Show Notes
In March 2026, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth stood before a Pentagon worship service and prayed for "overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy", calling for the eternal damnation of America's enemies. Military commanders across every branch have been reported, in over 200 formal complaints, telling troops the Iran war is "God's plan" and that Trump was "anointed by Jesus" to trigger Armageddon. Benjamin Netanyahu has quoted 1 Samuel 15:3, the command to destroy the Amalekites, sparing "neither man nor woman, infant nor ox" to justify Israeli military operations. This is what happens when political leaders weaponize faith to sanctify violence. And it has been happening for 1,700 years. From Constantine's battlefield vision in 312 CE and the subsequent murder of philosopher Hypatia by a Christian mob, through Augustine's just war doctrine that gave state violence a Christian vocabulary, to Charlemagne's massacre of 4,500 Saxon prisoners at Verden for refusing baptism. We cover the First Crusade's Rhineland pogroms, where Jewish mothers drowned their children rather than see them forcibly baptized, and the Jerusalem massacre of 1099, where chroniclers described blood reaching horses' knees. We examine the Albigensian Crusade's destruction of Béziers, where the papal legate reportedly said "Kill them all, God will know his own," and the witch trials that followed, killing up to 60,000 people (80% of them women) using Heinrich Kramer's Malleus Maleficarum as theological cover. We also cover what this history did specifically to women, a thread that runs unbroken from Tertullian calling women "the devil's gateway" in 200 CE, through the rape of nuns during the Fourth Crusade's sack of Constantinople, to the sexual violence documented in California's Spanish mission system, to the girls in Native American boarding schools whose hair was cut, languages stolen, and bodies abused under church-run federal contracts. The only thing more dangerous than a tyrant, is one who believes God gave them permission. SOURCES Augustine, The City of God, c. 413–426 CE
Tertullian, De Cultu Feminarum, c. 200 CE
Socrates Scholasticus, Historia Ecclesiastica, c. 439 CE (murder of Hypatia)
Annales Regni Francorum (Charlemagne / Verden massacre)
Barbero, Alessandro — Charlemagne: Father of a Continent, UC Press, 2004
Chazan, Robert — European Jewry and the First Crusade, UC Press, 1987
Mainz Anonymous and Solomon bar Simson Chronicle (Rhineland massacres, 1096)
Raymond of Aguilers, Historia Francorum (Jerusalem, 1099)
Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus Miraculorum, c. 1220 (Béziers)
Nicetas Choniates, Historia, c. 1206 (Fourth Crusade / Constantinople)
Brenon, Anne — Le vrai visage du catharisme, Loubatières, 1988
Kramer, Heinrich — Malleus Maleficarum, 1487 (ed. Mackay, Cambridge UP, 2006)
Levack, Brian — The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe, Routledge, 4th ed., 2016
Cuneo, Michele de — Letter of October 28, 1495, trans. Samuel Eliot Morison
Díaz del Castillo, Bernal — True History of the Conquest of New Spain, c. 1568
Hassig, Ross — Mexico and the Spanish Conquest, U of Oklahoma Press, 2006
Pedro Pizarro — Relation of the Discovery and Conquest of Peru, c. 1571
Stannard, David — American Holocaust, Oxford UP, 1992
Kamen, Henry — The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision, Yale UP, 1997
Jouanna, Arlette — La Saint-Barthélemy, Gallimard, 2007
Parker, Geoffrey — The Thirty Years' War, Routledge, 1997
Regan, Donald — For the Record, Harcourt Brace, 1988
Maurice, Jean-Claude — Si vous le répétez, je démentirai (Bush / Gog and Magog)
NPR — "Netanyahu's references to violent biblical passages raise alarm," Nov. 7, 2023
U.S. Dept. of the Interior — Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report, 2022
Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada — Final Report, 2015
Johnson v. McIntosh, 21 U.S. 543, U.S. Supreme Court, 1823
Vatican Statement repudiating the Doctrine of Discovery, March
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The word “gossip” started out as something sacred. In Old English it was godsibb, literally “God-sibling,” the name for a godparent or anyone who stood with you at a baptism and became spiritual kin. By the Middle Ages the meaning had loosened to cover any close friend or companion, and in particular the circle of women who gathered in the birthing room to help a mother through labor. Those long hours of waiting were filled with talk, and the “gossips” became known as much for their conversation as for their support. Men, fearful and suspicious of women in community without men supervising began to demonize women gathering publicly or speaking to each other. Male writers of the 1500s and 1600s sneered at “gossips” as idle, chattering women, and by the 1800s the verb “to gossip” meant exactly what it does today. It was uniquely WOMAN sin and was built to isolate a woman from network. Then... they added it to the Bible.