrament be excluded”; and civil laws govern marriage issues.

When Pius IX wrote this, his church banned marriages between Catholics and non-Catholics, unless the non-Catholics became Catholics. Carried to its logical conclusion, this claim would prohibit or nullify all non-Catholic marriages, and all children of non-Catholic unions are illegitimate, even today. It was Pius IX who proclaimed the doctrine of papal infallibility, and while this originally covered only official proclamations, it was later extended to other papal statements, particularly to encyclicals, which were letters on a subject that previously were considered to be a pope’s thoughts and not a binding decree on church members. As will be seen, the elevation of the encyclicals to edicts has put the modern church in a bind, as it cannot reverse some troubling papal statements on sex issues without denying infallibility.

In a Nov. 1, 1885, encyclical, “Immortale Dei,” Pope Leo XIII outlined his view — and by definition his church’s view — of marriage, a holy institution “wherein the rights and duties of husband and wife are controlled with wise justice and equity; due honor is assured to the woman; the authority of the husband is conformed to the pattern afforded by the authority of God; … and the best possible provision is made for the guardianship, welfare, and education of the children.” He declared in this encyclical that the state must be Roman Catholic, with no deviation allowed, and children must be educated as Catholics.

In an Aug. 16, 1898, encyclical, “Quam Religiosa,” Leo XIII criticized Peru’s new marriage law and claimed sole authority for his church to control all marriages: “It is with sorrow that We view the recently disseminated law in Peru. Under the appearance of regulating the marriage of non-Catholics, it introduced in effect, what is called a civil marriage, even though that law does not affect people of all conditions. What is more, putting aside the authority of the Church, a civil ceremony is permitted for mixed marriages whenever the Holy See, for serious reasons and for the eternal salvation of the Christian family, would consider it inappropriate to exempt anyone from the law forbidding marriage between those of different faiths. [including Catholics and Protestants] We were seriously upset by these events, which have been perpetrated in violation of the obedience due to Our dignity and to the authority divinely invested in Our supreme ministry. … in the truly Christian marriage, [civil authorities] have no authority, for this matter should be left to the jurisdiction of the Church, which is not established by men.”

Leo XIII claimed Jesus created the marriage sacrament, “and this duty cannot be divorced from religion and immersed in worldly affairs.” Thus, “No marriage can be considered firmly ratified unless it is joined according to Church law and discipline.” He demanded public officials “should promise that civil marriage laws will contain nothing contrary to the teaching of the Church.” Again, no non-Catholic marriages can be valid.

In a Feb. 11, 1906, encyclical, “Affari Vos,” Pius X attacked France’s law of separation of religion and government. “You have seen the sanctity and the inviolability of Christian marriage outraged by legislative acts in formal contradiction with them …”

As quoted earlier, Pius X and Pius XI strongly criticized the institution of civil marriages and divorces. On Dec. 31, 1930, Pope Pius XI issued the encyclical “Casti Connubii,” on “Christian marriage,” that attacked unions not approved by his church. This included the infamous declaration against contraception that has caused so much damage both to societies and his church, as well as prohibitions on divorce and abortion, even to save the life of the mother! He also declared that his god decreed “in Paradise” (so Pius was a creationist) that the purpose of marriage was to have children, which is one reason he condemned contraception, and that marriage was only “between one man and one woman,” which is the modern battle cry against giving homosexuals equal legal rights to heterosexuals, including a right to marry.

Pius XI claimed that his church’s power over marriage was superior to any government’s: “… let it be repeated as an immutable and inviolable fundamental doctrine that matrimony was not instituted or restored by man but by God; not by man were the laws made to strengthen and confirm and elevate it but by God, the Author of nature, and by Christ Our Lord by Whom nature was redeemed, and hence these laws cannot be subject to any human decrees or to any contrary pact even of the spouses themselves.”

Pius XI added that a marriage under his god’s decree was inviolable and differed from the “union of animals” as well as “the haphazard unions of men, which are far removed from all true and honourable unions of will and enjoy none of the rights of family life. From this it is clear that legitimately constituted authority has the right and therefore the duty to restrict, to prevent, and to punish those base unions which are opposed to reason and to nature …” Once more, only Roman Catholic marriages are valid, and governments can prevent non-Christian marriages.

After repeating his assertion that his church, not civil governments, had sole power over marriage, Pius XI approvingly quoted Pope Pius VI from the 18th century, who distinguished between a “true marriage,” done as a permanent bond within his church, and marriages outside that church: “ ‘… in that case there is no marriage, but an illicit union opposed of its very nature to the divine law, which therefore cannot be entered into or maintained.’ And if this stability seems to be open to exception, however rare the exception may be, as in the case of certain natural marriages between unbelievers” or in some unconsummated Christian marriages. It must be pointed out that the vast majority of marriages — many of which are or have been lifelong — have always been outside Christianity as Christians have always been a minority. Also, the institution of marriage predates Christianity by thousands of years. And, of course, he even denied Protestant marriages.

Pius XI condemned people who argued for temporary or open marriages, calling them “enemies of marriage”; people who said marriage was a civil institution; and laws allowing divorce. He said supporters of civil marriages “want it to be no cause for reproach that marriages be contracted by Catholics with non-Catholics without any reference to religion or recourse to the ecclesiastical authorities.” He expanded on this: “They, therefore, who rashly and heedlessly contract mixed marriages, from which the maternal love and providence of the Church dissuades her children for very sound reasons, fail conspicuously in this respect, sometimes with danger to their eternal salvation. This attitude of the Church to mixed marriages appears in many of her documents, all of which are summed up in the Code of Canon Law: ‘Everywhere and with the greatest strictness the Church forbids marriages between baptized persons, one of whom is a Catholic and the other a member of a schismatical or heretical sect; and if there is, add to this, the danger of the falling away of the Catholic party and the perversion of the children, such marriage is forbidden also by the divine law.’ ”

In defending his church’s views on marriages Pius XI repeatedly claimed that his god was the sole source of true marriages and blamed criticism of his views on nothing less than Satan: “Not all the sponsors of these new doctrines [civil or religiously-mixed marriages] are carried to the extremes of unbridled lust; there are those who, striving as it were to ride a middle course, believe nevertheless that something should be conceded in our times as regards certain precepts of the divine and natural law. But these likewise, more or less wittingly, are emissaries of the great enemy who is ever seeking to sow cockle among the wheat. …” His obsession with his church’s “rights” excluded human rights, as Pius XI signed a treaty with Adolf Hitler, knowing that Nazism was a violent, racist and antisemitic movement. (Some historians argue Nazism’s strongly Protestant aspect probably frightened Pius XI into signing the treaty to avoid a new “Reformation” in Germany.)

Not until the 1960s Vatican II Council did the Roman Catholic Church grudgingly and condescendingly authorize Catholics to wed non-Catholic Christians while still insisting Catholics ought to wed only Catholics.

“The sacrament of matrimony was established by Christ as a symbol of his own union with the Church, to give full scope to its sacred power and to enable it truly to become for husband and wife a great mystery (see Eph. 5:32), whereby they might express in their own lives the love by which Christ gave himself for the church. For this reason, marriage demands the fullest and most perfect agreement between the partners, especially where religion is concerned. … This is why the Catholic Church takes with the utmost seriousness its obligation to guard the faith both of the marriage partners and of their children. It does its best to ensure that Catholics marry Catholics.

“The Church’s discipline with regard to mixed marriages, as laid down in Canon Law, clearly demonstrates this careful vigilance. It takes the form of two impediments to marriage: mixed religion and disparity of worship. The first of these forbids marriage between a Catholic and a baptized non-Catholic, while not taking from the validity of such a marriage. The second renders invalid a marriage between a Catholic and a non-baptized person.”

The statement insisted pastors “should employ all appropriate means to ensure that their young people marry Catholics. … The church therefore deems it her duty to protect her members lest their faith be endangered or lest they suffer spiritual or material damage.”

The liberal element was in ending excommunication for a Catholic who was married by a non-Catholic minister, but at the same time declared, “It is absolutely forbidden to celebrate marriage before a Catholic priest and a non-Catholic minister, each of them performing his own rite, at the same time.”

A Jan. 7, 1970, apostolic letter by Pope Paul VI reinforced the opposition to mixed marriages, as they “do not, except in some cases, help in re-establishing unity among Christians. … For these reasons the Church, conscious of her duty, discourages the contracting of mixed marriages, for she is most desirous that Catholics be able in matrimony to attain to perfect union of mind and communion of life.”

Paul VI explained the Catholic had a duty to preserve the faith, “nor is it ever permitted to expose oneself to a proximate danger of losing it. Furthermore, the Catholic partner in a mixed marriage is obliged, not only to remain steadfast in the faith, but also, as far as possible, to see that children be baptized and brought up in that same faith and receive all those aids to eternal salvation which the Catholic Church provides for her sons and daughters.”

He ordered that a clergyman had to approve any “mixed marriage” while marriages between Catholics and non-Christians were invalid. Also, not only did he forbid a joint marriage rite by a priest and non-Catholic minister, but “nor is it permitted to have another religious marriage ceremony before or after the Catholic ceremony, for the purpose of giving or renewing matrimonial consent.”

Taken together, these statements indicated Roman Catholic officials were still obsessed with the idea that Catholics exist in a purified state amidst a mass of morally corrupt and damned non-Christians and non-Roman Catholics, and that Christians were constantly at risk of contamination by non-Christian contacts. Thus the church insisted Catholics — with a grudging nod to non-Catholic Christians and an abhorrence of non-Christians — must remain pure or at least be protected as much as possible from impurity.

This Christian idea of marital purity underlay certain antisemitic words and actions of the political movements in pre-World War II Europe that are commonly called fascist.

In his 1922 novel, “The Sin against Love,” Nazi writer Artur Dinter called for laws severely repressing Jews, including a ban on Jew/non-Jew marriages as “bastardizing.” Dinter was also a staunch Christian, who wanted “the foundations for the reconstruction of a purely Aryan Christianity, including the elimination of the Jewish Old Testament and all the Jewish-Christian dogmatic business.” He wanted “the restoration of the pure teaching of the Saviour … the greatest antisemitist and antimaterialist of all time, the Hero of Nazareth.” Among later 19th- and 20th-century antisemites, some considered “Aryan” to be synonymous with the original form of Christianity as espoused by an Aryan Jesus, whom Jews supposedly murdered because he offered a superior religion and socio-economic idea.

In guidelines published in 1932, the German Christian movement — possibly a majority among Protestants by then — declared in point 7: “We see in race, Völkstum, and nation laws of life that God has bequeathed and entrusted to us. It is God’s law that we concern ourselves with their preservation. Mixing of the races, therefore, is to be opposed.” Point 9 said: “In the mission to the Jews we see a serious threat to our Völkstum. That mission is the entryway for foreign blood into the body of our Völk. … We reject missions to the Jews in Germany as long as Jews possess the right of citizenship and hence the danger of racial fraud and bastardization exists. … Marriage between Germans and Jews particularly is to be forbidden.” New guidelines in May 1933, when they were a decisive majority among Protestants, claimed the Christian god ordained the differences among “races.”

German Christians also published such declarations in 1933 as: “A decisive battle of unprecedented dimensions is being fought in Germany. The battlefronts are clearer than ever before. On the one side stand Free Thought, severed from God, and Muscovite Bolshevism, storming against all that is holy with a hate-filled passion for destruction. The goal of red world-revolution fought for with satanic zeal is, according to its own words: ‘No marriage, no family, no church, no faith other than faith in Bolshevism alone! …’ ” Many Christian Germans, including Adolf Hitler, made it clear that they considered atheism, communism and Jews to be effectively identical.

Hitler, a lifelong Roman Catholic, bitterly denounced Jews, especially men, who dated “Aryans.” He said race mixing was destroying humanity. In “Mein Kampf,” Hitler denied that Jews were even human. He said they were dirty, stank and were covered in “moral stains” that led them to befoul the arts to promote “spiritual pestilence” and Marxism, which he also sometimes called “the godless movement.” He claimed that it was his duty to lead humanity against Jews, and in doing so, “I am fighting for the work of the Lord.” Here and in numerous other instances, Hitler expressed himself in a Christianity-based mix of anti-communist, anti-atheist, racist and antisemitic beliefs that were inseparable in his thinking. Many of his supporters expressed a similar mix of religion and bigotry.

Hitler denounced the sexually-oriented literature and bawdy nightclubs available in Germany, blaming Jews again, an attitude that parallels historical Christian hostility toward sexuality as well the belief, which increased in the 19th century, that Jews were a moral threat to any Christian society and had to be controlled or eliminated. Of course, the Nazis also threw homosexuals into concentration camps, forcing them to wear pink stars, in contrast to the yellow stars Jews had to wear. Both groups were publicly humiliated by a policy originally initiated by the Fourth Lateran Council in its obsession with keeping Christians from “morally polluting” themselves by having sex with Jews or Muslims.

In Austria, the post-World War I government had signed a concordat with the Vatican that effectively made Protestants second-class citizens by teaching Catholic beliefs in schools and instituting church control over marriage, according to historian Evan Burr Bukey. The population enthusiastically welcomed Germany’s takeover in 1938.

In Poland, Catholic clergy in particular strongly and successfully opposed efforts in the early 1930s to create a form of civil marriage and divorce, according to scholar Ronald Modras. Existing Polish law allowed marriages only within religious traditions; thus, Roman Catholics had to be married within their church and could not divorce; Jews had to be married by rabbis and had divorce as an option; etc. The non-religious were forced to “get religion” long enough to persuade a clergyman to officiate at their wedding; and Roman Catholic couples could only divorce if they publicly adopted a different religion. The proposed law would have created civil options, eliminating the obstacles many couples faced. Catholic clergy relentlessly denounced the proposal as atheistic, Jewish, Masonic and communistic (all of which many conservative Catholics considered to be one and the same). Catholics also demanded the state fund Catholics-only schools, for fear that exposure to non-Catholics, particularly Jews as teachers or fellow students in the nondenominational public schools, would corrupt Catholic children, Modras said.

To put a necessary context on this, while Polish bishops denounced increasing violence against Jews in the 1930s, they also routinely characterized Jews as being at war against Christianity and as a source of much moral corruption, such as spreading pornography and leading youth Catholics into communism, atheism or freethought, Modras said, quoting a number of examples. Historians say Jewish leaders considered mid-1930’s Poland to be the most-dangerous place for Jews, not Germany. Not surprisingly, this mixed message from Christian leaders had murderous results: Many Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland either were killed by fellow Poles, such as in the town of Jedwabne, where some 1,600 Jews were locked in a barn and burned alive, or turned over to the Nazis by Poles. Some non-Jewish Poles who protected Jews were harassed by Polish Christians. After the war, Polish Christians continued to murder Jewish Holocaust survivors.

In 1941, Hungary’s Parliament passed a third anti-Jewish law. Its provisions included a racist ban on marriage between Jews and Christians, and a definition of the children of such marriages as Jews. In the Upper House, Roman Catholic Archbishop Justinian Cardinal Seredi and Evangelical (Lutheran) Bishop Bela Kapi of Transdanubia objected because it prohibited some marriages that churches allowed, thereby denying church doctrine that conversion could change a Jew. Seredi noted that he had supported earlier anti-Jewish laws despite their nasty effects on converts. Kapi said the legislation hurt Christians more than Jews. Legislators — both lay and clergy — did not defend the rights of Jews, only the rights of the churches, historians Randolph L. Braham and Moshe Y. Herczl both point out. Defenders of the law emphasized that, as Minister of Justice Laszlo Radocsay argued, “… we must protect ourselves from any further blood dilution.” László Ravasz argued that such marriages would help purify “Hungarians whose blood is about fifty percent Hungarian blood, as long as the chance exists for all their blood to become purified and Hungarian …” and argued that “impure” blood should not prevent marriage. Scientifically, this was nonsense; yet it made sense in Christianity’s paranoid belief.

In 1937, in Romania, the National Christian Party took over the government. Antisemitic laws were proposed or enacted in the next three years, including one on Feb. 27, 1938, that distinguished Romanians “by blood” from those “by residence.” As elsewhere, a law — adopted Aug. 8, 1940 — defined Jews both as members of a religion and as a race, and blurred the line between the two concepts. A Jew, legally, was someone who followed the “Mosaic” faith, or whose parents were Jews, or a convert to Christianity whose parents were unconverted Jews, or a Christian who had a Christian mother and an unconverted Jewish father, or Jews “by blood,” even if they were atheists. A Dec. 17, 1941, law extended the definition to anyone with two Jewish grandparents, but not one. One law prohibited marriages between Romanians “by blood” and Jews; and required a Jewish parent to raise a Christian child as a Christian or else the child would be removed.

On Sept. 9, 1940, the government declared that “protected” religions included Roman Orthodoxy; Roman Catholicism; Latin, Greco-Ruthenian and Armenian Catholicism; two Protestant sects; Unitarianism; Armenian Gregorianism; and Islam. Judaism was allowed to exist, but with restrictions — up until the massacre of Jews began. Some Protestant sects were banned and persecuted. A Cabinet member even proposed a ban on conversions of Jews to other religions as “the ethnic being of our people must be protected against mixture with Jewish blood.” Thus Romania was a de-facto Christian nation, with protection for Unitarians and Islam as well, but not for Jews or some “heretics” or schismatics.

The Legion of the Archangel Michael, aka the Iron Guard, was the most-violently antisemitic Romanian movement, but the Christian-dominated government supported the mass murder of Jews — by hanging, burning, starvation, etc. — in occupied Russian territories. The Legion briefly mutinied against the government on Jan. 21-24, 1941, and before it was repressed, spent three days slaughtering Jews, notably in Bucharest. The Legion was not part of Prime Minister Ion Antonescu’s government afterward, but Antonescu and three other Romanian government leaders were executed in June 1946 for war crimes that included massacres of Jews. Not surprisingly, a large cross was erected at the site of their execution when the communist government was overthrown.

In February 2010, Pope Benedict XVI continued his predecessors’ campaigns for baseless bigotry when he denounced England for a law mandating equal treatment for homosexuals, including when seeking to adopt children. Five Catholic agencies in England had to cut their ties to the church in order to continue to operate and stay within this law.

At the same time, in the U.S., three Michigan preachers were suing over the federal hate crime law, claiming it would prevent them from criticizing gays, noting that the Bible condemns homosexuality. Their suit claimed, “… homosexual acts are acts of grave depravity that are intrinsically disordered. … Homosexuality is an illicit lust forbidden by God.” So the pope and some Protestant leaders chose “to stand in the doorway and darken the hall” to uphold a common hatred of a minority innocent of anything except being condemned by a handful of ancient, tribalistic writers.

Christianity thus cast a long, bloody shadow over many lovers in the 20th century, and is still thwarting many true loves in the 21st.

What are the real-world consequences today of Christianity’s paranoia about who can love whom and how? The answer must be wide-ranging because Christianity’s totalitarian obsession with people’s love lives causes broad damage.

A necessary footnote: The Bible damns homosexuals, the basis for Christian laws that often mandated execution of “sodomites,” in the literalist belief that the story of Sodom and Gomorrah was punishment for gay sex. Thus, a 1658 New Plymouth, Mass., law (like Connecticut’s) dictated: “Capitall offences lyable to death … Sodomy Rapes Buggery.” Theologians often denounced homosexuals, and Christian propaganda about the supposed horrors of Hell usually included sadistic tortures for gays. Such works include the 2nd-century “Apocalypse of Peter,” 7th-century “Pseudo-Methodius” and Dante’s 14th-century “Inferno,” in which gays endlessly walk the Seventh Circle of Hell on a red-hot sand under a relentless “snow” of fiery flakes. In 824, “Wetti’s Vision” gloated that they “therefore were continually attacked by huge fiery monsters, horrible beyond description. Despite their opposition, [the monsters] committed on [homosexuals] the same damnable crimes that they had been guilty of on earth.”

Such hatred and sadism obviously affect how many Christians view and treat gays. Thus, Christian attempts to control love, sex and marriage, even for non-Christians, continued into the 21st century in the U.S. in fights about sodomy laws and homosexual marriage. Sodomy laws technically applied to both heterosexual and homosexual activities, but enforcement was usually (not always) directed at gays. One argument Christians used to defend sodomy laws was that repeal would be followed by efforts to legalize gay marriage.

The legal struggle about sodomy laws probably came to an end with the U.S. Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling (which should have been unanimous) on June 26, 2003, in Lawrence vs. Texas that people’s sex lives are private and are not controlled by the government. This overturned the court’s 1986 5-4 ruling, under Chief Justice Warren Burger, in Bowers vs. Hardwick that upheld sodomy laws. Burger’s concurring opinion cited Roman death-penalty decrees for sodomy — he called homosexual sodomy a “crime under Roman law” — but his citations were not to pagan laws but to laws by Theodosius II and Justinian, both Christian emperors. More incredibly, Burger declared, “Condemnation of those practices is firmly rooted in Judeao-Christian moral and ethical standards.” He openly incorporated Christian religious beliefs into secular U.S. laws in violation of the Constitution. In fact, pre-Christian societies generally had no problem with homosexual behavior (with some exceptions). Having homosexual affairs did not hurt the careers of Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar or Hadrian. Burger lied by inferring that the pagan Romans banned homosexuality, when it was only Christians who exhibited such bigotry.

The three 2003 Supreme Court injustices (William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas) who voted to uphold Texas’ sodomy law were all conservative Christians noted for their hostility to the godless Bill of Rights and to the right of non-Christians not to have Christian beliefs and bigotries forced upon them.

After the “Bowers” ruling, state courts began overturning sodomy laws, correcting the Supreme Court’s theocratic tyranny — although essentially on libertarian grounds (the states had no business in people’s bedrooms), not on the more-comprehensive grounds that sodomy laws violated the First Amendment by enforcing one religion’s pathological view.

The religious nature of sodomy laws was obvious because protests came only from conservative Christian groups — i.e., those in the anti-Enlightenment, anti-American tradition. A Louisiana Republican gubernatorial candidate, Public Service Commission Chairman ‘Jay’ Blossman, stressed this in a letter criticizing the “Lawrence” ruling: “It overturns thousands of years of Christian tradition that holds homosexual behavior to be an abomination.”

Likewise, in a Jan. 21, 2000, speech in Malta, Roman Catholic Cardinal Thomas Winning of Scotland harshly criticized proposals to ease restrictions on homosexuals in Malta, claiming: “Today, society is facing a new threat, aided and supported by governments and politicians: the threat to equate homosexual partnerships with marriage. … All over Europe an active and militant homosexual lobby is pushing for greater power, and the threat to Christian family life is very real.” Exactly how two men or women getting married threatens any marriage between a man and a woman has never been explained. These comments only make sense in the extremely-paranoid Christian view.

When the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled Nov. 18, 2003, that homosexuals must be allowed to marry under that state’s constitution, George W. Bush said he would work to “defend the sanctity of marriage” and declared, “Marriage is a sacred institution between a man and a woman.” Both statements would enforce an unconstitutional religious edict with no moral basis. U.S. Rep. Walter Jones, a North Carolina Republican, said the ruling was “just one more assault on the Judeo-Christian values of our nation.” A number of congressmen rushed to support a federal constitutional ban on homosexual marriages.

In 2004, under pressure from Christians, state legislatures began ordering votes on laws or constitutional amendments to ban homosexual marriages, in violation of the Constitution by refusing to honor relationships legalized in some states that all other states are required to honor. Although basic constitutional rights are not subject to popular votes, many of these state referenda have not been overturned. In 2005, Calif. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed a bill passed by the Legislature to allow same-sex marriages, citing a 2000 voter initiative, Proposition 22, declaring marriage to be only between a man and a woman. By contrast, in keeping with the U.S. Constitution, Massachusetts allowed gay marriages and its Legislature twice rejected constitutional amendments to ban them; Connecticut and Vermont allowed gay civil unions, effectively marriages, although civil unions are problematic because they might not extend all the legal rights of marriage.

On June 16, 2004, the Southern Baptist Convention demanded a theocratic amendment to the U.S. Constitution to ban homosexual marriages, on the basis that “the union of one man and one woman is the only form of marriage prescribed in the Bible as God’s perfect design.” On June 25, 2004, Bishop Wilton Gregory, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, also supported the amendment and urged all bishops to lobby for it. On April 24, 2006, 50 religious leaders signed a joint petition to the Congress for a “marriage protection amendment” to define marriage as between a man and a woman. It was led by prominent Protestant evangelicals, but also was endorsed by Jewish, Episcopal, Orthodox, Lutheran and Mormon leaders, plus the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Catholic Cardinal Justin Rigali of Philadelphia was quoted, “On this particular matter we are rock bottom as far as morality goes.” Such an amendment — it failed in the U.S. Senate — would contradict the First Amendment, creating a constitutional conflict.

A typical comment, quoted by news media in these struggles, was made by an 18-year-old high school student in north Georgia who opposed a Gay-Straight Alliance club in his school, arguing, “It ain’t in the Bible.”

In August 2005, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America rejected proposals to allow gays in committed relationships, to serve as clergy, and to allow blessing ceremonies for gay couples. One gay-clergy foe, Louis Hesse of the Eastern Washington-Idaho Synod argued, “A Gospel of full acceptance, accepting everyone the way they are, what does that say about sinfulness.” The story noted that the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod rejected gay clergy, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada rejected blessing gay couples.

In July 2005, the Catholic Church in Canada said it would not baptize the children of gay couples if both parents insisted on signing the certificate.

Thus, caught in the middle of the relentless, clergy-organized opposition to equal rights are young homosexuals whom Christians harass at schools and other venues. One example is from a 2003 lawsuit by a gay junior high school student, 14, in Jacksonville, Ark., which said he was preached to and condemned by school officials who quoted the Bible and forced him to read aloud biblical passages condemning homosexuality. In a letter, the Pulaski County school district defended its actions, claiming the boy had talked to classmates inappropriately about being gay. As Homer Simpson would say: “Dooooooh!” Kids talk about all kinds of things. It’s free speech, and it’s also the purpose of education, to encourage discussion of ideas, issues and differences among people and the recognition sometimes that it’s bigotry to condemn people merely for being different in ways that don’t hurt others. Being homosexual doesn’t hurt heterosexuals, any more than being an atheist hurts theists. Being bigoted to the point of discriminating against or physically attacking someone for being gay or atheist, now that does hurt people.

One nasty but predictable irony of Christian theology is that black clergy, some of them veterans of the 1960s civil-rights activities, have been generally staunch opponents of gay marriages, rejecting the obvious historical comparison between the civil-rights and gay-rights movements. In one instance, an estimated 15,000 black Christians marched in Atlanta, Ga., behind Rev. Eddie Long to oppose same-sex marriage. In Nigeria, Archbishop Peter Akinola, head of the 17.5-million Nigerian Anglican Church and unofficial leader of Africa’s 40 million Anglicans, threatened to separate from the Church of England if it accepted openly-gay bishops (the U.S. Episcopal Church did that in 2003) or otherwise condoned homosexuality. The Anglican/Episcopalian Church has been rent for years by the fights over gay clergy. Also, under the influence of American evangelical preachers, Uganda in late 2009 debated a law to execute homosexuals and punish heterosexuals for not ratfinking on homosexuals.

In contrast, several major U.S. atheist and humanist groups have expressed support for gay rights.

Quite a few public officials obviously believe the U.S. is a Christian theocracy, not a free nation, and do not believe in obeying the First Amendment ban on an establishment of religion. Christian arguments against contraception, abortion and gay marriages and for sodomy laws all rely on the paranoid attitude described earlier, particularly the police-state theology that their god would punish the U.S. for moral pollution if sexuality in general is not controlled, and particularly if homosexuals are allowed the same basic rights as their fellow Americans. Some Christian leaders, such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, have gone so far as to claim that disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina’s flooding of New Orleans, or “prophesied” disasters, such as hurricane hitting Florida, were or would be caused by acceptance of homosexuals.

As Canadians considered legalizing same-sex marriages in January 2005, Catholic clergy opposed the move. Canada’s government rejected the church protests and approved gay marriages in June-July 2005. England and Spain also approved gay marriages. On Dec. 1, 2005, South Africa’s Constitutional Court effectively ordered the country’s Parliament to allow gay marriages. On Nov. 14, 2006, South Africa’s parliament passed the Civil Union Bill, effectively allowing same-sex marriages, over protests by such Christians as Kenneth Meshoe who said his country was “provoking God’s anger.” In December 2009, Mexico City — capital of a heavily Roman Catholic nation — approved gay marriages.

Perhaps the purest admission of the religious nature of anti-homosexual discrimination came in a debate about a gay-rights bill that the Washington Legislature passed Jan. 27, 2006. The bill added “sexual orientation” to laws banning discrimination on the basis of race, religion, etc. Republican Sen. Dan Swecker opposed it because it would “trample unrelentingly” on religious beliefs. “We, the state, are telling people to accept, actually to embrace, something that goes against their religious views.” Of course, the same can be said about religious beliefs that support discrimination against blacks, women, Jews etc.

Since then, attempts to ensure the right of homosexuals to marry and enjoy the many legal benefits of marriage have repeatedly been thwarted by campaigns organized by religious groups. A Jan. 22, 2010, Chicago Tribune news article described how one gay couple had to spend $10,000 on attorney fees in order to secure most of the same legal rights that a heterosexual couple gains by paying a small fee for a marriage license. As I noted at the start of these articles, no secular basis exists for any government discrimination against gays; it is solely the product of religious prejudice. So it’s not surprising that religious groups — particularly the Mormon Church, Roman Catholic clergy and black American clergy — have been leaders in the fight to deny gays their equal rights, as guaranteed them by the First Amendment. In California, Maine and other states, the opposition to equal rights was religious, particularly by the Mormon and Catholic churches.

The plaintiffs in the 2010 trial of a lawsuit against California’s Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage after courts had ruled it was legal, documented the role of religion in the war against equal rights for gays. A Mormon Church official said the Proposition 8 campaign was “entirely under priesthood direction,” and church leaders urged members to donate millions for the campaign. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops praised the Mormons for their “financial, organization and management contributions” to Proposition 8, while crediting Catholic support for getting the measure on the ballot. Two religion scholars were quoted as admitting that discrimination against gays is at least partly religious in origin.

What price the churches will pay for this is unpredictable, but polls show young people overwhelmingly are less prejudiced toward gays, less supportive of discrimination, than the increasingly-elderly populations that prop up churches. Perhaps that is why polls in recent years show the ranks of the “unchurched” and the openly nontheistic are skewing young.

Beyond groups historically targeted by Christianity’s bigotry, its obsession with controlling people’s lives generally, and marriage and sexuality in particular, has injured many. Quality-of-life reports over the years repeatedly have shown, statistically on average, that the best places to live in the United States are the most-secular areas, the Northeast and West Coast. The heavily Christian South and other states with high levels of church attendances usually are near or at the bottom of every list of statistics — level of education, high-school graduation, income, good health, etc. — that a state wants to be high on, but high on the lists of bad statistics, such as crime, violence, teen pregnancy, sexually-transmitted diseases, abortion etc. One study found that evangelical U.S. Christians had a higher-than-average divorce rate, while atheists — along with Catholics — were below average in divorces nationally. If this study is accurate, it is damning to Christian claims that they should only marry Christians or at least theists, the premise of the theology discussed here.

In a nasty irony, a Jan. 12, 2010, Pew Research Center poll on race, with a focus on interracial marriages, found 70 percent of religious believers hostile to the idea of a family member marrying an atheist: 43 percent said they might eventually accept such a mixed marriage, but 27 percent said they never would. Only 27 percent said they would have no problem with a mixed marriage. In contrast, the poll found far more acceptance of racially-mixed marriages.

Nationally, religion’s effects are just as bad, according to a September 2005 comparison of various nations’ religiosity and quality-of-life statistics. The U.S. was the most religious of First World nations, comparable to religiosity in less-developed, often less-democratic countries; and the U.S. also had the worst social statistics vis-à-vis the more-secular nations.

The following shows how Christianity’s insistence on religious unity and control of government and law is damaging to people, including their sex lives and marriages. In a summary of the 2005 scientific study, researcher Gregory S. Paul compared the U.S. with less-religious countries:

• “Data correlations show that in almost all regards the highly secular democracies consistently enjoy low rates of societal dysfunction, while pro-religious and anti-evolution America performs poorly.”

• “… the U.S. is the only prosperous democracy that retains high homicide rates, making it a strong outlier in this regard. Similarly, theistic Portugal also has rates of homicides well above the secular developing democracy norm. Mass student murders in schools are rare, and have subsided somewhat since the 1990s, but the U.S. has experienced many more than all the secular developing democracies combined.”

• “… rates of adolescent gonorrhea infection remain six to three hundred times higher in the U.S. than in less theistic, pro-evolution secular developing democracies. At all ages levels are higher in the U.S., albeit by less dramatic amounts. The U.S. also suffers from uniquely high adolescent and adult syphilis infection rates, which are starting to rise again as the microbe’s resistance increases. The two main curable STDs have been nearly eliminated in strongly secular Scandinavia.”

• “Increasing adolescent abortion rates show positive correlation with increasing belief and worship of a creator, and negative correlation with increasing non-theism and acceptance of evolution; again rates are uniquely high in the U.S.”

• “In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion in the prosperous democracies. … The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so, and almost always scores poorly. … No democracy is known to have combined strong religiosity and popular denial of evolution with high rates of societal health. Higher rates of non-theism and acceptance of human evolution usually correlate with lower rates of dysfunction, and the least theistic nations are usually the least dysfunctional.”

A 2007 United Nations report, the “Innocenti Report Card 7,” of UNICEF, “Child poverty in perspective,” collected statistics from “economically advanced nations.” Of 21 countries, all in Europe except Canada and the U.S., the U.S. was the 20th worst overall, ahead only of the United Kingdom. The U.S. had the worst statistics for children’s “health and well-being,” and was 20th in “family and peer relationships” and in “behaviours and risks.” One statistic relevant to this chapter is that of 24 countries (Statistics from Japan, New Zealand and Australia were incorporated here), the U.S. has the highest birth rate for women ages 15-19. Non-Christian Japan had the lowest teen birth rate. While the role of Christianity in social dysfunction is open to debate, it clearly does not make the U.S. a better place to live than more-secular nations. People’s marriages and sex lives suffer where Christian influence is strongest.

Finally, another, often-violent battleground between Americans and Christians was over abortion and two issues that Christians often treat as related: stem-cell research and human cloning. Under religious influence, the U.S. and state governments had prohibited contraceptives for a long time; and where contraception was allowed, it was limited to married couples; single people could not legally have sex under anti-fornication laws.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 “Roe vs. Wade” decision triggered a violent Christian reaction. Since then, mass rallies have tried to block access to abortion clinics; clinics have been bombed, burned or doused with nauseating chemicals; and several doctors, nurses and guards have been killed or wounded. Protesters and assailants invariably cited strong Christian beliefs. Some acted on the “Phineas priest” belief cited earlier. Some violence was committed by “Army of God” members; including several killers at abortion clinics. The Army of God Web site is run by the Rev. Donald Spitz and calls for violence against abortion clinic personnel.

A zealous Roman Catholic, John C. Salvi III, was charged with killing two and wounding five at a Boston, Mass.-area abortion clinic in 1994; convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. Presbyterian Rev. Paul Hill was executed in 2003 for murdering a abortion doctor and his bodyguard in 1994 in Pensacola, Fla. Hill declared that all non-Christian faiths are Satan worship. Lutheran pastor Michael Bray was one of Hill’s supporters and had a car bumper sticker that said, “Execute Murderers/Abortionists.” James Kopp was a Roman Catholic who said he had a moral duty to kill abortion doctors, his lawyer declared. Bray also supported Kopp, who was sentenced to prison for murdering a New York doctor in 1998. Eric Rudolph was charged in 2003 with killing a police officer and wounding a nurse in a January 1998 bombing at a Birmingham, Ala., abortion clinic, and was a suspect in bombings at the Olympics in 1996, in Atlanta, Ga.; and at an abortion clinic and gay nightclub in 1997 in Atlanta. Rudolph was linked to Christian fundamentalist and white supremacist groups, reportedly writing a ninth-grade essay denying the Holocaust. He pleaded guilty in 2005 to bombings in Alabama and Georgia, and was sentenced to life in prison. In 2004, evangelical Christian Stephen John Jordi, who had a tattoo of a flaming cross, pleaded guilty in federal court in Florida to plotting to blow up abortion clinics and gay bars. He also reportedly targeted churches that refused to take a strong stance against abortion. Jordi corresponded with Paul Hill and reportedly was angered by the arrest of Eric Rudolph. Finally, Scott Roeder was convicted in January 2010 in Kansas of murdering abortion Dr. George Tiller. Although various anti-choice groups claim they reject this violence , the groups’ rhetoric has been relentlessly violent and clearly a call to arms to devout Christians to pursue the rhetoric literally.

Christianity is simply incapable of dealing with honest, real-life, day-to-day love. You would almost think that the Christian definition of “love” is “intense bigotry toward anyone we don’t like.” That happens to be a definition of “hatred.”