Path of Inspiration/Playing With

Basic Trope: A seemingly benign religion which was originally created for an evil purpose, and remains rotten at the core.

Played Straight: Louis Cypher is the high priest of a religion which preaches kindness, faith in your fellow man and Team Spirit through 'contracts of good behaviour' with the high priest... In order to mass-produce easily deceived and pure-hearted dupes whose good souls are then sold to demons through the contracts.
Exaggerated: Louis Cypher is the high priest of a religion whose converts are taught Incorruptible Pure Pureness... All of which turns the priests into omnipotent Eldritch Abominations who devour the souls of every living creature in existence and destroy the universe.
Justified: Cypher wants power over people, and figures that by starting a religion, he will gain adherents that will follow his instructions.
Inverted: A saint creates an underground cult that appears to be a Religion of Evil (therefore drawing in criminals and scum) that is intentionally designed to gradually teach its adherents goodness and virtue in the face of evil and make better people out of them.
Subverted: A benign religion has some controversial elements, but these are completely justified.
Doubly Subverted: ...but its acts of charity are required to summon a demon.
Untwisted: ...or instead those acts are just done so that the religion looks benevolent to the outside.
Parodied: A religion starts out benevolent, then starts talking about the more evil acts of their god very early on, and the potential converts don't even question how a benevolent deity could slaughter innocent babies, require human sacrifices, require all girls have sex with the high priest, or require they destroy all other races.
Deconstructed: The religion, while preoccupied with helping the poor as part of its missionary work, is very open about the fact that its people are slaves to their god. All discussions on religion as justifying social mores considered abhorrent in the modern West, including the possibility of secular ideologies replacing religion in this way, are brought up.
Reconstructed: A group of indigenous people, upon hearing about this religion, tell the missionaries about how they can't see the god, and therefore he likely doesn't exist. And that if God made them pagans, who are the missionaries to change them?
Averted: Saintly Church. Or everyone is atheist.
Enforced: The author is an atheist, so he puts this trope in all his works. And others.
Necessary Weasel: The author has recently converted to a religion, but his audience has come to believe in this; he will often use a variant of his religion as the "good" religion to fight against the Path of Inspiration.
Downplayed: The church is indeed benevolent, and they do indeed do controversial things, "controversial things" in this case being defined as scarification.
Lampshaded: "Religion used to justify murder. Who would've thought?"
Invoked: Someone in need of money starts a religion, knowing it's an easy way to get charitable contributions while doing nothing.
Defied: A splinter sect of the Path of Inspiration becomes a Saintly Church.
Discussed: "I don't care what Final Fantasy has told you: Most religious people aren't out to get you."
Conversed: "In these games, the church is always the bad guy."
Exploited: Alice tells Bob that she's an atheist because all religions are just attempts to restrict individual freedom, and many of them either force their beliefs on others or involve ethnic supremacy.