Religion has caused most of the wars and evil in the world. Why do you want to perpetrate this?

Christians have killed, tortured, and burned in Christ's name, and that is not a smear — it is a record that has to be owned before anything else is said. The question is whether the explanation is religion, or something the record shows more clearly.

1. The record is real and should be conceded. The Crusades, the Inquisition, the wars of religion, the burning of heretics, complicity in slavery and antisemitism — these are not inventions of skeptics. Any defense that starts by minimizing them is not worth hearing. The first Christian response is repentance, not rebuttal.

2. The statistic is weaker than it sounds. The often-cited Encyclopedia of Wars by Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod catalogs roughly 1,763 conflicts over some five thousand years and classifies only about 123 as primarily religious in cause — under seven percent. Definitions are contested and the number should be treated as an estimate, not a proof. But the broad pattern is hard to dismiss: most warfare is about land, power, dynasty, and resources.

3. The label is often doing the work. William Cavanaugh argues that the modern category of “religious violence” is largely a construct, and that the wars we call religious were usually struggles over territory and sovereignty wearing religious clothing. His thesis is contested by other historians, and it should be presented that way. Still, the point stands that labeling a war religious is an interpretation, not a datum.

4. The deadliest regimes of modern history were secular. Soviet communism, Maoism, and Nazism were explicitly anti-religious or post-religious in ideology, and their death tolls were not smaller than the Crusades — they were orders of magnitude larger. That does not excuse Christian violence. It does show that removing God from the equation does not remove the slaughter.

5. Jesus consistently repudiated the sword. When Peter drew a blade in the garden, Christ said, “Put your sword back into its place. For all who take the sword will perish by the sword” (Matthew 26:52). When a Samaritan village rejected him and the disciples wanted fire from heaven, he rebuked them (Luke 9:54-55). He also told Pilate, “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36). Violence in his name is not obedience to him; it is the opposite.

6. Scripture predicted the counterfeit in advance. Jesus warned that wheat and weeds grow together until the harvest (Matthew 13:24-30), and said plainly, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 7:21). Hypocrisy is not evidence against the standard. It is evidence that the standard was being ignored — often by people with a crown to protect.

7. The engine is the human heart. James asks, “What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you?” (James 4:1). That diagnosis is not flattering to anyone, religious or secular. It also predicts what history shows: remove one ideology and the same appetites find another banner.

8. Christians also built what you are using to make the charge. Rodney Stark documents the Christian origins of hospitals, universities, and much of the charitable infrastructure of the West, and the abolition movement was led overwhelmingly by believing Christians. This is not a counter-tally to balance the bodies. It is evidence about what the movement actually produces when it is followed.

9. The argument refutes the arguer. Here is the turn. “Religion causes evil” is a moral judgment, and it assumes evil is real and that a cause can be indicted for it. On a purely naturalistic account, human violence is just one behavioral strategy among others, and “evil” is a taste rather than a fact. The objection needs the moral law it has not accounted for. And by its own method — judge a worldview by its worst adherents — secularism fails the same test it administers.

Religion has been used to bless terrible things, and Christians should be the first to say so. But the honest accounting shows that the sword is drawn by human hands for human reasons, that Christ forbade it, and that the standard being used to judge him is one he supplied.

Sources: William Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence; Rodney Stark, The Triumph of Christianity; Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod, Encyclopedia of Wars; Paul Copan.

Related challenges:
• What does it mean to be a Christian? There are over 30,000 different groups, all of which answer this question differently. If agreement cannot be found on THIS issue, can the claims of Christians themselves be taken with any degree of seriousness?
• ALL sins are forgiven if you ‘accept Jesus as your savior’, right? What about the non-forgivable sin of blaspheming the Holy Spirit? We have a little CONTRADICTION problem here?!
• Why do arrogant Christians think they’re right about everything?