Many people know the facts about the Jewish Holocaust, the mass killings in the Soviet
Union, and other mass persecutions and killings in Europe between 1914 and 1953.
Very few are aware of the religious roots of the genocidal ideas that enabled
Communists, Nazis, Fascists, and other rightists and leftists to kill millions of people
whom they hated for being different, and whom they blamed for causing their
problems. How and why did millions of Europeans embrace and rework Christian
eschatological (‘end time’) explanations of their past and present, and use these
explanations to destroy a world they hated and build what they saw as a new world?
And how did followers of secular and anti-religious ideologies manage to resurrect some
of the most violent aspects of early Christianity?
