I'm really sorry you and your family were mistreated. My experience was very different. Some religious people have committed crimes.

According to article it was not beatings by nuns that caused Mrs. O'Hair to abuse her sons.

He traces her atheism to that self-absorption and hubris and to an aggressive antiestablishment streak that led her (with her two sons) into a variety of left-wing causes—even, he claims, to the Soviet embassy in Paris in search of exile. Rejected by Moscow, she retreated angrily back home to Baltimore where, as he puts it, "The rebel found a cause in prayer at school."