All About Mormons

Some claim that religion has caused more deaths than any other human institution. That’s an easy claim to make, but does the evidence support it? I recently found an interesting article on Wikipedia that lists all major mass deaths caused by human hands. Of course some evil people have used religion as an excuse to kill each other. People have justified killing each other using every imaginable cultural difference. But how many deaths is religion in fact responsible for?

The answer to that question isn’t so straightforward. Religion has played a role in some wars, but it is often only one of many causative factors. It’s also a mistake to assume that all conflicts motivated by religion have been unjust. In some cases, religion has led persecuted people to overthrow their oppressors.

Religion has also saved many lives. For example, Christianity unified medieval Europe, especially before the rise of Protestantism. Perhaps there would have been even more wars between European kingdoms without it. In modern times, suicide rates are also lower among religious people. Should we subtract the lives saved from the total lives allegedly lost?

These complexities aside, I tried to estimate the number of deaths that religion has caused over the years. To simplify, I ignored all conflicts that had fewer than 100,000 fatalities. I considered a conflict to be religious even if religion (or lack of religion) was not the main cause. Where a bilateral conflict involved two religions, I split the fatalities between them. I included religious conflicts even if I considered those conflicts to be just. I also ignored accidents and removed repeated events from the Wikipedia list. This analysis reveals that religion is far from the main excuse human beings have used to justify killing each other.

Christianity

The Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) killed 7,250,000 people. It started as a war between Catholics and Protestants, but it developed into a political war that had little to do with religion.

Three million people died in the French Wars of Religion (1562-1598, Catholics vs. Protestants).

Two million people died in the crusades (1095-1291). In response to Muslim conquests in Europe and the Holy Land, Catholics tried to regain access to holy sites in the Middle East. As this conflict involved both Muslims and Catholics, we’ll divide the fatalities between them.

150,000 people died in the genocide of the Bosnian war (1992-1995). That conflict was a complex territorial war that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia. Ethnic cleansing of the Muslim Bosniak population by Orthodox Serbs was a tragic part of the conflict.

Total deaths: 7,250,000 + 3,000,000 + 1,000,000 + 150,000 = 11,400,000.

The Taiping Rebellion

The Taiping Rebellion (1851-1864) resulted in 60,000,000 deaths. Many people in China at the time thought the ruling Qing government was corrupt, so a leader named Hong Xiuquan started a civil war. Hong was a fascinating man. He advocated for shared property and equality, independent of sex or class. He also prohibited drug use, slavery, and prostitution. Hong believed that he was the literal brother of Jesus Christ, and that belief motivated his politics. Christianity can accommodate diverse ideas, but I feel that Hong’s beliefs go too far. Those beliefs place him outside the Christian fold. But it is interesting that distorted Christian thinking had such an influence on 19th-century China.

Total deaths because of Hong Xiuquan’s arguably just civil war: 60,000,000.

Islam

The Conquests of Timur-e-Lang (1369-1405) killed 17,500,000 million people. Timur relied on Islamic symbols and language, calling himself the “Sword of Islam.”

The Dungan revolt in China (1862-1877) resulted in 10,000,000 deaths. The conflict started when a bamboo-pole salesman didn’t get the price he’d asked for. Racial antagonism, class warfare, and religious differences fueled the resulting revolt. The Dungan people are Muslim.

1,500,000 people died in the Second Sudanese Civil War (1983-2005). The war started when the Muslim central government imposed sharia law on non-Muslim southerners.

The crusades, mentioned above, resulted in part from Muslim conquests in Europe and the Holy Land. Two million people died. Let’s assign one million of those fatalities to Islam.

The Du Wenxiu Rebellion (1856-1873) caused 900,000 deaths. China’s Qing government oppressed the Muslim Hui people and other non-Muslim minorities. Racial antagonism, class warfare, and religious differences led to conflict.

900,000 people died in the Armenian Genocide as well (1915-1923). The Ottoman Empire (Muslim) killed Armenian Christians.

The Greek genocide took 600,000 lives (1915-1923). The Ottoman Empire again massacred Christians.

Total deaths: 17,500,000 + 10,000,000 + 1,500,000 + 1,000,000 + 900,000 + 900,000 + 600,000 = 32,400,000.

Taoism

The Yellow Turban Rebellion (184-205) cost 5,000,000 lives. In the middle of a food crisis, a secret Taoist society rebelled against the oppressive Han dynasty.

Total deaths: 5,000,000.

Aztec religion

The Aztecs performed 900,000 human sacrifices between 1350 and 1521.

Total deaths: 900,000.

Atheism

Many make the mistake of downplaying atheism’s role in communism. But according to Vladimir Lenin, “Atheism is a natural and inseparable part of Marxism, of the theory and practice of scientific socialism.” Of course there are many good atheists, just as there are many good Christians and Muslims. But just as some have used religion to justify atrocities, so, too, have some used atheism.

63,500,000 died during the Mao Zedong era in China (1949-1976). Communist Mao engaged in mass human-rights violations and genocide. His policies caused the Great Chinese Famine and tens of millions of preventable deaths.

Soviet mass killings and man-made famines led to 34,500,000 deaths between 1917 and 1953.

The Cambodian Genocide (1975-1979) caused 2,000,000 deaths. The Communist Khmer Rouge regime led by Pol Pot engaged in political mass killings.

The War in Afghanistan (1979-2000) resulted in 1,750,000 fatalities. (Soviet-Afghan War, Taliban Era, etc.)

Total deaths: 63,500,000 + 34,500,000 + 2,000,000 + 1,750,000 = 101,750,000.

Deaths Unrelated to Religion or Atheism

In contrast, here is a list of the conflicts that had little to do with religion:

• World War II (1939-1945): 62,500,000 deaths
• European colonization of the Americas (1492-1900): 51,000,000 deaths
• World War I (1914-1918): 40,000,000 deaths
• Mongol conquests (1206-1368): 30,000,000 deaths
• Manchu conquest of ChinaQing dynasty conquest of the Ming Dynasty (1616-1662): 25,000,000 deaths
• An Lushan Rebellion (755-763): 24,500,000 deaths
• Conquests by the Empire of Japan (1894-1945): 17,500,000 deaths
• Crimes during Congo Free State 1885-1908 (1885-1908): 13,500,000 deaths
• Russian Civil War (1917-1921): 7,000,000 deaths
• Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815): 5,250,000 deaths
• Bengal famine of 1943 (1943-1943): 4,000,000 deaths
• Second Congo War (1998-2003): 3,950,000 deaths
• Deluge (1655-1660): 3,500,000 deaths
• Hundred Years’ War (1337-1443): 2,800,000 deaths
• Korean War (1950-1953): 2,450,000 deaths
• Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies (1944-1945): 2,400,000 deaths
• Shaka’s conquests (1816-1828): 2,000,000 deaths
• Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970): 2,000,000 deaths
• Vietnam War (1955-1975): 1,900,000 deaths
• Expulsion of Germans after World War II (1945-1950): 1,750,000 deaths
• 1971 Bangladesh genocide (1971-1971): 1,513,000 deaths
• Mexican Revolution (1911-1920): 1,250,000 deaths
• Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988): 1,250,000 deaths
• Vietnamese Famine of 1945 (1944-1945): 1,200,000 deaths
• Great Irish Famine (1846-1849): 1,125,000 deaths
• Indonesian killings of 1965-1966 (1965-1966): 1,050,000 deaths
• Gallic Wars (-58–50): 950,000 deaths
• Rwandan genocide (1994-1994): 750,000 deaths
• Spanish Civil War (1936-1939): 750,000 deaths
• Paraguayan War (1864-1870): 750,000 deaths
• 1983-85 famine in Ethiopia (1983-1985): 700,000 deaths
• Sanctions against Iraq (1990-1998): 375,500 deaths
• Nanking Massacre (1937-1938): 195,000 deaths
• War in the Vendée (1793-1796): 175,000 deaths
• Indonesian occupation of East Timor (1974-1999): 146,700 deaths
• Manila Massacre (1945-1945): 110,000 deaths
• Massacres of Poles by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (1943-1944): 102,500 deaths

Total fatalities unrelated to religion: 315,392,700.

Summary

The total number of deaths “caused by religion” (ignoring the other often more important causes of these same conflicts) is 11,400,000 + 60,000,000 + 32,400,000 + 5,000,000 + 900,000 = 109,700,000.

The total number of deaths caused by secular conflicts is 101,750,000 + 315,392,700 = 417,142,700.

So only 21% of these deaths were caused directly or indirectly by religion. Only 2% are attributable to Christianity.