Voltaire said it better than any sociologist who came after him. Religion was born the day the first swindler met the first fool, he wrote, and the line survives because it describes with clinical precision a mechanism that no council, no reform and no media scandal has ever managed to dismantle. The point is not to wound anyone’s personal belief, it is to describe an institutional function. For nearly two thousand years, institutions that present themselves as guardians of the sacred have organised wars, perfected torture, covered up the systematic rape of minors and built fortunes that rival those of the largest corporations on the planet. The outcome is simple. Faith, managed with enough cynicism, remains the least regulated and most profitable business in human history. No other business model has survived two millennia without a single full external audit, and none has managed, on top of that, to have its own victims defend so fiercely its right to keep operating without oversight. What follows is not a survey of belief, it is an inventory of the concrete tools that belief has repeatedly been made to serve, decade after decade, continent after continent.
War and torture as a technology of government
The Thirty Years’ War, fought between 1618 and 1648, is still taught as a religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants. That is a convenient simplification, one the European death toll contradicts bluntly. Confession was the banner. Territory, trade routes and control of resources were the real motive. Catholic and Protestant princes negotiated alliances with powers of the rival faith whenever it suited them, which alone disproves any purely spiritual reading of the conflict. The Peace of Westphalia, which ended the slaughter in 1648, ended up enshrining the very principle that still shields churches from outside scrutiny today, religious freedom as a border no state dares cross.
Historians put the death toll of the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) at between four and eight million, with regions of the Holy Roman Empire losing up to a third of their population.
The Spanish Inquisition served a different function, and in some ways a more revealing one. British historian Henry Kamen, the standard reference on the subject, places the number of executions at between three thousand and five thousand over three hundred and fifty years, out of roughly one hundred and fifty thousand cases opened. That figure is low compared with the black legend that has circulated since the sixteenth century. And that is precisely where the important point lies. A tribunal does not need to execute tens of thousands of people to control millions. It only needs everyone to know they could be next. The open file, the confession extracted under duress, the confiscation of property and the denunciation of neighbour by neighbour did work that the stake, on its own, could never have done. The institution even formalised its own network of lay informants, the so-called familiares, spread across entire towns to watch their own neighbours in the name of the faith. It was not a killing machine. It was something more efficient, a surveillance machine.
The mechanism did not disappear with the Enlightenment, it simply changed setting. In 1976, in the small German town of Klingenberg, the young Catholic Anneliese Michel died of severe malnutrition and dehydration after sixty-seven exorcism sessions officially authorised by her diocese, spread over ten months. Doctors had diagnosed temporal lobe epilepsy. The Church diagnosed demonic possession. Her parents and the two priests who led the ritual were tried and convicted of negligent homicide. The scandal was enough to make the Vatican revise, years later, the official rite of exorcism for the first time since the seventeenth century. Unlike the war or the inquisitorial tribunal, there is no territory or crowd involved here, only the pure substitution of a medical diagnosis for a religious verdict, applied to the body of a single person, with the institution’s official seal.
Clerical child abuse as institutional continuity
The pattern repeats with a regularity that no longer allows for the word exception. In France, the independent Ciase commission documented two hundred and sixteen thousand cases of child sexual abuse committed by priests between 1950 and 2020. In Spain, the figure is around two hundred thousand. In Portugal, four thousand eight hundred and fifteen minors were identified as victims over the same period. In Australia, the Royal Commission recorded sixteen thousand three hundred and sixty-one formal complaints. In the United States, a study commissioned by the bishops’ own conference, carried out by the John Jay College in 2004, documented close to four thousand priests accused between 1950 and 2002. The pattern is identical in every country, only the language of the file changes.
Colombia is not an anomaly within that picture. It is an exact replica. The CasaMacondo investigation documented almost eight hundred priests reported for sexual abuse, ninety-four per cent of the cases dating from the last two decades. Of those cases, only fifty-one ended in conviction within the country. Cardinal Luis José Rueda Aparicio, archbishop of Bogotá, stated that in a city of ten million people, only six complaints had ever been filed in the entire history of the archdiocese, a figure neighbouring dioceses, with far smaller cities, contradict with their own records. The Church kept eighty-seven per cent of its archives locked away until the Constitutional Court forced it to hand them over in 2025.
The institutional pattern behind those numbers does not rest on individual priests who fail on their own. It rests on a chain of command that transfers, protects and stays silent, because the institution’s reputation weighs more, in the internal balance, than a child’s body. The very model of canon law justice makes that outcome easier, an accused priest can be moved to another parish within the same country rather than expelled or handed to civil justice, which multiplies the chances of reoffending instead of closing them off. Each transfer resets the clock on public suspicion while leaving the underlying authority over children fully intact. This is neither the ritual violence of an exorcism nor the fraud of a televangelist, it is the bureaucratic administration of silence on an industrial scale.
The evangelical mutation, faith turned into cash flow
Catholicism perfected control over fifteen centuries. Pentecostal evangelism, younger and nimbler, perfected extraction. The prosperity gospel does not promise the soul’s salvation in the hereafter, it promises material enrichment in this life, in exchange for one very concrete condition, ten per cent of a believer’s income, handed over religiously, no pun intended, every single week.
The case of Edir Macedo, founder of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in Brazil, illustrates the model with a clarity no sociologist would need to explain. A 2009 Brazilian government investigation estimated the Church received one billion four hundred million reais a year in tithes alone, collected across four thousand five hundred temples spread over one thousand five hundred cities. Macedo went on to appear on the Forbes billionaires list with a fortune of one billion one hundred million dollars, built on donations from a congregation that is mostly poor, Black and Indigenous, convinced that sowing money is the same as sowing miracles. With part of that fortune he built a three-hundred-million-dollar replica of the Temple of Solomon in São Paulo, with stones imported directly from Jerusalem under an eight-million-dollar contract. A São Paulo prosecutor formally accused him of organised fraud, in a line worth recording, preachers use the faith, desperation or ambition of their followers to sell the idea that God only looks favourably on those who contribute financially to the church.
The model was exported. The Universal Church now operates in more than one hundred countries, and local variants of the same script repeat themselves from Bogotá to Lagos, from Manila to Miami. Macedo built a complete, replicable financial structure, with a mandatory tithe and branches in a hundred countries, crowned by the purchase of Brazil’s second-largest television network, which turned a former lottery-ticket seller into one of the country’s most influential political figures. Other operators in the same market need none of that scaffolding, one well-executed technique is all it takes.
Ignorance as raw material
In 1986, magician James Randi proved, with a simple radio scanner, that American televangelist Peter Popoff was not receiving divine revelations about his followers’ illnesses. He was receiving instructions from his wife through a hidden earpiece, fed from backstage using the prayer cards the audience itself had filled out before the service. During one of those sessions, in Detroit in 1984, Popoff went as far as announcing he had just cured uterine cancer in a plant sent in by Randi’s own team, dressed as a woman for the occasion. Popoff filed for bankruptcy the year after being exposed. He returned to television in the nineties selling miracle water and, thirty years after being caught in a fraud proven with technical evidence, he is still broadcasting the same show on channels across the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.
The consequence of that cultivated ignorance is not always measured in money. The Followers of Christ church, in Oregon, teaches its members to reject modern medicine and rely solely on prayer to heal illness. A 2011 legal reform finally removed the legal protection that had shielded parents who chose prayer over hospital care, after local prosecutors had documented, case by case, a list of children who died of conditions any emergency room could have treated in an afternoon. Most of the convicted parents, at the time of trial, still did not understand what they were being accused of. There was no profit motive in their decision, only the ignorance the institution had cultivated for years as a virtue.
Since the 1990s, at least twenty children belonging to the Followers of Christ church, in Oregon, have died of treatable medical conditions after their parents chose to rely exclusively on faith healing.
The mechanism is identical in both cases, only the scale of the damage changes. A functional ignorance is cultivated, shielded from any outside check, and whatever that ignorance produces is harvested, money in one case, a child’s life in the other. Nobody needs to be a criminal mastermind to run this system. All it takes is finding, as Voltaire wrote, the right fool at the right moment.
The fraud has changed clothes without changing structure. It wore a cassock in the sixteenth century, a televangelist’s suit in the twentieth, and today it has a YouTube channel and an international bank account. Every version keeps the same core, the promise of something no human being can actually deliver, and the certainty that nobody will ever demand proof. Voltaire was right, though he probably never imagined quite how right. The swindler no longer needs to hide, he has a mass audience, an impeccable moral message and, in most cases, the absolute certainty that nobody will ever come asking him to account for it…
G.S.
Sources
- El archivo secreto, la lista de curas denunciados por pederastia y abuso sexual en Colombia, CasaMacondo
- Iglesia Católica tendrá que entregar información secreta de casos de abusos contra menores, El Espectador
- How a Demon-Slaying Pentecostal Billionaire Is Ushering in a Post-Catholic Brazil, The New Republic
- Edir Macedo, Brazil’s Billionaire Bishop, Bloomberg
- Edir Macedo, Wikipedia
- La Guerra de los Treinta Años, el conflicto que devastó Europa, Infobae
- El exorcismo de Anneliese Michel, Infobae
- Peter Popoff, Wikipedia
- Followers of Christ church face jail, probation for faith-healing neglect of newborn, NBC16
