Why I'm Writing This

Flawed thinking leads to flawed choices, and flawed choices take you away from what you want instead of toward it. This paper, potentially, is a striking example of this phenomenon.

We're told, almost as settled fact, that religion seems connected to the most significant examples of social atrocity. But what if that's not true? And if it isn't true, what else might end up looking different?

I’m not saying that anything would or should end up looking different. What I am saying is that the best way to choose, in any area of life, is to get a clearer view of the choices.

Part 1: Religion Vs. Ideology

If you just count bodies, the twentieth century alone makes a strong case that secular political ideology, not religion, is the biggest killer in human history.

• Stalin era Soviet Union: roughly 20 to 30 million dead (purges, famine, gulags)
• Mao era China: roughly 40 to 60 million.
• Khmer Rouge Cambodia: roughly a quarter of the population killed in about four years.

None of that was done in the name of God. It was explicitly atheist, materialist ideology, and in most of these cases the regimes actively targeted religion as an enemy to be stamped out. So the raw body count doesn't support the popular saying at all.

Part 2: Is "Religious" Violence Actually Religious?

Many conflicts labeled religious turn out to be more tribal, ethnic, or political when examined closely.

• Sunni versus Shia conflict: often driven by power, land, and historic grievance between factions, with religion as the banner rather than the root cause
• Rwanda (Hutu vs Tutsi): roughly 800,000 to 1 million killed in about 100 days in 1994. This is fundamentally an ethnic and tribal conflict rooted in colonial-era race categorization, not a religious one.
• Northern Ireland (the Troubles): framed as Catholic versus Protestant, but really about nationality and political power, namely whether Northern Ireland remained part of the United Kingdom or joined a united Ireland. Catholic and Protestant functioned as tribal identity labels more than doctrinal battle lines

So what often gets filed under "religious violence", at closer examination, turns out to be tribal or political conflict. The label tells you which side someone's on. The actual driver underneath is almost always land, power, or grievance.

But let's not play that card with everything. The Crusades don't belong on this list, and I'm not going to pretend they do. Land and politics were tangled up in it, for sure, but a lot of those men marched, killed, and died genuinely believing God wanted it done. That one was done in the name of God. Full stop. No hiding behind nuance.

So here's the number anyway. Historians' estimates for deaths across the entire Crusades era, roughly two centuries of intermittent warfare, run in the range of one to three million. That's horrific. It's also a fraction of what one twentieth century decade produced under Stalin or Mao.

Put a rough order to it by body count. Secular political ideology, communism and fascism, sits at the top with tens of millions killed, by far the largest category. Ethnic and tribal conflict comes next, capable of enormous death tolls concentrated into short, brutal windows.

Explicitly religious violence, the Crusades among them, historic religious wars, modern jihadist terrorism, is real, and some of it is genuinely religious with no asterisk needed, but it's still significantly smaller in scale than the other two categories.