Nor have the dangers posed by religion faded with time. Richard Dawkins surveys the Middle East, the Balkans, Northern Ireland, India, and Sri Lanka and contends that “most, if not all, of the violent enmities in the world today” are due to the “divisive force of religion.” So parlous is the contemporary influence of religion, notably Islamic extremism and Christian fundamentalism, that Daniel Dennett fears “a toxic religious mania could end human civilization overnight.”
The problem with this critique is that it greatly exaggerates the crimes that have been committed by religious fanatics while neglecting or rationalizing the vastly greater crimes committed by secular and atheist fanatics. This is the topic of the next two chapters, in which we examine more closely the historical evidence the critics invoke. I intend to show that the widely held view that religion is the primary source of the great killings and conflicts of history is simply wrong—indeed that it can only be held by those who insist on ignoring or falsifying the evidence.
Let’s begin with the Crusades, which are vividly described by James Carroll as “a set of world historical crimes” whose “trail of violence scars the earth and human memory even to this day.” A Catholic, Carroll is an example of how many liberal Christians have absorbed the secular allegation that the Crusades illustrate the horrors of religion. Moreover, in fairly standard fashion, Carroll reserves his harshest language for the role of Christians in the Crusades. About the horrors perpetrated by the Muslim side, he is notably reticent. Here we have the familiar doctrine: religion is bad but Christianity is worse.
But is it true? Let’s remember that before the rise of Islam the region we call the Middle East was predominantly Christian. There were Zoroastrians in Persia and Jews in Palestine, but most of the people in what we now call Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt were Christians. The sacred places of Christianity—where Christ was born, lived, and died—are in that region. Inspired by Islam’s call to jihad, Muhammad’s armies conquered Jerusalem and the entire Middle East. They then pushed south into Africa, east into Asia, and north into Europe. They conquered parts of Italy and most of Spain, overran the Balkans, and were preparing for a final incursion that would bring all of Europe, then known as Christendom, under the rule of Islam. So serious was the Muslim threat that Edward Gibbon speculated that if the West had not fought back “perhaps the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the Revelation of Mahomet.”
