c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) It’s easy to characterize religion as a bloodthirsty enterprise. History seems to be strewn with the wreckage of witch hunts, crusades and religious jihad. If God does exist, a caller to my Southern California radio show offered, he ought to be tried for crimes against humanity.

“New atheists” such as “Letter to a Christian Nation” author Sam Harris and “The God Delusion” author Richard Dawkins seem to blame religion _ particularly Christianity _ for all the world’s ills. But nothing could be further from the truth.

Many conflicts that appear at first glance to be religious in nature are actually political or cultural wars that divide along religious lines. The strife in Northern Ireland is not a theological dispute about Catholicism vs. Protestantism per se, but rather a cultural power struggle between two groups of people. In a similar way, much of the conflict in Eastern Europe and the Middle East is the result of ethnic hostilities, not genuine religious differences.

The Crusades, the Inquisition, some of the religious wars of the Reformation and the Salem witch trials, on the other hand, were more theological. Even so, the record is not as grim as many make it.

Thousands of witches were not burned at the stake; the Salem witch trials resulted in 19 executions before they were stopped by Christians. The Spanish Inquisition involved thousands and the Crusades tens of thousands, not millions.

Of course, it’s tragic when even a handful of innocent lives are taken. Injustice isn’t justified because the numbers diminish. But an accurate accounting does serve to put things in perspective, especially when you consider the alternative: Has atheism fared any better?

The simple fact of history is that the greatest evil has resulted from the denial of God, not the pursuit of God. Conservative columnist Dennis Prager has noted, “In this (20th) century alone, more innocent people have been murdered, tortured and enslaved by secular ideologies _ Nazism and communism _ than by all religions in history.”

Grab an older copy of the Guinness Book of World Records and turn to the category “Judicial,” subheading “Crimes: Mass Killings.” You’ll find that carnage of unimaginable proportions resulted not from religion, but from institutionalized atheism. (The 2007 edition of Guinness does not contain those same categories.)

Guinness reports, “The greatest massacre ever imputed by the government of one sovereign against another is the 26.3 million Chinese killed during the regime of Mao Zedong between 1949 and May 1965. The Walker Report published by the U.S. Senate Committee of the Judiciary in July 1971 placed … the total death toll in China since 1949 between 32.25 and 61.7 million.”

In the former Soviet Union, Nobel Prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn estimated that state repression and terrorism took more than 66 million lives from 1917 to 1959 under Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev.

The worst per capita genocide happened in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. According to Guinness, “More than one-third of the 8 million Khmers were killed between April 17, 1975 and January 1979.”

The greatest evil does not result from people zealous for God. It results when people are convinced there is no God to whom they must answer.

Let’s ask another question: Are oppression and bloodshed religious duties of Christianity or logical applications of the teachings of Christ? If not, then violence done in the name of Christ cannot be laid at his door.

Nothing in Christian teaching mandates forcible conversion to the faith or coerced adherence to biblical doctrines. The teachings of Christ do not lead logically to wanton bloodshed. In fact, Christ and his followers have been the greatest force for good in the history of the world.

Consider William Wilberforce, who helped abolish slavery in England and the British Commonwealth 200 years ago; Mother Teresa, who ministered to the poor people of Calcutta; and William Booth, who worked tirelessly to alleviate human suffering with the Salvation Army.

The list goes on and on. And for every well-known servant of Christ to the poor and downtrodden, there have been millions upon millions more who served quietly, unnamed and unnoticed.

This is Christianity’s real record _ not a history of evil, violence and debauchery, but a legacy of radical transformation for good.

(Gregory Koukl is the founder and president of Stand to Reason (http://www.str.org), an organization devoted to a thoughtful and engaging defense of classical Christian values in the public square.)

KRE/PH END KOUKL

Editors: To obtain a photo of Gregory Koukl, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.

See related story, RNS-ATHEIST-RESURGE, transmitted Jan. 26, 2007.