Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved
One of the more currently fashionable criticisms of Christianity is that countless human beings have been slaughtered in the name of the Christian God during the last thousand years of human history. It is no doubt true that in the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, and the Salem Witch Trials people who called themselves Christians took part in the deaths of those who they considered to be heretics, or believers of other faiths. That such abominations actually occurred I will not take issue with, but I would like to point out a troika of salient facts that often do not see the light of day when accusing conversations on this subject are underway.
First of all, all three of the above mentioned atrocities were committed by people who lived in a time when civil government and religion were, so to speak, “in bed together.” Every time the church and the state become so deeply blended the result is a corruption of the church. As a 21st Century Christian my biggest point of agreement with those who are today in favor of a separation of church and state has far more to do with my concern for the church’s purity than the state’s wellbeing. When Christ and Caesar, the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of man, are forced to intertwine the result is always people in government who are Christian in name only and who wear the cross only to gain raw political power. Such was the case in the days of the Crusades, Inquisition and the witch trials. Political and ecclesial power were in a truly unholy union, and great evil resulted.
The second point I’d like to make is that I have never met a follow Christian deeply in love with Jesus Christ and in intimate spiritual union with Him who would ever consider murdering anyone in His Name. The very idea is repulsive. Why? Because the very core of the faith He brought to us two-thousand years ago is one of love. Every true believer knows that the only way we have been commanded to appeal to others to believe what we believe is by loving them, even if they make themselves our enemies. In fact if they harm us we are called to literally “turn the other cheek” and then pray for their souls. Telling the truth about who Jesus is and doing so in love are the only weapons a true child of God has in his or her arsenal. Anyone in history who tried to convert through threat of physical harm does not belong to Jesus Christ and, in fact, does not know Him at all.
Finally I want to point out a profound fact of history. The number of people killed in the three horrors perpetrated in the name of the fatally compromised “Christianity” of those times numbered, at most, in the tens of thousands. That is altogether too many, but please compare those numbers with the monstrous slaughters carried out by three of the worst despots of the 20th Century, Hitler, Stalin and Mao, all in the name of two socio-political philosophies, Nazism and Communism. It has been estimated that over 100 million human beings lost their lives at the hands of these men and the systems they propagated. The stark fact is that what I call the “Atheistic Religions” (or in the case of Nazism one that was nominally Pagan) of the last hundred years ended the lives of such a vast number of men, women and children as to make those lost to a perverted version of Christianity pale by comparison.
The ultimate point I’m making here is that true Christianity is a religion of life, not death. In my next segment I’ll take this conviction one step further and seek to illuminate what the faith I call my own has done to bless Western Civilization throughout its history, another fact that has been ignored by those who reject, out of hand, the way of Jesus Christ.