So, I think that when what for lack of a better term I will call "fearmongering" about Islam crops up, there are natural reasons for this. They are illusory ones, but natural, like a stick in water looking bent. Depending on a person's familiarity with large-scale demographic imagery, there can be a tendency for people to think of the category "Islam" as like a single institution or corporation that one might be a member of or employed by. Project the manager hierarchy onto the image, and you get the monolithic sense that "Islam" as an overall category, could as such be dangerous, when really it's subgroups that are dangerous. I mean, people might profess any of the following:
- Allah is the one God, and Mohammed is His prophet.
The Quran is literally true.
The Quran and the haditha are literally true.
The Quran is metaphorically true.
The Quran and the haditha are metaphorically true.
Mohammed was a true prophet, but the compilation of his sayings was politically organized.
Mohammed was inspired, was special, but not necessarily the last prophet.
Jesus is the Messiah and will come back to save the world one day; Mohammed is a prophet of these things; but Mohammed will not come back to save the world, and the Mahdi who assists the Messiah is not Mohammed.
So, even if we could approach Islam as a whole as a dangerous political bloc, how dangerous might it really be? From the Christian perspective, interestingly enough, Islam is incapable of being the source of the final enemy of God in history. Since the Antichrist would pose as God, and since Islam is adamant about God having no incarnate form, no Muslim could ever become the Antichrist. So no matter what, Islam could never, if Christianity is true, be as dangerous as it might seem.
Another way to look at it would be in terms of mimetic disease, so to speak. Let's say when a religion inspires a lot of killing, it's like the outbreak of an epidemic disease. Communism, as a secular religion (to permit the oxymoron!), is a decent example of such a dynamic. The 20th Century saw many outbreaks of communism in many countries, and the resilience of the populations infected, varied. Eventually the disease was more or less quarantined and we are now, rather tirelessly, being inoculated against it. Now anyway, then, if Islam could be thought of as like Communism, and Christianity just as well, then we ought to rank which disease is deadlier, based on what we know of outbreaks of these diseases in the past. Of course mutant strands can arise in any system that might be worse than any strand in another system ever was, but...
I hesitate to make an assertion like, "Christianity has killed X people over the ages." But let's grant that an assertion like this, perhaps parsed more specifically as, "Nations ruled by Christians have killed X people over the ages," is true, maybe with a qualifier like "and their beliefs were highly relevant to the killing." How many people = X?
The number is actually, surprisingly even to me, very high. Like, way higher than for anything we might be normally tempted to fill in for "Nations ruled by _____," like "Islam" or "Communism," say.
To start our list, I'll give you an obscure example. The government of China before Mao's, the KMT, was terribly murderous towards its people. Not nearly so much so as Mao's was, but they did, after all, kill more people in a single act, than any other government ever did in the entire known history of the world: they deliberately caused the Yellow River to flood in 1938, wiping out as many as about 900,000 of their own people in one decision and decisive event. Overall, when the kinds of slavery they imposed and the starvation they brought about, and the executions and massacres they perpetrated, are factored in, the balance of the statistics favors an order of magnitude of about 10,000,000 for KMT democide.
What hath Nanjing to do with Jerusalem? Well, the leader of the KMT was a Christian, that's what.
This wasn't the first time, or even the most acute time, honestly, that a Christian leader in China oversaw a lot of death. The Taiping Rebellion, which killed maybe ten million to forty million people, was caused by a Christian movement that arose in the region. IIRC the only information we have that would let us guess at the responsibility of the Christian rebels for that death toll, comes from a comparison of the statistics for the capture of the capital: the rebels killed 25,000 residents, the government killed 100,000, so let's say at most the Taiping rebels killed 10,000,000 people, somehow or other, over that time period. But really, most of those who died did so as a side-effect of the war, from deprivation attending the desolation of the landscape, so depending on how much or how so the rebels contributed to that factor, they might have had more blame to bear for the population loss as such.
So far, so what? Why am I not bringing up more obvious culprits, like the Inquisitions or the witch-hunts or the (Middle Eastern and Albigensian) Crusades? I could also refer to tsarist Russia's Circassian genocide in the 1800s, or the "infinite number" of miscellaneous heretics that Robert Bellarmine claimed had been exterminated by his day, or the Ustashe holocaust in WW2 Yugoslavia, and so on and on. Such assorted interludes add up to many, many millions of people. Throw in the 30 Years' War, and what the Khanate forces did to Muslims (outside the context of the European Crusades) in relation to their leaders Mongke and Hulagu, and you get a part of the X of the dead, comparable to the figures just outlined for China.
But that's not even the half of it. Let's start firing the big guns by referring to the Native Americans. Sure, a lot of the dying here was caused by diseases that were unintentionally introduced. But the invaders hardly did anything to help the natives resist the diseases, enslaving and starving so many that many more perished for that reason on top of whatever alien sickness had come to afflict them. When the Mongolian armies invaded China earlier, there was a similar pattern of atrocities + famine + plague, and the population collapse is estimated at 30,000,000 to 60,000,000, with one fairly random source claiming that about 18,500,000 of this was due to outright killing (I am unaware how this number was arrived at; it comes from a relatively credible set of historians but I stress the "relatively," here). So if anywhere from 20,000,000 to 100,000,000 Native Americans died due to the European invasion, then for all we know, anywhere from 10,000,000 to 50,000,000 of this might have been due to causes for which the invaders were entirely culpable. David Stannard quotes one priest (IIRC) aware of the matter at the time, who said something about the attendant plagues being fortuitous for his and his associates' cause, as it helped with the depletion of the native population overall; so I wonder whether we ought to excuse the invaders at all, for the vast morbidity of those times and places?
If you're skeptical of capitalism, or even if you're sympathetic to things like communism, you might be tempted to blame capitalism in some relevant sense for British India's string of enormous famines. But under the circumstances (especially given e.g. Max Weber's analysis of the relationship between Protestantism and capitalism, say) you could just as well say that it was Britain as a Christian country that killed who knows how many millions, if not tens of millions, of Indians, that way.
And then there's Africa. And not just, or even mostly, the European slave trade. That is believed, on what evidence I know not, to have resulted in anywhere from a few million, to maybe 60,000,000 (I'll confess, not a very plausible number), deaths. But this was only a prelude to things like the Congo Free State, or (most of) France's holocausts in its African colonies (the Algerian democide began earlier than the land grab of the late 1800s), or Portugal's, or whoever's. Again, we're talking somewhere on the order of magnitude of 10,000,000 to 20,000,000 dead---or maybe even more (since it's possible that about 20,000,000 died in just the Congo Free State alone).
I could go on, honestly: pogroms against Jews here or there, things America has done (plenty), Yugoslavia again (in the 1990s; think of that one massacre in which 8,000 people died, for which the government of Belgium, IIRC, later resigned!); I'm probably forgetting quite a few case studies. Suffice it to say, it appears entirely possible that Christian nations have killed something like 100,000,000 people over the ages, maybe even around 200,000,000. Oftentimes in episodes that took place in eras when the Earth's population was far smaller than it is now.
Now, the title of this thread is "A weird argument for Christianity," because you know, why on Earth did a religion started by a man like Jesus Christ lead to this? You'd hope that if the rhetoric of the Holy Spirit indwelling us were true, then even if Christians weren't perfect, there wouldn't be such an eerie correlation between the history of atrocity, and the history of Christianity, or whatever. Yet there it is.
So, as a Christian, I think this is why: when we do metaphysics, we often end up thinking of substances and their properties, which are the objects that correspond to how in language we have subjects and their predicates. Evil is the opposite of good, is its active negation: evil is either corruption or destruction, the negation of good properties or the negation of good substantial objects. The demons (to talk "in-universe" re: the Christian narrative) would be hungry to corrupt Christians into destroying more life than any others would, I suspect. The fact that it is Christianity that is so correlated with the demons' expression in history, is symptomatic of the fact that the Christian movement is supposed to be the best exemplar of God's grace and power. If the Church were not triumphant in itself, the demons would not want to possess so many of its militant followers.
QED...
