Coercion

The Spanish Inquisition was authorized by the Pope in 1478 and abolished only in 1834. It first targeted Jews who had converted to Catholicism (conversos), suspecting them of secretly keeping their old faith, and later also converted Muslims (moriscos), Protestants, and others. Its tribunals used torture, such as the rack and water torture, and held public ceremonies (autos-da-fé) in which the accused were paraded and sentenced. An estimated 150,000 people were prosecuted, and an estimated 3,000–5,000 were executed, mostly by burning at the stake.

The Alhambra Decree of March 1492 gave the Jews of Spain four months to convert to Christianity or leave the country forever, under penalty of death. Between 40,000 and 100,000 left; many others converted to stay. Many of the refugees fled to Portugal, where in 1497 King Manuel I declared the Jews Christian by royal decree, and had those who tried to leave forcibly baptized, after separating them from their children.

In August 2014, the Islamic State attacked the Yazidi religious minority in the Sinjar region of northern Iraq, giving them the choice to “convert or be killed”. Thousands of Yazidis were killed, and thousands of women and girls were abducted and forced into sexual slavery. The UN Human Rights Office qualified this as genocide, citing “forced religious conversion and sexual slavery” as parts of the campaign.

In 1858, in Bologna, then part of the Papal States, police took six-year-old Edgardo Mortara from his Jewish parents. A Catholic servant claimed she had secretly baptized him years earlier, when he was ill as a baby, and according to Church law, a baptized child could not be raised by non-Christians. Pope Pius IX refused all pleas, including international protests, to return the boy to his family. Edgardo was raised as a Catholic, and became a priest.

For over a century, about 150,000 Indigenous children in Canada were taken from their families and placed in residential schools, funded by the government and mostly run by churches — Catholic, Anglican, United, and Presbyterian. The last school closed in 1997. Children were forbidden to speak their languages and practice their culture, and at least 4,000 of them died, mostly from disease linked to poor conditions. Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission called the system a “cultural genocide”, designed to “kill the Indian in the child”. In 2022, Pope Francis apologized, and acknowledged it as genocide.

In 2004–2005, cadets at the US Air Force Academy complained of evangelical Christian pressure by officers, staff, and fellow cadets. In a survey, almost one in five cadets reported unwanted religious proselytizing, and at a Protestant service, chaplains urged cadets to proselytize their roommates, warning that those who did not turn their lives over to Jesus would burn in hell. An Air Force investigation found a “perception of religious bias” at the academy, though it did not find systemic discrimination. In a military hierarchy, “invitations” from a superior are hard to refuse.

Deuteronomy 13:6–10 commands that anyone — even “thy brother … or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom” — who entices others to “serve other gods” must be killed: “thou shalt stone him with stones, that he die”. Deuteronomy 20:16–17 commands the Israelites, regarding the cities of the Canaanite nations: “thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth: But thou shalt utterly destroy them”.

Quran 9:5, known as the “Sword Verse”, says: “kill the polytheists ˹who violated their treaties˺ wherever you find them … But if they repent, perform prayers, and pay alms-tax, then set them free” (the bracketed words are the translator’s interpretation). Quran 9:29 says about Jews and Christians: “Fight those who do not believe in Allah and the Last Day … from among those who were given the Scripture, until they pay the tax, willingly submitting, fully humbled.” At the same time, the Quran also says “there is no compulsion in religion” (2:256).

In June 2014, the Islamic State proclaimed itself a worldwide caliphate, claiming religious and political authority over all Muslims worldwide — a claim rejected by the vast majority of Muslims. In the territory it controlled, it enforced its interpretation of Islamic law with public executions, and it inspired and directed terror attacks around the world.

On February 14, 1989, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa calling on “all brave Muslims of the world” to kill the author Salman Rushdie and those involved in publishing his novel The Satanic Verses, which was deemed blasphemous. In 1991 the book’s Japanese translator was stabbed to death, and its Italian translator was stabbed and seriously wounded. In 2022, 33 years after the fatwa, Rushdie was stabbed ten times on stage in New York, and lost the sight in one eye.

In 2009, Asia Bibi, a Christian farm worker in Pakistan, was accused of blasphemy after an argument with Muslim co-workers, and in 2010 she was sentenced to death by hanging. In 2011, Salmaan Taseer, the governor of Punjab, who had defended her and criticized the blasphemy law, was assassinated by his own bodyguard; two months later, Shahbaz Bhatti, the Minister for Minorities, was killed as well. In 2018, Pakistan’s Supreme Court acquitted her, citing contradictions in the witnesses’ testimony. She had spent eight years on death row, and had to leave the country for her safety.

In January 2015, gunmen killed 12 people at the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which had published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. In October 2020, Samuel Paty, a teacher near Paris, showed some of these cartoons in a civics lesson on freedom of expression. After a false online campaign against him, he was beheaded outside his school.

In Iran, women are required by law to wear the hijab, enforced by the “morality police”. In September 2022, 22-year-old Mahsa Amini was arrested for allegedly wearing her hijab improperly, and died in custody three days later. A UN fact-finding mission concluded that her death was caused by physical violence she suffered in custody. Her death sparked the largest protests in Iran in years, under the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom”.

In Ireland, Catholic religious orders ran the Magdalene laundries: institutions where about 30,000 women — unmarried mothers, and others deemed “fallen” or morally at risk — were confined and made to do unpaid laundry work, sometimes for many years. The last one closed only in 1996. In 2013, the Irish Prime Minister formally apologized, calling the laundries “the nation’s shame”.

In March 2001, the Taliban blew up the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan — two giant statues, 38 and 55 meters high, carved into a cliff about 1,400 years earlier. The Taliban leader Mullah Omar ordered their destruction so that “no one can worship or respect them in the future”, and later declared: “Muslims should be proud of smashing idols.”

On December 6, 1992, a rally of about 150,000 Hindu nationalists in Ayodhya, India, demolished the Babri Masjid, a 16th-century mosque that they claimed stood on the birthplace of the god Rama. About 2,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed in the riots that followed. A government commission of inquiry found that the demolition was “neither spontaneous nor unplanned”.

In June 2015, young Jewish extremists set fire to the Church of the Multiplication at Tabgha, on the Sea of Galilee, which marks the traditional site of Jesus’ miracle of the loaves and fishes. On the wall they sprayed, in Hebrew, “false idols will be smashed” — a phrase taken from the Jewish prayer Aleinu.

In Myanmar, Buddhist nationalist movements led by monks, such as the 969 Movement and Ma Ba Tha, spread hatred against the Muslim Rohingya minority. In 2016–2017 the army carried out a campaign of killings, rape, and the burning of villages, and more than 700,000 Rohingya fled to Bangladesh. The UN called it “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing”, and UN investigators called for Myanmar’s generals to be tried for genocide.