Apologetics — answering the New Atheism on its strongest ground
Of all the charges the New Atheists brought, this is the one that lands. Not the teapot. Not the one-less-god line. This one:
Religion poisons everything. More blood has been spilled in the name of God than for any other cause in human history.
It lands because it is not an abstraction. Everyone in the room can picture something. And the Christian who answers it with a quick statistic and a smirk has not answered it at all — he has confirmed the stereotype that believers are people who will not look at the evidence when the evidence is embarrassing.
So let us look at it. All the way down.
First, Concede What Is True
The crimes are real. Not exaggerated — real.
Crusading armies killed civilians and sacked a Christian city on the way to a holy war. Inquisitors tortured people into confessions. Christians burned other Christians over the sacraments. Men who owned slaves read family devotions on the porch of a plantation. Churches moved abusers from parish to parish and called it discretion. Entire denominations baptized their nation’s wars and handed God’s name to the recruiting office.
A Christian who minimizes any of that is lying, and he is lying about something Scripture itself refuses to minimize:
For the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles through you, as it is written. (Romans 2:24, KJV)
Paul wrote that to religious people. His charge is that the worst damage done to God’s reputation in the world is done by the people who carry his name. The skeptic did not discover this. The Bible said it first, and said it harder.
Second, Notice That the Argument Cuts Both Ways
Now the historical claim itself. Set aside the rhetoric and the claim is empirical: religion is the leading cause of war and death.
It does not survive contact with the catalogue. Historians who have worked through the long list of armed conflicts find that the overwhelming majority were fought over land, succession, trade routes, tribal rivalry, and the ambitions of particular men. Religion appears, sometimes decisively, sometimes as a banner tied to a cause that was already underway. It is one thread in the rope. It is not the rope.
And then there is the century just behind us — the most secular in human history and, by a wide margin, the deadliest. The regimes that produced the largest piles of bodies in the twentieth century were not acting in the name of God. Several of them were explicitly, programmatically atheist and persecuted believers as a matter of policy.
But here is where a thoughtful Christian should stop and refuse an easy win. Those atrocities do not disprove atheism. A man can be an atheist and be appalled by Stalin, and he is not a hypocrite for it. The body count of a worldview’s worst adherents is not a refutation of the worldview.
Which is the whole point. If that reasoning does not work against atheism, it does not work against Christianity either. The argument proves too much and therefore proves nothing. It should be retired by both sides.
Third, Ask What the Charge Is Standing On
Now the question underneath, the one the argument never asks about itself.
To say the Inquisition was evil — not inefficient, not unfashionable, not counterproductive, but evil — you need a standard that stands above both the inquisitor and the man condemning him. Otherwise you are simply reporting that you dislike it, and the inquisitor reports that he approved of it, and there is no court above the two of you.
On a consistent naturalism, where does that standard come from? If human beings are rearranged matter produced by an unguided process, then cruelty is a behavior some organisms perform. It may be unpleasant. It may be maladaptive. It cannot be wicked, because wickedness requires a law, and a law requires someone above the parties to give it.
So the atheist’s indignation is real and it is right — and it is borrowed. He is standing on Christian furniture to argue that the house should be torn down. The moment he says the Crusades were an atrocity, he has conceded that there is such a thing as an atrocity, and he has no account of where that category came from.
Christianity has one. Men bear the image of God, so killing them is not merely inconvenient — it is a violation against their Maker. That is exactly why the Crusades were wrong. The standard that convicts the church is the church’s own book.
Fourth, the Internal Test — and Here It Gets Uncomfortable
Winning the philosophy does not get a Christian off the hook, and I want to be careful not to let it.
The honest version of the question is this: does Christianity, actually believed and obeyed, produce the behavior the skeptic is pointing at? Because if it does, the worldview is indicted no matter how good the moral argument is.
Put the record next to the text. Love your enemies. Bless them that curse you. Turn the other cheek. Put up thy sword. Whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant. Nothing in the catalogue of church crimes was done in obedience to any of that. Every item on the list required the perpetrator to go directly against the plain words of the one he claimed to serve.
And Jesus anticipated precisely this — men acting in his name whom he does not know:
Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity. (Matthew 7:21-23, KJV)
Invoking the name is not the same as belonging to the man. Christ says so himself, in advance, with no softening.
And when Scripture does diagnose where wars come from, it does not say religion:
From whence come wars and fightings among you? come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members? Ye lust, and have not: ye kill, and desire to have, and cannot obtain: ye fight and war, yet ye have not, because ye ask not. (James 4:1-2, KJV)
That is the Christian explanation of the body count, and it is more unflattering to us than the atheist’s version. The engine is appetite. Religion is one of the instruments appetite picks up — a very effective one, because it sanctifies what a man already wanted to do. Remove religion and the appetite remains and finds another instrument. The twentieth century found several.
The Charge Is Half Right
Here is where I will give the skeptic more than he asked for.
Religion — as a system of performance, position, and leverage — does poison things. On that, Jesus of Nazareth and Christopher Hitchens are closer than either camp likes to admit. Read the Gospels and notice who receives the Lord’s hardest words. Not the prostitute. Not the collaborator collecting taxes for Rome. Not the Roman soldier. The religious professionals, over and over, in language that still scorches the page.
So when a man tells me religion is dangerous, I do not argue. I tell him the most dangerous thing in the world is a man with a holy title and an unconverted heart, and that the Bible has been saying so since Isaiah.
Where the Charge Finally Answers Itself
There is one more fact, and the skeptic’s own argument walks straight into it.
If religion kills, then consider who it killed. The central event of the Christian faith is a collaboration between a religious establishment and a political state to execute an innocent man. The chief priests delivered him. The governor signed the order. Every institution the critic distrusts was in the room that morning, functioning exactly as he says such institutions function.
Christianity is the only worldview on earth whose founding moment is religious men murdering God. We are not embarrassed by the critique. We are built on the day it was proven.
And what came out of the mouth of the man they nailed up was not a counter-charge. It was this: Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.
That is the answer to the body count. Not a better statistic. A cross, absorbing every murder ever committed under a holy banner, offered to the men who committed them.
Religion poisons everything. Christ cleanses it. The question was never whether men have done evil in God’s name — they have, and they will answer for it. The question is what you will do with the God they misrepresented.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist