"This is not to say that critics like Hitchens are entirely right. First, it has to be said that modern retellings of the misdeeds of the church frequently involve gross exaggerations. In his recent book Atheist Delusions, Prof David Bentley Hart points out that every new era tends to retell the past in a way that elevates its own position as the great deliver and bringer of special freedoms, and demotes the reputation of the previous generation. This necessarily requires exaggerating, even lying, about the horrors of the past. We do this on a small scale when we talk about the moralism of the 1950s or the prudishness of Victorian England. It happened on a macro scale in the eighteenth-nineteenth centuries, argues Hart, when Enlightenment leaders popularised the expression "Dark Ages." Here was an attempt to describe the era of Christendom as a time of oppression, ignorance and violence, overcome by the era of freedom and peace brought about by secular reason. However, as Hart points out, this is little more than "a simple and enchanting tale, easily followed and utterly captivating in its explanatory tidiness; its sole defect is that it happens to be false in every identifiable detail. This tale of the birth of the modern world has largely disappeared from respectable academic literature."
Let me offer two examples of these exaggerated retellings of the past. The Spanish Inquisition is often thought to be Christianity at its most bloodthirsty with hundreds of thousands of heretics killed (trawl the Internet and you will even find estimates of a million or more.) However, in its 350-year history, the Spanish Inquisition probably killed around 6,000 people. That comes out at eighteen deaths a year. Of course, one a year-one ever-is too much, but the figure hardly sustains the monstrous narratives we often hear. Or take the iconic Northern Ireland conflict. The thirty-year "troubles" led to the deaths of fewer than 4,000 people. Again, one death "in the name of Christ" is a blasphemy, but how did the Northern Ireland conflict ever come to symbolize the ferocity of the church? Compare it with the thoroughly secular French Revolution. As many people were executed in the name of "liberty, equality and fraternity" in a single year of the Revolution (the "Terror" of September 1793-July1794) as were killed in the entire three decades of the "troubles". And I am still in favour of liberty, equality and fraternity.
And this is my second problem with the complaint of Hitchens and others. The violence of Christendom is dwarfed by that of non-religious causes. such as World War 1 (8,000,000 deaths) and World War II (35,000,000 deaths). Then there is the very awkward fact that the twentieth century's three great atheistic regimes were hotbeds of unrestrained violence. Joseph Stalin's openly atheistic project killed at least 20,000,000 people, which is more people each week than the Spanish Inquisition killed in its entire 350-year history. Pol Pot, another avowed atheist, is known to have slaughtered 2,000,000 people out of a population of 8,000,000. I must emphasise that this is not to claim that atheists are more violent than Christians. It simply underlines that violence is a perennial human problem, not a specifically religious one. And those like Christopher Hitchens who suggest that these communist regimes were quasi-religious in their zeal and so provide further evidence of the pernicious effect of religion have abandoned sincere investigation into the problem and settled upon crass anti-religious apologetics. Better to state the obvious: religion or irreligion can inspire hatred.
The claim that religion has started most of the wars of history ought to cause embarrassment to thinking people. And yet it remains, as David Bentley Hart points out, "the sort of remark that sets many heads sagely nodding in recognition of what seems an undeniable truth. Such sentiments have become so much a part of the conventional grammar of 'enlightened' scepticism that they are scarcely ever subjected to serious scrutiny."
At best, the criticisms of Hitchens and others prove only that Christians have not been Christian enough (sincere believers confess that daily). For anyone can tell you that when Christians are violent and imperialistic they are not obeying their Messiah but defying him who said "love your enemy and do good to those who hate you." The solution to religious violence, then, is not less Christianity but more. As the brilliant Yale University philosopher-theologian Prof Miroslav Volf writes:
"When it comes to Christianity the cure against religiously induced and legitimized violence is almost exactly the opposite of what an important intellectual current in the West since the Enlightenment has been suggesting. The cure is not less religion, but, in a carefully qualified sense, more religion... The more the Christian faith matters to its adherents as faith and the more they practice it as an ongoing tradition with strong ties to its origins and with clear cognitive and moral content, the better off we will be."
The same point was made years ago by our deist friend Albert Einstein. Though a Jew and painfully aware of the inconsistencies of the German church, he believed that what Germany needed in that crucial hour was not less Christianity but more. In his 1915 essay "My Opinion of the War" he wrote: "But why so many words when I can say it in one sentence, and in a sentence very appropriate for a Jew. Honour your master, Jesus Christ, not only in words and songs but, rather, foremost in your deeds." The solution to violent Christianity is real Christianity.
Finally, there is an awkward question that atheist critics ought to face. It has to do with atheism's intellectual capacity to restrain hatred and inspire love. Christians and atheists alike are capable of both love and hate. Agreed. But when Christians love, they do so in full accordance with their worldview that begins with the love of God and the inherent value of his much-loved creatures. When Christians hate, they do so in logical defiance of that worldview. But here is the question: what is there in the atheist's perspective that can rationally inspire love and discourage hate? I know that most atheists (in the Christianized West) choose love over hate. That is to be applauded. But if human beings are accidents in an unknowing universe, how can the decision to love or hate be anything more than a preference, a product of "feelings," as atheist Bertrand Russell once famously acknowledged? On what grounds can the atheist speak rationally of the high and equal value of the poor or the weak or the asylum seeker? Put another way, while it is obvious that only one way of life is logically compatible with Christianity (the Messiah's way of humility and love), any kind of life is logically compatible with atheism.
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