In a recent post, I haphazardly made the comment that “hundreds of millions” of people have been murdered and tortured by the church, and it was brought to my attention that I was exaggerating. Now, I did not pull that number out of my ass, as a month or so before I actually researched this topic. But the data was hard to pin down, ranging from a few million to one writer’s estimate of closer to a billion. The best-documented higher-end estimate came from a paper by Dr. Naveed S. Sheik, Body Count: A Quantitative Review of Political Violence Across World Civilizations. In that paper, he estimated between 100 million and 170 million people were killed by Christians. My error was using numbers toward the upper end of the scale (hundreds of millions), where supporting data were less robust. I apologized to my Catholic friends who were rightly offended by my mistake.

The reason it is hard to reach a consensus has many dimensions: 1) Where do you draw the boundaries of people killed by the church? While someone arrested for speaking against the church (like saying the solar system is heliocentric), being tortured by church officials, and then burned at the stake by those same officials is a clear example, on the other end of the spectrum, it gets muddled. While including the nine million who died in the Crusades and the ten million who died in the Thirty Years’ War, some authors include things like the other wars in Christian nations, such as World Wars I and II, Vietnam, the Iraq War, the war in Afghanistan, Gaza, and Iran, where 40-45 million people died needlessly, or the over 50 million indigenous people who died from the white Christian men’s conquest.

If making World Wars I and II part of the people killed by the church seems unfair or even absurd, those who make that argument point out that within each country, the churches (such as the German Lutheran Church, with Bonhoeffer et al. being an exception) did not speak out against the war but abetted the war effort. At the present time, the Russian Orthodox Church’s support is unyielding for the invasion and murder of Ukrainians, and American evangelicals not only support the war on Iran, but fully support aid to Israel, much of which has been used to kill Gazans.

Then, with the deaths of North and South American indigenous peoples, do you only count those who were murdered with a sword bearing Christian symbols, or those who died from poverty and diseases caused by Christian Europeans?

I understand why my Catholics friends are most sensitive about this topic, because the protestants have falsely used these numbers to show that the Catholic church is inferior.  My mantra is competitive piety defines all religions. I heard about the “murderous inferior Catholics” while I was attending an Appalachian Baptist church. “Martin Luther put an end to all of that abuse.” But, for example, it was protestants who caused much of the abuse and killing of African slaves, and thousands of children died in the horrible  Victorian (and pre-Victorian) mills, owned by upstanding Protestant church leaders,

So, in summary, to be safely within the boundaries of good historical data and rational criteria, it would have been better if I had said the church has only tortured and murdered fifty million people in the past two thousand years. So I sincerely apologize again for my mistake, as I typically champion good evidence for the opinions I share. All I can say at this juncture is, again, I’m sorry, and I ask for your forgiveness, and I will try to be more careful.

But back to my original post, someone may ask, “Mike, why do you say such negative things about the Church and Christian culture?”

I Am Not a Hater of the Church… I Am a Lover of the Churchless

Christianity, like all religions that subscribe to competitive piety, I suppose, shares one common trait: projecting innocence to the world. I have been involved with dozens of Protestant churches and, for one year, an Anglican church. All churches have communicated, in various ways, that they are “Holy,” created and separated from the world BY GOD, and therefore infallible. To maintain this image and belief, while the church may not be more malicious than equivalent secular institutions, it works much harder to hide its mistakes… to maintain its perfect image. This is exemplified in sexual abuse.

Here is the rub. Those who have left the church, or are in the process of leaving, who are not idiots, have already discovered the church’s secrets, and that is one reason they are leaving. Many, if not most, teens raised in the church will discover the truth about the church’s checkered history if not in high school, in college… or life. Once they know they have been deceived by the church (that the Earth isn’t six thousand years old, that the pastor really left because he was sleeping with women at the church, and that your friend’s family left the church because she was molested by a youth leader), they leave.

I want all of Christian life to be more authentic because this would slow down the hemorrhage out of our churches. More honest and less competitive. I was allowed to teach a series on church history in Minnesota before moving to Washington state, where I became the devil in the eyes of many Christians here. In that Sunday school course, I warned people I would be brutally honest, covering not only the wonderful saints in the church’s history, but also the devils in sheep’s clothing. Of Christian massacres of the innocent, like the German persecution of so-called witches. It is healthy to embrace your humanity. It also helps to make it clear that the institution of the church is a human endeavor, not an organization created by God. Human institutions blend the glorious and the awful… not God’s perfect creations. I will close this here, and I will try to do better when posting things to keep them as accurate as possible.

Respectfully, Mike