Growing up, I was your typical young adult who went to college because I thought it was the next best step after high school. I come from the millennial generation that was told we had to go to college if we wanted a good job. But I wanted to be anywhere besides school at that point in my life. I was burnt out, and it all felt somewhat pointless as I wasn’t even sure what I wanted to be.
In my search for deeper meaning, I decided to join the Air Force with one of my best friends. Serving my country by helping fight the ol’ Global War on Terror felt like real purpose. I also had an interest in aviation, and the Air Force offered a pathway to pursue both. So, I enlisted hoping for adventure, world travel, and maybe some glory along the way.
Fast-forward through 13 years of service as an enlisted aviator in both rescue and special operations. Like many veterans, my outlook shifted. The realities of war and the experience of life outside Western civilization tend to change one’s perspective.
Violent conflict, famine, destruction, and poverty remain a reality across much of the world. Yet from the comfort of our living rooms in the Christian-influenced West, we often don’t experience the weight of it. Because of how blessed we are, it can be easy to overlook the true darkness of human nature and invoke the distant wars of history as a moral objection to God, without recognizing the prosperous civilization Christianity helped build.
The claim often goes something like this:
Religion makes people violent and is responsible for most wars. Therefore, religion itself is the real evil, and the world would be better off without God.
But when we examine the actual history of both war and religion, we quickly see why this objection is not only baseless, but nearly the opposite of reality.
Fallen Humans Cause War, Not Religion
Let’s get this immediately out of the way. Religion is not the cause of most wars. The historical record simply doesn’t support that claim.
Encyclopedia of Wars, one of the most comprehensive works cataloging conflict throughout history, identifies only ~7% of recorded wars as religiously motivated. Remove those attributed to Islam, and that figure drops to just ~3%.1
In contrast, the secular power struggles of ideological regimes throughout the 20th century made it arguably the deadliest period in recorded human history. The following accounts, drawn from scholarship compiled by Clay Jones, are extremely disturbing but important to consider.2
Nazi Germany participated in the murder of 6 million Jews, along with millions of Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Roma, disabled individuals, and others.
The Soviet Union killed an estimated 20-26 million people through executions, forced labor camps, and other forms of state repression. Between 1932 and 1933 alone, millions of Ukrainians were intentionally starved to death by the government.
Chinese communists killed 26-30 million alleged counterrevolutionaries through executions, forced labor, and the prison system during the 1950s.
The Japanese military raped, tortured, and murdered vast numbers of Chinese civilians in the early 1900s. Atrocities included disembowelment and accounts of soldiers forcing fathers to rape their own daughters. In Nanking alone, estimates commonly place the death toll in the hundreds of thousands during what became known as the “Rape of Nanking.”
Turkey’s Young Turks killed around 1.2 million Armenians from 1915–1923, many of whom were Christians viewed as an obstacle to a more homogeneous Turkish state.
Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge killed as many as 2.2 million Cambodians, roughly one-quarter of the population, in its attempt to radically transform Cambodian society and eliminate perceived foreign influences.
This list could go on, but I will spare you the further depressing statistics, as I think you get the point. What these accounts demonstrate is that removing religion does not remove the human capacity for horrific violence.
The evils of this fallen world are a human problem, not a religious one.
Christian War
For the sake of honesty, it is important to acknowledge the ~3% of non-Islamic, religiously motivated wars, some of which involved Christians. This demonstrates that religious motivations have, at times, contributed to conflict.
But it’s at this point that we need to consider a couple of important facts.
First, just because a war is possibly motivated by Christian belief does not automatically mean the entire conflict was unjust. For example, if a country is committing genocide against a minority population, it may be just for another country to intervene and stop it.
However, one account often cited as an example of Christian atrocity is the Crusades. But when the Crusades are invoked to portray Christianity as a religion of unjust conquest, it is often done with little consideration for the historical context in which they occurred.
The First Crusade was launched in 1095 after centuries of Islamic conquest into historically Christian lands. Amid growing concerns over the loss of territory and the treatment of Christians in the East, the Byzantine emperor appealed to the West for military assistance. What followed was a series of Crusades spanning roughly 200 years, as Christian forces fought for control of the Holy Land. Ultimately, however, the Crusaders failed to maintain a lasting presence there.3
While the Crusades are a legitimate example of religiously motivated warfare, Christians are often portrayed as the primary aggressors. In reality, the Crusades emerged within the much larger historical context of centuries of conflict and Islamic expansion into formerly Christian territories.
Via the Towel
The second consideration is that the presence of religion or religious people in a war is not the same thing as religion being the cause of that war. Conflicts involving Christians were often fueled by underlying political, territorial, and cultural motivations.
At the same time, we should not use that distinction to dismiss genuinely unjust acts. The unsanctioned cruelty of lower-level soldiers during the Crusades, the fighting between Catholics and Protestants for political power under the banner of religious orthodoxy, and the abusive methods used to root out heretics during the Inquisition are all condemnable.
These are real instances in which self-professing Christians engaged in cruelty. And while we’ve demonstrated that such acts represent a very small minority within the vast sea of violence carried out throughout human history, that does not make them excusable.
However, we should never judge the truth of Christianity by those who fail to properly live it out. Such cruelty finds no support in the teachings of Christ. Just as we wouldn’t blame Mozart when a musician plays his work incorrectly, we shouldn’t blame Jesus when broken humans fail to follow His example.
Unlike the violent atrocities discussed above, Christianity has historically been at its best when it spreads via the towel, just as Scripture teaches. It spreads not through conquest, but through service, sacrifice, and love. Jesus did not command His disciples to conquer their enemies; He knelt down and washed their feet.4
This is the faith that exploded across the Roman Empire while Christians themselves endured severe persecution. It is the same faith that experienced remarkable growth in places like China after the Cultural Revolution, much of it through underground and unregistered house churches despite decades of suppression by a Communist government.5
The hospital system, modern science, the abolition of slavery in the West, and the conviction that every human being possesses dignity and worth were founded in Christian ideals. Such convictions helped shape the concepts of equality and individual rights that are embedded in America’s founding principles.
Christianity does not need the sword to spread. Its model is Christ, who picked up a towel.
Alan Axelrod and Charles Phillips, eds., “Religious Wars,” Encyclopedia of Wars, vol. 3 (Facts on File, 2004), 1484–1485.
See also Andrew Holt, “Counting ‘Religious Wars’ in the Encyclopedia of Wars,” December 26, 2018, for a breakdown of the calculation.
Clay Jones, Why Does God Allow Evil? Compelling Answers for Life’s Toughest Questions, chap. 2.
William J. Federer, What Every American Needs to Know About the Qur’an: A History of Islam & the United States, 59–108.
See John 13:4-5
I absolutely love this! I wrote about this same topic in my book and saw the aame things you said. This was well put together and I especially like how you brought up how the Crusades actually started. That's the part a lot of people often miss.