With the death of Christian faith in Europe in the Twentieth Century, we got a glimpse of what the whole world might be like had Jesus never been born. The Twentieth Century saw the rise of brutal totalitarian states like Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Millions of people were confined to Soviet gulags or Nazi concentration camps. Millions of these were either shot, gassed, hanged or died of starvation and disease. The century also witnessed the return of abortion and infanticide, things that had largely been eliminated under Christian influence in the past. There were brutal wars in which tens of millions were killed. And all of this centered in the formerly Christian continent of Europe.

With the rise of relativity in physics and the uncertainty of quantum mechanics, people began to apply these ideas to the realm of morality and ethics. Albert Einstein, for one, would have none of it. For him, relativity applied to physics only, it had no implications for ethics and morality. But most people don’t think as deeply and consistently as Einstein. There was a natural tendency to think that relativity and quantum uncertainty pull the rug out from under the Christian moral compass, and open the way to a greater kind of freedom. But even a great atheist like Nietzsche was not fooled. He warned already in the Nineteenth Century: “The collapse of the religious impulse would leave a huge vacuum.” The history of the Twentieth Century told us how that vacuum was filled. It was filled with the kind of inhumanity toward others that most people thought had been eliminated from the human race through evolution, education and material progress.

During the 20th Century a horrific total of more than 170 million people were killed. Of this number at least 130 million were killed because of atheistic ideology. 15 million deaths can be attributed to the Nazis. 40 million deaths can be laid at the feet of Stalin and Soviet Russia. An even more horrific total of 70 plus million died at the hands of Maoist China. Additional millions were killed in Cambodia due to the Communistic ideology of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge. In these horrific slaughters we can see the first fruits of a post-Jesus world. In the words of David Bentley Hart: “The will to lead modern humanity onward into a post-religious promised land of liberty, justice, and equality has always been accompanied by a willingness to kill without measure.” This echos the words of Edmund Burke a couple of centuries earlier: “Human behavior needs restraint, the less within, the more is needed without.” I would suggest that whatever positives the 20th Century brought to the West were a legacy of Christian culture. The distinctive contribution of that century was unparalleled atrocities.

If these numbers do not trouble you in a world that contains nearly eight billion people, keep in mind that in the 2000 years of Christianity, with all of its horrors, the total number of people killed unjustly by Christian governments totals about 17 million maximum. The Inquisition is rightly criticized as an affront to human freedom and dignity, but its 30,000 victims pale in comparison with Auschwitz’s minimum of 1.1 million and possibly as high as two million. Consider also the great amount of criticism leveled against Christianity on account of the Salem Witch trials, which killed 20-25 people. Every one of those executions was a tragedy, but compared to Auschwitz, where technology allowed the killing of people on a mass scale, this was a relatively minor event in the history of humanity’s inhumanity of others.

Without God, moral relativism reigns. There is no solid foundation for ethical or moral thinking. When moral relativism takes hold of a society, human life becomes cheap. When you devalue God, you devalue human life. I understand that Napoleon once said he saw first hand what men without God look like during the French Revolution: “AOne does not govern such men, he shoots them down. They have descended to the level of beasts.@ The bottom line is: You become like the God you worship. If you worship actors, athletes and politicians, you become more and more like them. If you worship power, you become cruel and self-serving. If you worship wealth, you become greedy, and you lose compassion. If you worship self, you become your own worst image of yourself.