‍The Catholic Church butchered 68 million Christians during the Middle Ages

  Gary Hoge  ·  October 17, 2026

‍You may have heard the claim that the Catholic Church slaughtered 68 million people during the Middle Ages, sometimes identified as Baptists or other Christians who refused to submit to Rome.

‍Sixty-eight million people! That’s an astonishing number. But is there any historical evidence for it?

‍A problem with the numbers

‍For starters, there weren’t any Baptists during the Middle Ages. The Baptist movement originated in the early seventeenth century, with John Smyth and his congregation in Amsterdam around 1609.¹ So whoever those alleged 68 million victims were, they weren’t Baptists.

‍But there’s a much bigger problem: the number itself.

‍Sixty-eight million people is more than the entire estimated population of Greece, the Balkans, Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, the Low Countries, the British Isles, Germany, and Scandinavia combined in 1340.² According to historian Josiah C. Russell, those regions had a total population of approximately 60.5 million people, just seven years before the Black Death began devastating Europe.

‍Now, the Middle Ages lasted roughly a thousand years, so comparing the alleged death toll with the population at any single moment doesn’t, by itself, disprove the claim. But consider what happened when Europe really did experience a catastrophe on that scale.

‍The Black Death

‍Between 1347 and 1353, the Black Death swept across Europe, killing an estimated one-third to one-half of its population.³

‍The consequences were enormous. Villages were abandoned, farms went untilled, labor became scarce, and Europe’s economy and social structure were profoundly altered. The effects of the plague are still studied by historians today.

‍Now imagine a deliberate campaign of religious persecution that killed 68 million people over several centuries. Surely a catastrophe of that magnitude would have left some unmistakable mark on the historical record.

‍Where are the records of those executions? Where is the demographic evidence? Where are the accounts of entire regions being depopulated by religious authorities?

‍Medieval Europe left us an enormous historical record. Yet historians have found no evidence of anything remotely approaching a Church-sponsored slaughter of 68 million people.

‍But persecution really happened

‍None of this means that religious persecution didn’t occur. It did.

‍Catholic authorities sometimes imprisoned, tortured, and executed people for heresy, often in cooperation with civil governments. These were real injustices, and there’s no reason to pretend otherwise.

‍Historical research into the inquisitions, particularly the well-documented Spanish Inquisition, points to death tolls vastly smaller than the millions alleged. The surviving records are incomplete, and estimates vary, but nothing in the historical scholarship comes close to supporting the claim of 68 million victims.⁴

‍And religious persecution wasn’t uniquely Catholic. Protestant authorities also persecuted religious dissenters, including other Protestants. But that’s another subject, and it doesn’t excuse what Catholics did.

‍The truth is bad enough

‍The Catholic Church didn’t slaughter 68 million people during the Middle Ages. There’s simply no credible historical evidence for that claim.

‍That doesn’t mean Catholics and others have nothing to answer for. But acknowledging genuine atrocities doesn’t require us to accept imaginary ones.

‍The truth is bad enough without exaggerating it.

‍__________

^‍1 Stephen R. Holmes, “When Did John Smyth Embrace ‘Arminianism’—and Was the First Baptist Congregation ‘Particular’?” Baptist Quarterly 52, no. 4 (2021), 146–157. The article dates the formation of Smyth’s Baptist congregation to approximately 1609. Read the article

^‍2 Josiah C. Russell, “Population in Europe,” in Carlo M. Cipolla, ed., The Fontana Economic History of Europe, Vol. I: The Middle Ages, (Glasgow: Collins/Fontana, 1972), 25-71.

^‍3 Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Black Death.” Estimates of mortality vary, but the pandemic killed an extraordinary proportion of Europe’s population and profoundly affected European society. Read the article

^‍4 Gustav Henningsen and Jaime Contreras, research on Spanish Inquisition trial records, 1560–1700; see also Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (Yale University Press, 1998). These studies concern the Spanish Inquisition specifically, not every inquisitorial institution. Estimates of several thousand executions are associated with the Spanish Inquisition across its history, although incomplete records prevent an exact total. Historical overview