Holy Water Isn’t Acid. Stop Weaponizing Faith.

In movies, holy water burns vampires like acid. In the real world, people scald their enemies with faith that ought to nourish, not kill.

Last week, I observed that movie-holy-water requires one thing to be effective: it needs monsters. Otherwise, it remains in the font, blessing babies. But what happens if you don’t have vampires or demons close at hand? Then, you’re tempted to bring your spiritual heroics closer to home and declare fellow human beings to be the devil in human clothing.

When Faith Becomes Acid

You don’t have to look far to see Christians treating other human beings like spiritual contaminants that need to be purified or purged from the room. When that is the mindset, faith becomes a delivery system for harm.

Instead of movie-holy-water, we use the Bible itself. We hide behind phrases like “discernment,” or “biblical values,” or “spiritual warfare.” But the result looks the same: someone gets labeled dangerous, unclean, or demonic—and then we feel righteous while we burn them.

Using Holy Water on Monsters

At home, we turn our enemies into monsters. We do this to LGBTQIA+ individuals. We do it to immigrants. To women who won’t stay in their assigned roles. To those in poverty. To people living with mental illness. To people experiencing homelessness. We do it to anyone whose questions feel threatening. We do it to people we’re supposed to love, because we’ve been trained to confuse domination with faithfulness.

Abroad, this can even look like:

Pete Hegseth declaring that Iran is “hell-bent on prophetic Islamist delusions,” delegitimizing a country’s faith and setting America up as spiritually superior;
Military commanders telling their troops that the war is “God’s divine plan,” that Trump is “anointed by Jesus,” and that faith is a battle narrative, with American troops doing the spiritual work of initiating Armageddon and thus the return of Christ.

This mindset turns war into religious destiny. It turns human beings—like the more than 150 schoolgirls killed in a recent U.S. strike on an Iranian school—into targets, flattened into the story’s “monsters” who supposedly need to be purified (read: burned) by American “holy” violence.

Water as a Sacred Element

But water deserves better symbolism than “acid for our enemies.” Across Christian scripture, water is rarely about domination. It’s about life, liberation, and transformation. Water helps us leave slavery behind, washes feet, and manifests in cleansing tears and refreshing springs. Baptism is a ritual of dying and rising—a sign that we belong to a story where death doesn’t get the final word and where cleansing and restoration are the work of God.

This is also where it helps to glance sideways at another tradition for a moment—not to mash religions into a smoothie, but to let the contrast teach us something. In Taoist thought, water is strong precisely because it doesn’t need to dominate. It yields, it flows, it takes the low place. It wears down stone over time, not by violence, but by patience.

That’s a sharp rebuke to the Christian impulse to turn faith into a hammer.

If water teaches anything across traditions, it’s this: the sacred doesn’t need to harm to be powerful. The holy can be gentle and still be real. Cleansing is not the same thing as cruelty.

So, What Should Holy Water Teach Us?

Movies treat holy water like a weapon to hurt enemies. Some Christians treat faith the same way. But this stands against the witness of water in the Christian story. Water stands for healing, purification, restoration, blessing, and belonging. And so should we.

Holy water reminds us that God meets us in the ordinary world. This mundane God calls us into a holiness that looks less like acid and more like empathy and compassion.

So, yes, now and then you’ll see me flicking out that yard-sale sprinkler bottle to pray blessings over a sacred space. Not because I’m gearing up for vampire season, but because I’m trying to remember what faith is for. Faith should never be a weapon. It should be an instrument of healing—clean water for thirsty people, not acid for imagined monsters.

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