From ancient conflicts to modern-day controversies, join us as we examine some of the darkest chapters in religious history. We'll explore tragic events and devastating decisions that have left lasting scars on humanity, showing how faith has sometimes been twisted to justify unthinkable actions.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00I didn't expect the kind of Spanish Inquisition.
00:05Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!
00:08Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we're looking at grave misdeeds done by people throughout history,
00:14all in the name of what they claimed was a higher power.
00:17The key question of the Salem Witch Trials is what caused these afflicted girls to start falling into these fits?
00:26The Branch Davidian disaster.
00:28There is a battle between good and evil, between every individual and themselves, you know?
00:32Between what's right is right, it's Christ, and what's wrong is wrong, that's the devil.
00:37Founded in 1955 by Benjamin Rodin, the General Association of Branch Davidian Seventh-day Adventists
00:44is widely regarded as a doomsday cult.
00:47Rodin died in 1978, and his wife Lois assumed his place as Davidian prophet.
00:52That was until 1981, when Vernon Howell, who changed his name to David Koresh,
00:57arrived amassing growing influence in the organization until 1987,
01:02when he spun off his own sect of Davidians.
01:04They prepared you for war, because that's what the belief was.
01:09Everything had to be military style.
01:12My mom's job was to sew the vest, bulletproof vests that they were using for protection.
01:20There was just this level of an impending doom.
01:23Koresh's Branch Davidians assimilated the original group by force,
01:28and in 1993, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms attempted to raid the Mount Carmel Center ranch.
01:35The ensuing 51-day standoff and firefight resulted in the deaths of four ATF agents,
01:41as well as 82 Branch Davidians, including 28 children.
01:45Houston and the world watched as the Davidian compound and the cult itself burned.
01:49Because the burns are a very painful way to die.
01:53But Dr. David Olson says many of the cult members may have died from smoke inhalation,
01:57not the fire itself.
01:58The time that that fire was set, they may have had literally just a minute or two to escape.
02:03Abuse in the Catholic Church and its cover-up.
02:05We have confidence in the victory of good over evil.
02:22Fight the real enemy.
02:24In 1992, Irish singer Sinead O'Connor appeared on Saturday Night Live,
02:29and in one of the show's most controversial moments, tore up a photo of Pope John Paul II.
02:34She claimed it was in response to the Catholic Church's concerted efforts
02:38to cover up disturbing cases of abuse against minors by those in its ranks,
02:43including priests, nuns, and more.
02:45At the outset, I apologize once again to all those who have been sexually abused as minors by priests.
02:55Today, that apology is made in a special way with heartfelt sorrow
03:02to those abused by John Gagin.
03:05O'Connor's career took a heavy blow, but over time, her protest has been regarded as highly prescient.
03:11More and more cases of stomach-churning misconduct were exposed over the years,
03:16most notably by the Spotlight Division of the Boston Globe newspaper.
03:20Their reporting led to five Catholic priests being convicted and sentenced to prison in 2002.
03:25I mean, we went into this essentially because the boss said, look into it, you do what the boss says.
03:30And the church had always said, there's just one or two bad priests out there, it's an isolated problem.
03:34We thought, okay, we've heard there may be six or seven, and then suddenly we thought, could there be a dozen?
03:38And then we seemed to have 20.
03:40And by the time we were confident publishing our first story about the scale of the problem,
03:44we said there were at least 70.
03:45We now know there were hundreds in the Boston Archdiocese alone.
03:47Thirty Years' War.
03:49The Peasants' War is just a name, and it gives the wrong impression.
03:53There wasn't a war as we understand the term, rather an unknown number of isolated uprisings.
04:00These peasants' revolts constitute a tradition going back into the 14th and 15th centuries.
04:06This devastating Central European religious conflict saw as many as an estimated 8 million deaths
04:12over its three-decade span, both military and civilian.
04:15The war was spurred on by the 16th century rise of Protestantism in Europe,
04:20which was perceived as threatening centuries of Catholic dominance.
04:23The success of the Prague defenestration can best be understood
04:27if we look at the Bohemian Act of Confederation of 1619.
04:34Here we have a document in which the Bohemian estates define what they want
04:39in terms that we will later call a state.
04:42It began in earnest when Emperor Ferdinand II, the Catholic King of Bohemia,
04:47aka modern-day Czech Republic, was replaced by Frederick V of the Palotinate, a Protestant.
04:52From there, what had started as a civil war within the Holy Roman Empire
04:56snowballed into a region-wide conflict.
04:59The Thirty Years' War forever altered the social and political trajectory of Central Europe,
05:03and all because Ferdinand had intended to stomp out Catholicism.
05:07Perhaps Frederick the Great put it best.
05:10Each man should be blessed as he thinks fit.
05:14And so religion is shifted firmly into the private sphere.
05:18The mass deaths of Jonestown.
05:20In Guyana, a California congressman, three American journalists and a woman
05:24were gunned down, murdered by a gang of fanatics.
05:27Congressman Lee O'Ryan had gone to the town of Georgetown in Guyana
05:30to investigate allegations that some young Californians were being held prisoners and virtual slaves
05:36by a mysterious cult called the People's Temple.
05:39For context, the actions of Jim Jones and his People's Temple
05:42led to the single largest deliberate loss of American life
05:46until the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001.
05:49Jones, a preacher who'd formed his cult in Indianapolis in 1954,
05:54had moved it to a rented plot of land in Guyana,
05:57owing to increasing backlash to allegations of abuse and violence.
06:01There were some cult members with him who said they wanted to leave,
06:04but one of them pulled a gun and started shooting at the other defectors.
06:08And then a truckload of people pulled up and they started shooting too.
06:11Ryan was killed.
06:12So was NBC News correspondent Don Harris, along with his cameraman Bob Brown.
06:17These allegations became especially pronounced
06:19as the movement moved further and further away from mainstream Christianity.
06:23On November 17th, 1978, an investigative visit by U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan turned deadly
06:30when security guards killed Ryan and four others.
06:33That night, Jones commanded his 918 congregants to drink cyanide-laced Flavor-Aid,
06:40commonly mistaken for Kool-Aid,
06:42while he and his personal aide Annie Moore allegedly took their own lives.
06:46He had babies and children go first.
06:50And they would take the syringe and the nurse or other people who were administering it
06:56would simply put it into the person's mouth and they would swallow it
07:00and then give them a small drink of punch to wash it down.
07:03The establishment of the Canadian residential school system.
07:06In 2015, the estimate was about 4,100 children likely died attending these schools.
07:13We believe that number could be as high as 15,000 now.
07:17We do know from testimony and from records that students died of negligence,
07:21they died of starvation, they died of disease,
07:23and increasingly there's a belief that their deaths were deliberate in some cases.
07:27In the time between the so-called Indian Act was passed in 1876
07:32to the time the last school shut its doors in 1997,
07:36irreparable damage was done to Canada's indigenous communities.
07:40Without their families' consent,
07:42children born to indigenous families were forcibly placed into harsh, punishing boarding schools,
07:47where their culture, identities, and histories were stripped from them
07:50in the hope that they would assimilate.
07:52The residential schools had a disturbingly high mortality rate,
07:55possibly in the thousands, partially attributed in the years since
07:58to insufficient measures to curb the spread of tuberculosis.
08:02I don't think our parents knew what was happening in those schools.
08:06They didn't know the horrors.
08:08They didn't know the loneliness, you know,
08:11the deprivation of food, and, you know, they didn't know any of that.
08:15And we never talked about it.
08:17And that wasn't talked about after you went home during the summer.
08:20Although the Canadian government and the Catholic Church have apologized since,
08:24the detrimental effects of the residential school system have trickled down through the ages
08:29and remain a black mark on the country's history.
08:31Federal government and key ministers in that government have issued, you know, heartfelt apologies.
08:36But at the same time,
08:38Justin Trudeau's government is in litigation with residential school survivors in court.
08:42And he has so far ignored calls for a national investigation into the deaths.
08:46So I think for a lot of people,
08:47it's tough to square what those apologies mean when it comes to concrete action
08:51that indigenous leaders have said would be necessary to move forward.
08:55The Troubles in Northern Ireland.
08:56The current conflict in Northern Ireland has now lasted for nearly 10 years.
09:01For much of that time, politicians in the Irish Republic have refrained from questioning Ulster's status
09:06as part of the United Kingdom.
09:08While scholars and historians are quick to dispel notions
09:11that this ethno-nationalist conflict stemmed primarily from religious tensions,
09:15it's inarguable that they played an integral role in its escalation.
09:19Essentially, Protestant Unionists and Loyalists butted heads with Irish Nationalists and Republicans.
09:25Do you believe that there can be permanent peace in Ireland
09:29as long as Britain remains in the North?
09:31I honestly don't believe that there could be.
09:35Because there will be in future generations people who are prepared to take up arms,
09:40even though they won't have the support of the vast majority,
09:44to take up arms in such a situation.
09:46The Unionists wanted Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom,
09:49and the Nationalists vociferously supported the founding of a united Ireland.
09:53The conflict turned deadly, and over several decades,
09:56just over 3,500 people were killed, over half of whom were civilians.
10:00The troubles may not have explicitly have been divided along religious lines,
10:05but those lines formed the basis of the conflicts to begin with.
10:08In 1998, peace came, with an agreement that maintained Northern Ireland
10:12as part of the United Kingdom,
10:14but brought Catholic Nationalist Party Sinn Féin into government
10:18in a power-sharing arrangement, with its former Loyalist foes.
10:21It has been a remarkable journey.
10:23We're now in the control, effectively,
10:26of one of the most successful peace processes in the world today.
10:30The litany of disturbing allegations against the Church of Scientology
10:34Scientology is now facing harsh new criticism from one of its own.
10:38A former high-ranking official, Deborah Cook,
10:40blasted the Church leadership in a weekend email to thousands of current and former members.
10:45She targets Scientology's fundraising practices and calls on members to scale back on donations.
10:50Oof, where do we even begin with this one?
10:52As you're probably already aware of, L. Ron Hubbard's new religious movement
10:57has seemingly been a lightning rod for controversy since its December 1953 inception.
11:02While the organization is protected under religious grounds in some countries,
11:06like Australia and the United States,
11:08others, like France, have labeled it an extremist cult.
11:11Nick was labeled a suppressive person.
11:14His mother says Church officials actively and repeatedly pressured her to, quote,
11:18disconnect from her son to cut off ties completely.
11:22She feared that refusing meant she, too, would be labeled a suppressive person
11:26and would likely lose her relationship with her daughter, Ashley, still a devout Scientologist.
11:31Over the years, the Church and its numbers have been found guilty of domestic espionage,
11:35coercion, and fraud.
11:37It's also repeatedly intimidated those who have descended from its ranks,
11:41as well as its secular critics.
11:43Perhaps most disturbingly of all, rumors persist of rampant human trafficking,
11:47as well as other forms of abuse, by officials within the Church.
11:51A former Scientology member with local ties is suing the Church, claiming repeated abuse.
11:57According to the lawsuit, the girl lived at the spiritual headquarters in Clearwater
12:00from age 6 to 12 in the 1980s and early 90s.
12:04She claims she was forced to work long hours and was the victim of abusive rituals.
12:10Witch trials in the early modern period
12:12The Puritans settled in Salem about 70 years before the outbreak of the Salem witch trials.
12:19They had fled England, where they had been persecuted for their religious beliefs by the Anglican Church.
12:25Puritans are not fans of this church, not because it's too strict, but because it's not strict enough.
12:31One of the most damning religious panics of all time,
12:34this dark era of human history saw 100,000 people prosecuted for witchcraft,
12:39of whom as many as 60,000 were executed.
12:41Peaking in the 16th and 17th centuries, and taking place primarily in Europe and North America,
12:47friends, families, and neighbors turned on each other.
12:49A court is convened in the town of Salem.
12:52Tituba is brought before a court, before a council, and they ask her,
12:56Are you a witch?
12:57Did you bewitch the Paris girls?
13:00One of the peculiarities of the Salem witch trials is that those who confess are granted clemency.
13:06If you maintained your innocence, but you were found guilty, then you were put to death.
13:11Most of the accused were women, and the crimes they were charged with are theorized to have stemmed from war and food shortages.
13:18People needed someone to blame.
13:20Most infamous of all were the Salem witch trials on American soil,
13:24which were the result of growing tensions between the Puritans and Church of England supporters.
13:29Thomas Putnam files 12 legal complaints and testifies against 24 individuals who are accused of witchcraft,
13:36but his daughter Anne takes it all one step further.
13:40Anne Putnam, in the end, actually levies accusations against 48 people,
13:46so nearly one quarter of all the people who get accused of witchcraft in Salem Village.
13:51Crusades
13:52The Crusades were seemingly the religious wars to end all religious wars.
13:57Largely engineered by the Latin Church, the Crusades consisted of a series of military operations in the Holy Land,
14:03located between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River.
14:06The Crusades were intended as a way for Christianity to retake Jerusalem and the larger Levant as a whole,
14:12ripping it from Muslim rule.
14:14The effort to control the geographical region took a serious hit in 1187,
14:18when the Sultan Saladin and his Ayyubid army recaptured Jerusalem and restored Muslim dominance.
14:24Despite the war and bloodshed, the Latin Church's attempts were ultimately for naught,
14:28having failed in its original goal.
14:30Before we continue, be sure to subscribe to our channel and ring the bell to get notified about our latest videos.
14:36You have the option to be notified for occasional videos, or all of them.
14:40If you're on your phone, make sure you go into settings and switch on your notifications.
14:46Spanish Inquisition
14:47The old Monty Python joke has a ring of truth to it.
15:08No one expected the Spanish Inquisition.
15:10At one point, the Catholic Church was known to carry out Inquisitions.
15:14A form of ecclesiastical court, in which justice would be served solely on its Christian terms.
15:20Prosecuting such violations as heresy, apostasy, blasphemy, and the aforementioned witchcraft,
15:26the Spanish Inquisition was an exceptionally trigger-happy period.
15:29Cardinal, read the charges.
15:34You are hereby charged that you did, and diverse minds commit parasy against the Holy Church.
15:40My own mind.
15:41That's enough!
15:42Its most devastating moments came in the form of the Alhambra Decree,
15:46which outlawed Judaism and Islam under the Spanish monarchy.
15:50Hundreds of thousands of people were forcibly converted to Christianity,
15:53expelled from Spain's territory entirely, or even executed.
15:57Which moment in our video shocked you the most?
16:15Be sure to let us know in the comments below.
16:27Let us know in the comments below.