I hate to start a column by talking about Bill Clinton, because this column is not about him. But as so often happens, he's provided an irresistible anecdote to lead into what I do want to talk about. It happened at Georgetown University in November, when the ex-president threw in his opinion of why Sept. 11 happened; America was paying the price for its history of slavery and genocide of the Indians, and Christendom was paying the price for committing massacres during the First Crusade some 900 years ago.

Now I'm never one to suggest we can't all use some reflection on our sins, or some historical perspective on the roots of current events. Trouble is, citizen Clinton has offered us neither. He's publicly repenting, as he so often does, of other people's sins — vast groups of long-dead people, at that. And he's radically simplifying history by promoting the myth that the reason so many Muslims hate Christians is because Christians started the fight in days of yore.

In fairness, Clinton probably believes the myth, because he went to college in the 1960s. By then, one admittedly distorted view of Western and American history — taught, as someone has said, "in the spirit of national self-congratulation" — had been replaced by one even more distorted, in which Westerners played history's villains, cruelly despoiling pristine native cultures around the world. And the ultimate villain was Christianity. Christianity, it was said, launched endless bloody wars ("More people have been killed in the name of Jesus Christ than any other name in the history of the world," author Gore Vidal said. Christianity condoned slavery. Christianity fostered Hitler. Christianity oppressed science (remember Galileo). And so on … and on.

Where does the truth lie? Somewhere between these views, of course — but decidedly closer to the older view than to the newer one.

Two recent witnesses for the defense are journalists Vincent Carroll and David Shiflett, authors of the new book Christianity on Trial: Arguments Against Anti-Religious Bigotry (Encounter Books, 2002). They don't whitewash the offenses committed by Christians through the centuries. But they bring much-needed perspective to a series of accusations against Christians, sufficient to warrant, if not total vindication, surely a verdict far more favorable than the prosecution seeks.

Carroll and Shiflett take 200-plus pages to make their case. Grant me a few paragraphs to summarize the high points … and bear in mind that the authors are taking on the toughest case, not just of what Christianity says in theory but of what Christians generally do in practice.

Is Christianity a religion of conquest? Not for the most part. For the first millennium or so, despite all the wars raging around them, Christians either resisted participation in warfare (the first three or four centuries) or accepted it with moral conditions unfamiliar to the warlike world of the era in which conquest needed no ethical or ideological justification. Among Christians, force was only justified to counteract evil, and slaughtering noncombatants was forbidden by the code of chivalry. Soldiers in the Middle Ages were regularly urged to hate the sin, not the sinner. Even in just wars, soldiers were required to do penance after battle for giving reign to warrior emotions: "The gospel's message of peace," the authors write, "was too pervasive simply to ignore."

The Crusades changed that for a time, and many Christians did embrace the idea of Holy War. Yet even those came in response to Muslim invaders who had been overrunning much of the Christian world for centuries and were driven partly by the political agendas of secular rulers. What's most significant is that the idea of Holy War didn't stick among Christians; it went largely dormant for centuries, was resurrected for a time in European religious wars between Christians and eventually provoked a backlash that began a Christian movement toward tolerance in Europe and spread to the American colonies. Looking across history, what strikes the authors isn't that Christians have fought wars, too, but that they so frequently prevented or mitigated them.

Did Christians justify slavery? Some did, but they didn't invent it — and most important, it was primarily Christians who, for explicitly religious reasons, opposed it. In a world teeming with slavery, Paul "insisted on reciprocity in a relationship where none existed in law and little or none occurred in practice," and urged that masters and slaves (both common in early Christian congregations) treat each other as brothers equally valuable before God. Much later, Europeans and Americans bought slaves sold to them by Africans (slavery was routine in Africa), but even in the worst days of that practice there were many who felt obliged to teach slaves to read (sometimes in defiance of state law) so they could read the Bible.

Finally, Christians drove the movements to abolish slavery in Europe and America, providing the passion and persistence that — in all those places except the United States — ended the practice peacefully. Without Christians, there's no telling when (if at all) that would have happened; without Christians, moral opposition to slavery would have been confined to a tiny handful of people.

Are Christians responsible for Hitler? Not really. It's been said that the Nazi party derived its anti-Semitism from Christianity, and that churches at best put up little resistance. The pope of the time, Pius XII, has been called a Nazi flunky, "Hitler's Pope." But the charges range from drastically oversimplified to outright absurd.

Bill Clinton (yes, him again) said a couple years ago that Hitler "preached a perverted form of Christianity." In fact, Hitler was no kind of Christian, perverse or otherwise; he was a pagan who gleefully predicted that "through the peasantry ... we shall really be able to destroy Christianity because there is in them a true religion rooted in nature and blood." Virulently anti-Christian attitudes and pagan ceremonies were common among the SS (a groom would hand his bride a dagger to conclude a wedding).

It's undeniably true that some Christians welcomed Hitler at first, and that many others did little to stop him. "It is easy for those who do not live under a totalitarian regime to expect heroism from those who do," the authors note dryly, "but it is an expectation that often will be disappointed." Yet given the risks of resistance, "it should be less surprising that the mass of Christians were silent than that some believed strongly enough to pay for their faith with their lives." Protestants and Catholics alike stood up to the Nazis — hiding Jews, protesting government policies, seeking Hitler's overthrow. Pastor Martin Niemoller led the “Confessing Church” in speaking against Hitler, and more than 7,000 pastors—nearly 40 percent of Germany’s Protestant pastors—joined him in fighting Nazi efforts to bar non-Aryans, or any who married non-Aryans, from the clergy. Pius XII issued condemnations of totalitarianism that avoided mentioning Hitler by name (he feared Hitler would crack down on Catholics), but also aided many thousands of Jews to escape through the Vatican refugee program.

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There's much more to Carroll and Shiflett's book. They recount how Christians founded universities and virtually invented hospitals that would care for anyone, regardless of social standing. They show that Christians, though sometimes impeding science, have far more often advanced the discipline based on their religious fascination with God's creation. They relate the key role Christians have played in promoting racial equality, self-government and respect for the environment. And they don't neglect to contrast Christians with some of the peoples whom progressive folk glorify, including many Native American tribes. The Aztecs and many others, they remind readers, perfected unspeakable tortures and cruelties; Roman pagans routinely slaughtered their own children if they were defective or — what they thought much the same thing — girls.

Yet in all this the authors avoid what might be called the spirit of religious self-congratulation. It's not even clear whether they are Christians. "This book does not stipulate or assume the truth of the Christian faith," they write. "It is written about Christians, but not necessarily for them. For that reason, the vast majority of the authorities cited are historians rather than theologians."

That fact makes this book all the more valuable. A catalogue of good deeds doesn't establish the truth of Christianity, and the existence of evil deeds by professing Christians doesn't refute it. (Our understanding of original sin actually predicts it.) But a book like this shows believers and nonbelievers alike that Christians shouldn't suffer from a moral inferiority complex. Make no mistake, the most important thing God does through us is to use us to bring other people into the next world. But He also moves us to make this world a brighter place while we're in the neighborhood.