Hard Questions: Why has the church done so much harm?

If you've spent any time looking honestly at Christian history, you know the question isn't whether the church has done harm. It has. The question is whether that harm can be explained, whether it can be reckoned with, and whether a tradition capable of such damage is worth staying inside.

The Crusades — eight major military campaigns from the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries in which Christians killed Muslims, Jews, and other Christians in the name of reclaiming the Holy Land. The Inquisition — centuries of torture, forced confession, and execution carried out by church institutions against people accused of heresy. The transatlantic slave trade — in which Christian nations, with the theological blessing of Christian clergy, enslaved approximately twelve million Africans over four centuries. The conquest of the Americas — in which the doctrine of discovery, enshrined in papal bulls and embraced by Christian missionaries, provided the theological license for the destruction of Indigenous civilizations. The Native American boarding schools — in which churches including the Episcopal Church operated institutions designed to, in the words of their founders, "kill the Indian and save the man," severing children from their families, languages, and spiritual traditions. The systematic sexual abuse of children by clergy across denominations, enabled by institutional cover-up that protected perpetrators and silenced victims for decades.

That list is not exhaustive.

The easiest deflection is to say that the people who did these things weren't real Christians. They misread Scripture. They betrayed the gospel. The true church, properly understood, would never have done any of it.

The same tradition that produced the Inquisition also produced the abolitionists. The same Christianity that blessed the slave trade also produced Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and Sojourner Truth — all of whom grounded their resistance explicitly in the gospel. The tradition is not monolithic, and the people who resisted the church's worst impulses were often doing so from inside the same faith.

But the deflection collapses when it becomes a way of avoiding the institutional question — when "those weren't real Christians" slides into a self-sealing claim that defines the true church as whatever group didn't do the bad thing, and thereby exempts the institution from examining how it produced the bad thing in the first place. That is not honesty. It is reputation management dressed up as theology.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer — the German Lutheran pastor executed by the Nazi regime in 1945 for his involvement in the resistance — watched a Christian nation become capable of what Germany became, and spent his theological life trying to name the mechanism. His answer, worked out in The Cost of Discipleship (1937), was cheap grace.

Cheap grace, Bonhoeffer wrote, is "grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ." It is the version of Christianity that offers forgiveness without requiring transformation, belonging without demanding accountability, the comfort of religious identity without the cost of actually following Jesus. When Christianity becomes primarily a cultural inheritance rather than a way of life, it stops functioning as a check on power and starts functioning as a cover for it. The German church had made its peace with the Nazi state because it had traded the demanding gospel for a comfortable national religion.

The same mechanism is visible across the church's worst chapters. When Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century, the church gained enormous power and lost something essential — the prophetic distance from empire that had characterized its first three centuries. The Crusades were possible because the church had merged its identity so thoroughly with feudal political structures that it could mobilize military violence in the name of Christ without apparent irony. Colonialism was possible because European Christianity had so thoroughly identified itself with European civilization that it could not imagine the two as separable — and therefore could not recognize the destruction of Indigenous cultures as the destruction of something sacred.

Power corrupts institutions as reliably as it corrupts individuals. The church is an institution, staffed by human beings, embedded in political and cultural structures, and it has never been immune to the dynamics that corrupt every other human institution. What distinguishes the harm the church has done is not that power corrupted it, but that it had theological language available to sanctify the corruption. "God wills it" is more dangerous than ordinary greed, because ordinary greed at least knows what it is.

What to do with the failure is the harder question.

Miroslav Volf, a Croatian theologian who lived through the ethnic violence of the Yugoslav wars, argues in Exclusion and Embrace (Abingdon Press, 1996) that genuine reconciliation requires something more costly than apology. It requires what he calls the "will to embrace" — not minimizing what was done, but refusing the self-protective closing off that makes further harm inevitable. Volf is not naive about what this costs. He wrote the book in the shadow of the Srebrenica massacre.

Genuine reckoning with the church's history of harm is not a PR exercise. It is not about managing the institution's reputation or demonstrating that today's church is different from yesterday's. It is about the actual work of truth-telling, restitution, and changed practice — the kind that costs something.

The Episcopal Church has begun some of this work. In 2006, General Convention officially declared slavery a sin and directed dioceses to begin acknowledgment and reflection efforts. The Episcopal Diocese of New York committed $1.1 million toward reparations and held an apology service at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. In 2022, General Convention passed Resolution A127, mandating research into the church's involvement in Indigenous boarding schools; the Episcopal Church has since identified involvement in at least 34 of the 526 known boarding schools in the United States. The Truth, Justice and Healing Commission continues that work.

This is genuine. It is also incomplete. Resolutions are easier than transformation. Apology services are easier than reparations. Research commissions are easier than returning land. The church knows how to perform contrition. It is learning, more slowly, how to practice it.

So: why has the church done so much harm?

Because it is a human institution, and human institutions accumulate power, and power distorts the judgment of everyone who holds it. Because the merger of Christianity with empire gave the faith tools for domination it was never meant to carry. Because cheap grace — the religion of cultural comfort rather than costly discipleship — is always more popular than the real thing, and always more dangerous. Because when the church stopped reading the prophets seriously, it stopped hearing the voice that called it to account.

None of that makes the harm less real. It makes the accounting more honest. And honest accounting is, in the tradition's own terms, the beginning of repentance — not the performance of it, but the actual thing.

Where are you with this today? Maybe this history is part of why you left, or why you never came. The church harmed people you love, or harmed you. You're not wrong to have walked away. You're not wrong to be suspicious. What I can tell you is that this congregation is not interested in defending an institution at the expense of the people that institution damaged. We are trying to be something smaller, more accountable, and more honest than that. Whether that's enough is a question only you can answer.

Sources and further reading: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1937; English trans. SCM Press, 1959). Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Abingdon Press, 1996). The Episcopal Church General Convention Resolution 2006 (slavery as sin); Resolution A127 (2022, Indigenous boarding schools). Episcopal Diocese of New York reparations commitment and apology service, 2021. Episcopal News Service, "Indigenous boarding school research groups merge as Truth, Justice and Healing Commission" (November 2025). Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (Yale University Press, 2010). James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Orbis Books, 2011).