Prudery and prurience often go hand in glove. Prurience and paranoia are fellow travelers as well. Eighteenth- and 19th-century anti-papist authors and pamphleteers turned out a steady stream of stories about the goings-on between priests and young women in confessionals. “The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk,” the ghosted confessions of a nun who was supposedly held as a sex slave in a convent in Montreal, was outsold only by “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in the years before the Civil War. “Anti-Catholicism,” as the historian Richard Hofstadter put it, “has always been the pornography of the Puritans.”

Protestants aren’t the only ones with a penchant for pornography. In the Inquisition era, the Catholics themselves — whose dungeons and torture chambers would provide so many of the lurid tropes of anti-Catholic gothic fiction — filled their witch hunting manual, the Malleus maleficarum, with pantingly precise descriptions of infanticide, cannibalism, bestiality and orgies. Back in the 14th century, the Knights Templar were accused of trampling, spitting on and urinating on the cross, and welcoming initiates into their order with obscene kisses on the mouth, navel and buttocks.

The church father Epiphanius’ horrifying description of the Phibionite Gnostics’ supposed sexual practices in his “Panarion” dates back further still, to the late fourth century. It’s worth quoting, since it contains so many monstrous (and licentious) allegations — and perhaps the world’s earliest depiction of what a right-wing propagandist today might call a partial-birth abortion:

First they have their women in common. … The man leaving his wife says to his own wife: Stand up and make love with the brother. … Then the unfortunates unite with each other, and as I am truly ashamed to say the shameful things that are being done by them. … Nevertheless, I will not be ashamed to say those things which they are not ashamed to do, in order that I may cause in every way a horror in those who hear about their shameful practices. … They have intercourse with each other but they teach that one may not beget children. … And if … the woman becomes pregnant, then … they pull out the embryo in the time when they can reach it with the hand. They take out this unborn child and in a mortar pound it with a pestle and into this mix honey and pepper and certain other spices and myrrh, in order that it may not nauseate them, and then they come together, all this company of swine and dogs, and each communicates with a finger from the bruised child. … Many other horrible things are done by them.