The Bloodiest Hands in the Room

“the biggest source of evil is, of course, religion”

May 23, 2026

I have heard the claim more times than I can count. Religion is the biggest source of evil in the world. It is aimed, usually, at Christianity. It sounds devastating at a dinner party. It collapses the moment someone asks for the receipts.

So let’s look at the numbers. Actually look at them.

Ridley Scott, director of Prometheus, made the claim in a 2012 Esquire interview. He is not alone. Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens built careers on a version of it. Kirk Durston, drawing on the research of Rudolph Rummel, former professor of political science at the University of Hawaii, 2007 winner of the International Association of Genocide Scholars’ Award, and a man frequently nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, actually went and checked. Rummel spent his career studying democide: government-sponsored mass killing, including genocide, politicide, and mass murder. His findings are peer-reviewed and exhaustive. They are also inconvenient.

Here is what gets credited to Christianity. The Crusades, the Inquisition, the witch hunts, the full greatest-hits package. Rummel’s estimates:

Crusades: 1,000,000 Spanish Inquisition: 350,000 Witch Hunts: 100,000 Total: 1,450,000

Over approximately one thousand years.

Before we move to the other side of the ledger, a deflection arrives right about here. Someone mentions Hitler. The Nazis were Christian, the argument goes. Add the Holocaust to the Christian column.

This is false. Not a close call.

Nazism never presented itself as a Christian enterprise. Hitler despised Christianity. His own writings describe it as “meek” and “flabby.” He wanted to destroy it “root and branch” and openly complained about Germany being stuck with what he called “feeble-minded” Christianity. He preferred, in his own words, “strong-arm” systems. His writings and speeches contain so many passages dripping with contempt for Christianity that arguing he was a Christian is roughly equivalent to arguing George Washington fought for the British. The evidence runs entirely the other direction. His private comments, recorded by those closest to him, make clear he found militant, conquest-oriented religion far more congenial to his purposes than anything the Sermon on the Mount had to offer.

The Holocaust does not belong in the Christian column.

But let’s be honest about the Christianity side of the ledger while we are here. The question worth asking is not whether people committed atrocities while claiming to be Christian. They did. The question is whether those atrocities represent authentic Christianity or a perversion of it.

Ask any atheist what Jesus of Nazareth’s two great commands were and they are unlikely to know. Love God with everything you have. Love your neighbor as yourself. And by neighbor, Jesus made explicitly clear he meant every human being on the planet, including your enemies. So how does killing 1,450,000 people fit with loving your neighbor as yourself?

There are quack doctors in the world. That does not make all of medical science quackery. A person who carries out a Crusade while violating Christ’s explicit command to love their neighbor is not demonstrating the teachings of Jesus. They are demonstrating what human nature does when it is handed institutional power and left without accountability to the actual teachings it claims to follow.

Jesus said it plainly: “You will know them by their fruit.” He also said that on Judgment Day, many would say Lord, Lord, did we not do great things in your name? And his answer would be: “I never knew you.”

A root cannot deny its fruit.

Look at the founding dates on these shields. Then look at the founding purposes. The Knights Hospitaller: founded exclusively as a medical order, caring for the poor, sick, and injured. The Order of Saint Lazarus: founded as a leper hospital. The Order of Alcántara: a hospitaller foundation before it took on a defensive role. The Teutonic Order: a field hospital first, a military force second. The military function was grafted onto the care function, not the other way around. These institutions were built to answer a question: who needs to be protected and healed? The Islamic ribat was built to answer a different question: where does the frontier of Islam end, and how do we push it further? Both traditions fused religion with warfare. They started from opposite ends.

Now here is what gets credited to atheistic states in the twentieth century alone. Not religion. Not Christianity. States that made atheism a core value, promoted it through their education systems, enforced it in daily life, and worked actively to eradicate religious belief entirely.

People’s Republic of China (1949-1987): 76,702,000 U.S.S.R. (1917-1987): 61,911,000 Total: 142,081,000

In seventy years.

Christianity killed 1,450,000 over more than a thousand years. Atheistic states killed a hundred times as many in less than one percent of that time. To equal what godless regimes produced in the twentieth century alone, Christian wars would have had to run without stopping for approximately 98,000 years. And most of those atheist deaths were not battlefield casualties. China starved more of its own citizens to death in a single year of peacetime than Christian wars killed across a millennium.

The Khmer Rouge, operating in a considerably smaller country, killed thirty-one percent of their own population. Cambodia. Thirty-one percent.

Even granting every number in the Christian column at full value, you cannot reach ten percent of what godless regimes produced. The Inquisition resulted in fewer than 5,000 deaths over approximately 300 years. The Salem witch trials lasted four months and killed nineteen people, none of them sentenced by the church, which had no such power. The full Christian atrocities column, tallied generously over a thousand years, does not come within shouting distance of what atheistic states accomplished in a single century.

Some atheists attempt to shift the blame to Communism rather than atheism. It is worth asking what specific feature of the Communism practiced by these states permitted such unprecedented slaughter. The Hutterites are a communal society. They are exceptionally peaceful. The philosophical difference between them and Maoist China is not economic structure. It is that the Hutterites believe in God. The Communist countries less zealous about eradicating religious belief, Cuba and Nicaragua for example, had considerably lower mass murder tallies. The pattern holds. The more aggressively atheism was promoted and enforced, the greater the atrocities.

Here is what makes the atheism side of this argument genuinely chilling, and it is not simply the body count. It is the reason the body count is possible at all. One of the things God provides, if God exists, is an objective moral standard that transcends human civilization, history, and whoever currently holds power. Remove God and morality becomes whatever the society in power decides it to be. A guardrail that civilization carries in its own hands, attached to nothing outside itself. As the society drifts, the guardrail drifts with it. There is nothing to stop the drift. There is no final accounting. There is no right or wrong beyond what the powerful decree.

That is not a philosophy lecture. That is a description of what happened in China and the Soviet Union and Cambodia. The guardrail moved. One hundred and forty-two million people went over the edge.

There is a third column that honest accounting requires. It has been conspicuously absent and its absence has been nagging at me.

Islam. From the wars of conquest launched in the seventh century through the ongoing persecution of Christians across the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia today, the body count conducted in the name of Allah is staggering. Historians and demographers who have attempted to quantify deaths from Islamic conquest, jihad, and religiously justified warfare from the seventh century to the present produce estimates ranging from 80,000,000 to 300,000,000 depending on methodology. The lower end of that range is still catastrophic. The higher end rivals the atheist column entirely.

At its peak in 1683, the Ottoman Empire stretched from the gates of Vienna to the Persian Gulf, from Morocco to the Caucasus. This is what 1,000 years of religiously mandated expansion looks like on a map. It did not stop because the ideology changed. It stopped because it ran into walls it could not break.

The above Image shows the locations for the crusade battles and the image below shows the locations for Jihad battles. The motivations were not the same. The Crusades were extremely costly and were not launched to make money or enrich via colonialism. They bankrupt the people who went on them. Jihad was the economy of Islam, slaves, booty and colonial expansion.

Some will object that Islam is a political ideology as much as a religious one, and they are not wrong. Islam makes no clean distinction between the political and the theological. It never has. But that does not move the numbers. Whether the motivation in any given campaign was piety or power or both, the justification given was God’s name. The men doing the killing said so themselves. Honest accounting means we count it. And when we count it, the claim that religion is the greatest source of evil in human history becomes not just wrong but almost comically wrong.

The Crusades: defensive, lasted 300 years, ended 800 years ago. Islamic jihad: offensive, lasted 1,400 years, active today. The slide asks “Moral Equivalence?” That is the right question. The answer is no.

Not believing in God is not a neutral act with no consequences. Barak Lurie, himself a former atheist, puts it plainly: it is like not believing in the police, the judiciary, medicine, or fire stations. You do not have to believe in them. But living in a world without them has consequences.

Matthew Parris is an atheist. He wrote the following in The Times in 2008 after returning from Africa:

“Now a confirmed atheist, I’ve become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa. Christians black and white, working in Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write... Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete.”

An atheist. Writing that Christianity is irreplaceable. Because he went and looked.

Statistics Canada data, summarized in a Maclean’s article titled “Do Atheists Care Less,” found that the average annual donations of churchgoers were more than three times that of the rest of the population, and that churchgoers volunteered twice as many hours in their communities. An atheist charity launched specifically to showcase atheist generosity raised $18,760 from 447 members in its first four months. Roughly what eighteen churchgoers give in a year.

Judge the tree by its fruit.

Who fought against and ultimately destroyed the institution of slavery? Christians and Jews. Who stood against eugenics, the forced sterilization of those the state deemed inferior? Christians and Jews. Who pushed back against China’s one-child policy when the rest of the world looked away? Christians and Jews. The people most routinely credited with history’s worst atrocities, have also produced history’s most consistent record of resistance to institutionalized evil. Those who cling to the ideologies that produced these atrocities, have the nasty habit of projecting the bad fruit of their ideologies, upon those who make them look bad by comparison. That is not a coincidence. Judge the tree by its fruit, and see what happens when a civilization is anchored to a God who declares every human being made in His image. Not gulags or killing fields (Atheist/Communist). Not concentration camps (Atheist/Socialist). Not slave markets (Islam).

This Islamic slave trading has never stopped, except where Christians have managed to stamp it out. Ten times as many Africans were sold EAST out of Africa, to the Islamic markets. The same direction they travel today.

The track record of history does not show that religion is the greatest source of evil. It shows the opposite. Authentic Christianity, centered on loving God and loving every human being on the planet as yourself, restrains evil and produces measurable good. Atheistic states, freed from any transcendent moral accountability, produced the largest mass murder events in recorded human history in a fraction of the time.

This is not an argument that individual atheists are bad people. Many atheists live decent, generous, admirable lives. What they are living on, whether they acknowledge it or not, is the moral capital of a civilization built by people who believed every human being was made in the image of God. That capital does not replenish itself. It was deposited by centuries of Christian influence into the foundations of Western law, charity, medicine, education, and the very concept of human dignity. Remove the foundation slowly enough and most people never notice it going.

Until it is gone.

And when it is gone, the society that replaced it with nothing does not stay empty for long. Nature abhors a vacuum. A confident, totalizing ideology that has never stopped expanding since the seventh century, and that carries its own complete answer to every question of law, governance, family, war, and God, will not wait to be invited.

We are not preparing our children to answer that. We are not even preparing them to recognize it.

Next time someone announces at a dinner party that religion is the source of all evil, ask them if they have looked at the numbers. Ask them what Jesus actually taught. Ask them which philosophers were running the gulags. Ask them what fills the space when the last Christian remnants wear off a culture.

Then wait.

The God haters don’t have numbers. They have an emotional position dressed in the language of reason. Or they have simply never been asked to question what they were taught. In which case they are doing exactly what they accuse believers of doing.

Taking it on faith.

Before I close, I want to leave the critics something useful. Not a concession. A standard.

This is what Christianity actually teaches. Not the Crusades. Not the Inquisition. Not whatever a televangelist said in 1987. This. Every word of it is straight from the text. If you think a Christian is failing to live up to it, you are welcome to use it. Read it once and see if you can find a more demanding or more generous moral code anywhere on earth. This is not the pathetic passive absence of harm. This is ACTIVE, Love in action.

“Be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you” (Eph. 4:32). “Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you, bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you” (Luke 6:27-28). “Give to every man that asketh of thee, and of him that taketh away thy goods ask them not again” (Luke 6:30). “As ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise” (Luke 6:31). “Bear ye one another’s burdens” (Gal. 6:2). “Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamour and evil speaking be put away from you, with all malice” (Eph. 4:31). “If thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink” (Rom. 12:20). “Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good” (Rom. 12:21). “Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy” (Matt. 5:7). “Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God” (Matt. 5:9). “Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction” (James 1:27). “Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves; for the rights of all who are destitute” (Prov. 31:8). “The stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself” (Lev. 19:34). “What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God” (Mic. 6:8). “Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things” (Phil. 4:8). “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).

Hold every Christian you meet to that standard. Please. That is exactly what Jesus told us to do. And the more you read it, the more you may find yourself wondering where your own creed keeps its version. Compare it to the creed of other belief systems. Islam has nothing like it.

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