Abrahamic Religions and the Selective Memory of Suffering.
Panini, www.reasoninrvolt.com
Every civilization that has ever burned a library has called it purification. Every army that has ever demolished a temple has called it liberation. Every inquisitor who has ever lit a fire beneath a human being has called it salvation. The Abrahamic religions did not invent cruelty — cruelty is the common property of our species. What they invented was something far more dangerous: a theological framework that transforms cruelty into cosmic obligation. They built an architecture of sacred grief — Judaism remembering Babylon and the Shoah,
Christianity remembering the Roman arena, Islam remembering rejection at Mecca — and then used that architecture to demand permanent moral immunity while conducting, across fifteen centuries and five continents, the most sustained campaign of religious persecution in the history of human civilization.
The suffering was real. The innocence is a lie. These traditions cry in pain while breaking the legs of others — and then have the audacity to call it theology.
I. The Paradox Stated Without Apology
Persecution, as a moral category, implies innocence. To be persecuted is to suffer unjustly — to be the victim of power wielded without legitimate warrant. When a religion claims persecution, it claims moral authority: the authority of the wounded. That authority dissolves the instant the wounded community, upon gaining power, does to others precisely what was done to it.¹ This is not a peripheral failure in Abrahamic history. It is a structural inevitability, embedded in the theology itself, predictable from first principles, confirmed by every century of the historical record. The Abrahamic claim is not merely that God exists. It is that God spoke exclusively, finally, and decisively to one community, through one revelation, in one language, via one lineage of prophets — and that all other communities, their gods, their rituals, their philosophies, their sacred memories accumulated across thousands of years — are not merely different but wrong. Cosmically wrong. Eternally wrong. Wrong before God and wrong before history. The pagan is not mistaken. He is damned. The polytheist is not exploring. She is offending the sovereign of the universe. Once you have constructed that theological architecture, the persecution of outsiders does not require hatred. It requires only consistency.
II. Exclusive Truth as the Machinery of Violence
Monotheism is not simply a claim about the number of gods. It is a claim about jurisdiction over every human mind that has ever existed.² When the Abrahamic traditions say “one God,” they mean: one final authority over all human beings, all cultures, all histories, all futures — including the futures of people who never heard the revelation, never consented to its authority, and built entire civilizations of genuine beauty and philosophical sophistication before the first Abrahamic missionary ever arrived at their shores. The unbeliever is not merely someone who disagrees about metaphysics. He is someone in rebellion against ultimate reality. The idolater does not merely practice a different ritual — she insults the cosmic sovereign. The heretic does not merely hold a different opinion — he corrupts the community of truth and must be excised like a cancer. The apostate does not merely leave a religion — she commits the gravest crime conceivable against an omnipotent God who will, according to the tradition, repay that crime with eternal fire. Ordinary human conflicts are about land, power, resources, and status — all negotiable. Abrahamic conflict at its theological core is a confrontation with eternity, and eternity does not negotiate, does not compromise, does not agree to disagree.³
When human disagreement is reframed as rebellion against God, violence does not merely become permissible. It becomes righteous. This is not an aberration in Abrahamic history. This is the engine running exactly as its designers intended.
III. Christianity: From Martyr to Inquisitor to Colonizer
Roman persecution of Christians was real. Christians were executed, disenfranchised, thrown to animals for public entertainment, and made into symbols of imperial power. The early church’s memory of this suffering shaped its entire moral self-conception — the community of the wounded, the fellowship of martyrs, the body of the innocent crucified. And then Constantine converted in 312 CE. And then Theodosius made Christianity the compulsory religion of the empire in 380 CE.⁴ And then pagan temples were closed, their priests silenced, their endowments seized. And then the Serapeum of Alexandria — one of the ancient world’s supreme centers of learning, heir to centuries of accumulated Greek, Egyptian, and Near Eastern scholarship — was destroyed by a Christian mob operating under episcopal sanction in 391 CE.⁵ And then the Justinian Code made heresy a capital offense. And then the Jews of England were expelled in 1290, the Jews of France in 1306, the Jews of Spain in 1492 — the same Spain that launched the Inquisition to ensure that conversos who secretly maintained Jewish practice were found, tortured, and burned.⁶ And then the Cathars of southern France — Christians who disagreed about the nature of matter and spirit — were exterminated in a crusade launched by a Christian pope against Christian people on Christian soil, with the papal legate Arnaud Amalric famously instructing the soldiers at Béziers to kill everyone because God would sort out his own. And then Hus was burned at Constance. And then Tyndale was strangled and burned for translating the Bible into English. And then Servetus was burned in Calvin’s Geneva for denying the Trinity. And then the Thirty Years’ War killed a third of the population of Central Europe in the name of correct Christian doctrine. And then the witch trials. And then the residential schools. And then the missions of California, where the Franciscans created a system of forced labor and cultural annihilation that a later age would recognize without difficulty as a prototype of the concentration camp.⁷ The same religion that built its entire identity on the image of an innocent man tortured to death by the state became, within three centuries of that man’s death, the most prolific institutional torturer in the history of Western civilization. That is not irony. That is theology operating at full capacity.
IV. Islam: From the Persecuted Community to the Conquering Empire
The early Muslim community at Mecca was harassed, boycotted, and driven into exile. The Hijra — the migration to Medina — is one of Islam’s founding narratives: a righteous community fleeing oppression.⁸ It is a genuinely moving historical episode. And then, within a century of the Prophet’s death, Arab armies had conquered the Persian Empire, the Levant, Egypt, and North Africa — territories home to Zoroastrians, Copts, Jews, Greek Christians, polytheists, and countless indigenous religious communities that had developed their sacred lives across millennia before the first Quranic verse was revealed. The dhimmi system codified the permanent legal subordination of non-Muslims in conquered territories — not as a temporary wartime measure, but as a theological statement about the proper cosmic hierarchy of human beings.⁹ Apostasy was made a capital offense in classical Islamic jurisprudence, meaning that the act of changing one’s mind about metaphysics became punishable by death — arguably the most totalitarian intellectual position any civilization has ever institutionalized.
The Nalanda monastery complex in Bihar — one of the ancient world’s greatest universities, home to thousands of scholars studying logic, medicine, mathematics, and philosophy — was destroyed by Bakhtiyar Khilji’s forces in 1193 CE.¹⁰ The temples of the Indian subcontinent were demolished across centuries on a scale that makes the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas look like a rehearsal. None of this negates the genuine suffering of the early Muslim community in Mecca.
But it demolishes, with the finality of a completed historical record, any claim that Islam as a civilizational force has operated primarily as a victim rather than a conqueror, a legislator, and — when theologically motivated — a destroyer of other peoples’ entire sacred worlds.
V. The Epistemological Scandal
Here is the question the Abrahamic traditions have never answered to the satisfaction of any independent tribunal in fifteen centuries of trying: where is the evidence? The claim is not modest. One God created the universe from nothing, intervened repeatedly in human history, chose a specific people from among all peoples, spoke through specific prophets in specific languages, revealed specific texts whose authority supersedes all human reason, and will judge every human being who has ever lived — billions across all of recorded and unrecorded history — on the basis of their acceptance or rejection of these specific revelations that the majority of them never encountered.¹¹ What is offered as proof is circular authority of breathtaking audacity: the Quran proves Muhammad because Muhammad received the Quran, and the Quran’s divine origin is proven by the Quran’s own claim to divine origin. The loop is sealed from the inside. The book is true because the book says it is true. The prophet is final because the tradition says he is final. The revelation is authentic because it announces its own authenticity. This is not epistemology. This is the systematic immunization of an assertion against all possible examination — a claim constructed specifically to be unfalsifiable, untestable, and therefore permanently beyond the reach of rational challenge.¹² And yet on the basis of this self-sealing proclamation, whole civilizations have been sentenced without trial. The polytheist is called an idolater. The freethinker is called a blasphemer.
The philosopher who demands evidence is called arrogant. The pagan who built cathedrals of thought before Abrahamic revelation arrived is called a savage. The non-believer is consigned to eternal torment — not for any crime against another human being, not for any act of cruelty or injustice, but purely for the crime of insufficient deference to a claim that has never been demonstrated to the satisfaction of any mind not already committed to believing it. This is not a religion of love. This is intellectual tyranny dressed in the language of grace.
VI. Hinduism Is a Civilization. Abrahamic Monotheism Is a Dogma. The Difference Is Everything.
Critics of Hinduism — predominantly Christian, Muslim, and Jewish intellectuals occupying chairs of South Asian studies at American universities — habitually reach for the Manusmriti as their decisive exhibit against Indic civilization. Here, they announce, is the Hindu Bible. Here is the divine warrant for caste hierarchy. Here is proof that Hinduism is just as theologically totalitarian as the traditions these scholars were raised in. The argument collapses the moment you subject its central premise to elementary scrutiny. The Bible is not one among a million books written by Christians across three thousand years. It is the book — closed, canonized, declared the inspired and infallible word of God, the non-negotiable foundation of all subsequent theological authority, the document whose contents were fixed by ecclesiastical councils whose decisions were binding on all Christians everywhere.¹³
The Quran is even more extreme in its claims: literally the unmediated, uncreated, eternal word of God transmitted through a single final prophet, inimitable in its language, untranslatable in its essence, the seal of all possible revelation for all possible time. These are not texts. They are padlocks on the door of human inquiry, forged by institutions whose survival depends on that door remaining permanently shut. The Manusmriti is one brahminical legal text among hundreds of thousands of competing texts produced across four thousand years by a civilization that never convened a Council of Nicaea, never produced a binding creed, never established a papal authority, never created a Sharia court with universal jurisdiction over all Hindus everywhere, and structurally cannot produce any of these things because it has no mechanism for doing so.¹⁴ There is no Hindu Pope. There is no Hindu ijma — the consensus mechanism that, in Islamic jurisprudence, transforms scholarly agreement into binding divine law.
There is no Hindu College of Cardinals deciding which texts are canonical and which are heretical. Judging Hinduism by Abrahamic standards is not comparative religion. It is the imposition of an alien categorical framework onto a civilization that evolved entirely outside it — and then declaring that civilization deficient for failing to conform to a framework it never recognized as legitimate.
VII. The Plurality That No Abrahamic System Has Ever Permitted or Can Ever Permit
The Lingayats of Karnataka rejected Vedic authority entirely and built a powerful devotional tradition that persists to this day. The Shaivas and Vaishnavas disagreed about the nature of ultimate reality and produced rival philosophical systems of extraordinary sophistication — and coexisted. The Charvakas — India’s ancient school of thoroughgoing philosophical materialists — rejected karma, rebirth, the authority of the Vedas, the existence of the soul, and all metaphysical claims whatsoever, and were preserved as a legitimate philosophical school, their arguments recorded and engaged by their opponents rather than their persons destroyed.¹⁵ The Nastikas — the heterodox schools including the Jainas, the Buddhists, and the Charvakas — represent a permanent structural feature of Indic intellectual civilization: the legitimized internal dissenter, the skeptic inside the tent who is answered rather than eliminated. No structural equivalent exists within orthodox Abrahamic theology, because none can. The heretic in an Abrahamic framework is not a philosophical opponent to be refuted. He is a disease to be quarantined. B. R. Ambedkar — the man who suffered more from Hindu social hierarchy than almost any intellectual of the twentieth century, a man with every personal reason to condemn the entire Indic tradition — publicly burned the Manusmriti in 1927 at the Mahad Satyagraha.¹⁶
He is now enshrined across India as the architect of its constitution, the father of its legal framework, one of its supreme moral heroes, with his image displayed in courtrooms and government offices from Kashmir to Kerala. A Muslim burning the Quran in a Muslim-majority country produces a categorically different civilizational response — one measured in deaths, fatwas, and the flight of the burner from every country where Islamic law holds political authority.
That difference is not a footnote. That difference is the entire argument about the structural relationship between these civilizations and the concept of free inquiry.
VIII. The Bhakti Evidence and the Abrahamic Contrast
Ravidas was a cobbler. Chokhamela was an untouchable. Nandanar was barred from entering temples by caste. Kabir was a Muslim weaver who rejected orthodox Islam and orthodox Hinduism with equal and magnificent contempt, and whose hymns are sung today in Sikh gurdwaras, Hindu temples, and secular concert halls simultaneously. Tukaram was a failed merchant from a lower-caste community who experienced visions and became one of Maharashtra’s supreme spiritual voices.¹⁷ These figures did not merely survive at the margins of Indic civilization. They were absorbed into its center — recognized by the living tradition in its own time as voices of ultimate truth, not rescued from obscurity by liberal academics centuries later. Their hymns are not historical curiosities. They are living liturgy. Now name the Christian mystic from a slave caste whose hymns are sung in the Vatican. Name the Muslim saint of untouchable origin whose poetry is recited in the great mosques of Mecca. Name the Jewish prophet from a despised underclass whose words were incorporated into the Torah by the rabbinic establishment during his own lifetime. The silence is structural, not accidental. Abrahamic civilization cannot produce these figures because its canonical architecture does not permit the unauthorized voice to become the authoritative voice. Abrahamic reform movements — liberation theology, Sufi mysticism, Reform Judaism, progressive Islam — operate under permanent institutional pressure from orthodox majorities who correctly identify the reform position as incompatible with the tradition’s foundational claims.¹⁸ The Bhakti saints needed no permission. In Indic civilization, there was no single authority empowered to grant it or withhold it. That is not a weakness. That is the structural signature of a civilization that never confused plurality with chaos.
IX. The Power Test and the Leprosy of Exclusive Truth
There is a simple, brutal, historically reliable test for the moral integrity of any religious community’s claims about tolerance, conscience, and the dignity of the human person: what did it do when it had power?
Tolerance is the refuge of the weak. Freedom of conscience is the most eloquent argument available to a community that cannot yet enforce its alternative.¹⁹ The real revelation comes when the armies arrive, when the courts are staffed by believers, when the instruments of law and punishment are in the hands of the theologically certain.
Christianity, upon gaining imperial power in Rome, did not protect the religious freedom of the pagans who had — imperfectly, sometimes violently, but structurally — tolerated it for three centuries. It dismantled them with legislative efficiency and occasional mob violence. Islam, upon conquering vast territories inhabited by sophisticated civilizations with ancient religious traditions, did not extend equal civic dignity to non-Muslims. It erected a theological apartheid — the dhimmi system — and called it mercy, because the alternative on offer was the sword. This pattern is not the product of bad actors corrupting a good theology.
It is the product of a good theology functioning correctly. And this is where the argument arrives at its most essential point — the point that no interfaith dialogue, no progressive reinterpretation, no liberal theological project has ever successfully addressed: you cannot cure this disease with bandages. Liberal Christianity is a bandage. Reform Judaism is a bandage. Progressive Islam is a bandage. They are beautiful bandages, sincerely applied by people of genuine goodwill — and they are being pressed against leprosy.²⁰
The disease is not intolerance. The disease is the exclusive truth claim itself. You cannot reform your way out of “there is no God but God and Muhammad is his final prophet.” You cannot liberalize your way past “no one comes to the Father except through me.” You cannot progressively reinterpret your way around “outside the Church there is no salvation.”
These are not peripheral ornaments susceptible to removal while the structure stands. They are the load-bearing walls. Remove them and you do not have a reformed Abrahamic faith. You have something else entirely — something that the orthodox majority of each tradition will correctly identify as apostasy. The monopoly claim is not a corruption of the theology. It is the theology.
X. The Colonization of the Sacred
What happened to the Americas, to sub-Saharan Africa, to South Asia, to Southeast Asia, to Australia, and to the entire indigenous world was not merely political conquest — the ordinary brutal business of empire that every powerful civilization has conducted at some point in its history. It was theological conquest of a specific and uniquely destructive character: a systematic, institutionally organized, doctrinally mandated assault on the religious memory of entire civilizations, conducted by people who believed — with complete sincerity, with scholarly sophistication, with the full weight of their canonical authority behind them — that the sacred worlds they were destroying were not sacred at all.²¹ The Aztec gods were not merely politically inconvenient. They were demons. The sacred sites of the Americas were not merely culturally significant to their inhabitants. They were the habitations of evil powers that the Christian missionary was duty-bound to displace. The children taken from their families and forbidden from speaking their languages were not being abused — they were being saved, from themselves, from their ancestors, from the cosmic error into which they had been born.²² The exclusive truth claim is what made the perpetrators incapable of recognizing the sacred in what they destroyed. A Roman general conquering a Greek city knew perfectly well that he was destroying something beautiful and might feel the friction of aesthetic regret. The Abrahamic missionary felt no such friction, because his theology had pre-emptively declared that there was nothing sacred there to destroy. The exclusive truth claim is not merely an intellectual position. It is an anesthetic — the substance that numbs the moral nerve that might otherwise fire when one civilization erases another. That anesthetic was manufactured from scripture, administered by institutions, and has never been recalled.²³
XI. The Verdict
The suffering of Abrahamic communities was often real, sometimes catastrophic, and in the case of the Holocaust, industrialized to a degree that strains the capacity of language to describe.²⁴ None of that suffering is in dispute. All of it deserves honest acknowledgment. And none of it — not one martyrdom, not one massacre, not one exile, not one century of genuine persecution — constitutes a single gram of evidence for the truth of exclusive monotheistic revelation, or a single microgram of justification for what these traditions did to the rest of the world when the opportunity arose. Suffering does not purify doctrine. Victimhood does not produce evidence. Martyrdom does not verify a truth claim. A religion can be genuine in its grief and catastrophic in its theology simultaneously. That is the Abrahamic condition, stated as precisely as the historical record permits. The question that no quantity of sacred memory, no volume of interfaith dialogue, no progressive theological revision, and no liberal reinterpretation has ever answered is this: on what rational basis should any human being — anywhere, in any century, born into any culture — be required to surrender the sovereignty of his own mind to an unverifiable claim transmitted by self-appointed intermediaries of a God whose existence, whose specific demands, and whose eternal punishments have never been demonstrated to the satisfaction of any inquiry conducted without prior commitment to the conclusion? Why should doubt be a crime? Why should independent thought be rebellion? Why should the philosopher who demands evidence be told he is arrogant, while the believer who demands none is told he is humble? The Abrahamic traditions have spent fifteen centuries building museums to their own suffering and monuments to their own righteousness. They have named their pain persecution and named the pain of others conversion, conquest, order, salvation, or simply the will of God. They have asked the world to remember what was done to them and to forget what they did to the world. The answer to that demand is no. The record is complete. The exclusive truth claim — that one book, one prophet, one God, one revelation owns the eternal destiny of every human soul that has ever drawn breath on this earth — is not humble. It is not loving. It is not peaceful. It is the most sustained act of intellectual imperialism in the history of human civilization. And it has the mass graves to prove it.
Notes
1. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977); Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
2. Jan Assmann, Of God and Gods: Egypt, Israel, and the Rise of Monotheism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008). Assmann’s concept of the ‘Mosaic distinction’ — the radical binary between true and false religion as a founding contribution of Abrahamic monotheism — is the indispensable analytical framework for this argument.
3. Rodney Stark, One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 3–32. Stark, writing as a defender of monotheism, nevertheless acknowledges with unusual candor the violence-generating consequences of exclusive truth claims.
4. Ramsay MacMullen, Christianizing the Roman Empire, A.D. 100–400 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200–1000, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003). The Edict of Thessalonica (380 CE) made Nicene Christianity the compulsory religion of the Roman Empire.
5. Edward Watts, City and School in Late Antique Athens and Alexandria (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 188–202. The destruction of the Serapeum in 391 CE under Bishop Theophilus of Alexandria is documented in Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History, V.16, and Rufinus of Aquileia, Historia Ecclesiastica, II.22.
6. Henry Charles Lea, A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, 3 vols. (New York: Harper, 1887); Salo Wittmayer Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 18 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952–1983). On the mass killing at Béziers (1209), see Mark Gregory Pegg, A Most Holy War: The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
7. Robert H. Jackson and Edward Castillo, Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization: The Impact of the Mission System on California Indians (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995). The California mission system (1769–1833) killed an estimated 100,000 indigenous Californians through disease, forced labor, and cultural destruction operating under explicit Franciscan theological authority.
8. W. Montgomery Watt, Muhammad at Mecca (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953).
9. Antoine Fattal, Le statut légal des non-Musulmans en pays d’Islam (Beirut: Imprimerie Catholique, 1958); Bat Ye’or, The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians Under Islam (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1985). The dhimmi system was not a temporary expedient but a theologically grounded permanent institution derived from Quranic authority.
10. Dharmasvamin, Biography of Dharmasvamin, trans. George Roerich (Patna: K.P. Jayaswal Research Institute, 1959); S. R. Goyal, A History of Indian Buddhism (Meerut: Kusumanjali Prakashan, 1987), 279–310.
11. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X: ‘Of Miracles’ (1748); Antony Flew, The Presumption of Atheism (London: Pemberton, 1976).
12. Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1963), 33–39. The criterion of falsifiability exposes the epistemic structure of Abrahamic revelation claims: they are constructed to be immune to disconfirmation, which is not a theological virtue but a logical defect.
13. Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); Harry Y. Gamble, The New Testament Canon: Its Making and Meaning (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985).
14. Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History (New York: Penguin, 2009); Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Wilhelm Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988).
15. Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya, Lokayata: A Study in Ancient Indian Materialism (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1959); Johannes Bronkhorst, Buddhism in the Shadow of Brahmanism (Leiden: Brill, 2011).
16. Gail Omvedt, Ambedkar: Towards an Enlightened India (New Delhi: Viking, 2004), 67–74. The Mahad Satyagraha and the public burning of the Manusmriti on December 25, 1927, constituted the most dramatic act of internal civilizational self-critique in twentieth-century Indian history — and the tradition absorbed it.
17. John Stratton Hawley, A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015); A. K. Ramanujan, Speaking of Siva (London: Penguin, 1973); Charlotte Vaudeville, Kabir, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974).
18. Karen Armstrong, The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism (New York: Knopf, 2000).
19. Paul Veyne, When Our World Became Christian, 312–394, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Polity, 2010); Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans, and Heretics (New York: Random House, 1995).
20. John 14:6 (New International Version): ‘I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’ The Shahada: ‘There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God.’ Fourth Lateran Council (1215): ‘There is one Universal Church of the faithful, outside of which there is absolutely no salvation.’ These are not peripheral statements susceptible to progressive reinterpretation. They are the axioms from which everything else follows.
21. David Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harper & Row, 1984).
22. Ward Churchill, Kill the Indian, Save the Man: The Genocidal Impact of American Indian Residential Schools (San Francisco: City Lights, 2004); Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future (Winnipeg: TRC, 2015).
23. Luis N. Rivera, A Violent Evangelism: The Political and Religious Conquest of the Americas (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992); Inga Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517–1570 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
24. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010). The Holocaust murdered six million Jews and five to six million others. It was conducted in a civilization that had been Christian for sixteen centuries, by people baptized in Christian churches, in countries whose anti-Jewish theological tradition stretches from the Church Fathers through Luther to the twentieth century without interruption.