Christopher Hitchens, one of the most famous atheists in history, wrote a book called God Is Not Great with the subtitle: "How Religion Poisons Everything." The Crusades. The Inquisition. Witch trials. Clergy abuse. If Christianity is supposed to make people better, why has it been connected to so much evil? This question deserves total honesty, not spin.
Before we say anything else, let’s be completely clear: terrible things have been done in the name of Christianity. That is a historical fact. Anyone who denies it is not being honest.
Christians launched wars. Church leaders tortured people accused of heresy. Clergy abused children and other leaders covered it up. European colonizers used the Bible to justify horrific treatment of indigenous peoples. These things happened. They were evil. And Christians should own that rather than change the subject.
With that said, the question is not whether bad things have been done in the name of Christianity. They obviously have. The question is: Did those people do those things BECAUSE of what Jesus taught, or IN SPITE of what Jesus taught?
That distinction changes everything.
Let’s walk through the most common charges one by one. No spin. No deflection. Just history.
The Crusades were a series of military campaigns launched by European Christians to recapture the Holy Land. Violence was committed on all sides, and atrocities occurred that are impossible to defend. Entire cities were sacked. Civilians were killed. There is no way to make the worst episodes of the Crusades look good.
What most people do not know is the historical context. By the time the First Crusade was launched in 1096, Islamic armies had spent over 400 years conquering formerly Christian territories across North Africa, the Middle East, Spain, and into parts of Europe. The Byzantine Emperor appealed to the Pope for military help after losing most of Asia Minor. This does not justify the atrocities committed during the Crusades, but it corrects the popular myth that Christians just randomly decided to attack peaceful people minding their own business.
It is also worth noting that many Christians at the time opposed the Crusades, and that some of the worst violence was directed at fellow Christians (the sack of Constantinople in 1204 was carried out by Crusaders against a Christian city).
The Inquisition was a system of church courts that investigated and punished people accused of heresy. It was real, it was oppressive, and people were tortured and executed. No Christian should minimize that.
What modern historians have found, however, is that the scale has been massively exaggerated in popular culture. Historian Henry Kamen, one of the leading scholars of the Spanish Inquisition, estimates the total number of executions at roughly 3,000 to 5,000 people over a span of 350 years. Every one of those deaths was wrong. But the claim that "millions were killed by the Inquisition" has no basis in the historical record. Dealing with real history matters more than repeating inflated myths.
The Salem witch trials in Massachusetts killed 20 people. The broader European witch trials over roughly 300 years killed an estimated 40,000 to 60,000 people. Every death was an injustice. The hysteria, the false accusations, the executions of innocent women and men are a stain on history.
Two facts are worth noting. First, the numbers commonly cited in popular culture (often "millions") have no historical support. Serious historians have studied the records extensively. Second, it was Christian ministers, theologians, and leaders who were among the first to speak out against the witch trials and push to end them. The trials were stopped not by atheism but by Christians who recognized the injustice being committed.
This is the hardest charge for modern students, and there is no gentle way to say it. The abuse of children by clergy was evil. The systematic cover-ups by church leadership were evil. The victims deserve justice, and many of them have not received it.
No Christian should minimize, deflect, or make excuses for this. The leaders who committed abuse and the leaders who covered it up betrayed every single thing Jesus stood for. Jesus said, "If anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea" (Matthew 18:6). By Jesus’s own standard, the abusers stand condemned.
This is not an argument against Christianity. It is an argument against corrupt humans who violated Christianity while claiming to represent it.
When someone does something terrible in the name of a teacher, you have two options. You can blame the teacher. Or you can check what the teacher actually said. Jesus said: "Love your neighbor as yourself." "Blessed are the peacemakers." "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you." "The greatest among you must be a servant." Every atrocity committed "in the name of Christianity" was a direct violation of those words, not a fulfillment of them.
If religion "poisons everything," someone needs to explain how the same religion produced some of the greatest good in human history. Hitchens was clever with what he chose to leave out:
The honest question is not "Has Christianity ever been associated with harm?" Of course it has. The honest question is: "On balance, has Christianity produced more good or more harm in the world?" And the historical record overwhelmingly favors the good.
If religion poisons everything, then removing religion should make things better. The 20th century tested that idea, and the results were catastrophic.
The Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, China under Mao Zedong, and Cambodia under Pol Pot were all governments that explicitly rejected God and religion. They did not commit atrocities in the name of any faith. They committed them in the name of atheistic ideology. The estimated death toll:
These atheist regimes killed more people in a few decades than all religious wars in history combined.
The point is not "atheism is worse than Christianity." The point is: removing religion does not remove human evil. Humans are capable of horrific violence with or without God. The deeper question is: which worldview has the resources to call that violence wrong? Christianity calls it sin against a holy God. Without God, you are left trying to explain why any of it is truly wrong rather than just something you personally do not prefer (callback to the Moral Argument in Lesson 2).
If you judge any philosophy by its worst followers, every philosophy fails. Democracy produced slave-owning American founders. Science produced the atomic bomb and eugenics. Medicine produced Josef Mengele. That does not mean democracy, science, or medicine are evil. It means humans corrupt everything they touch.
Christianity should be judged by its founder and his teachings, not by every person who has ever claimed to follow him. And what did the founder teach?
Every Crusader who killed in his name violated those words. Every priest who abused a child violated those words. Every colonizer who enslaved people "for God" violated those words. They are not evidence that Christianity is false. They are evidence that humans fail to live up to it.
"More people have been killed in the name of religion than anything else in history."
This is one of the most repeated claims in popular culture, and it is factually false. The atheist regimes of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot killed an estimated 50 to 100 million people in just a few decades. All religious wars in history combined do not approach that number. Encyclopedia of Wars by Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod cataloged 1,763 wars throughout human history and found that only 123 (about 7%) were primarily religious in nature. The vast majority of human violence has been motivated by land, power, resources, and ideology, not religion.
"If Christianity were true, Christians would be better people."
Christianity does not claim its followers are perfect. It claims they are forgiven. The entire message of the gospel is that humans are broken and need a savior. The Bible is relentlessly honest about the failures of its own heroes: David was an adulterer and murderer, Peter denied Jesus three times, Paul persecuted Christians before his conversion. If the Bible were propaganda, it would make its heroes look flawless. The honesty about human failure is itself evidence of authenticity, and it is exactly what you would expect if Christianity’s diagnosis of human nature is correct.
"The Crusades prove Christianity is a violent religion."
The Crusades prove that humans are violent, even when they claim to follow a teacher who said "blessed are the peacemakers." Judge the teacher, not the students who failed the exam. Jesus never commanded his followers to kill for him. When Peter drew a sword to defend Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus told him to put it away and healed the man Peter had injured (Luke 22:51). The Crusaders violated the explicit teachings of the person they claimed to follow.
What is the key distinction the lesson makes about atrocities committed "in the name of Christianity"?
According to the Encyclopedia of Wars, what percentage of wars throughout history were primarily religious in nature?
Terrible things have been done in the name of Christianity. Honest Christians do not deny that. But every one of those atrocities violated what Jesus actually taught. Meanwhile, Christianity produced hospitals, universities, the abolition of slavery, the Civil Rights Movement, modern science, and the largest charitable networks in history. The 20th century proved that removing religion does not remove human evil. And the real test of a worldview is not whether its followers are perfect, but whether its teachings are true. Judge the teacher, not the worst students.