Talk about free will, suffering, and religion long enough, and someone will eventually retreat to the safest possible position: flatten everything complicated into a neat prejudice.
Religion is bad, they say, because of extremism, cults, and the bloodshed scattered across history. Or religion is good, because it teaches love, equality, charity, and care for the suffering. Both reactions share the same habit of mind: they turn a tangled human reality into a binary. It looks decisive. In truth, it is lazy.
Human life is not exhausted by labels.
Suffering, free will, and the burden of choice
Within Christian theology, God is not the creator of suffering; suffering enters through humanity. More precisely, it enters through human free will. That claim often lands badly, as if the point were simply to tell people to bear their own pain in silence. But the deeper argument is different: if human beings truly possess the capacity to choose, then they also possess the capacity to choose wrongly, and to suffer the consequences of what human beings do to one another.
That is a frightening responsibility.
Free will is a double-edged sword. It makes love possible, but it also makes cruelty possible. The problem is not the sword itself, but the hand that wields it.
Sartre, though an atheist existentialist rather than a religious thinker, arrived at a similarly severe conclusion: human beings are condemned to be free, and therefore responsible for what they do. Freedom is not a romantic gift one can admire from a distance. It is a burden one cannot escape. Religion, in that sense, is only one dimension within the field of human choice. When someone uses that freedom to commit evil, many people turn around and blame the instrument.
The same habit appears in debates about religion. As a system of ideas, religion is not morally self-executing. Everything depends on interpretation, embodiment, and use. Some people use religion to heal wounds; others use it to inflict them. Some discover compassion and inclusion in doctrine; others draw from the same tradition a language of exclusion and hatred. Extremism and cult behavior do not arise because religion automatically generates them. They arise because greed, vanity, manipulation, and the hunger for power distort whatever they touch.
The problem is not only belief, but human nature
Once that is admitted, a great deal becomes harder to simplify.
It becomes impossible to say that religion itself is the root of all violence, just as it becomes impossible to declare religion pure and innocent in every historical form. Human beings are fully capable of twisting faith into a mechanism of domination. They are also capable of turning it into a source of endurance, solidarity, and mercy.
This is why blaming religion alone so often feels intellectually dishonest. It identifies a convenient target and avoids the more disturbing truth: remove religion, and human beings do not suddenly become less capable of domination, cruelty, fanaticism, or self-deception. They merely find new banners.
Suspicion is easy; sacrifice is harder
History offers cases that do not fit clean ideological narratives. During the Second Sino-Japanese War, many missionaries risked their lives to aid Chinese civilians and the wounded. John Magee, an American Episcopal priest, helped rescue large numbers of civilians during the Nanjing Massacre and recorded footage that later became crucial evidence of Japanese atrocities. Vincent Lebbe, a Belgian Catholic priest who became a Chinese citizen in 1927, organized relief teams in the early years of the war. Ernest Forster, an American Presbyterian missionary in Xuzhou, used church schools and hospitals as shelters and was remembered for saving thousands of women and children. Robert Jacquinot de Besange, a French Jesuit, worked with Shanghai's mayor in 1937 to establish the "Jacquinot Safe Zone," regarded as the world's first refugee safety zone. Gladys Aylward sheltered ninety-four children in Shanxi and escorted them to Xi'an in wartime. A British missionary in Henan reportedly stood alone at the gate to prevent Japanese soldiers from killing Chinese civilians.
There were many more.
One can always reply that missionaries carried Western values, that charity and evangelization were not separable, or that cultural influence was part of the picture. Fine. Motives may be examined. Intentions may be debated. But it is worth asking a harsher question of those who dismiss such acts from a distance: whom did they save?
Typing suspicion is far easier than risking one’s life. Whatever else may have been present, the act of rescue itself was nakedly good.
The religious roots people prefer to forget
Many people are happy to enjoy social and moral inheritances shaped in part by religion, while speaking of religion as though it were merely a relic of ignorance.
Take the modern idea that all human beings are born equal. In the Western tradition, that principle did not emerge from nowhere. Protestant readings of the Bible emphasized that every person is created by God and stands before God in a direct and equal relation rather than through a monopolized religious hierarchy. This thread fed into Locke’s theory of natural rights and appears clearly in the language of the American Declaration of Independence, with its appeal to rights endowed by a Creator. After World War II, the religious coloring of such ideas was deliberately softened and secularized in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights under Eleanor Roosevelt’s leadership, but the genealogy did not disappear simply because modern institutions adopted a nonreligious vocabulary.
The same selective amnesia appears elsewhere.
The widespread acceptance of the two-day weekend grew partly out of the Sabbath tradition and later Christian insistence on regular days of worship and rest. In industrial societies, especially in historically Christian countries, churches and social movements pushed for Saturday and Sunday to be recognized as time for workers to recover rather than be consumed entirely by labor.
Ideas about marriage and love, too, were shaped by religious moral worlds. So were the institutional beginnings of orphan care. Early Christian teaching placed strong emphasis on care for the poor, the orphaned, widows, and the sick. After Christianity was legalized in the Roman Empire in the fourth century, church charity systems became more organized, and orphanages took more durable institutional form through monasteries and church communities. In China, indigenous relief structures also existed at different times, including Buddhist charitable institutions in the Tang period and state-run child welfare offices in the Song. But in the late Qing era, Christian orphanages and foundling homes also filled real gaps amid social upheaval, even while generating conflict with local customs and suspicion toward missionary motives. The larger point remains: across traditions and regions, religious communities have often been among the earliest providers of shelter, food, education, and long-term care for vulnerable children.
The story of hospitals is similar. The modern hospital has deep historical ties to Christian charitable practice, especially the belief that caring for the sick is a sacred obligation. Many early European hospitals were founded by churches or monasteries before evolving, over time, into professional medical institutions. In China, missionary medicine played an important role in the rise of Western-style hospitals. In 1835, the American missionary Peter Parker founded Boji Hospital in Guangzhou, widely regarded as the first Western hospital in China. In the nineteenth century, missionary-led hospitals also introduced obstetric medicine, vaccination, nurse training, and medical education. By 1949, more than 340 church hospitals existed across China. Many later became major public institutions after state takeover, merger, and renaming. Several of the country’s most prestigious modern hospitals trace their origins to these church-founded institutions.
Even the dating system used across much of the world reflects a Christian inheritance: the Common Era calendar emerged from the older Anno Domini system, organized around the traditional dating of the birth of Jesus Christ.
Modern science is another case people often discuss in a simplistic way. Science eventually became a distinct empirical discipline, but many of its early conditions of possibility were nurtured in a Christian worldview that imagined the universe as ordered, intelligible, and governed by consistent laws because it was created rather than ruled by arbitrary mystery. Figures like Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton worked within worlds profoundly shaped by Christianity. For many early scientists, studying nature was not a rebellion against divine meaning but one path toward understanding creation.
Even modern ideological and philosophical formations—capitalism, as Max Weber famously argued in connection with Protestant ethics, but also strands of moral philosophy, historicism, existentialism, individualism, universalism, and egalitarianism—did not develop in a vacuum detached from religious history.
Yet public education often presents the modern world in thoroughly deracinated form. People inherit concepts after their religious content has been secularized, then imagine those concepts emerged from nowhere. Religion gets associated only with backwardness and superstition, while its formative role in moral, legal, institutional, and intellectual history is pushed out of sight.
That is what makes the pattern so ironic: people benefit from these inheritances without mentioning their sources, but the moment religion is linked to scandal or violence, they speak as if the entire structure were nothing but poison.
Psychoanalysis never agreed on religion either
The complexity of religion is visible not only in history but also in how major thinkers have tried to explain it.
Freud saw religion as a collective illusion, rooted in primitive impulses and in human fear of uncontrollable natural forces. In his view, religion functioned as a psychological defense mechanism, a compensation for anxiety, death, and the terror of the unknown. He described it in terms close to a universal obsessional neurosis, a mass delusion through which people reshape reality in fantasy in order to protect themselves from pain.
Jung, however, took a very different path. For him, religion was not merely the projection of conflict or repression. It was also an expression of archetypes embedded in the deep structure of the psyche. Religious symbols gave form to these archetypes and could therefore serve a healing and integrative function, helping individuals connect with the collective unconscious and move toward psychic wholeness.
Lacan complicated the question in another direction. He treated religion as one way of symbolizing the Big Other—the external order of law, prohibition, culture, and language that structures subjectivity. In this account, religion is not simply a personal belief system. It is part of the symbolic order through which individuals locate themselves in relation to moral law, social norms, and meaning itself. Religion becomes not only creed but ethical practice, a process by which symbolic structures are internalized into identity.
These disagreements are not a sign that religion is trivial. They are evidence of how difficult it is to reduce religion to any single function.
Interpretation is always open
Religious texts are never read in only one way. Their meanings branch according to language, context, desire, community, and power. One person reads a text toward charity, another toward punishment. One finds humility, another finds authorization to dominate. That does not happen because religious language is uniquely defective; it happens because language itself is limited, and texts are always open enough to receive projection.
People often discover in scripture what they were already inclined to seek.
Refusing both sanctification and demonization
None of this requires sanctifying religion. Religion has indeed been used as an instrument of oppression, warfare, cruelty, and injustice. That history cannot be erased, and it should not be excused.
But intellectual honesty demands another question: can we acknowledge the darkness without making ourselves blind to the light?
That is where prejudice becomes dangerous. Prejudice destroys discrimination in the proper sense of the word—the ability to distinguish, to separate one thing from another, to judge carefully rather than react conveniently. Once prejudice takes hold, every problem gets assigned to the easiest target, and the deeper causes are left unexamined.
Free will gives human beings choice, and choice brings responsibility. That responsibility is one reason social reality is so complicated. Religion, as a humanly inhabited tool and tradition, can call forth generosity or magnify cruelty. People who insist on placing it cleanly in the category of pure good or pure evil are usually not showing moral clarity. More often, they are fleeing complexity.
Faith should not become an excuse for evading responsibility. But neither should religion be mythologized as the source of every human atrocity.
In the end, suffering comes from human nature as much as from circumstance, and choice comes from free will. Religion can be used to heal or to wound. What matters, finally, is the person holding it. Any belief system can be distorted; that possibility alone does not justify abolishing it in principle. Rejecting religion will not eliminate human evil. Recognizing the good religion has done does not require forgetting its historical shadows.
What is needed is not a louder stance, but a deeper one.