Martha was loud, opinionated and an unwed mother. One of those things got her killed. Rebecca, for equally specious reasons, was also condemned to die. Rebecca’s sibling Mary, because she attempted to intervene on her sister’s behalf, was executed, too. Rick Warren—the portly, amiable homophobe, author of The Purpose Driven Life and pastor of the curiously named Saddleback megachurch—was not even born when religious hysteria caused the death of these women and 17 others. However, Warren’s evangelizing Africans into a state of murderous frenzy over homosexuality screams Massachusetts, 1692—a time when Cotton Mather (author, pastor, and said to
