A man I worked with back in the 1960s used to say, “Religion? It has
caused more violence and suffering than anything else in history!”
It became somewhat fashionable during the 20th century
to claim that the most wicked governments in human history were governments
with a religious (usually a Christian) agenda. This claim – totally
unsubstantiated by the facts – started to be heard everywhere, especially,
of course, among liberals and socialists, and atheists often threw this
claim at believers. Indeed, even in this early 21st century,
Richard Dawkins still uses this outdated (and now well disproven) argument - not
the only outdated and now discredited argument which Dawkins uses against
Christianity!
The true facts are rather different, indeed, quite dramatically different.
I want to give five or six examples which amount to very powerful evidence
that it is God-denying
Secularism which has caused
more violence and suffering than anything else in history.
1. The French Republic.
It is sometimes forgotten that the French revolution held a very strong anti-church and anti-clerical agenda
(apart from its more obvious anti-aristocratic motivation).
Post-revolution, the French murdered about
one million of their own
people; often this was without trial or after a 'trial' which can only be
called cruel, shambolic and cynical in the extreme. The revolutionaries may
have considered the French monarchy somewhat unresponsive and uncaring
towards the masses (in fact, the French king had refused to use force
against his opponents), but this would prove 'small fry' compared to the
wholesale slaughter which followed that revolution. Indeed, in the end the
guillotine could not handle the multitudes accounted worthy for slaughter,
and mass drowning was employed as a tool of execution. No historian worthy
of his salt doubts that many
thousands died as a result
of that revolution simply because they were the victims of envy, greed and
jealousy!
For a period of about 50 years following the actual revolution per se,
scores continued to be settled in a most brutal and blood thirsty manner
with many deaths and with the rule of law often being an utter sham. The
interesting thing about this particular example is that here is an example
of a society which overturned not only the rule of the aristocracy but of
the church also. The revolution held a strongly anti-clerical agenda. Today
it is often claimed that the French Republic was the first truly modern
government and "the first
truly liberal government" –
actually, in many senses, that is perfectly true, but does
this not tell us rather a lot about Liberalism and Secularism? After
all, this period of French history was also totalitarian, despotic,
frequently highly lawless, raging as it did with a hatred of fairness and
justice and a callous disregard for the dignity of human life?
Maximilien Robespierre (1758-1794) was one of the chief architects of the
French Revolution and the infamous 'reign of terror' which followed it. He
had absorbed all the leftist, man-centred concepts
of the Enlightenment and was influenced by arch-atheist Voltaire and also by
Rousseau. He hated organised religion and wanted to replace worship of the
Christian God with acknowledgement of the Deist 'god' (in which God
continued to reign supreme but in complete isolation from Mankind to whom He
had delegated full moral authority and autonomy). Robespierre was
instrumental in the blood-letting and wholesale brutality of the 'reign of
terror,' and even had many fellow revolutionaries executed for being 'too
moderate.' As his vanity, persecution-complex and megalomania grew, he
himself, ironically, was betrayed, finally going to the guillotine in 1794.
The first five years of the 'Rein of Terror' ended then, but historians are
in error when claiming that that 'reign' only lasted for five years - fifty
years is closer to the mark.
Is it not most interesting that every human government which has resulted
from the overturning of the authority of the Church has also been cruel,
despotic and willing to kill with impunity?
Moreover, it was this revolution
which would later encourage people like Marx and Lenin and, yes, Hitler and
Stalin too in their evil designs. How come? Because what happened in France
around 1789 showed these 19th and
20th century
demagogues and despots how a formerly stable society could be radically –
and quite rapidly - changed by the will of the masses when those masses are
fed a continual diet of
the ideologically appropriate philosophy; the message of France was: get the
propaganda right, then find a way of feeding that to the masses and anything
becomes possible! Late 18th century
France was their 'blueprint.'
2. Nazism, Communism and Marxism.
In the 20th century
alone, more people were slaughtered under Secularist God-denying
governments, and in the name of secularist ideologies, such as Nazism and
Communism, than in all the
documented religious persecutions within western history combined!
Most people know that Hitler was responsible for the deaths of 6,000,000
Jews alone (apart, that is, from the other groups of Slavs, Poles etc.,
which his henchmen slaughtered on a vast scale). What is probably far less
well-known is that as many as 110-118 million people have been killed by
Communism alone - in eastern Europe, Africa, Central and South America and
in southeast Asia.
Regarding communist Russia, rarely, if ever, has a regime taken the lives
of so many of its own people. Mark Weber has compiled some horrifying
statistics and several paragraphs here are based on mark's extensive
research:
Citing newly-available Soviet KGB documents, historian Dmitri Volkogonov,
head of a special Russian parliamentary commission, recently concluded that
"from 1929 to 1952 21.5 million [Soviet] people were repressed. Of these a
third were shot, the rest sentenced to imprisonment, where many also
died."32(Cited by historian Robert Conquest in a review/ article in The New
York Review of Books, Sept. 23, 1993, p. 27).
Olga Shatunovskaya, a member of the Soviet Commission of Party Control,
and head of a special commission during the 1960s appointed by premier
Khrushchev, has similarly concluded: "From January 1, 1935 to June 22, 1941,
19,840,000 enemies of the people were arrested. Of these, seven million were
shot in prison, and a majority of the others died in camp." These figures
were also found in the papers of Politburo member Anastas Mikoyan.
Robert Conquest, the distinguished specialist of Soviet history, recently
summed up the grim record of Soviet "repression" of it own people:
(Review/article by Robert Conquest in The New York Review of Books, Sept.
23, 1993, p. 27.; In the "Great Terror" years of 1937-1938 alone, Conquest
has calculated, approximately one million were shot by the Soviet secret
police, and another two million perished in Soviet camps. R. Conquest, The
Great Terror [New York: Oxford, 1990), pp. 485-486.; Conquest has estimated
that 13.5 to 14 million people perished in the collectivization
("dekulakization") campaign and forced famine of 1929-1933. R. Conquest, The
Harvest of Sorrow (New York: Oxford, 1986), pp. 301-307].
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the post-1934 death toll was well
over ten million. To this should be added the victims of the 1930-1933
famine, the kulak deportations, and other anti-peasant campaigns, amounting
to another ten million plus. The total is thus in the range of what the
Russians now refer to as "The Twenty Million."
A few other scholars have given significantly higher estimates. Russian
professor Igor Bestuzhev-Lada, writing in a 1988 issue of the Moscow weekly
Nedelya, suggested that during the Stalin era alone (1935-1953), as many as
50 million people were killed, condemned to camps from which they never
emerged, or lost their lives as a direct result of the brutal
"dekulakization" campaign against the peasantry. "Soviets admit Stalin
killed 50 million," The Sunday Times, London, April 17, 1988.; R. J. Rummel,
a professor of political science at the University of Hawaii, has recently
calculated that 61.9 million people were systematically killed by the Soviet
Communist regime from 1917 to 1987. R. J. Rummel, Lethal Politics: Soviet
Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1917 (Transaction, 1990)].
In China, in particular, the destruction has been imagination-defying
(the true figures for the governmentally-caused famines of the Chinese 'Cultural
Revolution' and 'Great
Leap Forward,' for example,
are only just emerging and historians have been stunned. Anything from
twenty to forty million people perished in China).
Statistics historian R.J. Rummel's estimates are as follows:
I. TRANSFORMATION AND THE NATIONALIST STRUGGLE, 1900 TO SEPTEMBER 1949.
2. 105,000 Victims: Dynastic and Republican China.
3. 632,000 Victims: Warlord China.
4. 2,724,000 Victims: The Nationalist Period.
5. 10,216,000 Victims: The Sino-Japanese War.
6. 3,949,000 Victims: Japanese Mass Murder in China.
7. 4,968,000 Victims: The Civil War.
II. THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA.
8. The People's Republic of China: Overview.
9. 8,427,000 Victims: The Totalization Period.
10.7,474,000 Victims: Collectivization and "The Great Leap Forward."
11. 10,729,000 Victims: The Great Famine and Retrenchment Period.
12. 7,731,000 Victims: The "Cultural Revolution."
13. 874,000 Victims: Liberalization.
R.J. Rummel's 'China's Bloody
Century' is here.
These figures, if accurate, amount to something like 54 million people in
China alone!
Obviously some of the above incredible figures are pre-communism but the
figures do show
the appalling wastage of human life in that vast land. Obviously, none of
these outrageous figures are in any sense attributable to Christianity, or
indeed to any other organised religion!
What of the Khmer Rouge? These
Communists caused carnage and havoc in the Cambodia of the 1970s. It has
been estimated that due to their activities a
full one fifth of Cambodia's
population of that period was lost! This was about 2 million people,
although some have claimed higher figures than this.
Neither can we ignore the horrific Rwandan
Genocide of 1993-94. The
figures for those killed are somewhere between 500,000 and one million
people (probably the second figure is closest). Tutsis and Hutu moderates
were slaughtered in their tens of thousands, mainly by two Hutu militia
groups, one known as the MRND ('National Republican Movement for Democracy
and Development') and the Impuzamugambi ("Those who have the same goal"),
the latter group being especially committed to genocide. These were
secularist, 'democratic,' leftist-type movements of Marxist origin. Sadly,
among the slaughtered were a very large number of churchgoing Christians.
So we start to learn that in the 20th century
alone, many more have been killed by God-denying Secularist movements and
governments than ever died in religious conflicts. Some, though, will still
want more examples and comparisons before being convinced...
3. The Spanish Inquisition - A Comparison.
What of The Spanish
Inquisition? It has been
claimed that this was one of the greatest evils in European history and this
could certainly be called an act of Christianity, at least in an organised,
institutionalised sense. But what is the truth? I am not going to apologize
for things carried out in Roman Catholic countries and one cannot excuse
torture, but I think we should always strive for the truth. Many of us have
long suspected that some of the figures quoted somewhat hysterically for
this "Christian outrage" may
have been wildly exaggerated. Now two books give us much greater information
and careful analysis; Henry Kamen's The
Spanish Inquisition and The
Inquisition, edited by
Brenda Stalcup. In referring to these sources, J.P. Holding writes this,
'Kamen reports that the threat of the Spanish Inquisition has been
particularly overblown. Without minimizing the atrocities that were
committed, it is nevertheless a fact that many skeptical sites (relying at
times on Helen Ellerbee, a notoriously unreliable source) frame the Spanish
Inquisition particularly as one might elsewhere frame Mao's Great Leap
Forward. Kamen [K60, 203] notes that, "Taking into account all the tribunals
of Spain up to about 1530, it is unlikely that more than two thousand people
were executed for heresy by the Inquisition... for most of its existence
that Inquisition was far from being a juggernaut of death either in
intention or in capability." By Kamen's estimate, for example, "it would
seem that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries fewer than three
people a year were executed in the whole of the Spanish monarchy from Sicily
to Peru, certainly a lower rate than in any provincial court of justice in
Spain or anywhere else in Europe." [K203]. This was weighted against people
of Jewish and Muslim origin, but let it never be said that the numbers
themselves are anything to be flabbergasted about. It is also notable that
the impetus for the Inquisition in Spain came first not from the church, but
from the king and queen of Spain who asked for an Inquisition to be
conducted.'
'Stalcup notes that the Catholic Church (CC) in the Dark Ages "was the
one stable institution that provided leadership and order" and quotes
historian Bernard Hamilton as saying that "as the sole vehicle of a more
civilized tradition in a barbarous world" the CC "became involved in social
and political activities which formed no part of its essential mission, but
which it alone was qualified to discharge." [14] With the exception of a few
Jews and Muslims, all people in Western Europe depended on the CC for
meaning and survival. Any undermining of this social construct was a threat
to the physical, mental, and spiritual well-being of the whole. (Kamen
likewise says of the Spanish variation, "It fulfilled a role...that no other
institution fulfilled." [K82])
(Quoted from 'Were You
Expecting It?' by J.P.
Holding. The full article is here.).
There is no doubt that certain points here are never taken into account
when one hears discussions of the 'Inquisition,' yet atheists and liberals
love to throw in this actually very poor example of "Christian
injustices." I'm afraid that
not only the cults and sects, but we Protestants too have often been guilty
of making exaggerated claims about the Inquisition - but we should not
exaggerate these things. It seems, then, that despite the horror which any
discussion of this topic raises in some people, the truth is probably that
as few as two thousand people were ever executed due to the Inquisition. Even
if we double that figure it remains an absolutely tiny figure in comparison
with the many millions who have died as a result of Communism, especially in
China.
4. 'Witch-hunting' - A Comparison.
Many liberals and atheists have had enormous fun with this one! Some of
their claims of the numbers involved have frankly bordered on the lunatic.
Many modern historical revisionists appear to see this as a sort of'suppression
of women's rights' issue,
the general idea being that thousands of witch-hunters spent their entire
lives searching for poor, confused women because they were just sadistic
bullies who loved to see women being put to death! Moreover these modern
writers always operate from the modernist assumption that
there is no world of the supernatural. Such people are almost invariably
atheists, holding no concept of God, or of Satan. But, as regarding the
numbers, Philip Sampson has pointed out,
'In recent years...scholars have studied witchcraft more carefully.
The picture which emerges is not the one we have been led to expect. As long
ago as 1928, Montague Summers called the belief that witches went to the
stake in England, "a popular and fast-grounded, if erroneous, opinion" of
the "ignorant," best suited to the "romanticist and story book"' (Philip
J. Sampson, Six Modern Myths, p
133).
Today a picture is often painted of ignorant and superstitious churchmen who
were finally put out of their 'witch-hunting' work endeavours by the brave
and clever scientists of the Enlightenment; this, of course, is pure hokum,
truly a modernist myth if ever there was one. Fact is: Many have always
believed that witches with supernatural powers exist even if tiny in
mumbers. Even today in England we have 'white witches' and 'black witches'
(nothing to do with race, the terms refer to severity of doctrine). I am
informed (by an informant who came from that background) that witch covens
are especially strong in a band stretching across southern England from
Cornwall in the west to the New Forest in Hampshire in the east! Yes, an
absolutely tiny group no doubt but a fact nevertheless. This is worth
pointing out since those who use this issue to attack Christianity always
proceed on the assumption that witches cannot possibly be a reality, and
that this whole matter was just something somehow dreamed up by hateful
fundamentalist, persecuting religious misogynists.
The actual quoted numbers of women executed as witches have been placed
well and truly within fantasyland by writers like Carl Sagan, bristling with
a hatred of Christianity and a desire to belittle us wherever possible.
Sagan has quoted over ten million (Sagan, The
Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, p116), as has M.
Daly (Daly, Gyn/Ecology, p183,
208). But such figures are absurd and lack any sort of historical
credibility, indeed, one only arrives at such silly figures by insisting on
being purely emotional and rejecting all wise historical counsel. As Sampson
has pointed out,
'More recent estimates put the number of executions at about 150 to
300 people per year throughout all of Europe and North America...Over a
period of about three hundred years this amounts to between 40,000 and
100,000 people." (Sampson,
p138).
Of course, one does not wish to excuse outrage where outrage really
occurred, but it is high time that some of the ludicrous figures quoted by
some who simply want to discredit Christianity were challenged. Some have
even called the burning of witches a "holocaust"
- again, this emotive talk
is fully without any foundation. The suggested numbers, though lamentable,
are not of holocaust proportions! Indeed, if some of the suggested figures
of people like Sagan were true, even today Europe would suffer from a
serious lack of women and would never have built up present population
levels!
I myself have looked into the same facts and figures which are available,
though often hard to track down, and my estimate would be lower than that of
Philip J. Sampson, perhaps - in absolute total - between 25,000 and 80,000 -
very lamentable but, don't forget, this is for a period of perhaps 350 years
and covering the entirety of Europe and north America. Meanwhile Sagan's "ten
million" should be regarded
as sheer fantasy and fiction!
5. The Crusades - A Comparison.
This is a newish objection to Christianity but nowadays it always seems
to come up and I don't think I should leave it out. Recently some very naive
liberal Christians were saying that relations between Christianity and Islam
might improve if Christians apologised for the "death
and destruction" of the
Crusades. Once again, in no time, distortion came into the picture with "many
millions" being quoted as
the likely figure of deaths caused by the Crusades - but what is the truth?
The Crusades originally had the goal of recapturing Jerusalem and the
Holy Land from Muslim rule and were launched in response to a call from the
Eastern Orthodox Byzantine Empire for help against the expansion of the
Muslim Turks into Anatolia. There were nine principal 'crusades' (and
several more minor ones) covering a period from 1095-1272, however, several
were very brief with the Eighth Crusade lasting less than a year and the
Fourth Crusade lasting just two years. As the Crusades progressed, however,
they often seem to have been motivated more by politics and greed than by
true religious reason and it is doubtful whether 'Christianity' itself
should be held responsible for some of the dreadful things which happened,
especially when plainly
political papal power used
'crusades' to attack Eastern Orthodoxy (the Fourth Crusade)! Indeed, the
common perception that the 'crusades' were all about Christians attacking
Muslims is totally incorrect; perhaps only two or three of the crusades were
more major conflagrations and involved attacking Muslims on a large scale.
A total figure of 9 million deaths has been cited for all of the crusades -
but it is very debatable how much Christianity can truly be held accountable
for this when a particular crusade was clearly political; also, 'soldiers of
fortune' joined some of the expeditions and raped, pillaged and torched
villages along route in total defiance of orders: can that ever be
considered a Christian responsibility? In some terrible cases Muslim women
were mercilessly exterminated by the victorious "Christians" - but was this
typical behaviour? No. The evidence is strong that mercy also played a large
part in many of the campaigns; unfortunately, however, war always has, and
always will, lead to unjustifiable excesses. I think we must concede that
something from 8 to as many as 11 million people probably did die during the
crusades but when we narrow this down to the plainly
religiouscrusades intent on recapturing the Holy Land (which we surely
should) this might well be reduced to something up to 7 to 9 million. This,
of course, while deeply regrettable, would be tiny compared to the carnage
of perhaps 54 million people in China during a period of less than 100
years, but it remains a lamentable fact and we can't deny that.
6. The Second World War.
Some have given the Second World War as an example of Christian outrages
resulting in millions of deaths perpetrated by one group of Christians upon
another, but this is a very poor example which can be very quickly refuted.
Let us look at this:
The claim is that both Great Britain and the United States on the one
hand and Germany on the other hand were "Christian
nations." However this is
simply untrue. The Nazi party had negated the authority of the German
Lutheran Church and the sincere, godly pastors (like Dietrich Bonhoeffer)
were imprisoned if they did not agree to support Hitler. Thereafter the
Nazis embarked on their reign of bloodshed, terror and genocide.
Hitler and Minister for Propaganda Joseph Goebbels made a determined
effort to replace the
great respect which the German people had held for Lutheran Christianity
with another ideology and
another philosophy.Respect for pagan, teutonic and and nordic
mythtologies started to be actively encouraged, this coupled with the stress
on atheistic 'survival of the fittest' Darwinism.
So, in embarking on their evil and doomed path, the Germany of 1939-1945 cannot -
by any stretch of the imagination - be considered as a "Christian
nation." However, it
was two Christian nations in particular, Great Britain and the United States
(plus several other 'Christian nation' allies, including Canada, Australia
and New Zealand) which were determined to stand up to Hitler's despotism! -
So this is actually a very strong argument for the moral integrity of
Christianity! It was, perhaps, the world's two major Christian nations which
felt that Hitler could not be allowed to get away with his hideous outrages
forever and that some national sacrifices were necessary in order to defeat
him!
Conclusion.
We have not here even considered the great non-religious conquering
warlords of earlier times, including Genghis Khan and Atilla the Hun, but
there were several others too. These conquerors presided over the slaughter
of untold millions. How many died as the result of their campaigns? 7
million? That sounds much too low. 20 million? 45 million? Nobody knows for
sure. But what we should by now clearly be able to see from our brief study
is that the oft-heard 20th century claim (still upheld by people like
Richard Dawkins), that Christianity and organised religion in general have
caused more violence and suffering than anything else in human history, is
not only defeated but defeated with some ease. Indeed we have learned that
it is Secular human governments, whether pre-Christian or motivated by
Communism, Nazism or Liberalism (the French Republic), which have unleashed
untold human suffering upon this planet - much of this occurring within the
20th century alone. Incidentally, of that huge portion of this death and
destruction which took place in the 20th century, a large part is directly
attributable to the influence of Charles Darwin and Darwinism, a majoratheistic influence.
Secularism (in its
many forms) when adopted by human government is a mass-killer!
© Robin A. Brace, 2005. Complete re-work and major edit in September, 2008.
UK APOLOGETICS
