This crime was child abuse. Child abuse happens in all sectors of society, and the abusers hide behind their religion or need for discipline or any number of factors. But it's the abusers who are to blame, not the excuses they hide behind.

The "excuses" make different kinds of criminality possible. What happened to that kid required (a) a psychopath (b) an ideology that he could use to validate what he was doing and (c) an anomic urban environment that put no check on his actions.

The ideology alone leads to consequences like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Ronaldsay_child_abuse_scandal

In that case the ideology was the "satanic ritual abuse" scare, an American Christian middle-class professional version of the Kindoki panic. Nobody involved in that was prone to murderous violence, and the world of social work is big enough that nobody could have got away with physical torture. But the effects were bad enough.