The Farcical Battle Over Religious and Atheistic Death Counts

One of the memes you hear in the old rhetorical war between so-called theists and atheists is that the other side has a larger death toll, so theirs is the more dangerous ideology. Which has killed more people, religion or secularism?

The apologist James W. Miller addressed this issue in “Atheists Have Killed More Than Religious People, Full Stop.” As you can tell from the title, he says he’s tired of the atheist trope that the Crusades, Inquisitions, pogroms, religious conquests, and so forth show that religion is the greatest threat to society.

On the contrary, he says, the twentieth-century record is that secular authoritarianism in Marxist regimes has killed far more people than the ancient religions:

Under Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Union killed an estimated 20 million people through purges, forced labor camps, famine policies, and executions (Conquest, The Great Terror; Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism). Mao Zedong’s rule in China resulted in the deaths of roughly 45 million people, largely through the Great Leap Forward and political purges (Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine). The Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot killed around 1.7 to 2 million people in Cambodia, nearly a quarter of the population (Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime).

Moreover, “These were not regimes that merely happened to be atheist. They were regimes that often treated religion as an enemy to be eliminated. Churches were destroyed and clergy were imprisoned or executed. Faith itself was seen as a rival authority that had to be crushed.”

By comparison, the scale of religious killings in the ancient or medieval period is paltry:

The Crusades, often cited as the definitive case of religious violence, resulted in an estimated 1 to 3 million deaths over several centuries (Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A History). That is tragic, but it’s not remotely comparable to the industrialized killing of the twentieth century.

The Salem witch trials, frequently used as a symbol of religious hysteria, resulted in about 20 to 25 executions (Boyer and Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed). The number is small enough to fit inside a single room.

In any event, Miller says human nature is to blame for wars and political killings, and ruthless leaders typically only misuse religions to rally people around a secular flag or cause, such as the capture of land or the elimination of foreigners. “If a ruler invokes God to expand territory or consolidate power,” he says, “the motive is not faith. It’s ambition. The religious language is a tool, not the engine.”

Also, he says, religions aren’t equally liable to be misused in that way. Christianity and Islam have very different moral cores.

Christianity, at its core, does not teach conquest. Jesus taught his followers to love their neighbors, their enemies, and the stranger on the other side of the world. He rejected retaliation. He refused political power. He submitted to execution rather than overthrowing his oppressors.

When atrocities are committed in the name of Christianity, they occur precisely where these teachings are ignored. The further one moves from the ethical center of the faith, the easier it becomes to justify violence.

By contrast, Islam “incorporates a stronger framework of reciprocal justice within its legal and moral tradition. This does not make it uniquely violent, but it does make it different.”

The upshot is that

Religion, and Christianity in particular, has been a remarkable curb on the animal instincts of the human race. Removing that muzzle just lets a wild dog loose.

When belief in God disappears, it’s often replaced by something else that demands ultimate loyalty. The State. This substitute can become far more dangerous because it lacks any higher authority to restrain them.

What the atheist needs to reckon with, Miller says, is that “If anything, the ongoing habit of dismissing religion as inherently harmful is a far greater risk, pushing society toward a thinner moral framework, one that is less capable of restraining power and that is thus more vulnerable to the very atrocities it claims to prevent.”

Share

Now, the comparison of body counts isn’t just unseemly since it’s also quite the red herring. Perhaps propagandists for atheism have overplayed this card, or they’ve been misled by their adherence to scientific quantification, as if the quantity of deaths were the key point in a criticism of religion.

The record is liable to be overblown on both sides, especially when the goal is to associate all religious or nonreligious people with mass murderers. Obviously, just because a murderous regime has an ideology doesn’t mean all the deaths it causes are ideological. Miller himself points out that some of the Soviet deaths resulted from “famine policies.” So that had nothing to do with atheism directly, but with misguided faith in the economic system of communism that failed to support large populations with food. Indeed, if communism is to blame, we might blame early Christianity for practicing and popularizing similar socialist principles.

Also, the religious death tolls were demonstrations of the harm that could befall you if your mind got out of line. A theocracy persecutes its subjects for ideological deviations, so the religious harassment, torture, and killing were means of enforcing totalitarian control over everyone’s minds, including those who weren’t punished.

More importantly, the lopsided death tolls are largely due to the downside of secular progress. Clearly, modern secular societies have used scientific knowledge to design and build more effective weapons. If ancient theocracies were less enthralled to stultifying dogmas and prejudices, and were open-minded enough to develop the technological applications of rigorous science, they might have used guns, bombs, and missiles for tribal religious purposes, and committed genocide against foreign theocracies.

Then again, that very open-mindedness would have conflicted with religious dogmatism. So the trade-off is between the religious small-mindedness that impoverishes the masses in feudal, low-tech dictatorships, and the open-mindedness that presents us with godlike powers of creation and destruction that improve our living standards but also endanger us with weapons of mass destruction.

Miller is correct that religion itself isn’t the source of all human violence, although I assume no atheist has ever said otherwise. Tribalism is the more likely culprit, and tribalism is found even in chimpanzees. Troops of chimpanzees will war against each other, fighting over choice territory. Wild animals are often violent for basic evolutionary reasons: when resources are scarce, animals must compete for mates, food, and territory.

Yet religion isn’t exactly a neutral tool that is only ever misused when violence is done in religion’s name. Religion fits tribalism like a hand in a glove. The theologies of organized religions — which is to say popular, workable ones — typically demonize those who reject them.

Think of a band of chimpanzees that believes fervently in its right to exist because the members are driven by biological drives for self-preservation. Now imagine the band had the cultural ability to signal its rights not just with hoots, hollers, and hand gestures, but elaborate religious symbols that stir religious ecstasy, fear of death, and longing for immortality. What greater genocidal wars would chimpanzees perpetrate if their minds were opened to religious exacerbations of tribal self-aggrandizement and xenophobia?

The chief advantage of modern secularism is that science supports a humanist ethos that opposes tribalism. Philosophical reflection on science shows us that our commonalities, such as our brain structures, genetic code, and existential condition of being people born into an impersonal cosmos, outweigh our petty differences.

At this point, the apologist will allege that while secular reason can inform us about our nature, it can’t justify moral values, so secularism is consistent with mass slaughter because genuine naturalists will be nihilists. People may have the commonality of cerebral cortexes, but they don’t thereby have any right to live. Hence, there should be nothing wrong with killing people.

That’s a tedious argument I’ve dealt with elsewhere. There are indeed serious meta-ethical issues with grounding a noble basis of morality, but theism provides only illusory solutions. Telling asinine miracle stories and theological fantasies that promote magical thinking can only trick us into accepting an unrealistic estimation of our value.

No, the better approach is to reckon with natural reality without succumbing to cheap, self-serving delusions. Social cooperation is instinctive in many animal species, but morality for people who’ve outgrown some of those instincts, or who are equipped with rational veto powers, must motivate us with inspiring narratives that do justice to the facts as they’re responsibly understood. Theistic religions may have motivated the ancient world, but in the twenty-first century, they’re outdated. A better story is the philosophy consisting of existential, cosmicist, humanistic, and pragmatic elaborations on naturalism.

Granted, the mere potential for progress doesn’t guarantee success. The secular humanist ethos didn’t prevent the emergence of bloodthirsty secular authoritarian regimes in the twentieth century. Indeed, there’s no guarantee that modern educated people will learn how to live in peace and prosperity over the long term without the aid of theistic delusions. Those delusions kept the civilized experiment going for millennia, whereas the explicit rejection of theistic rationales at the state level has been with us for only several centuries.

The New Atheist movement was dubious not just because of its unsustainable positivism, nurtured in the science departments that trained many of the movement’s leaders, but because this movement papered over the existential issues that naturalism raises.

Instead, New Atheism apologized for neoliberal consumerism. You saw this in the UK’s atheist bus slogan, “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” And you saw this in Sam Harris’s defense of the liberal status quo (that let structural problems fester in the developing world and rural parts of the US, resulting in the Trumpian populist backlash), and in Neil deGrasse Tyson’s repudiation of philosophy for not being as useful as science.

What the politically compromised leaders of the New Atheist movement failed to realize is what the older, existential atheists understood: the death of God is bound to be a subversive event. New Atheists railed against fundamentalist Christians and Muslims, but they wanted to oppose the prospect of a neomedieval theocracy with the bounties of a progressive secular society. Instead of scrutinizing the sustainability of that progress, they ended up apologizing for the mismatch between capitalism and the other liberal institutions, including democracy and science. Capitalism is the cuckoo bird in the nest of Western modernity.

What atheism does is confront us with our existential condition. We’re enlightened enough to realize we’re alone and godless, so we must produce a way of life that does justice to that condition. Everyone is in that position, including religious folks who don’t realize it. They’re not God-given spirits, but evolved animal bodies that bootstrapped their self-awareness, intelligence, imagination, sociality, and ambition with linguistic and cultural symbols, freeing themselves largely from natural selection. What type of civilization is best for such relatively awakened mammals?

If theism should figure in an existentially authentic civilization, it should do so only as art, as a fiction we tell alongside countless other stories to enrich our lives. The notion that we should bow before a special, obviously absurd narrative perished with God when early modern Europeans realized they should be open-minded enough to search for cultural alternatives to improve their social conditions, to extricate themselves from the worst aspects of what would later be called medievalism.

Evidently, the threat of cultish authoritarianism remains with us in the twenty-first century, despite the victories against fascism in the Second World War and the collapse of Soviet communism. The rise of Trumpism shows what the ancient Greek thinkers knew: that demagogues are liable to sabotage democracies by using effective (sophistical) rhetoric to exploit the issues of the day, stirring up resentments, and gathering a cult of personality to take and abuse political power.

The humanist response to this is straightforward: strengthen the liberal society’s checks and balances, including the education system to instill critical thinking skills, and redistribute the wealth that capitalism produces, to prevent neofeudal inequalities that stoke resentment, the call for a strongman leader, and the regression to tribal scapegoating and barbarism.

But what’s the religious solution? Let’s follow Miller’s advice and be specific, taking Christianity as an example. Miller points out that the early Jesus movement was pacifistic and egalitarian for believers. (Brothers in Christ were viewed as equal, but God would still separate the sheep from the goats at the end of time, making for an eternal inequality.)

Still, it’s no accident that the organized religion of Christianity compromised on those absolutist convictions. The word “organized” in “organized religion” is a euphemism since the difference here is between a cult and a politically empowered, sustainable institution.

If you read between the lines, Jesus’s point in the Gospels was that godly morality is unearthly. Humans can’t achieve the kingdom of God without God doing all the work. Thus, Augustine said we must make do with the City of Man before God deigns to usher in his final judgment and replace human labour with the divine kind. We should expect Christendom to deviate from Jesus’s morals because the Church must operate in the fallen, demon-ridden realm of nature.

From a Christian standpoint, then, Paul’s theology of the Christ of faith supersedes the historical Jesus’s countercultural absolutism. This is why Paul’s epistles come after the Gospel narratives in the New Testament, even though the epistles were written earlier.

But the point is that Miller begs the question when he speaks of the early Jesus cult as Christianity’s moral “core.” The cult may have preceded the organized Church, but Christianity has been politically compromised for some seventeen hundred years, since the Roman Empire adopted the cult and merged it with imperial dynamics.

Consequently, we can hardly expect viable meta-ethical answers from established, politically and economically compromised Christianity.