Almost anyone who has graduated from college in the last 50 years has repeatedly heard the statement, “More people have been killed in the name of God than in the name of anything else.” And most of them believe it.
It would take a long essay to respond to this claim. I will therefore only note here that if by “God” the people who make this statement are referring to the God of the Bible, and therefore to Christians (Jews rarely had enough numbers or power to persecute anyone), the statement is simply not true.
Yes, Christians killed Jews (though it was never official church doctrine to do so). For example, whole communities of Jews were slaughtered by Christians on their way to fight in the Crusades.
And tens of millions of Indigenous people in the Americas were killed as a result of Christian invasion and settlement—though most of those deaths were caused…
