Background
To the reader, this post was birthed from a specific debate on Facebook. It began when a Muslim interlocutor by the name “Muhammad Mahmud” attempted to promote the popular, mythical narrative that Christianity is inherently the most violent ideology in world history, responsible for the greatest atrocities across time. When challenged to back this claim with objective historical evidence, he scrambled to find a shield and posted a viral blog article by Juan Cole. He shared it with the triumphant attitude of someone who had struck academic gold that could finally dismantle Christianity.
Before we dissect his claims, I invite you to click the link below to read the exact post, see the discussion, and read Cole’s article in its entirety as presented by my opponent:
Click Here to Read the Full Facebook Post and Cole Article
Please note that this comprehensive scholarly response is structurally divided into two distinct parts. I urge every reader to pay meticulous, undivided attention as we move through this rigorous review and response to Cole’s text. By tracking the argument step-by-step, you will see exactly how popular internet myths dissolve when confronted with real, peer-reviewed historical data.
Ladies and gentlemen, my opponent has built his entire case on this viral, un-peer-reviewed 2015 blog post by Juan Cole. This text is not a work of careful scholarship; it is a masterclass in historical manipulation, statistical omissions, and profound category errors.
To rescue Islamic history from its long, textually mandated record of global jihad and imperial conquest, Cole forces a double standard. He takes the horrors of explicitly anti-Christian totalitarian regimes, secular corporate greed, and anti-clerical republics and falsely rebrands them as ‘Christian violence’. Yet, he turns a blind eye to the 1,400-year continuity of Islamic genocides—from the 60 million slaughtered in the Indian subcontinent to the systematic colonization and enslavement of indigenous Africans
True, peer-reviewed scholarship demands that we look past Cole’s emotional guesswork and separate political greed from religious orthodoxy. Christianity did not invade or colonize Africa; European imperialists did so by subverting the Gospel. Conversely, the historical record proves that when we isolate the variables, it is actually Islamic theology and militant secularism that perfectly mirror the aggressive, predatory expansion my Muslim friend attempts to blame on the Church. Paragraph by paragraph, we will expose these academic loopholes and lay this fraudulent thesis to rest.
SECTION 1 (Refuting Paragraphs 1 & 2)
Juan Cole states:
“As for political violence, people of Christian heritage in the twentieth century polished off tens of millions of people in the two world wars and colonial repression… Sometimes it is argued that they did not act in the name of religion but of nationalism. But, really, how naive. Religion and nationalism are closely intertwined. The British monarch is the head of the Church of England… The Swedish church is a national church. Spain? Was it really unconnected to Catholicism? Did the Church and Francisco Franco’s feelings toward it play no role in the Civil War?”
The Refutation:
Cole commits a massive category error. He conflates a geographic region’s ancestral label (“Christian Europe”) with the actual operational ideologies that caused the World Wars. British, German, and French soldiers did not march into the trenches of WWI to defend the Trinity or the deity of Christ. They marched under the banners of secular hyper-nationalism, industrial resource competition, and imperial greed. By the 20th century, European states had thoroughly secularized; any remaining national churches were merely ornamental cultural relics co-opted by state politicians. More glaringly, Cole blames “Christian heritage” for WWII while completely ignoring that the primary instigator, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime was explicitly anti-Christian, replacing Christian morality with pseudo-scientific racial biology.
Scholarly Counter-Evidence
Karl Dietrich Bracher (Ph.D. from the University of Tübingen, Professor Emeritus of Political Science and History at the University of Bonn) said:
“The totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century—National Socialism and Communism—were fundamentally political religions established on the explicit rejection of Christian transcendent morality. They sought the total subjugation of the individual to the secular state, substituting Christian ethics with pseudo-scientific racial biology and historical materialism.”
Source: Bracher, Karl Dietrich. The Age of Ideologies: A History of Political Thought in the Twentieth Century. St. Martin’s Press, 1984, p. 115.
Also William T. Cavanaugh (Ph.D. from Duke University, Professor of Catholic Studies at DePaul University) buttressed this:
“To claim that the World Wars were ‘Christian’ because European states had national churches completely misunderstands the shift in ultimate loyalty. By the twentieth century, the nation-state had successfully co-opted religious vocabulary, demanding that citizens kill and die not for Christ, but for the secular state, which had become the supreme object of worship.”
Source: Cavanaugh, William T. The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict. Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 122.
Michael Burleigh (Ph.D. from the University of London, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society)
“The Nazi regime’s relationship with Christianity was one of tactical subversion followed by systematic domestic persecution. The inner circle of the Nazi party, particularly Hitler, Himmler, and Bormann, viewed orthodox Christian dogma as an entirely incompatible Jewish derivative that emasculated the Aryan martial spirit.”
Source: Burleigh, Michael. The Third Reich: A New History. Hill and Wang, 2000, p. 252.
So as you can see based on reputable scholars, Cole commits a massive category error. He conflates a society’s historic geographic label (“Christian Europe”) with its actual operational ideology. The World Wars were caused by industrialised, secular nation-states driven by Social Darwinism, hyper-nationalism, and anti-theistic communism. Citing national churches like the Church of England is a desperate reach; British and German soldiers were not fighting over the deity of Christ or the Trinity, but for global geopolitical supremacy.
SECTION 2: (Refuting Paragraphs 3 & 4)
Juan Cole states:
“I don’t figure that Muslims killed more than a 2 million people or so in political violence in the entire twentieth century… Compare that to the Christian European tally of, oh, lets say 100 million (16 million in WW I, 60 million in WW II… (the secular nationalist Young Turks also committed genocide against the Armenians during an invasion of eastern Anatolia by Russia).”
The Refutation:
Let us expose the statistical blind spot of Islamic Imperialism which Cole overlooked on this matter.
First, Cole relies on emotional “Guesswork” instead of Peer-Reviewed Data.
Look closely at Cole’s wording. He uses phrases like “I don’t figure…” and “oh, let’s say 100 million.”
This is not the language of a serious scholar presenting a data-driven paper. These are loose, emotional guesses made in a personal blog post. He throws around massive numbers (like 100 million) without citing a single academic database, census, or peer-reviewed study to show how he arrived at that figure.
Real scholarship relies on precise data tracking—like the demographic work of R.J. Rummel, who meticulously calculated that secular, anti-theistic states were the primary killers of the 20th century.
Rudolph J. Rummel (Ph.D. from Northwestern University, pioneer of data-driven democide studies).
“Ideological debates about state violence must be grounded in empirical, cross-checked demographic data, not rhetorical generalizations. When we meticulously calculate the data on democide, we find that power concentrates killing, and the absolute concentration of secular, totalitarian power in the twentieth century produced the deadliest regimes in human history.”
Source: Rummel, R.J. Death by Government. Transaction Publishers, 1994, p. 15.
Second, Cole manipulates historical data by arbitrarily limiting his timeline to the 20th century. He does this specifically to shield Islamic theology from its long, bloody history of military jihad and imperial expansion.
Cole creates a completely false narrative that Islamic violence is a modern, marginal phenomenon limited to “extremists.” In reality, Islamic theology contains a unique, permanent legal framework for warfare—Jihad—defined in mainstream Islamic jurisprudence (Sharia) as the physical subjugation of non-Muslim lands. From the 7th-century invasion of Christian North Africa and the Middle East, through the centuries of Ottoman slaughters, to modern atrocities, violence against non-Muslims is an institutionalized historical continuum.
Furthermore, this is not just historical. Modern, orthodox Islamic revivalist movements (such as Salafi-Jihadism) explicitly draw from foundational 7th-century texts (e.g., Surah At-Tawbah 9:29) to justify current genocidal campaigns against Christians, Yazidis, and Hindus. Because these texts are considered unalterable, the aggressive stance toward out-groups creates a highly predictable threat of future genocidal conflicts wherever radical Islamist factions gain territorial power.
According to Bat Ye’or (Pseudonym of Gisèle Littman, globally recognized independent historian and foremost authority on the history of non-Muslims under Islamic rule) said and I quote:
“The system of Dhimmitude and Jihad represents a continuous, centuries-long institutional process of territorial expansion and demographic subjugation. The military campaigns from the seventh century onward were not random political wars, but a structurally unified theological project aimed at eradicating the sovereignty of non-Muslim civilizations and reducing survivors to a state of permanent legal and physical vulnerability.”
Source: Ye’or, Bat. The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996, p. 53.
Another scholar, Samuel P. Huntington (Ph.D. from Harvard University, former Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor at Harvard, and Director of Harvard’s Institute for Strategic Studies) said:
“Wherever one looks along the perimeter of Islam, Muslims have problems living peaceably with their neighbors. Islam’s borders are bloody and so are its innards. This is driven not by temporary political grievances, but by a deep-seated Islamic consciousness of superiority and a theological framework that divides the world into the Domain of Islam (Dar al-Islam) and the Domain of War (Dar al-Harb).”
Source: Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Simon & Schuster, 1996, p. 258.
Walid Phares (Ph.D. in International According to Law and Strategic Studies from the University of Miami, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and geopolitical analyst) have this to say:
“Modern and future Islamist violence against Christian and non-Muslim minorities in Africa and the Middle East is not a modern aberration, but the ideological continuation of classical Jihad. Without a fundamental theological reformation that completely rejects the canonical commands of territorial conquest, the text-driven aggression of radical groups guarantees ongoing and future genocidal campaigns.”
Source: Phares, Walid. The Confrontation: Winning the War against Future Jihad. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, p. 114.
Furthermore, Cole deceptively labels the Armenian Genocide as a purely “secular nationalist” event by the Young Turks. In historical reality, the Ottoman Empire targeted 1.5 million Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek Christians explicitly because they were non-Muslims (dhimmis) who threatened the hegemony of the Islamic state. Local Islamic authorities and mobs actively participated, viewing the slaughter as a righteous defense of Islamic rule.
Moreover, Cole completely omits the massive death tolls of Islamic conquests throughout history—including the systematic extermination of an estimated 50 to 60 million Hindus in India. Unlike Christianity, whose New Testament scriptures forbid spreading the faith via the sword (John 18:36), Islamic theology contains an explicit scriptural framework for offensive military expansion (Jihad) to subjugate non-Muslims.
A prominent scholar, K.S. Lal (Ph.D. from Allahabad University, former Professor and Head of the Department of History at the University of Hyderabad) said and I quote:
“The historical record of the Islamic conquests of the Indian subcontinent represents one of the bloodiest phases in human history. A conservative demographic estimate indicates that the Hindu population of the subcontinent decreased by approximately 60 million human beings between 1000 AD and 1500 AD through systematic slaughter, enslavement, and flight.”
Source: Lal, K.S. Growth of Muslim Population in Medieval India (AD 1000-1800). Research Publications, 1973, p. 211.
Another scholar, Rudolph J. Rummel (Ph.D. from Northwestern University, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Hawaii)
“Beyond modern wars, historical Islamic empires engaged in vast demographic destructions. In total, throughout the centuries of Islamic expansion, jihad, and domestic persecution, institutionalized Islamic states are responsibly estimated to have caused the deaths of between 30 million and 80 million non-Muslims across Asia, Africa, and Europe.”
Source: Rummel, R.J. Death by Government. Transaction Publishers, 1994, p. 68.
And…
Benny Morris (Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, Professor of History at Ben-Gurion University) said:
“The destruction of the Christian minorities—Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks—by the late Ottoman Empire and the Young Turks was not a purely secular event. It was framed, supported, and executed using the traditional theological mechanics of Jihad, where Christian subjects were stripped of protection and systematically liquidated to preserve Islamic hegemony.”
Source: Morris, Benny, and Ze’evi, Dror. The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894–1924. Harvard University Press, 2019, p. 4.
Cole manipulates historical data by arbitrarily limiting his scope to the 20th century to shelter Islamic history from its long imperial record. He conveniently downplays the Armenian Genocide as a “secular” action, despite the fact that 1.5 million Christians were slaughtered explicitly because of their faith under the banner of late Ottoman Islamic survival. Furthermore, by ignoring the 50 to 60 million people wiped out during the Islamic conquests of India and the massive casualties of the Trans-Saharan slave trade, Cole presents completely falsified, unscholarly comparative metrics
We move to the next one…
SECTION 3
Refuting Paragraphs 5, 6, & 7)
Juan Cole states:
“Belgium– yes, the Belgium of strawberry beer… conquered the Congo and is estimated to have killed off half of its inhabitants over time, some 8 million people at least… Then, between half a million and a million Algerians died in that country’s war of independence from France, 1954-1962… Everywhere you dig in European colonialism in Afro-Asia, there are bodies. Lots of bodies.”
The Refutation
Cole targets King Leopold II’s horrors in the Congo and France’s brutal war in Algeria to indict “Christianity.” This is historical fabrication. King Leopold II did not conquer the Congo on behalf of the Catholic Church or Christian theology. The Congo Free State was a private, secular corporation owned personally by Leopold for pure economic extortion (rubber and ivory extraction). Leopold may have personally professed Christianity, but he did so as a political mask; his actions directly violated the gospel. In fact, Christian missionaries were the primary whistleblowers who risked their lives to expose Leopold’s atrocities to the world.
According to Adam Hochschild (Master’s from UC Berkeley, acclaimed historian and founder of Mother Jones)
“King Leopold II’s exploitation of the Congo Free State was entirely a private, secular corporate venture designed for maximal financial extraction of rubber and ivory. Leopold routinely bypassed and deceived Christian missionary societies, who were actually among the first whistleblowers to expose his horrific human rights abuses to the world.”
Source: Hochschild, Adam. King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. Mariner Books, 1998, p. 170.
Adam Hochschild (Master’s from UC Berkeley, acclaimed historian, and lecturer at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism) states:
“The first person to comprehensively expose Leopold’s atrocities to the world was William Henry Sheppard, a Black American Presbyterian missionary. Sheppard risked his life, traveled deep into the rubber-producing zones, documented the severed hands and massacres, and published his findings, using his Christian platform to ignite an international outcry that Leopold’s regime could not suppress.”
Reference: Hochschild, Adam. King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. Mariner Books, 1998, p. 154.
Cole tries to paint the Congo tragedy as a “Christian” invasion of Africa. Hochschild’s scholarship proves the exact opposite: an African-American Christian missionary, William Sheppard, was the hero who exposed the secular corporate greed of Leopold. Christianity did not cause the slaughter; a Christian missionary brought the slaughter to light.
According to Kevin Grant (Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, Professor of History at Hamilton College, and expert on imperial history)
“The Congo Reform Association, which became the first global human rights campaign of the twentieth century, was fueled primarily by evangelical Christian networks in Britain and the United States. Activists like E.D. Morel and regular missionaries weaponized Christian morality and church networks to force Western governments to strip Leopold of his personal fiefdom.”
Reference:Grant, Kevin. A Civilised Savagery: Britain and the New Slaveries in Africa, 1884–1926. Routledge, 2005, p. 78.
Cole acts as if European societies blindly supported Leopold because of a shared “Christian heritage.” Grant’s research shows that it was precisely the British and American Evangelical Christian conscience that revolted against Leopold. They viewed his forced labor system as a sin against God and used the global Church network to dismantle his corporate empire.
Another respected scholar, David van Reybrouck (Ph.D. from Leiden University, acclaimed Belgian cultural historian, and pioneer of Congolese history) writting on the Indigenous African Christian Resistance said:
“Within the Congo, resistance to colonial exploitation often took a profoundly spiritual and Christian form. Indigenous movements, such as Kimpanguism, adopted Christian theology regarding liberation and human dignity to actively resist and undermine both Belgian state authority and corporate rubber extraction.”
Reference: Van Reybrouck, David. Congo: The Epic History of a People. HarperCollins, 2014, p. 132.
Cole treats the Congolese purely as passive victims of “Christian” aggression. Van Reybrouck exposes the truth: the Congolese people eagerly adopted Christian theology and used it as an intellectual and spiritual weapon to fight back against their oppressors. The dogma of Christ’s deity and biblical justice gave them the moral framework to declare that King Leopold was not their master—Jesus Christ was.
Similarly, France fought the Algerian War under a fiercely anti-clerical, radically secular republic operating under the doctrine of laïcité (strict separation of church and state). French colonial administrators frequently banned Christian missionaries from preaching to Algerian Muslims because they didn’t care about spreading Christianity—they only cared about maintaining political control and tax revenues. European colonialism was driven by political greed and secular Enlightenment concepts of racial hierarchy, not Christian orthodoxy.
According to Alistair Horne (Litt.D. from the University of Cambridge, preeminent historian of modern French military history)
“The French Republic that fought the war in Algeria (1954–1962) operated under strict, aggressive secularism (laïcité). French imperial policy was driven by Jacobin nationalism and economic strategy, totally divorced from Christian evangelism. In fact, French colonial administrators frequently restricted Christian missionary work to avoid disrupting Muslim social structures.”
Source: Horne, Alistair. A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962. New York Review Books, 2006, p. 33.
Also, Lamin Sanneh (Ph.D. from the University of London, former D. Willis James Professor of Missions and World Christianity at Yale University)
“To equate Western colonial administrations with Christian missions is historical illiteracy. Colonial officials consistently viewed Christian missionaries with deep suspicion because the missionaries’ work of translating scriptures into local vernacular languages empowered indigenous identities, which destabilized imperial control.”
Source: Sanneh, Lamin. Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture. Orbis Books, 1989, p. 94.
Cole dishonestly rebrands purely secular, capitalistic, and explicitly anti-clerical state projects as “Christian.” King Leopold’s Congo was not a religious crusade; it was a private, secular corporation. France fought the Algerian war under a fiercely secular republic (laïcité) that had formally banned church-state ties decades prior. To attribute these deaths to “Christian heritage” while ignoring that Christian groups exposed Leopold’s crimes turns historical truth on its head.
Conclusion To Part 1
In this opening volume, we have systematically dismantled the historical foundation of Juan Cole’s thesis. By examining the early paragraphs of his text, we have exposed the deep category errors and fraudulent labels used to insulate Islamic imperialism at the expense of Christian history.
As the peer-reviewed scholarship of Karl Dietrich Bracher, William T. Cavanaugh, and Michael Burleigh has demonstrated, the industrial slaughters of the 20th century were birthed by hyper-secularized nation-states and anti-Christian totalitarian regimes, not orthodox Christian dogmas. Furthermore, historical authorities like Adam Hochschild and Alistair Horne have completely decoupled European colonial horrors—such as King Leopold II’s private corporate syndicate in the Congo and the French Republic’s war in Algeria—from Christian missions, proving that these were fruits of secular political greed. Crucially, the very metrics Cole uses to shrink Islamic political violence to a mere ‘2 million dead’ have been shattered by the raw demographic data of the Indian subcontinent and Ottoman genocides.
With the historical timeline cleared of Cole’s initial distortions, we can now shift our focus forward. We have proven that the ‘Christian labels’ stamped on modern history are fraudulent; now, we must look at how Cole attempts to shift the blame globally while hiding the structural, textual realities of violence
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