Know Your History: The Claim and the Record
This study exists because the claim is everywhere and rarely checked. Someone tells you religion is responsible for most of the world's wars, and unless you know the actual numbers, the only honest move is to nod or change the subject. This guide gives you the receipts. Alycia Wood's case rests on a simple method: do not argue the feeling of the claim, check it against the historical record.
Know this cold: the twentieth century, the bloodiest century in recorded history, was driven overwhelmingly by secular and anti-religious regimes. That single fact reframes the entire debate, and it is worth memorizing well enough to state without notes.
Believe: The Numbers Are Not a Trick
Physicist Steven Weinberg gave the opposing claim its most quotable form.
“For good people to do evil things, that takes religion.” (Steven Weinberg, as quoted by Wood)
Believe the actual count instead of the clean line. The First World War: roughly fifteen million dead. Stalin's USSR: roughly twenty million of its own people. The Second World War: roughly fifty five million. Mao's China: roughly forty million more. None of these were religious wars. Several of the regimes were openly hostile to religion as a matter of policy.
- Memorize one or two of these figures well enough to state them without hesitation in conversation.
- Notice that the agnostic writer David Berlinski makes the same point from outside the faith: "If memory serves, it was not the Vatican" that handed humanity poison gas, eugenics, and nuclear weapons.
- Hold both truths at once: religious violence has happened and does not need to be denied. It is also not the main engine of history's deadliest atrocities.
Believe: The Real Driver Is Unaccountable Human Nature
If religion is not the engine, something else is. Wood points to research by psychologist Jesse Bering, an agnostic, who found that children cheated freely when alone, and cheated far less when told an invisible princess was watching them, real or not. The sense of being seen by a moral presence changed behavior on its own.
“Who are you when no one is watching?”
Wood extends this to ordinary modern life: people harass and mistreat each other through anonymous online accounts specifically because they believe no one is watching, or that watching does not carry consequences. The twentieth century's worst regimes ran the same experiment at the scale of entire nations, with the same result, removing accountability did not make people better.
- Name one place in your own life, online or off, where you act differently because you sense no one is watching. Be honest with yourself before you are honest with anyone else.
- Joseph Byamukama's research adds a cross-cultural angle worth knowing: most traditional societies, with no contact with each other, independently arrived at belief in a single watching creator. That pattern is hard to explain as coincidence and lines up with what Bering's research found from a different direction.
Believe: Secular Ideologies Borrow Religion's Shape, Without Its Restraint
Justin Brierley's work adds a piece worth knowing alongside the body count. He argues people are not built to live inside a do-it-yourself story they author with no larger framework holding it up. Take religion away and that hunger for ultimate meaning does not disappear. It gets redirected, often toward a political ideology, a movement, or a state, which then starts functioning like a religion in everything but name: its own sense of sin, its own promise of salvation, its own willingness to judge and punish those who depart from the creed.
- Know this for conversation: the twentieth century's worst secular ideologies were not neutral systems that happened to turn violent. They borrowed religion's structure of ultimate authority while removing the restraint of an authority higher than the state itself.
- This explains something the simple statistic alone does not: why removing religion did not produce a calmer, more rational century. The hunger for ultimate meaning went looking for a new home, and several of the homes it found were worse, not better.
Worship: A God Who Actually Sees
The conversation can stop at correcting a statistic. It should not. The deeper good news here is not just that the secular death toll is high. It is that the God who actually watches is not a surveillance camera waiting to catch you. He is the God who sees, who already knows the worst of what is in the human heart, and who still moved toward us instead of away.
“Atrocities do not just happen in the name of religion.”
Worship here looks like relief, not dread. The eyes that never stop watching belong to the same God who sent his Son rather than simply judging from a distance. That is a very different kind of being watched than an algorithm or a comment section.
Scripture to Sit With
- Jeremiah 17:9. The heart is deceitful above all things. The capacity for atrocity runs deeper than any one institution, religious or secular.
- Romans 3:23. All have sinned. No belief system has a monopoly on the capacity for harm.
- Proverbs 15:3. The eyes of the Lord are everywhere. We are never actually unwatched, even when we feel unaccountable.
Discussion Questions
- Had you heard the claim that religion causes most of history's wars before this study? Where did you first hear it, and did you ever check it?
- Why do you think the secular death toll of the twentieth century gets left out of this conversation so often?
- Wood says people behave better when they sense they are watched. Where have you noticed that pattern in your own behavior, online or in person?
- She also insists people can be good without believing in God. Why does it matter to grant that honestly rather than overstating the case for faith?
- Read Jeremiah 17:9 and Romans 3:23 together. How does a clear view of the human heart change this entire debate about violence and religion?
Know How to Use the Numbers Without Becoming a Jerk About It
Knowing the death toll is not the same as knowing how to use it in conversation without sounding like you are scoring points. Resist the urge to deploy it as a conversation-ending mic drop. Use it instead as a genuine question: if the deadliest century in history came mostly from attempts to remove religious authority rather than enforce it, what does that suggest about human nature once accountability is taken off the table? That question invites someone to think with you instead of defend against you.
- Practice asking the question form before the statement form. Questions open conversations. Statements of fact, however accurate, often close them.
- Remember that the goal is not to win an argument about the Vatican's comparative innocence. It is to relocate the conversation from one institution's record to the human heart's record, which implicates everyone in the room, including you.
Know It Well Enough to Say It
This week, find one moment to actually say the corrected version of this claim out loud to someone, a friend, a coworker, a family member who has repeated the popular line. You do not need to win an argument. State the numbers plainly: the twentieth century's deadliest regimes were secular, not religious. Then ask the better question together: what actually keeps people from becoming what they are capable of becoming, and who is really watching.
Go Deeper
This study draws on Alycia Wood's Jude 3 Project teaching on engaging atheism. A related episode worth your time: "Can You Be Good Without God?", also with Alycia Wood.