In his writings, Hitchens refers to things like the Crusades, the Inquisition and the Salem Witch Trials as indications that Christianity is morally corrupt. He engages here in an argumentative fallacy called “poisoning the well”, which is when one identifies a negative associated with a certain belief or entity, and then claims that the entire entity is somehow corrupt by association. The truth about these atrocities is that they don’t correspond to Christ’s teachings, and therefore, are not Christian activities. Nor are they typical Christian behavior. It doesn’t matter if the people that committed these acts claimed to be Christians. If Hitchens wants to assert that whatever a person calls himself affirms their membership in a group and defines that group’s character, then we would need to infer that all Darwinists are cannibals, as Jeffrey Dahmer was a Darwinist.

Let’s look at some more objective assessments of Christianity’s influence on history.Yale historian Kenneth Scott Latourette called Christianity “the most potent force which mankind has known for the dispelling of illiteracy, the creation of schools, for the emergence of new types of education.... The universities...were at the outset largely Christian creations.... Music, architecture, painting, poetry, and philosophy have owed some of their greatest achievements to Christianity. Democracy as it was known in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was in large part the outgrowth of Christian teaching. The abolition of …slavery was largely due to Christianity. So, too, were the measures to protect the Indians against exploitation of the whites.... The elevation of the status of women owed an incalculable debt to Christianity.... No other single force has been so widely potent for the relief of suffering brought by famine and for the creation of hospitals and orphanages."

Regarding charitable giving, studies published in a recent book by Arthur Brooks from the University of Colorado called "Who Really Cares; America's Charity Divide", demonstrates very clearly that religious conservatives give more than secular liberals in each category studied. In addition to aiding family members more often, they return correct change more often, aid the homeless more often, give blood more often, donate more money to various charities more often, feed the hungry more often, build houses, and do innumerable other acts of goodwill. Brooks could not find a single measurable way in which secularists were more generous than religious persons, so the old religious stereotype that Hitchens would love to propagate has been disproven. Contrast this with the legacy of atheism, which has resulted in about 42 million killed by the Nazis, 50 million killed by the communist USSR, another 40 million killed by communist China, and on and on it goes. The 20th century has featured a long string of atrocities committed by professed atheists that continues to this day. Atheism by nature has no objective moral values, so the atheist cannot claim that some renegade representatives have not lived up to their moral code—they have none to live up to.

In summary then, when people depart substantially from the teachings of Christ, it doesn’t matter what they call themselves; they are not “Christians”, so activities like the Inquisition do not go in the “Christian” column. On the other hand, no other movement has had a more positive influence on mankind; indeed, western civilization and America herself have Christianity to thank for their existence. God, as it turns out, IS great after all.