Religious beliefs in science-fiction: Arthur C. Clarke and the critique of the Church through "Childhood's End"

In Clarke's landmark work, "Childhood's End," where a society of aliens known only as "Overlords" comes down and attempts to guide humanity on the path to enlightenment, Clarke makes some very critical statements of faith and religion in general. In Part I, "Earth and the Overlords," the colonial supervisor Karellen makes a statement on page 23 of the Del Rey Edition, to quote Clarke directly: "You will find men like him in all the world's religions. They know we represent reason and science, and they fear that we will overthrow their gods. Not necessarily in any deliberate act, but in a subtler fashion." Karellen makes this quote in reference to Wainwright, a man who is highly skeptical of the Overlords and uses his faith as justification for portraying Karellen and the Overlords as dictators. This one quote on page 23 sets up a variety of arguments and debates, but the one that Clarke appears to be leaning towards in this passage is that faith, most notably the Catholic Church and any organized institution of religion in general is a dividing force far more often than it is a unifying one. History, something Clarke was very familiar with, given that "Childhood's End" is essentially a parody on Britain's colonization of India, stands by this statement. In the past 500 years, the Catholic Church has killed more than 250 million people, more than the Nazis and Communist despots combined, and upheld beliefs of ostracism, racism, hatred, bigotry, homophobia, anti-Semitism and forced conversion through the Inquisition. The 500 years of warfare between Protestants and Catholics, that reached its zenith in the Thirty Years' War and did not end in Ireland until the 1970s, destroyed so many historical artifacts on both sides, as well as hundreds of pre-Christian, pagan European texts, that knowledge of entire societies may have vanished from human memory. The Catholics say that they are inclusive and tolerant, but Clarke appears to be using Karellen as a vessel for his own opinions on the Church, in that the Catholic Church saying that they are tolerant because they are inclusive is the same thing as Adolf Hitler saying that he was tolerant because he thought all white people were equal. Catholics claim that they strive for a utopia, and Clarke may be arguing that the only true utopian society would be one without the decidedly dystopian reality that institutionalized religion creates, and that the best way to eventually do away with the Church would be to ignore it, as Karellen states on pages 23 and 24.