is religion the cause of war essay

Andrew Holt, Ph.D.

History, religion, and academia.

The Myth of Religion as the Cause of Most Wars

The following essay, by Andrew Holt, is republished from John D. Hosler ‘s edited volume, Seven Myths of Military History (Hackett, 2022). It is provided here with both the permission of Professor Hosler and Hackett Publishing . Thoughtful feedback and comments are welcome and can be emailed directly to the author at [email protected].

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Chapter 1. War and the Divine: Is Religion the Cause of Most Wars?

Andrew Holt

“It is somewhat trite, but nevertheless sadly true, to say that more wars have been waged, more people killed, and these days more evil perpetrated in the name of religion than by any other institutional force in human history.”

—Richard Kimball [1]

To uproarious laughter, the late comedian and social critic George Carlin once condemned God as the cause of the “bloodiest and most brutal wars” ever fought, which were “all based on religious hatred.” He stated that millions have died simply because “God told” Hindus, Muslims, Jews, and Christians it would be a “good idea” for them to kill each other. Carlin’s comedy routine, entitled “Kill for God!” has received rave reviews by its viewers for being “brilliant” and “spot on,” with one anonymous fan confirming that religion is “by far the single biggest cause of human deaths.” [2]

To be clear, it is not modern military historians who claim religion is the cause of most wars, but rather many prominent intellectuals, scientists, academics, and politicians, often with far greater influence over popular cultural assumptions than professional historians, who have popularized such claims. In a 2006 interview, the neuroscientist and cultural commentator Sam Harris stated, “If I could wave a magic wand and get rid of either rape or religion, I would not hesitate to get rid of religion. I think more people are dying as a result of our religious myths than as a result of any other ideology.” [3] The Oxford University evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins claimed in 2003 that religion is the “principal label, and the most dangerous one,” by which human divisions occur, contributing to “wars, murders and terrorist attacks.” [4]

Prominent American politicians have commented similarly. Richard Nixon argued in 1983 that the “bloodiest wars in history have been religious wars.” [5] Perhaps unknowingly, Nixon was following his predecessor George Washington, who remarked in a 1792 letter that “religious controversies are always productive of more acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those which spring from any other cause.” [6] That Washington held such views in the late eighteenth century is not surprising, given the rationalist spirit of his social class and times. Some of his contemporaries equally expressed their concern over the propensity for violence among traditional religious believers. Thomas Paine is perhaps most notable in this regard. In The Age of Reason he argued that “the most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries, that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion. It has been . . . the most destructive to . . . the peace and happiness of man.” [7]

Paine’s views reflect a particular strain of thought that emerged in a slightly earlier period of the European eighteenth century, which many persons then and now have referred to as the “Enlightenment.” While intellectuals of the period tended to emphasize religious toleration, many also wrote harshly about the negative social effects of traditional religion. Such concerns undoubtedly reflected the fact that they were writing in the wake of the so-called age of religious wars, during which Catholics and Protestants engaged in lengthy and destructive conflicts including, most notably, the French Wars of Religion (1562–98), the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), and the English Civil War (1642–51). [8]

None can challenge the claim that religion has often inspired or motivated violence, but has it truly been, as Harris claims, the “most prolific” source? Are, or were, religious wars, as Nixon wrote, the “bloodiest” sort of wars? Is it true that “more wars have been waged” and “more people killed” because of religion than any other institutional force, as Richard Kimball claims in the quotation that begins this essay?

Interestingly, these claims—often confidently asserted—that “more” wars have been waged and “more” people killed as a result of religion, can only be substantiated by an accounting of all major wars of which we have historical knowledge and both a means of separating the “religious” wars from other types of wars and counting the bodies. Such a list is destined to be incomplete and open to debate for many reasons, not least of which is the ambiguity surrounding many human conflicts. Was, for example, the English Civil War primarily a struggle over parliamentary rights vis-à-vis royal absolutism, or was it driven by a deep religious divide? Or was it both? Regardless of these pitfalls and uncertainties, such an accounting, no matter its imperfections, that seeks to understand the causes of particular wars and the degree of their lethality is possible. It is only with such an accounting that one can determine if religion is, indeed, the cause of most wars.

To most historians, this may seem an impossible task, with insurmountable methodological problems. Nevertheless, the critics cited here—neither specialists on warfare in any era nor trained historians—assume an ability to do this. Indeed, there is no other basis for making their claims without these assumptions.

The critics cited thus far do not provide such an accounting. Kimball and Harris imply that their claims are transparently obvious. For Kimball, religious ideologies and commitments are “indisputably central factors” in the “escalation of violence and evil around the world.” [9] He states that this “evidence is readily available,” after which he cites not data but the headlines of seven newspaper stories about contemporary religious violence. [10]

Yet this is anecdotal evidence. Moreover, alternative causality is dispensed with, as when Harris rejects out of hand the notion that the Hindu-Muslim conflict has political or economic roots. [11] Furthermore, neither author endeavors to sift through history’s wars in order to make even a rough estimate of how many were primarily motivated by religious considerations, much less offering a method for how one distinguishes “religious” wars from all other types of wars. And neither acknowledges a basic proposition that all historians would accept: that most, if not all, wars are driven by multiple factors. At what point does a preponderance of religious factors, however they might be defined, outweigh secular motives or goals allowing for a war to be categorized as a “religious” war? The critics cited here appear to consider such questions and modes of inquiry irrelevant.

Of course, one could reasonably argue that firmly distinguishing between religious and nonreligious wars is so impossible that any effort to count and categorize all known wars in this manner is doomed to failure. Indeed, as I prepared this essay, I spoke with multiple historians who all inquired how one could possibly accomplish such a task, with some intonating it is not possible due to the complexity of warfare, which is almost always based on multiple causes and motivations. If this is true—that it is essentially impossible to distinguish “religious” wars from other types of war, much less provide accurate casualty figures for all wars ancient to modern—then the debate is over: there can be no basis to the argument that the former is the most frequent cause of war and/or the bloodiest type of human conflict. In sum, Harris, Kimball, and others would have zero basis for their claims. Likewise, those who seek to refute their charges would be unable to offer anything even approaching quantifiable evidence to support their objections. Game over.

But let us not fall prey to defeatism. Complexity and ambiguity pervade historical research and are elements in every conclusion reached by every historian. With that in mind, let us dare to hazard a definition of religious warfare.

Defining “Religious Warfare”

In attempting to define religious warfare, it first seems worthwhile to consider the origin of the term “religion.” In its earliest Ciceronian sense, the Latin word religio meant to have respect or regard for the gods, as demonstrated by the performance of obligatory rites in veneration of them. [12] Although a critic of Roman religion, Augustine of Hippo (d. 430) adapted the term in such a way that it could be uniquely applied to a Christian understanding of and relationship to the sacred. For Augustine, religio meant worship, the actions by which one renders praise to God, but he also sought to separate what he understood to be true worship from false worship. [13]

Yet while many in the West think of religion as worship centered around a god or gods, accompanied by adherence to theological doctrines and rituals, such a definition fails to embrace the totality of the worldwide religious experience, both past and present. Definitions evolve and change, and modern scholars of religion have come to accept a broader definition of religion, one that phenomenologists who specialize in comparative religion now generally embrace, which sees “religion” as any spiritual or pragmatic connection with a transcendental Other. This Other could include gods (or God), sacred forces, a supreme cosmic spirit, or even a universal law, like Buddhist Dharma. [14] Consequently, if “religion” represents belief in the Divine and reverence for the Other—and these beliefs influence the thoughts, morality, and deeds of believers—then it follows that “religious wars” are those conflicts in which religious belief or devotion plays a key role in the motivation of most of their originators and/or participants.

The oft-cited Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz famously argued that all wars are political. [15] Yet when religious motivations influence political goals, it becomes trickier to determine to what degree religion is the inspiration for a conflict. Must both sides in a conflict have religious motivations for it to be considered a “religious” war, or is one side sufficient? At what point do economic concerns, for example, outweigh religious concerns so that one would no longer consider a war “religious”? What if a war begins as religious but ends as an overtly political conflict, as was the case with the Thirty Years’ War? Those who make the claim that religion is the most prominent cause of violence or warfare never seem to bother with such details, yet they, nevertheless, obviously define “religious wars” broadly enough to support them.

To be clear, few would object to the proposition that religion or religious motivation often inspire violence. Many examples of religiously inspired warfare are to be found in the histories of the ancient Near East, Greco-Roman antiquity, Europe, the Far East, India, the Americas, and sub-Saharan Africa by members of various religions. Spanning the ancient to modern worlds, Mesopotamians, Chinese, Indians, Europeans, Arabs, Persians, Turks, Aztecs, and many others have embraced religious beliefs that at times led to, justified, or encouraged violence or warfare, sometimes resulting in a massive loss of human life. Yet the aforementioned critics of religious violence do not claim that religion sometimes inspires violence or warfare. If this were the case, then their claims would be noncontroversial. Instead, they claim that, more than any other factor, religious faith has led to more war throughout history and across all cultures.

If one is willing to hazard a definition of religious warfare, as I have just done, that allows for the distinct categorization of religious and nonreligious wars, then some data can be developed that might help us to evaluate these charges in a manner that is more systematic and logical than simply saying, “Your criticism of religion as the cause of most wars and bloodshed is without foundation.” As demonstrated in the remainder of this chapter, some have been willing to provide such a twofold analysis, namely to categorize wars as “religious” or otherwise and to provide death estimates for various wars. Such data are not supportive of the claims of Kimball et al. To the contrary, the only data currently available on these topics suggest that the popular claim that religion is the cause of “more” wars than anything else . . . is a myth.

Religious War by the Numbers

Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod’s three-volume Encyclopedia of Wars includes an analysis of 1,763 wars covering the worldwide span of human history. It has become an influential reference in the popular sphere, often cited by persons seeking to define specific wars as religious or otherwise. [16] In their lengthy index entry on “religious wars, Phillips and Axelrod do not explain their classification methodology. They only provide clues in their limited commentary on the concept of religious wars in their introduction, where they seem to suggest that religion was often used as a sort of cover for premodern wars that resulted from more mundane causes, including territorial, ethnic, and economic concerns. [17] Yet each war they list in the index under the category “religious wars” contains clear references to its religious nature or features, providing an apparent justification for its classification as such. [18]

What, then, did Phillips and Axelrod find? Interestingly, of 1,763 wars they list only 121 entries fall under the heading “religious wars.” In one case, two wars are considered in a single entry (“Sixth and Seventh Wars of Religion”), bringing their total to 122. [19] Thus, only 6.9 percent of the wars they considered are classified as religious wars. [20] One presumes they see the remaining 93.1 percent as primarily wars that took shape due to other factors, such as geopolitics, economic rivalry, and ethnic divisions. One may certainly quibble over the omission of some wars from Phillips and Axelrod’s list, but it would take a lot of quibbling to get to the point where religious wars represent the majority (882 out of 1,763) of the wars they count and consider. They also list other categories of warfare that have higher totals than religion. Under the heading of “colonial wars,” they list 161 wars. [21] After cross-referencing both lists, one finds that Phillips and Axelrod only list two wars in both the “colonial” and “religious” categories, suggesting that they have made every effort to categorize these wars based on their primary causes, as they interpret them, rather than secondary ones. [22] Consequently, based on the total numbers presented by Phillips and Axelrod in each category, one could argue that imperialist ideologies, regardless of the latent religiosity that occasionally colors such endeavors, have historically and collectively been the primary inspiration of more wars than explicitly religious ideologies.

Again, historians could certainly look at Phillips and Axelrod’s list of religious wars and criticize the omission of many and the inclusion of some. Indeed, in my rough accounting of the 1,763 wars they list in their encyclopedia, I would likely come up with a figure of religious wars that, perhaps, doubled theirs. Other historians may arrive at still different figures, both lesser and greater, based on how they choose to categorize “religious wars.” Yet it seems highly unlikely that any historian would look at the 1,763 wars considered in the Encyclopedia of Wars and determine that a majority of them were primarily religious. If someone were to attempt to provide such a systematic accounting, their efforts would, indeed, be interesting to consider here, but nobody besides Phillips and Axelrod seems to have been bothered.

In a similar way, Matthew White, a self-described “atrocitologist,” is sometimes cited by those comparing religious wars to nonreligious wars. His 2012 book purports to list the one hundred greatest atrocities in human history, based on total deaths. [23] Although a popular-history writer, White’s work was favorably reviewed in the New York Times and has won academic acclaim in some quarters, with Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker dubbing it, in a complimentary foreword, “the most comprehensive, disinterested and statistically nuanced estimates available.” [24] Historians, as well, have praised White’s efforts. Harvard University professor of history Charles S. Maier, in the same New York Times review, praised White for trying to arrive at “the best figures” and not being, like most historians when it comes to this type of research, “afraid to get his hands dirty.” [25]

White is clear and upfront about both his methodology and the controversial nature of his statistics. He notes, for example, on the first page of his introduction, “Let’s get something out of the way right now. Everything you are about to read is disputed. . . . There is no atrocity in history that every person in the world agrees on.” [26] His methodology, as described in the Times review, is simple and transparent. He gathers all of the death estimates he can find for an event, with all data on his website available for public review, throws out the highest and lowest numbers, and then calculates the median, “arriving at what he acknowledges is often just an informed guess.” [27] Yet, White’s “informed guesses” appear to be the best ones currently available.

Like Phillips and Axelrod, White also categorizes and provides a list under the heading “Religious Conflict.” [28] He notes that it is “impossible” to find a “common cause” in the various atrocities he considers, and that they can often fall under multiple headings. For example, White lists “Cromwell’s Invasion of Ireland” under the categories of both “Religious Conflict” and “Ethnic Cleansing.” [29] Yet even allowing for this, White lists only eleven atrocities that fall under the heading of “Religious Conflict.” He provides insights into how he arrived at his list in a section of his work subtitled “Religious Killing,” while pointing out that “no war is 100 percent religious (or 100 percent anything) in motivation, but we can’t duck the fact that some conflicts involve more religion than others.” [30]

In an attempt to solve a problem we have already noted here, White then asks how we can decide if “religion is the real cause of a conflict and not just a convenient cover story?” [31] In response, he lists three primary principles that cumulatively address this question. The first is when “the only difference between the two sides is religion,” for which he cites examples of people who look alike, speak the same languages, and live in the same communities yet engage in conflict over what can only be ascribed to religious differences. This would include Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. The second is an ability to describe a conflict without reference to religion or religious trappings. For this, he gives the example of the US Civil War, which he notes certainly had religious elements, but can also be described in a detailed history without ever referencing those elements. White argues this would be impossible, for example, in writing a history of the crusades. Finally, the third is when the parties themselves declare religious motives. Here White notes that “we should at least consider the possibility that they are telling the truth,” especially if there are not other significant potential reasons. [32]

With these rules in mind, White lists eleven atrocities from the one hundred that he classifies as “Religious Conflicts”: Taiping Rebellion, Thirty Years’ War, Mahdi’s Revolt, Crusades, [33] French Wars of Religion War in the Sudan Albigensian Crusade, Panthay Rebellion, Hui Rebellion, Partition of India, and Cromwell’s Invasion of Ireland. [34] Thus, according to White’s study, only 11 percent of the one hundred worst atrocities in history can be attributed, in some major part, to religion, with 89 percent primarily attributable to some other cause. Yet there are other atrocities in White’s book that seem to deserve to be grouped under a more general heading of religiously inspired atrocities, even if they do not meet his definition of “conflict.” These include the Roman gladiatorial games and Aztec human sacrifice, both of which White categorized separately under “Human Sacrifice.” [35] If we add these two atrocities to the eleven listed under religious conflict, this would bring the total of the one hundred greatest atrocities, based on White’s death estimates, attributed primarily to religious motivations (a broader category than just “conflicts”) up to thirteen, or only 13 percent.

A final breakdown, depending on how one evaluates White’s work, is therefore as follows: 11/100 (or 11 percent) of the worst atrocities in history can be ascribed to “Religious Conflict,” and 13/100 (or 13 percent) of the worst atrocities in history can be ascribed to “Religious Conflict” or “Human Sacrifice.” Although these percentages are higher than Phillips and Axelrod’s more comprehensive findings (6.9 percent), none supports the claim that religion has been and remains the cause of most wars. Indeed, “Hegemonial War,” a category that White defines as similar countries fighting “over who’s number 1,” and “Failed State” conflicts, involving the collapse of a central government and the division of lands among warlords that results from the civil war that follows, individually account for more of the “worst atrocities” on his list than “Religious Conflict.” [36]

Again, one may quibble about White’s categories, arguing that he omitted some significant wars and instances of mass violence or incorrectly included others, but it seems highly unlikely that any historian reviewing White’s list of the one hundred greatest atrocities in history would see a majority of them as primarily religious. An alternative accounting would be welcome for consideration here, but nobody else has offered one, certainly none of the prominent voices proclaiming religion as the cause of the “bloodiest” wars.

Steven Pinker has provided his own rankings, based largely on White’s research, of the twenty-one worst wars or atrocities based on death tolls in his widely reviewed 2011 book, Better Angels . [37] His list includes the following: Second World War, reign of Mao Zedong, Mongol conquests, An Lushan Revolt, fall of the Ming dynasty, Taiping Rebellion, annihilation of the American Indians, rule of Joseph Stalin, Mideast slave trade, Atlantic slave trade, rule of Tamerlane, British rule of India, World War I, Russian Civil War, fall of Rome, Congo Free State, Thirty Years’ War, Russia’s Time of Troubles, Napoleonic Wars, Chinese Civil War, and the French Wars of Religion. Pinker then provides a unique perspective by factoring in population differences at the times such events occurred. While Pinker lists 55,000,000 deaths resulting from World War II in the mid-twentieth century and only 36,000,000 for the An Lushan Revolt in mid-eighth-century China, he then uses population estimates to adjust the rankings per capita between the different periods. [38] Using this “mid-twentieth-century equivalent,” he finds that the An Lushan Revolt would move from fourth place to first place on his list with a mid-twentieth-century equivalent of 429,000,000 deaths, far surpassing World War II. [39]

While Pinker singles out religious conflicts/events in neither his ranking based on total deaths nor his population-adjusted rankings, it is interesting to note that religious conflicts appear to play a minor role in both. Only three of the conflicts would clearly seem to qualify as primarily religious conflicts or religiously inspired events: the Taiping Rebellion, the Thirty-Years’ War, and the French Wars of Religion, resulting in only 14.2 percent of the twenty-one worst atrocities in history as referenced by Pinker. It is worth pointing out that at least four of the twenty-one atrocities listed by Pinker could be attributed not to religion but rather Marxist efforts to establish or develop communist states, including the reign of Mao Zedong, the reign of Stalin, the Russian Civil War, and the Chinese Civil War, equaling 19 percent of the total. Consequently, one could argue that Marxism is a greater cause of violence and atrocities in Pinker’s study than religion!

The numbers, therefore, as provided by our three major studies to enumerate history’s most violent wars and conflicts, break down as follows: 6.9 percent of Phillips and Axelrod’s 1,763 historical wars were religious conflicts; 13 percent of White’s 100 worst atrocities in history can be ascribed to “Religious Conflict” or “Human Sacrifice”; and 14.2 percent of Pinker’s 21 worst atrocities in history were religiously inspired. Thus, our only existing quantitative analyses suggest that religious motivations inspire only a relatively small percentage of all conflicts. Moreover, there seem to be other causes or motivations that have inspired more wars or atrocities than religion.

Distinguishing Religious Wars from Secular Wars

One can disagree with such an approach in considering to what degree religion was the cause of a particular conflict. Such disagreements among historians are not surprising. War is messy, after all, and conflicts usually emerge from a complex mix of factors that might incorporate economic, political, ethnic, and religious concerns on one or both sides.

William T. Cavanaugh, a theologian and professor of Catholic studies at DePaul University, has considered the issue of defining and distinguishing religious warfare from other types of conflict in a highly influential 2009 book. Cavanaugh argues that various scholars have made “indefensible assumptions about what does and does not count as religion.” [40] He considers the claims of nine scholars who have suggested that “religion is particularly prone to violence” based on arguments that religion is, among other things, absolutist, divisive, and/or irrational. [41] He rejects their respective arguments, noting that “they all suffer from the same defect: the inability to find a convincing way to separate religious violence from secular violence.” [42] Indeed, as Cavanaugh argues, secular violence is often motivated by similar degrees of absolutism, division, and irrationality, but in nonreligious forms.

Among the scholars that Cavanaugh considers is Charles Kimball. He argues that Kimball’s book (which, incidentally, was chosen by Publishers Weekly as the top book on religion in 2002) “suffers” from its inability to “distinguish the religious from the secular.” [43] Kimball postulates that there are various “warning signs” that religion could turn evil. Among such warning signs, for example, are calls for blind obedience and the belief that the end justifies the means. Cavanaugh argues in rebuttal that all of the warning signs offered by Kimball could equally apply to nationalism or nationalist ideologies. Concerning Kimball’s claim about blind obedience as a marker of religious conflict, for example, Cavanaugh points out that “obedience is institutionalized” in the US military, as there is no allowance for “selective conscientious objection.” [44] Yet Cavanaugh appears most dismissive of the claim that the end justifies the means is uniquely associated with religious conflict, noting that the history of modern conflict is “full of evidence” that demonstrates how secular states have embraced such a view. Among such evidence, he references “the vaporization of innocent civilians in Hiroshima” and “the practice of torture by over a third of the world’s nation states, including many democracies.” [45]

To be clear, Cavanaugh is not rejecting the notion that religion can sometimes inspire violence. Instead, he is arguing that Kimball’s efforts to clearly distinguish religious violence as somehow worse than secular violence, and more prone to fanaticism, are unconvincing.

Similarly, Cavanaugh also challenges the claims of sociologist Mark Juergensmeyer, who argues that “religion seems to be connected with violence virtually everywhere,” perpetually and across all religious traditions. [46] Juergensmeyer, like Kimball, makes sharp distinctions between religious and secular violence, highlighting what he claims are significant differences. These include, for example, the notion that religious violence is “accompanied by strong claims of moral justification and enduring absolutism” as a result of the intense religious conviction of those carrying it out. [47] In response, Cavanaugh points out how secular warfare is often “couched in the strongest rhetoric of moral justification and historical duty,” citing, for example, Operation Infinite Justice, the US military’s initial name for the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan. [48] In another example, Juergensmeyer argues that secular conflicts are briefer, concluding within the lifetimes of the combatants, whereas religious conflicts can last for hundreds of years. [49] Cavanaugh objects by noting that, “Juergensmeyer himself says that US leaders have given every indication that the ‘war against terror’ will stretch indefinitely into the future” and that this war “seems so absolute and unyielding on both sides.” [50] To this one might also cite the examples of the so-called Hundred Years’ War, lasting from 1337 to 1453, as well as the Second Hundred Years’ War, lasting from 1689 to 1815, both of which have traditionally been interpreted, and rightly so, as secular conflicts rather than religious ones.

Cavanaugh does not confine himself to refuting only Kimball’s and Juergensmeyer’s arguments. He critiques the positions of several other scholars who have made similar claims about religion, emphasizing their presumed inability to define religious wars or violence in a way that cannot also be applied to secular institutions or ideologies. He further argues that modern distinctions between religious violence and other types of violence “are part of a broader Enlightenment narrative that has invented a dichotomy between the religious and the secular. . .” that frames religious violence as “irrational and dangerous” in comparison to various forms of secular violence. [51] He then rejects the notion, convincingly, I think, that religious ideologies are inherently “more inclined toward violence” than secular ideologies or institutions, arguing that distinctions between the two have not been properly established by the scholars who make such claims. [52]

Secular Ideologies as a Type of Religion?

Another problem is that people often define religion and its essential qualities quite differently. Some scholars even debate whether or not nationalism, Marxism, liberalism, or intersectionality are essentially religious in nature as a result of varying demands for philosophical and political “orthodoxy” from adherents to the worldviews promoted by these ideologies. Yet the definition of religion provided earlier in this essay, based on the earliest meanings of the term, centered on belief in, respect for, and devotion to a transcendental Other, obviously excludes secular ideologies from qualifying as “religions.” Moreover, modern adherents of the major faiths, which include Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, among others, who embrace the Divine as a mover of historical events and the afterlife, in some form, as a reality, would see such secular ideologies, devoid of any emphasis on the sacred or the Divine, as something very different from how they define religion.

Similarly, Marxist governments, as well, have generally embraced atheism and typically rejected any associations of their beliefs with religion. Karl Marx himself disparaged “religion” as the “opium of the people,” serving only as a palliative that those in power offered to mask the suffering of the proletariat and, thereby, harmfully preventing the oppressed from perceiving the oppression that was the cause of their pain. [53] Marx did not see his conclusions, which he based on his study of history, economics, and government, as a faith or “religion.” To his mind, his insight was scientific truth, not empty belief, and he understood it to be a rational and true alternative to the irrational illusion of religion.

Consequently, while some may classify certain secular ideologies as essentially religious, when claiming that religion is the cause of more wars than anything else critics like Harris or Dawkins certainly do not. They are not, after all, referring to secular atheists or agnostics (like themselves), progressives, or Marxists, as the cause of most wars or violence, but rather those who are inspired to acts of war because of their belief in the Divine.

Secular Ideologies and Violence

As noted at the beginning of this essay, Kimball argues that “more people” have been killed in the name of religion “than by any other institutional force in human history.” [54] Yet other ideologies appear to have proven far deadlier (and in a shorter amount of time) than religiously inspired conflict. Consider the comments of Sam Harris, who devotes a portion of his introductory chapter in The End of Faith to the collective horrors and atrocities that have resulted from historic Hindu-Muslim animosity and highlights political efforts to accommodate Hindu-Muslim religious divisions through the establishment of the modern nations of Pakistan and India. Harris then asks, “When will we realize that the concessions we have made to faith in our political discourse have prevented us from even speaking about, much less uprooting, the most prolific source of violence in our history?” [55]

Concerning Harris’s suggestion that “concessions” in our “political discourse” to religious faith have been the main obstacle to reducing violence from its “most prolific” source (religious faith), it is worth noting that there has, indeed, been a political discourse that not only refused to make concessions to religious faith, particularly Christianity, but also outright attacked it—communism. [56] Indeed, the communist government of the Soviet Union initially attacked Christianity as a source of all evils, destroying churches and persecuting clergy during the 1920s, as it sought to uproot , to borrow Harris’s term, Christianity from Soviet society. Yet this did not stop violence in the Soviet Union or hinder the extensive Soviet promotion of revolutionary conflicts around the world. To the contrary, the twentieth century is grimly notable for the deaths of, so it has been estimated, nearly one hundred million people by communist governments. [57] Some estimates run even higher. R. J. Rummel, for example, studied governments responsible for mass killings of their own citizens, a phenomenon he called “democide.” [58] He attributed far higher numbers of deaths to the reigns of Mao or Stalin than did Pinker or White: seventy-three million to Mao (vs. forty), and thirty-eight million to Stalin (vs. twenty). [59] Similarly, in White’s statistical breakdown, by cause, of the deaths attributed to the one hundred greatest historic atrocities, multiple categories rank higher than religion. Of White’s estimated 455 million collective victims of these atrocities, he calculates that about 47 million were due to religion, or only around 10 percent of the total. [60] In contrast, White estimates that communist ideology is responsible for 67 million deaths, or nearly 15 percent of the total. [61]

As I have tried to make clear throughout this essay, none of what I have written here is meant to imply that religions are always, or even typically, peaceful, or that members of various religious faiths cannot exhibit the same degree of violence as those otherwise motivated. Religious peoples are often willing to engage in warfare. To the contrary, my argument is that claims that religious wars are more violent and greater in number than other types have no empirical evidence to support them. Such arguments are wholly anecdotal, which almost certainly explains why professional historians have not embraced them. Available quantitative analyses of history’s wars in this regard, as flawed as they are, point in a different direction: that religious conflicts are but a relatively modest percentage of the total and that other causes or ideological motivations have inspired as much or more conflict than religion. Thus, until new data are collected that demonstrate otherwise, the claim that religion is the greatest cause of war is an unsubstantiated myth.

[1] Richard Kimball, When Religion Becomes Evil: Five Warning Signs (New York: Harper, 2002), 1.

[2] George Carlin, “Kill for God,” YouTube, accessed January 16, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEi3Gaptaas .

[3] Bethany Saltman, “The Temple of Reason: Sam Harris on How Religion Puts the World at Risk,” The Sun , September 2006.

[4] Richard Dawkins, A Devil’s Chaplain: Reflections on Hopes, Lies, Science, and Love (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), 158.

[5] Richard M. Nixon, Real Peace: A Strategy for the West (Boston: Little, Brown, 1983), 14.

[6] George Washington to Edward Newenham, June 22, 1792,” National Archives Founders Online, accessed January 16, 2019, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-10-02-0324 .

[7] Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, Part the Second: Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology (London: R. Carlisle, 1818), 82.

[8] See Richard S. Dunn, The Age of Religious Wars: 1559–1689 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970), ix; and Philippe Buc, Holy War, Martyrdom, and Terror: Christianity, Violence, and the West (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 29–36.

[9] Kimball, When Religion Becomes Evil , 4.

[10] Kimball, When Religion Becomes Evil , 4.

[11] Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 27.

[12] Cicero, De Natura Deorum Academia , trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), XLII.112–13. On religio , see Clifford Ando, The Matter of the Gods: Religion and the Roman Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 1–6; William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 60–69.

[13] Cavanaugh, Myth of Religious Violence ,63; Ando, Matter of the Gods ,4–5.

[14] Alfred J. Andrea and Andrew Holt, Sanctified Violence: Holy War in World History (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2021), 1.

[15] Carl von Clausewitz, On War , ed. and trans. M. Howard and P. Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), I.1.24–27: “War is merely the continuation of policy by other means”; “a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, carried on with other means”; and, consequently, “all wars can be considered acts of policy.”

[16] Encyclopedia of Wars ,ed. C. Phillips and A. Axelrod, 3 vols.(New York: Facts on File, 2005), III:1484–85. Commentators citing the Encyclopedia of Wars in this manner include the Huffington Post , Christian apologetics groups, such as the Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry (CARM), and the libertarian political/social commentator Theodore Beale, more commonly known as Vox Day. See Vox Day, The Irrational Atheist: Dissecting the Unholy Trinity of Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens (Dallas: Benbella, 2008), 103–6; Robin Schumacher, “The Myth That Religion Is the 1# Cause of War,” CARM: Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry, accessed March 13, 2019, https://carm.org/religion-cause-war ; and Alan Lurie, “Is Religion the Cause of Most Wars?” Huffington Post , April 10, 2012.

[17] Encyclopedia of Wars ,I:xxii–xxiii.

[18] In their entry titled “Charlemagne’s War against the Saxons,” e.g., Phillips and Axelrod refer to the effort to convert the Saxons to Christianity as one of Charlemagne’s “major” objectives and describe his success. See Encyclopedia of Wars , I:307–8.

[19] The common figure ascribed by various sources to the Encyclopedia of Wars is slightly different, usually listing 123 religious wars. See, e.g., Bruce Sheiman, An Atheist Defends Religion: Why Humanity Is Better Off with Religion Than without It (New York: Alpha, 2009), 117.

[20] Phillips and Axelrod’s list, reordered chronologically here, includes the following: First, Second, Third, and Fourth Sacred Wars (spanning 595 to 336 BCE); Roman-Persian Wars (421–22 and 441); Visigothic-Frankish War; Mecca-Medina War; Byzantine-Muslim Wars (633–42, 645–56, 668–79, 698–718, 739, 741–52, 778–83, 797–98, 803–9, 830–41, 851–63, 871–85, 960–76, and 995–99); Arab conquest of Carthage; revolt in Ravenna; First and Second Iconoclastic Wars, Charlemagne’s invasion of Northern Spain; revolt of Muqanna; Charlemagne’s War against the Saxons; Khurramites’ revolt; Paulician War; Spanish Christian-Muslim Wars (912–28, 977–97, 1001–31, 1172–1212, 1230–48, and 1481–92); German Civil War (1077–1106); Castilian conquest of Toledo; Almohad conquest of Muslim Spain; Spanish conquests in North Africa (1090–91); First, Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Crusades (spanning 1095–1272); Crusader-Turkish Wars (spanning 1100–1146 and 1272–91); Aragonese-Castilian War; Wars of the Lombard League; Saladin’s Holy War; Aragonese-French War (1209–13); Albigensian Crusade; Danish-Estonian War; Luccan-Florentine War; Crusade of Nicopolis; Portuguese-Moroccan Wars (1458–71 and 1578); War of the Monks; Bohemian Civil War (1465–71); Bohemian-Hungarian War (1468–78); Siege of Granada; Persian Civil War (1500–1503); Vijayanagar Wars; Anglo-Scottish War; Turko-Persian Wars (1514–17 and 1743–47); Counts’ War; Schmalkaldic War; Scottish uprising against Mary of Guise; First, Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Wars of Religion (spanning 1562 to 1598); Javanese invasion of Malacca; Bohemian-Palatine War; Thirty Years’ War; First, Second, and Third Bernese Revolts (spanning 1621 to 1629); Swedish War; Shimabara Revolt (1637–38); First and Second Bishops Wars; Maryland’s Religious War; Transylvania-Hapsburg War; Portuguese-Omani Wars in East Africa; First Villmergen War; Covenanters’ Rebellions (1666, 1679, and 1685); Rajput Rebellion against Aurangzeb; Camisard Rebellion; Second Villmergen War; Brabant Revolution; Vellore Mutiny; Great Java War; Padri War; Irish Tithe War; War of the Sonderbund; Crimean War; Tukulor-French Wars; Mountain Meadows Massacre; Serbo-Turkish War; Russo-Turkish War (1877–78); Ugandan Religious Wars; Ghost Dance War; Holy Wars of the “Mad Mullah”; raids of the Black Hundreds; Mexican insurrections; Indian Civil War; Bosnian War; and US War on Terrorism.

[21] Encyclopedia of Wars , III.1447–48.

[22] The two wars listed in both the “colonial wars” and “religious wars” categories by Phillips and Axelrod are the Tukulor-French Wars and the Vellore Mutiny, nineteenth-century conflicts involving a complex mix of potential religious and colonial/territorial causes that may have proven too difficult for the authors to categorize under one primary cause. See Encyclopedia of Wars , III.1158–59 and 1243.

[23] Matthew White, The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History’s 100 Worst Atrocities (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012).

[24] Jennifer Schuessler, “Ranking History’s Atrocities by Counting the Corpses,” New York Times , November 8, 2011.

[25] Schuessler, “Ranking History’s Atrocities.”

[26] White, Great Big Book of Horrible Things , xiii.

[27] Schuessler, “Ranking History’s Atrocities.” For White’s figures, see “Death Tolls across History,” Necrometrics, accessed March 15, 2019, https://necrometrics.com/ .

[28] White, Great Big Book of Horrible Things , 544.

[29] White, Great Big Book of Horrible Things , 544–45.

[30] White, Great Big Book of Horrible Things , 544 and 107–8.

[31] White, Great Big Book of Horrible Things , 107.

[32] White, Great Big Book of Horrible Things , 107–8.

[33] Presumably, only the crusades that took place in the East.

[34] White, Great Big Book of Horrible Things , 544.

[35] White, Great Big Book of Horrible Things , 548. One could argue that Mesoamerican human sacrifice is more correct, as even societies like the Maya appear to have performed it, even if apparently on a lesser scale. The scale of Aztec human sacrifice—from only 150 sacrificial victims to 250,000 per year—is a debate; see Matthew Restall’s book When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting that Changed History (New York: Ecco, 2018), 85–95.

[36] White, Great Big Book of Horrible Things , 543–44.

[37] Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Penguin, 2011), 195. His categorizations are often problematic, as reflected in his consideration of the “Fall of Rome” as an “atrocity.”

[38] Pinker draws his figure of 36,000,000 for the An Lushan Rebellion from White, Great Big Book of Horrible Things , 93. White notes, “The census taken in China in the year 754 recorded a population of 52,880,488. After ten years of civil war, the census of 764 found only 16,900,000 people in China. What happened to 36 million people? Is a loss of two-thirds in one decade even possible? Perhaps. Peasants often lived at the very edge of starvation, so the slightest disruption could cause a massive die off, particularly if they depended on large irrigation systems. . . . [Moreover] many authorities quote these numbers with a minimum of doubt.”

[39] Pinker, Better Angels , 195.

[40] Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence , 4.

[41] Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence , 15–56. In addition to Kimball, he considers the academic arguments of John Hick, Richard Wentz, Martin Marty, Mark Juergensmeyer, David C. Rapoport, Bhikhu Parekh, R. Scott Appleby, and Charles Selengut.

[42] Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence , 8.

[43] Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence , 21–24.

[44] Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence , 23.

[45] Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence , 24.

[46] Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence , 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), xi.

[47] Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God , 220.

[48] Cavanaugh, Myth of Religious Violence ,32.

[49] Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God , 158.

[50] Cavanaugh, Myth of Religious Violence ,32.

[51] Cavanaugh, Myth of Religious Violence , 4.

[52] Cavanaugh, Myth of Religious Violence , 5.

[53] Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right , ” trans. A. Jolin and J. O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 131.

[54] Kimball, When Religion Becomes Evil ,1.

[55] Harris, The End of Faith , 26–27.

[56] Special thanks to Professor Florin Curta of the University of Florida for drawing my attention to this point in a private conversation.

[57] Stéphane Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression , trans. J. Murphy and M. Kramer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 4.

[58] R. J. Rummel, Death by Government (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1994), 36–38.

[59] Rummel revised his figures in 2005; see Andrew Holt, “The 20th Century’s Bloodiest ‘Megamurderers’ According to Prof. R. J. Rummel,” apholt.com, accessed January 16, 2019, https://apholt.com/2018/11/15/the-20th-centurys-bloodiest-megamurderers-according-to-prof-r-j-rummel/ .

[60] White, Great Big Book of Horrible Things , 554; in a footnote, he offers, “A friend once wondered aloud how much suffering in history has been caused by religious fanaticism, and I was able to confidently tell her 10 percent, based on this number.”

[61] White, Great Big Book of Horrible Things , 554.

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The cause of violence is a lack of respect for other persons’ individual rights. Religion is just another of the myriad excuses used to justify bad behavior.

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Religion as the Cause of Wars Essay (Critical Writing)

Introduction.

The Great War that took place between 1914 and 1918 was not a chronological event, which can easily be identified with religion. The followers from each side claimed that all were engaged in a justifiable war to defend themselves against aggression. In fact, all argued that the Supreme Being was on their side and each religion prayed for success. As a result, it did not matter whether or not other believers were destroyed given that they were simply considered as enemies. Religious wars are common since the creation of human being although they do not have many fatalities similar to other types of wars. The wars are always regarded as a struggle between different religions namely Jews, Christians and Muslims. This demonstrates that despite the civilization humankind has undergone over years, religion continues to cause war.

Religious beliefs are powerful motivations since aggressive individuals fight about them. They continue to cause conflicts even in small families. In fact, it is common for husbands and wives to fight on the religion that the family should adopt. The fight escalates especially when the wife refuses to follow the religion of his husband. As a result, it is common for divorce to arise from the religious differences between married couples. Such a relationship arises owing to the initial attraction between these companions. Each of these individuals has the hope that everyone will eventually see the righteousness in the other partner’s religion and accept to be converted. Conversely, some individuals coerce others to convert given that they strongly believe that they should belong to the same religion in order to have a lasting relationship. When the effort becomes futile, chances of domestic violence become high. Consequently, when they consider that the differences between them cannot be resolved even after involving other parties they end up in divorce (Erbele, 2012).

Religion causes tension even between close friends. For instance, it is common for Islamic families to have relationships with Christians. However, Muslims do not consume pork since it is not allowed by their religion. Although the relationship may be cordial, there is always suspicion from Muslim believers about the king of food they consume in Christian families particularly when the meal involves any kind of meat. Muslims are suspicious even when the meal does not include meat given that the meal may have been prepared using pork fat. Muslims ensure that they stay away from anything that involves pork. In one situation, a Muslim woman warned her husband to ensure that any Christian family they were visiting did not give her daughter any pork. This caused tension between them as the Muslim husband thought that the wife did not trust him to keep a close watch over their daughter (Woodlock et al., 2013).

The wife later admitted that she trusted the husband but did not trust the Christian family on issues regarding what they consume. Apparently, the woman does not even trust her in-law family since they are not Muslims. The tension between families is evident as in-law’s family openly consumes pork products. When visiting the in-law family, the wife ensures that she accompanies her husband and their daughter to ensure that the mother in-law who is usually craving for sausages does not give her daughter any pork product. She admits that it takes a few days for her blood pressure to resume its usual level after visiting the mother in-law who talks about the good taste of pork products (Woodlock et al., 2013).

There are other sources of war between humans such as soccer matches. However, religious differences are common excuses used by states to cause harm on those believed to have diverse religious views. For example, during the 20 th century, cruel administrations of Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, and Stalin ruthlessly murdered millions of those with different religious views. In Russia, atheists murdered thousands of Christians. The atheists sought to eliminate any kind of religion from the region. It is therefore evident that religion has been a contributive attribute to most historical wars.

In the contemporary world, acts of terrorisms are believed to be caused by religious differences. Recently, there was an attack on Kenya’s Westgate Mall. The perpetrators of the heinous act were evidently Muslims considering the CCTV footages that captured them praying while facing Mecca. When the attackers first entered the mall, they held over three hundred shoppers hostage. According to reports by those who survived the attack, the attackers would ask each person different Islamic questions. Those who did not know were shot dead immediately. However, the attackers allegedly told Muslims to leave unharmed. All others who subscribed to different religions were executed.

In Iraq, religious war continues to escalate between different arms of Muslims. Terrorism in the country particularly the capital city of Bagdad continues to kill and maim tens of people daily. Muslims extremists strongly believe that any human that does not subscribe to Islam does not deserve to live. It is this conviction that lead to war between Shiite and Kurds in Iraq despite both being Muslims. The Quran is often observed as one that incites religious wars. It acknowledges the humankind tendency of disagreement and consequently allows defensive warfare. In addition to the individual’s permission for self-defense, it permits religious war in the name of Jihad against non-Muslims.

In Gulf region, the unrelenting war is mainly caused by religious differences. The war between Israel and Palestine is contributed by the fact that Israel is mainly a Jewish state while Palestine is an Islam state. The tension between these countries is further increased by the urge to dominate a large portion of land to settle those who subscribe to the Jewish religion. In the Africa’s most populated state of Nigeria, tension between Christians and Muslims in the 20 th century consequently led to the current state of war perpetrated by the Muslim arm called Boko Haram. The extremists execute Christians at any opportunity. The Al-Qaeda-supported group has taken advantage of the hostility between the two religions to claim and secede from the main Nigeria and create a Muslim state (Abah, 2013).

On the other hand, it has been argued that religion has developed additional importance in the current world given that globalization has changed almost everything. It becomes essential when political and national groupings are broken apart. For example, in Yugoslavia during the beginning of the fiscal 1990s, Serbians, Croatians, and Bosnians took positions as Muslims, Orthodox, or Christians (Woodlock et al., 2013). From this, Muslim academics have over centuries managed to develop a ‘just war’ theory. The theory seeks to justify that Muslims can kill others when protecting their religious beliefs. Thus, for greedy and cruel leaders to advance their territorial desires, they have taken advantage of the inclusion of ‘just-war’ in the name of Jihad in the Quran.

In the Bible, it is evident that wars were mainly based on religion. God would use a certain population to punish those who did not follow His ways. The Israelites were commonly used as the vessel for God to punish others who turned against Him. Many people who try to justify terrorism tend to distort the approach in the contemporary world to cause fear in those perceived to be of different religion. Besides, for cruel people to oppress others, they often exploit religion based on the claim for defenseless. In other situations, it is positively utilized by others to defend against such oppression. Those who are perceived to be weak in the society gang up on religious grounds to ensure that the strong and cruel hardly unleash harm on them.

Thus, religious corruption is often criticized in almost all religions. For example, both the Bible and Quran criticize religious hypocrisy. The verse that criticizes religious in the Quran (Q2:204-205) may appropriately be applied to Saddam Hussein situation in the 1990s and early 2000. The president ensured that the world saw him reciting prayers on television. However, he continued to gas and bomb Kurds. He was evidently a cruel dictator who disguised himself as a devoted Muslim. It is this fact that one may conclude that indeed religion offers an essential cover and strong motivation for those who seek to do evil.

Another aspect of religion can be seen from the perspective of Atheism. When people declare that they are atheists, believers of such a religion frown upon them. It is common for such individuals to be excommunicated from the mainstream society. Such individuals are described in hurting terms. Savage comments such as being labeled stupid or fascists are common especially among age mates as well as those who are grown-up than the atheists. Such scenarios are common in the internet. When people declare that they are atheists, there is always an overwhelming reaction from all places on earth. In fact, atheists believe that all religions are unhelpful making believers to be agitated and angered. Conversely, atheists observe those who believe in religion as foolish (Houlihan, 2012).

In the recent years, tension between atheists and believers has been rising considering the swelling number of atheists who are convinced of the need to scorn believers. After the 9/11 attack on American landmarks, some popular people who practice atheism including Ayaan Ali backed nations to be violent against any Islamic country. In a conversation between Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, atheist’s hatred of Muslims was evident. He asked his friend if he is ever worried that after atheists win the war and wipe out Christianity, Muslims would replace the vacuum. This demonstrates the violent hatred of Islamic religion by emerging atheists.

On the other hand, it is indicative of the frightening idealized nightmare that atheists possess. One may wonder why atheists seek to eliminate Christianity. The atheists’ objective to eliminate Christianity may be driven by the fact that Catholics have allegedly committed multiple contravening crimes such as protecting their leaders who commit sex with minors while they are supposed to live in celibacy. The opposition of abortion by Christians and other religions is also a driving force that renders atheists to violently attack them resulting in actual war. Although religious institutions may be dysfunctional, it does not justify their elimination. The view echoes strong hatred that continues to increase anxiety in the society.

From the beginning of human existence, religion has been linked to many types of quarrels and brutalities. The hands of believers are tainted with blood. Thus, it is reasonable to claim that religion when placed in the hands of wrong individuals may result in devastating harm. In the early days, religious wars were less than what is experienced in the current world. The perception that religion is the primary cause of main wars in the history of humankind is only engrained in mind and community. Out of more than 1,800 main armed conflicts, only less than 130 can be categorized as having originated from religious differences. This means that about ten percent can be associated with religion. It indicates that few people were killed in these conflicts. In the ancient world, wars that were fought due to religion appeared to be less bloody compared to those fought based on other reasons.

In many societies, religion is a positive tool that facilitates the cohesion of a community. It offers a platform for relating and associating with others. Unfortunately, it is openly different when placed in the possession of power-hungry individuals. Such individuals use religious convictions to trounce their rivals. During political campaigns, it is common for aspirants to consolidate votes by associating themselves with certain religions. It is common for such power-hungry aspirants to convert to religions that they consider as a boost to their political endeavors. When religious authority is in the hands of such individuals, it demonstrates the state of human psychology as opposed to the religion itself. This is mainly the basis why most wars experienced in the past involved and will probably continue to entail religion.

Abah, H. (2013). Boko haram has no religious coloration – Bideh. Web.

Erbele, C. (2012). God and War: An exploration. Journal of Law & Religion, 28(1), 1-46.

Houlihan, P. (2012). Local Catholicism as transnational war experience: Everyday religious practice in occupied northern France, 1914–1918. Central European History, 45(1), 233-267.

Woodlock, R., Loewenstein, A., Caro, J. & Smart, S. (2013). Doesn’t religion cause most of the conflict in the world? Web.

• Supply and Demand Changes: Pork and Oil Prices
• "The Prayer of the Atheist Formal Analysis" by C. Valero
• God in "On Being an Atheist" by H. J. McCloskey
• St. Paul at the Areopagus
• The Lost Letters of Pergamum by Bruce Longenecker
• Thomas Jefferson’s Understanding of Christ
• History of Religion in Britain
• Ancient Hebrew Scriptures
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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IvyPanda . 2020. "Religion as the Cause of Wars." May 30, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/religion-as-the-cause-of-wars/.

1. IvyPanda . "Religion as the Cause of Wars." May 30, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/religion-as-the-cause-of-wars/.

Bibliography

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Beyond Intractability

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By Eric Brahm

November 2005  

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, a casual glance at world affairs would suggest that religion is at the core of much of the strife around the globe. Often, religion is a contentious issue. Where eternal salvation is at stake, compromise can be difficult at or even sinful. Religion is also important because, as a central part of many individuals' identity, any threat to one's beliefs is a threat to one's very being. This is a primary motivation for ethno-religious nationalists.

However, the relationship between religion and conflict is, in fact, a complex one. Religiously-motivated peace builders have played important roles in addressing many conflicts around the world. This aspect of religion and conflict is discussed in the parallel essay on religion and peace . This essay considers some of the means through which religion can be a source of conflict.

Religion and Conflict

Although not necessarily so, there are some aspects of religion that make it susceptible to being a latent source of conflict. All religions have their accepted dogma, or articles of belief, that followers must accept without question. This can lead to inflexibility and intolerance in the face of other beliefs. After all, if it is the word of God, how can one compromise it? At the same time, scripture and dogma are often vague and open to interpretation. Therefore, conflict can arise over whose interpretation is the correct one, a conflict that ultimately cannot be solved because there is no arbiter . The winner generally is the interpretation that attracts the most followers. However, those followers must also be motivated to action. Although, almost invariably, the majority of any faith hold moderate views, they are often more complacent, whereas extremists are motivated to bring their interpretation of God's will to fruition.

Religious extremists can contribute to conflict escalation . They see radical measures as necessary to fulfilling God's wishes. Fundamentalists of any religion tend to take a Manichean view of the world. If the world is a struggle between good and evil, it is hard to justify compromising with the devil. Any sign of moderation can be decried as selling out, more importantly, of abandoning God's will.

Some groups, such as America's New Christian Right and Jama'at-i-Islami of Pakistan, have operated largely through constitutional means though still pursue intolerant ends. In circumstances where moderate ways are not perceived to have produced results, whether social, political, or economic, the populace may turn to extreme interpretations for solutions. Without legitimate mechanisms for religious groups to express their views, they may be more likely to resort to violence. Hizbullah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine have engaged in violence, but they also gained supporters through social service work when the government is perceived as doing little for the population. Radical Jewish cells in Israel and Hindu nationalists and Sikh extremists in India are other examples of fundamentalist movements driven by perceived threat to the faith. Religious revivalism is powerful in that it can provide a sense of pride and purpose, but in places such as Sri Lanka and Sudan it has produced a strong form of illiberal nationalism that has periodically led to intolerance and discrimination .[1] Some religious groups, such as the Kach and Kahane Chai parties in Israel or Egypt's Islamic Jihad, consider violence to be a ‘duty'.[2] Those who call for violence see themselves as divinely directed and therefore obstacles must be eliminated.

Many religions also have significant strains of evangelism, which can be conflictual. Believers are called upon to spread the word of God and increase the numbers of the flock. For example, the effort to impose Christianity on subject peoples was an important part of the conflict surrounding European colonization. Similarly, a group may seek to deny other religions the opportunity to practice their faith. In part, this is out of a desire to minimize beliefs the dominant group feels to be inferior or dangerous. Suppression of Christianity in China and the Sudan are but two contemporary examples. In the case of China, it is not a conflict between religions, but rather the government views religion as a dangerous rival for citizens' loyalties. All of these instances derive from a lack of respect for other faiths.

Religious fundamentalists are primarily driven by displeasure with modernity.[3] Motivated by the marginalization of religion in modern society, they act to restore faith to a central place. There is a need for purification of the religion in the eyes of fundamentalists. Recently, cultural globalization has in part become shorthand for this trend. The spread of Western materialism is often blamed for increases in gambling, alcoholism, and loose morals in general. Al-Qaeda, for example, claims it is motivated by this neo-imperialism as well as the presence of foreign military forces in the Muslim holy lands. The liberal underpinning of Western culture is also threatening to tradition in prioritizing the individual over the group, and by questioning the appropriate role for women in society. Of course, the growth of the New Christian Right in the United States indicates that Westerners too feel that modern society is missing something. Conflict over abortion and the teaching of evolution in schools are but two examples of issues where some groups feel religious tradition has been abandoned.

Religious nationalists too can produce extremist sentiment. Religious nationalists tend to view their religious traditions as so closely tied to their nation or their land that any threat to one of these is a threat to one's existence. Therefore, religious nationalists respond to threats to the religion by seeking a political entity in which their faith is privileged at the expense of others. In these contexts, it is also likely that religious symbols will come to be used to forward ethnic or nationalist causes. This has been the case for Catholics in Northern Ireland, the Serbian Orthodox church in Milosevic's Yugoslavia, and Hindu nationalists in India.

Popular portrayals of religion often reinforce the view of religion being conflictual. The global media has paid significant attention to religion and conflict, but not the ways in which religion has played a powerful peacemaking role. This excessive emphasis on the negative side of religion and the actions of religious extremists generates interfaith fear and hostility. What is more, media portrayals of religious conflict have tended to do so in such a way so as to confuse rather than inform. It does so by misunderstanding goals and alliances between groups, thereby exacerbating polarization . The tendency to carelessly throw around the terms ‘fundamentalist' and ‘extremist' masks significant differences in beliefs, goals, and tactics.

Religion and Latent Conflict

In virtually every heterogeneous society, religious difference serves as a source of potential conflict. Because individuals are often ignorant of other faiths, there is some potential tension but it does not necessarily mean conflict will result. Religion is not necessarily conflictual but, as with ethnicity or race, religion serves, as a way to distinguish one's self and one's group from the other. Often, the group with less power, be it political or economic, is more aware of the tension than the privileged. When the privileged group is a minority, however, such as the Jews historically were in much of Europe, they are often well aware of the latent conflict. There are steps that can be taken at this stage to head off conflict. Interfaith dialogue , discussed further below, can increase understanding. Intermediaries may help facilitate this.

Religion and Conflict Escalation

With religion a latent source of conflict, a triggering event can cause the conflict to escalate. At this stage in a conflict, grievances, goals, and methods often change in such a way so as to make the conflict more difficult to resolve. The momentum of the conflict may give extremists the upper hand. In a crisis, group members may see extremists as those that can produce what appear to be gains, at least in the short-term. In such situations, group identities are even more firmly shaped in relation to the other group, thereby reinforcing the message of extremists that one's religion is threatened by another faith that is diametrically opposed. Often, historic grievances are recast as being the responsibility of the current enemy. Because at this stage tactics often come detached from goals, radical interpretations are increasingly favored. Once martyrs have been sacrificed, it becomes increasingly difficult to compromise because their lives will seem to have been lost in vain (see the essay on entrapment* for more on this problem).

What is to Be Done

In the eyes of many, religion is inherently conflictual, but this is not necessarily so. Therefore, in part, the solution is to promote a heightened awareness of the positive peace building and reconciliatory role religion has played in many conflict situations. More generally, fighting ignorance can go a long way. Interfaith dialogue would be beneficial at all levels of religious hierarchies and across all segments of religious communities. Where silence and misunderstanding are all too common, learning about other religions would be a powerful step forward. Being educated about other religions does not mean conversion but may facilitate understanding and respect for other faiths. Communicating in a spirit of humility and engaging in self-criticism would also be helpful.[4]

[1] David Little, "Belief, Ethnicity, and Nationalism" http://www.usip.org/religionpeace/rehr/belethnat.html .

[2] David Little, "Religious Militancy," in Managing Global Chaos, eds, Chester A. Crocker, Fen Osler Hampson, and Pamela Aall (Washington DC: USIP Press, 1996).

[3] R. Scott Appleby, "Religion, Conflict Transformation, and Peacebuilding," in Turbulent Peace: The Challenges of Managing International Conflict, eds, Chester A. Crocker, Fen Osler Hampson, and Pamela Aall (Washington DC: USIP Press, 2001).

[4] David Smock, Building Interreligious Trust in a Climate of Fear: An Abrahamic Trialogue, http://www.usip.org/pubs/specialreports/sr99.pdf

Use the following to cite this article: Brahm, Eric. "Religion and Conflict." Beyond Intractability . Eds. Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess. Conflict Information Consortium, University of Colorado, Boulder. Posted: November 2005 < http://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/religion-and-conflict >.

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Study Asks If War Makes A Person More ... Or Less ... Religious

What's the link between war and religion? Does living through the traumas of conflict make people more religious – or turn them against religion?

Those age-old questions are probed in two studies.

"War Increases Religiosity" appears in Nature: Human Behavior. A team led by Joseph Henrich, chairman of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology of Harvard University, analyzed interview responses from 1,709 individuals in 71 villages in three countries that had suffered prolonged, brutal internal conflicts that did not revolve around religious or ethnic differences: Sierra Leone's civil war, 1991-2002; the Lord's Resistance Army insurgency in Uganda, 1986-2006; and Tajikistan's civil war and continuing political violence.

The data showed that people who had been more intensely affected by the violence of war were more likely to join or participate in religious groups and practice religious rituals. The data, collected in 2010 and 2011, came from previously published work by other researchers.

The more profound the impact of war on an individual — such as the death, injury or abduction of a household member — the greater the likelihood grew of that person turning to religion. By contrast, those who had been less affected by the impact of war were also less likely to join a a religious group. The statistical breakdown showed that for those in Sierra Leone, greater exposure to war made it 12% more likely individuals would turn to religion; 14% more for those in Uganda; and 41% more for Tajikstan.

Even as years passed, Henrich's latest study found that religious practice continued to play a significant role in the lives of many of those surveyed. "These effects on religiosity persist even 5, 8 and 13 years post-conflict," according to the study. The effects held true whether those surveyed were Muslim or Christian.

So what does that mean in terms of day-to-day behavior? In Henrich's previous work, he had found that religion led people to be more "prosocial" — that is, more supportive, cooperative and generous — but in a particular way. "When people hear the word cooperation, they interpret that positively," he said. But his study showed a "more narrow" type of cooperation that only included people in one's own group or village while excluding outsiders. As Henrich put it, "When I'm hit by a shock, what should I do? Who should I turn to? The groups you're already in become tighter, and you're less interested in reaching out to those who are not" in your in-group.

The positive side is that such cooperation could lead to nation building. But the danger, Henrich says, is that these ingredients can alternatively lead to what he calls a "negative feedback loop." In that scenario, these already tightly knit religious groups could, in the event of an attack or if they fear one is imminent, band together to fight off other groups and defend their own religious beliefs.

And that's the mixed message from the study's findings. Even though the groups studied by Henrich and his colleagues had not initially experienced a war with a religious element baked in, they could have a religious awakening in the aftermath that could foster "parochial cooperation" – but could also "catalyze ongoing cycles of violent conflict."

Henrich echoes the conclusions of an earlier research study, published in 2016, by psychology professors Hongfei Du of Guangzhou University and Peilian Chi of the University of Macau. They also found that the greater exposure to war, the more likely people are to become more religious, belong to religious groups and participate in religious rituals. That was their takeaway after analyzing responses from 82,772 individuals in 57 countries contained in the 2010 World Values Survey.

In a post-war environment, religion can serve as a psychological buffer against worry about future conflicts, they write — and can also help people achieve a strong sense of belonging to a group.

And yet, Du wrote in his email to NPR, some research has shown that a different factor could tip the cycle toward peacemaking instead: whether the religious leaders hold and emphasize compassionate values rather than promote violent solutions to conflicts. It's an idea that was crystallized in a quote from Gandhi: "The need of the moment is not one religion, but mutual respect and tolerance of the devotees of the different religions."

Diane Cole writes for many publications, including The Wall Street Journal and The Jewish Week , and is book columnist for The Psychotherapy Networker. She is the author of the memoir After Great Pain: A New Life Emerges. Her website is dianejcole.com .

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Essay on Does Religion Cause War?

Religion and violence are one of the hottest topics in the world. This notion is enhanced by unquestioned beliefs, such as the concepts purporting that religious individuals are intrinsically anti-science and that religions hold absolute facts about the world. Therefore, arguments exist based on whether religion causes war. Some analysts believe that it may lead to violence, while others are of the contrary opinion. Thus, this paper will unveil the reasoning detailing why religion often exists in warfare, but not the main cause. In this standpoint, facts specifying how people utilize religious faith in order to cause conflict will make a significant part of the discussion. Religion does not cause war, but it is always present in most wars because parties struggling for political and economic influence, wealth and territories, and power tend to use it as a tool to justify their wrongdoings and even control how people think.

Fight for political space is one dominant theme, which is often intertwined with religion. A group of individuals will tend to challenge those in power, especially when they feel excluded from leadership. With the use of religion, such groups may convince others that their cause of action is justifiable and that it is based on faith (Eriksen, 2016). For example, the Syrian War had different faith-based groups, such as Islamic State of the Iraq and Levant (ISIS), whereby each party had support from different nations, such as U.S., and Russia, among others. So, every country supported a given group based on ideologies. In consideration of this instance, it is explicit that religion is used to justify a cause of action, but not necessarily the cause of war.

Some group of people or organization use religion in order to gain power by controlling people’s mindset. This approach restrains people from accessing the most fundamental freedoms, thus encouraging victims to be violent. According to Fiedler (2014), religion often exists as a culprit amid sectarian violence. For example, Muslims in Palestinian and Jews based in Israel often fight over a piece of land basing their arguments on history. This war is evidence that religion is just a recipe for the violence. So, in this case, it is not the religion causing the war, but people who group themselves based on religious faith and origin.

A clash of civilization is another major cause of conflict, which is closely linked to religion. This concept delves on the divergent views between Western culture and those of the Middle East. The West represents a monolithic reality adapted to modernism while Muslim world signifies old age, that is, backward (Cavanaugh, 2007). This perception results in unending opposition between these two groups, thus enhancing conflict between the Arab world and the West. For example, Muslims believe in Jihad War – a concept, which is regressive according to the western culture. Therefore, the conflicts that may arise are then fueled by these divergent viewpoints, which show that religion only acts to enhance the warfare, but not the actual cause.

In conclusion, religion is often entangled in most causes of war, but it is not the real instigator. First, the fight for political and economic power is one of the significant reasons for war globally whereby the parties involved make use of religion as a mask to achieve their goals. Second, the struggle for power forces the perpetrators to utilize religion as a tool to control and justify their cause of action. Third, class of civilization between the West and Muslims tend to enhance warfare that may exist between them. In all the three cases, it is evident that religion is an implicit instigator, which is well-knotted in the causes, but not the genuine initiator.

Cavanaugh, W. T. (2007). Does Religion Cause Violence?  Harvard Divinity Bulletin . Retrieved from https://bulletin.hds.harvard.edu/articles/springsummer2007/does-religion-cause-violence

Eriksen, I. (2016). Religion alone does not cause civil war.  ScienceNordic . Retrieved from http://sciencenordic.com/religion-alone-does-not-cause-civil-war

Fiedler, M. (2014). Religion is often a presence in violence, but it’s not the cause.  National Catholic Reporter . Retrieved from www.ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/religion-often-presence-violence-its-not-cause

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Whistling In The Wind

Economics, Politics, Religion and Esperanto

Religion As A Cause Of War

I would argue that a major cause of most (but not all) wars is religion. Religion divides people into separate groups and tells them that they are incompatible with each other. It provides justification for the killing of others and the promise of reward for martyrs.

There are numerous examples of religious wars. Some of the main ones include the Crusades, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, The War On Terror, The Thirty Year War, Northern Ireland and the numerous religious wars of England and France (which culminated in the Saint Bartholomew Day Massacre). A frequent justification for the British, French, Spanish, Portuguese etc, (which led to horrendous massacres) empires was so that the natives could be converted to Christianity. Religions claim they have the one truth that will save only them and all other religions are wrong and/or the work of the devil. The Torah, Bible and Koran all contain justifications for the killing of non-believers (who after all are going to Hell). They are clear that following a different religion is an unforgivable crime deserving death and destruction of entire cities (see here). 2nd Kings 10:19-27 records how every member of the religion of Baal was killed (with God’s approval).  2nd Chronicles 28:6 records the killing of 120,000 “valiant” men because they did not worship God. These are two of many examples.

Religion played a part in causing World War Two (as well as nationalism). Hitler believed he was doing God’s work (see a post on this topic), denounced atheism and regularly referred to God in his speeches. The Holocaust built upon the anti-Semitism that came from the Christian belief that Jews were guilty of murdering Jesus (see here). If there had been no religion, there would be no difference between Christians and Jews and therefore no persecution. Fascist dictatorships in Spain, Italy and Latin America were strongly supported and endorsed by the Catholic Church.

Some argue that Atheism is responsible for the crimes of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. However this is confusing correlation and causation. They killed people because they were brutal Communist dictators, not because of their religious beliefs (or lack of any). Collectivisation still would have failed and caused famines killing millions, regardless of the religious beliefs of the nation. For comparison, Scandinavian countries are very secular, yet are not dictatorships. (see here)

Even wars which were caused by reasons other than religion, religion was used to justify it and motivate soldiers. For example, the fact that Protestant Germany invaded Catholic Belgium was a main part of the recruitment process in Ireland during World War One, even though it was not a purely religious war.

Religion creates division between people who otherwise have little differences. It justifies hate and murder. It is responsible for numerous wars and conflicts. Along with nationalism it is the major cause of war.

(In my next post I will look at this topic in a specifically Irish context)

20 thoughts on “Religion As A Cause Of War”

My question is, as I believe that you have touched the surface of great thoughts, whether religious beliefs are truly the fuel of the fire or are those beliefs just a flag that the leaders use to rally the people under?

Thats the million dollar question and it doesn’t have an easy answer. It really depends on the situation. I think most times religion is the genuine cause, take Al-Queda for example

it is not a fuel kind of a thing, it is a catalyst that helps the fire to burn for a very long time.

No doubt religion can be used as a tool to manipulate people. But so can anything–“race,” color, class, dress, tradition, heritage, region, etc. If religion is removed from the equation, something else will simply be chosen as a tool to manipulate. Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot proved that point.

I don’t think that is necessarily true. I think its perfectly possible to be irreligious and still not go to war. Take the Nordic countries. They are the most secular free countries yet have not been involved in wars or had colonies

That’s a load of twaddle. Where do you think the Vikings came from? Yet you claim that the Nordic countries have never been involved in wars, “Take the Nordic countries. They are the most secular free countries yet have not been involved in wars or had colonies”. Hey but one can’t expect more from someone who’s spiritual father is Satan himself, the great Accuser and Deceiver. No mate, most wars have been caused by mans lust for power and greed.

The Vikings weren’t secular

Hej Robert,

You are very correct Robert. Ideas has consequences. But I believe you failed to see the core problem, which is man himself.

Nordic countries were very religious. Starting with polytheism in Nordic Mythology to Protestantism. It is in 20th century that Nordic countries began the move toward secularism, mostly because of sexual liberty and rebelling against puritanism.

Denmark colonized Estonia(1206-1645), Faroe Islands and Iceland (1536?- today), Greenland (1814-1979), and East Indian island(?-1845)

Norway, Sweden, and Finland also had colonies. They have also being in many wars. e.g The Battle of Jutland, WW.I. Moreover Denmark and Sweden fought against each other for a long time.

Majority of Danish, as I am married to a Dan and live in Denmark, do not believe in Personal God, they are non-religious but not atheist, since most believe in some higher powers/energies and many are mixing eastern religion e.g. Buddhism, with what they like to form what they believe.

I’m not to going to argue with you regarding Danish history which you would probably know more about. I will just say that your examples of colonies and wars happened before the secularization of those countries, forming a rough correlation. Secondly they are quite minor compared to other (more religious) countries. No Scandinavian country had colonies in Africa or Asia, the few they had were of very small islands. I may be incorrect in saying this but I thought Scandinavian countries were more dragged unwillingly into modern wars (like WW1 & 2) than active participants

The main reason I mentioned Scandinavia was to show that atheism/secularism doesn’t automatically lead to Stalin-style mass murder

I do not think atheism/secularism/Christianity automatically lead to mass murder because the problem is not with ideology but with people holding them.

In Denmark, 60% are members of the Danish Lutheran church(State church) but only 4% goes to church. Christianity in Denmark is more or less a tradition. Norway, last Monday, separated the church and the state, to officially became secular, and Denmark is on its way, since the state is forcing the church at the moment to marriage homosexuals.

I am glad that the church and the state are going to be separate because what is of the church is of the church, and what is of the state is of the state. Christians, in the government/state ought to use reasons, and good arguments to present cases. The time of just saying we simply believe, is over. It is time to think! Time to give reasons.

Sorry I was wrong with Denmark 60% are members of the Danish Lutheran church. It’s 80% of whole Denmark and 60% in Copenhagen according to last year research(Line Nybro Petersen, University of Copenhagen, PhD thesis “‘Wicked Angels, Adorable Vampires!”)

” The core problem, which is the man himself.”. When you talk about religions, it comes under the list of man’s problems including war. Because it was the man who created the religions, gods, etc for a particular purpose. And the “Religion As A Cause Of War” is an opinion based on discursive writing. So, Sir Robert is right in his own perspective or in his belief on the topic. According to me, you both are right. Five years back I believed that the religion, god and other belief related pieces of stuff were formed to attain concentration and peace, but there were too many religions and gods were formed and believed as time passed, where many elders or priests took advantage of people’s belief on god and made their own life luxurious. This is one case, and others were there were religions like Buddhism and Jainism formed because of religion that person who formed Buddhism and Jainism would have a bad culture or less respect towards some elders and people because of their place in the kingdom or because of their property or he may have wanted people to have a proper peace under his belief or perspective. Because of the overloaded amount of religions in the world, there was a clash between the beliefs of two or more religions so, people started fighting over that topic, that our belief is right and their’s is wrong. Now if a man would live without forming any religion or if they had only one religion, it would be a totally different case. Because you all should be knowing what kind of mindset a human has. There would be people who would fight for conquering lands, looting and others. In this era or this century you would say that there are UN and other peace maintaining agencies, but how long would you think they can keep the world in peace, people may even go against them because even if they do the slightest mistake, people will go asking questions and non-UN member states or the countries that oppose UN can go against them. And who knows even the members of the UN would sit quietly. And how can we say that the UN will keep helping others for upcoming years or centuries, it may do something that no one would expect that to happen? So war may go on for years or it may continue till there would be no life left on the Earth. Man’s mindset keeps on changing, it doesn’t matter how good or bad they are. how can you be so sure that Danish people may live like this in the upcoming generation? How can you be so sure that your next generation would be the same as now? I’m just a mere high school student, so I have an irregular mindset, so the above paragraph may not be a total yes after I grow up and gain more knowledge on how an adult’s life is. I’m sorry if I did write something wrong in the above paragraphs.

There is no substitute for data and careful study. A few people have done this for wars through the ages, and each of them have found that religion was a major cause in only about 10% of wars. Other factors (nationalism, perceived loss of traditional land, totalitarian states) are far more important. And you may not wish to know that atheism has been associated with more killing than religion, according to the studies. Check them out in Does religion cause wars?.

Of course any war is one too many, and all of our viewpoints and traditions have blood on their hands, so none of us can be complacent.

I admit that there are always a multiple of over lapping causes for war and it is hard to separate them out. The wars you are referring to were caused by Communist dictators, the fact they were atheist is irrelevant.

I completely agree that arguments should be based upon facts and logic and I want to thank you as you are probably the first commenter whose has referenced a study, rather than relying on rhetoric.

However I believe the study wildly under estimates the influence of religion on war, for example it rated the Northern Ireland conflict as only a number 1 on a scale of 0 to 5 with 5 being the most religious.

G’day Robert, I’m interested in your comments about Ireland, as obviously you have personal experience. But that in fact may be the problem – if we are too close to something, we may only see the limited view from our own perspective, and not the big picture.

The main study I quoted set up a series of criteria (whether the rhetoric supporting war was religious in content, whether religious leaders in the country supported or opposed the war, what other factors were relevant, etc) and then scored each of the criteria. I think they had more chance of being objective and thus were closer to getting it right than our subjective assessments.

Your comment about the communists and atheism is revealing. That is exactly what many christians might think about the atrocities committed by their side. We have to be even-handed and judge each ‘side’ by the same criteria. Do we know how many of the church’s atrocities during (say) the middle ages were really committed for religious reasons, or for power or greed, etc? Contrary to your comment, we have quotes to show that some of communisms atrocities were committed in the name of atheism, but again, do we know the balance of factors?

I think we need to (1) accept the findings of this independent study, and (2) by very humble about any claims we make.

Thanks for the opportunity to comment.

Robert, you mentioned al-Qaeda, and I’d like to take that up.

Al-Qaeda’s motives behind 9/11 were two-fold: to get the US to withdraw its unquestioned support of Israel and to force it leave the gulf (specifically, US troops stationed in Saudi Arabia). In fact, these were the reasons detailed by bin Laden in his confessional videos, as well as by Khalid Sheikh Muhammad in the 911 Commission Report.

These are very Realist concerns. I am not arguing that al-Qaeda does not have strong ideological roots, but that is more for the purposes of recruitment. Nowhere in their statements have they said that they would like to kill 300,000,000 American infidels.

Religion is a rallying cry. It does, like you say, create an in-group and and out-group. But you can’t say nationalism (secular nationalism) doesn’t play a part. The Tamil Tigers, for instance, were a Marxist group! And saying that Hitler only acted out of his religious convictions is, in my flaws opinion, a bit of a stretch.

Good day to you! I await your thoughts.

Its true that there is never just one reason for any war, there is always a multitude of overlapping reasons. Bin Laden couches his language in religious terms and has a Islamic caliphate as his aim. The reason he objects to American troops in Saudi Arabia is that they are non-Muslims near the holy site of Mecca. While nationalism does play a part, it would be a grave mistake to underestimate the role of religion.

I’m sorry if I gave the impression that nationalism does not play a part. It absolutely does and was a bigger motivator than religion for Hitler. My point is that it also was a motivator.

national identity is of course often (not always) linked with religious identity. so it becomes difficult to spate the two. Is the current conflict in the Ukraine because of religion or because of other geopolitical factors?

Things I suspect are much more complex – focusing on the wrong cause does nothing to0 increase our understanding of war – think of an onion – many layers – explanations for human behavior also have many layers

why does religion at times become an obstacle to human development,even cause of war and hatred? Can you please answer my question? I’m doing a project on this topic and if you have any idea in what other way please answer. I’ll be waiting for your reply ASAP.

Quite ironic how an atheist has to quote a passage from the Bible. The funny thing is you atheists claim the Bible is a book of fairy-tales. So according to your atheist philosophy it didn’t happen and those Baal woeshippers were not killed.

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Religion as the Cause of War, Essay Example

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War and religion are two entities that have existed since the beginning of time. War is an organized and prolonged conflict between two or more opposing sides. Often, one or more of those sides are driven by religious thoughts and beliefs. The questioning of the cause of war, as well as the questioning of others’ religious beliefs has gone on just as long as war and religion themselves. Many believe that the two are intertwined and that religion is usually the cause of most major wars. In places like Palestine, Iran and throughout the Middle East, religion has been fueling wars and conflicts for centuries. There are even wars that are started within one specific religion over various beliefs or territorial rights- like the fighting between the Islamic sects in the Middle East. Because of the wide and prominent occurrence of wars in the name of “god”, many people tend to believe that religion can be a leading cause of war all over the globe.

Even when deconstructed, wars that may not seem to be religiously oriented tend to come down to religion in the end. Countless wars fought throughout history were shown to be the result of territorial disputes, ethnic and racial differences or other various non-religious factors. When examined closely however, it was the poverty of the people that often caused them to revolt- poverty that was caused by religion. “Unlike many infectious diseases, the plague of war is not caused by some virus or bacterium or parasite, but rather by a pathogen that is even more potentially lethal: the beliefs created by the human mind” (Tosteson, 2003).

That statement by Tosteson is a powerful and heavy allegation- that human beliefs are more threatening and lethal to people than diseases. Can the human mind really be so powerful that it can manifest a war solely based on religious beliefs? History says yes. A religious war is a war caused by, or justified by, religious differences. Religious wars can be traced back as far as the beginning of organized religions and have continued and still occur today.

Between the 11th and 13th century, the Crusades occurred in Europe. The Crusades were a war between Christians and Muslims which centered around the city of Jerusalem and the Holy places of Palestine- a religiously motivated war that lasted a total of 702 years. The conflict between Palestine and Israel is both an ethnic conflict and a religious war that has been ongoing since the the 1950s and has caused a massive number of casualties over who owns the religious rights to Jerusalem. In 1966, South Vietnam saw a period of civil unrest where the discrimination against the Buddhist population in the country created the growth of Buddhist institutions as they sought to participate in national politics and gain better treatment- as the Buddhist population continued to be ignored, a “Struggle Movement” formed in South Vietnam and civil unrest took over the northern part of the country. In Ireland, religious rivalries between the Protestants and the Catholics have caused civil unrest and violence for decades.

“Much of the conflict in Northern Ireland can be explained by the unstable balance of power between the two groups and the vulnerability this causes. Northern Ireland has a population of 1,577,836 (The Northern Ireland Census, 1991). Of these, 605,639 are Catholic 788,136 are other religions, mostly Protestant, and 174,061 are none or did not state” (Malignani Institute of Technology Staff).

And even in today’s society, examples like the September 11th terrorist attacks, the Boston Marathon bombings, the continued conflict in Israel and Palestine and the deepening clashes between Islamic sects- particularly the Sunnis and the Shiites- continue to reinforce the notion that religion does in fact lead to war.

The previous examples show that no religion is excluded from any involvement in religious oriented wars. Catholics, Christians, Protestants, Muslims, Jewish, Buddhist, and Hindu followers have all been tied to religious wars throughout history in one way or another. This reinforces Tosteson’s theory that human beliefs are the most lethal pathogen in society- in one way, shape or form, a majority of major wars and violent attacks against innocent civilians have been in the name of religion.

Because of the violent nature of war, it begs for justification- however justifying what drives a man to want to kill is not a simple feat. Since the beginning of time, philosophers, historians, theologians and more have tried to pinpoint the cause of war- trying to find a meaning behind all of the violence and hatred. The facts show that many of the times, the driving forces of these violent acts are motivated by religious beliefs, even if those beliefs are misconstrued. Many times people will act out in the name of a certain religion, even when the majority of that particular religion disagrees with the actions of the group or person. Other times, an entire religion will be in cahoots and wage war against another religion. This can be over land and territory, contradicting religious beliefs, or superficial issues like money and class separation, which at their base have ultimately been caused by specific religious ideations.

Deconstructing religious wars belief by belief, it becomes obvious that the human mind can be a powerful motivating force in the cause of war. Looking at the history of the Catholic church, the Crusades were a brutal and violent time for the church that lasted over 700 years.

“The Crusades were expeditions undertaken- in fulfilment of a solemn vow- to deliver

the Holy Places from Mohammedan tyranny…The idea of the crusade corresponds to a political conception which was realized in Christendom from the eleventh to the fifteenth century. After pronouncing a solemn vow, each warrior received a cross from the hands of the pope or his legates, and was thenceforth considered a soldier of the Church. Crusaders were granted indulgences and temporal privileges, such as exemption from civil jurisdiction, inviolability of persons or lands” (Brehier, 1908).

The Crusades were a long and trying time for Europe, where Catholic ideologies dominated the area- causing wars, violence, and mass devastation.

In Palestine and Israel, a heated conflict has been ongoing since the beginning of the 20th century. The conflict between Israel and Palestine has its roots as far back as the late 19th and early 20th centuries- sourcing from the birth of major nationalist movements among the Jews, as well as the Arabs, both geared towards attaining sovereignty for their people. In 1947 the United Nations had to intervene on behalf of the Palestinian and Israeli people in hopes to decrease the conflict between the two sides. The United Nations partitioned the land into Arab and Jewish states- but once again, the two sides could not agree on the United Nation’s solution to the ongoing conflict, and war broke out. The conflict between Palestine and Israel continues today and the violence and crime associated with the conflict is rooted in religion.

Religious based terrorist attacks are also a form of religious war, if one defines war as an organized conflict between two sides. These attacks are drastic in nature and often rooted in deep founded religious beliefs. If religion causes war, and terrorism is a form of war, then it can be assumed that religion be a leading cause of terrorism. “The world’s great religions all have both peaceful and violent messages from which believers can choose. Religious terrorists and violent extremists share the decision to interpret religion to justify violence, whether they are Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, or Sikh” (Zalman, 2008). Examples of significant terrorist attacks rooted in religion include the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, and suicide bombings in Israel in the name of Islam, the attacks by Zionist militants on the British in the 1940s which were rooted in Jewish beliefs and the attacks by reconstructive Christian’s in the name of God aimed at homosexuals and women committing abortion.

History is a great indicator that religion may not be the only cause of war, but in many cases, if it is not the driving force of the conflict, in some way, shape or form, religious ideologies play a role in most large conflicts worldwide. The fact that every single religion has a history of war caused by specific beliefs echoes the statement that the human mind is the most dangerous and lethal weapon facing the globe. It is these strongly held beliefs that motivate people to cause such vicious and cruel acts. There is no question that when people have contrasting beliefs, conflict will arise. Religious wars have existed for centuries- and for centuries presidents, kings, politicians, historians and more have tried to find a way to end the constant conflicts and disagreements between the opposing sides. The fact is, there my be no solution. Even if it can be 100% proven that religion is the cause of war, that does nothing to end the conflict and violence that has been going on for centuries. In an ideal world, everyone would learn to get along- but that is not the world in which we live- and the fact is, people are going to continue to have this ideals and beliefs because religion is the opiate of the masses. As long as religion exists, religious wars will exist- it is an unfortunate inevitability.

Tosteson, Daniel. “Unhealthy Beliefs: Religion and the Plague of War.” The MIT Press, Aug. 2003. Web. 29 May 2013. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/20027865>.

Malignani Institute of Technology Staff. “The Northern Ireland Religion Conflict – The Conflict.” The Northern Ireland Religion Conflict – The Conflict . N.p., n.d. Web. 30 May 2013. <http://www.malignani.ud.it/WebEnis/theWebWeWant/conflict.html>.

Bréhier, Louis. “Crusades.” The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 4. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1908. 30 May 2013 <http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04543c.htm>.

Isseroff, Ami. “Current Issues in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.” The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict . MidEastWeb for Coexistence, 2007. Web. 30 May 2013. <http://mideastweb.org/nutshell.htm>.

Zalman, Amy, PHD. “Religious Terrorism.” About.com Terrorism Issues . About.com, 2008. Web. 30 May 2013. <http://terrorism.about.com/od/politicalislamterrorism/tp/Religious-terrorism.htm>.

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Essay On Is Religion The Cause Of War

Table of Contents

Short Essay On Is Religion The Cause Of War

Religion has often been cited as a cause of war, but it is not as simple as attributing war solely to religion. While religion can play a role in conflict, it is often just one of many factors.

Political and economic interests – wars are often fought for political and economic reasons, and religion can be used as a tool to justify or mobilize support for these interests.

Misinterpretation and extremism – religious extremists can misinterpret religious teachings and use them to justify violence, but this is not representative of the religion as a whole.

Historical tensions and conflicts – religion can become entangled in historical tensions and conflicts, leading to further division and violence.

Lack of understanding and tolerance – a lack of understanding and tolerance for different religions can lead to conflict and violence.

Power struggles – religion can be used as a tool in power struggles, with those in power using it to maintain control or gain power.

In conclusion, while religion can play a role in conflict, it is not the sole cause of war. It is often intertwined with other factors such as politics, economics, and power struggles. The root causes of war are complex and multi-faceted, and it is important to consider all factors when examining the causes of conflict.

Long Essay On Is Religion The Cause Of War

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Religion and the Israel-Palestinian Conflict: Cause, Consequence, and Cure

Mohamed Galal Mostafa is a former Egyptian diplomat, and currently a researcher at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is driven by several factors: ethnic, national, historical, and religious. This brief essay focuses on the religious dimension of the conflict, which both historical and recent events suggest lies at its core. That much is almost a truism. What is less often appreciated, however, is how much religion impacts the identity of actors implicated in this conflict, the practical issues at stake, and the relevant policies and attitudes -- even of non-religious participants on both sides. It follows that religion must also be part of any real solution to this tragic and protracted conflict, in ways a concluding paragraph will very briefly outline.

Why is religion at the core of this conflict?

Several religious factors pertinent to Islam and Judaism dictate the role of religion as the main factor in the conflict, notably including the sanctity of holy sites and the apocalyptic narratives of both religions, which are detrimental to any potential for lasting peace between the two sides. Extreme religious Zionists in Israel increasingly see themselves as guardians and definers of the how the Jewish state should be, and are very stringent when it comes to any concessions to the Arabs. On the other hand, Islamist groups in Palestine and elsewhere in the Islamic world advocate the necessity of liberating the “holy” territories and sites for religious reasons, and preach violence and hatred against Israel and the Jewish people.

Religion-based rumors propagated by extremists in the media and social media about the hidden religious agendas of the other side exacerbate these tensions. Examples include rumors about a “Jewish Plan” to destroy al Aqsa mosque and build the Jewish third temple on its remnants, and, on the other side rumors that Muslims hold the annihilation of Jews at the core of their belief.

In addition, worsening socio-economic conditions in the Arab and Islamic world contribute to the growth of religious radicalism, pushing a larger percentage of youth towards fanaticism, and religion-inspired politics.

The advent of the Arab spring, ironically, also posed a threat to Arab-Israeli peace, as previously stable regimes were often challenged by extreme political views. A prominent example was the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, who after succeeding to the presidency in 2012, threatened to compromise the peace agreement with Israel based on their religious ideology – even if they did not immediately tear up the treaty.

Practical Consequences O n Negotiations

If we take a closer look at the permanent status issues – borders, security, mutual recognition, refugees, the Jewish settlements in the West Bank, and the issue of authority over Jerusalem -- we find that the last two are directly linked to the faiths of Jewish people and Muslim people around the world. The original ownership and authority over Jerusalem are highly contested due to the presence of holy sites for Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the city. This conflict is also deeply rooted in history, in which Jerusalem has been attacked fifty-two times, captured and recaptured forty-four times, besieged twenty-three times, and destroyed twice. The city was ruled by the Ancient Egyptians, the Canaanites, the Israelites, the Greeks, the Romans, the Persians, Byzantines, the Islamic Caliphates, the Crusaders, the Ottomans, and finally the British, before its division into Israeli and Jordanian sectors from 1948 to 1967.

In Jewish and Biblical history, Jerusalem was the capital of the Kingdom of Israel during the reign of King David. It is also home to the Temple Mount, and the Western Wall, both highly sanctified sites in Judaism. In Islamic history, the city was the first Muslim Qiblah (the direction which Muslims face during their prayer). It is also the place where Prophet Muhammad’s Isra’ and Mi'raj (bringing forward and ascension to heaven, also called the night journey) ensued according to the Qur’an.

Thus the sanctity of Jerusalem resonates among many Muslims around the world, not just Palestinians. Reactions in the Arab and the Islamic world to the recent violence in Gaza and the West Bank after the U.S. decision to relocate the embassy to Jerusalem suggest that many view this issue mainly in a religious light. The narratives on social media platforms and the media in general in those countries usually included references to religion, even among seemingly secular people.

The issue of West Bank settlements, too, has a religious aspect. It concerns the physical restoration of the biblical land of Israel before the return of the Messiah, something central to the beliefs of some orthodox Jews. They continue to settle the West Bank to fulfill this prophecy, clashing with the local Palestinians.

On the other hand, according to fundamentalist schools of Islam, at the end of days, the whole land of Israel and Palestine should be under Islamic rule. Prophecies surrounding this issue are deeply rooted in some versions of the Hadith (traditional sayings of the Prophet), although only implied in the Qur’an.

Historical and Organizational Consequences

As far back as the 1948 war, some Jewish extremist groups justified their contribution to the conflict as part of a divinely promised return to the holy land of Israel. More recently, however, the most extreme such groups, like the “Gush Emunim Underground” which plotted to bomb the mosques in the Temple Mount area back in the 1980s, have been banned by the Israeli authorities

On the other side, several religious extremist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood justified their contribution to the conflict in 1948 as an eschatological event pertinent to the approach of the Day of Judgment. Nowadays, terrorist Brotherhood offshoots like Hamas call for using violence against Israel in the name of Islam, without distinction between civilian and military targets. They continue to use religion to gain supporters in Gaza and elsewhere by propagating this apocalyptic narrative. This Muslim Brotherhood group ideology, stretching through many Arab (and several non-Arab) countries, seeks to revive Islam and re-establish the historical Islamic Caliphate by seizing power. They consider Israel to be a “foreign object” in the continuum of a potential Islamic Caliphate, and they continue to call for the use of violence against it.

In parallel to this extreme Sunni side, ever since the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979, Iran has been the fiercest in opposing Israel. Its radical regime calls openly for the destruction of Israel and asserts the necessity of this quest from a theological standpoint. It finances Hezbollah and Hamas and supplies them with weapons and training, as well as supporting Assad’s forces in Syria, thereby posing a direct security threat to Israel – all allegedly in the name of Islam.

Social Consequences

For two Arab countries, Egypt and Jordan, direct peacemaking was achieved with Israel. Nevertheless, that did not entail the people-to-people or cultural normalization that is assumed to accompany peace, due to many reasons -- including religious ones. Accepting peace with Israel may be viewed as religious treachery, which goes against the beliefs not only of extremists but also of many relative moderates in Arab states. The key point is that these various forms of religion-based conflict drivers are not limited to religious groups, but are linked to much wider bases in society. This results from two major factors, as follows:

Interest and Identity Overlap: Interests of religious extremists who are directly linked to the religious drivers at many instances overlap with other segments in the Arab and Islamic societies. They share some elements of their identities, if not the whole. For example, a secular nationalist Palestinian and an extremely religious, Salafi Palestinian in the Qassam Brigades of Hamas may share very similar views of Israel. Much the same is true of some secularists, traditionalists, and fundamentalists in other Arab or Islamic societies.

Systematic Abuse of Linkages to Wider Bases in Societies: Religious extremists in the Arab and Islamic world and in Israel, whether violent or not, have used deliberately the ideological and functional linkages to connect to wider bases in their respective countries. Ideologically, links with the wider society are established by trying to radicalize elements that have this potential, either due to natural tendencies toward perceived communal self-defense, or to the superficial knowledge of their religions. For example, extremists would use an isolated incident of violence against the Jewish community to justify retaliation by their wider society. A non-religious traditional Arab might well share the fear of secularization, and of “Jewish influence,” with the Islamist.  Functionally, extreme Imams have very strong tools at their disposals across the Arab and Islamic world to promote violence through their mosques and privately funded media, subjecting people repeatedly to the narrative and rhetoric of violence against Israel in particular and Jewish people in general.

Possible Interventions

To contribute to curbing the religious violence in this conflict, several interventions can be considered: interfaith dialogue; the remembrance of past fruitful cooperation between Jews and Muslims, ever since the seventh century; and focusing on religious texts asserting positive and tolerant religious values, and reinforcing these values in educational systems on both sides. These are perhaps not new ideas. What should be new, however, is the urgency and centrality of this religious component as part of any current effort to achieve an Israeli-Palestinian “deal of the century” – or even just to mitigate the conflict and pave the way for peaceful coexistence in the long-term future.

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Is Religion the Cause of War Essay

Human beings are the most unique creation of God on this earth. We all are born equally by the grace of the supreme power of God. Further, we are differentiated into different religions according to the family where we are born. We are classified into different religions on the basis of different beliefs and practices. The history reveals about several destruction and bloodshed have taken place because of the religious wars in the past.

Short and Long Essay on Is Religion the Cause of War in English

Can we say that religion is the factor responsible for the destruction and war in the past and present? It is an important topic for exam aspirants. I will be providing a long and short essay on this topic that might be helpful for the students of schools, colleges, and universities.

10 Lines Essay on Advantages (100 – 120 Words)

1) Today people are separated from each other by following different religions.

2) People follow different gods and their teachings.

3) Religious war occurs when people start hating other religions.

4) Religious conflicts had a great history in our world.

5) Some religion promotes peace as the solution to every problem.

6) It is only people who fight in the name of religion.

7) When religious sentiments are harmed, people attack those with other religions.

8) No religion teaches war and conflict among each other.

9) Many dirty political motives promote war by targeting religion.

10) Crusades, Bosnian war, 9/11 attack, etc are some religious conflicts taken place in the past.

Short Essay 1 (300 Words) – Every Religion is the Messenger of Love, Peace, Unity, Not War

Introduction

The culture and traditions in different nations of the world differ from each other. It is because of the presence of people practicing different religions. Every religion has its unique culture and tradition. There are some countries in the world with people belonging to only one religion while some countries have people of different religions. India is a unique nation in the world where the highest cultural and religious diversity can be observed.

Every Religion is the Messenger of Love, Peace, and Unity

Religion is a way to be closer and worship the supreme power god. There are many religions in this world with their different culture and tradition. There is a sacred book in every religion that gives important teaching to the people. There is no religion in the world that states war and violence to be the solution to any problem. Every religion spreads the message of love, peace, and humanity among the people of the world.

The Cause of War in the Name of Religion!

It is not the religion that is the cause of religious wars in the past as well as the present. The reason for these wars and clashes is the difference in the views of people and the selfish motives of some political people. The people fight when their religious sentiments are hurt. There are some political people who have made religion cause of war and God as a business. They get benefitted when there are wars in the name of religion. We need to understand the political motives behind any type of religious war and take action accordingly. Also, we need to have respect for the values and beliefs of other religions.

It is a most common habit of people to blame the entire family or background of the person if he or she is wrong. In the same way, it will be wrong to state that religion is the cause behind the religious wars in the world except for political motives.

Long Essay 2 (1000 Words) – Is Religion Responsible for the Religious Conflicts in the World

Every nation and society in this world consists of people of different religions. Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Jainism, Parsi are some of the major religions. Religion is about worshipping the supreme power by our faith and beliefs. It can be said as the structure of the society where the people follow similar rituals, traditions, and possess a common faith.

What is Religion?

It is very complex to understand what basically religion is as it has various definitions in different contexts. It has been explained by several people in different ways. In easier words, Religion is a path that connects human beings with the divine power of God. It is about the beliefs and practices performed by human beings to worship god. There is only one supreme power in the universe and is worshipped in various forms by different religions. Different ways of having faith in god differentiate us into different religions and each religion is distinguished by a group of people with the same beliefs and practices. There are almost 10,000 religions in this world. Religion itself is an institution that inculcates moral values, unity, ethical values, Laws, rules and regulations, in us.

Conflicts due to Religion

The wars fought by the people of one religion against another religion are called religious conflicts. The religious wars fought in history are only 6.86% of the total wars fought. Wars are destructing as it causes massive loss of life, bloodshed, and terror. Religious wars form a major part of our history. These wars are said to depict religion to be the main cause for the happening of such violence and destruction. Some of the major religious conflicts are Crusades, The Inquisition, Middle East war, Bosnian war, French wars of religion, Northern Island war, etc. At present, the terrorist attacks and 9/11 attacks due to religious conflicts have taken place. The wars took place in the past, happening in the present, and will also be continued in the future. These wars are the result of the hatred that occurred between the people of different religions.

Why Religious Conflicts Occur?

The differences between the ideologies of the people of different religions have been a major issue for religious violence in the past and present. It is the belief that makes people become the follower of a particular religion. People become aggressive if something is said against their religion or faith. It simply hurts their belief. This increases the chances of revolts between people of different religions. Moreover, discrimination on the basis of caste and religion are amongst the major cause of conflicts at present in India and world.

The concept of secularism states that people of the nation are free to practice any religion according to their beliefs. This makes the people following different religions live together. The conflict is sure to arise where people of different religions live together. The reason for these conflicts is the hatred in the people of one religion for the other religion. It arises because people want others to live the same as they do. They try to impose their own rules on others and control people’s thinking. This is impossible as every one of us has the freedom to live life according to our choice. These differences will surely result in conflicts.

Religion is Always the Promoter of Love and Peace

People in the world are followers of different religions. Every religion has some sacred books. These sacred books like Gita, Quran, Bible or Guru Granth Sahib, etc contain the important teachings given by the religion. Every religion teaches us the same thing but the way they impart is different. All religions teach us to live in unity, love, and peace. No religion is a promoter of violence. Every religion gives us a lesson to end up the differences with a peaceful solution.

Religions being the promoter of peace harmony and love can never be a cause of violence. It can be stated with an example- The parents never teach us any wrong moral and habit. But somehow due to wrong influence if any one of us turns into a spoilt child. Will it be good to blame the family background or parents for the wrong deeds of the son/daughter? In the same way, we cannot blame the entire religion to be a cause of religious violence.

Is Religion Responsible for the Religious Conflicts in the World?

Religion is something that is beyond any type of conflict. It is not the religion but the belief of people who are said to be the followers of the religion. Most of the religious wars either in past or present are the results of misconceptions or any other factor like social, political, or economic factors given the face of religion. We cannot blame religion for the wrong deeds of some people. If we observe the terrorist activities it is also concerned with a particular religion but we cannot blame the whole religion because of the wrong deeds of few people of the religion.

Terrorists do not belong to any religion as no religion teaches violence and destruction. Lord Jesus also said that try to win the enemies not by war or killing but by peacemaking. The religious wars fought in the past were more to satisfy the self aggressiveness and motive than religion being a primary cause of war. Winning by war is the thought of the people, not religion. Thus, it will be more appropriate to state that ideologies of people and selfish motives are responsible for the conflicts, not religion.

Religion is used as a tool for arising conflicts among the people of different religions. This is because of some people who are just interested in getting success in their selfish motives. Truly Religious people will never find war as a solution for any kind of enmity. Religion teaches us love, peace and harmony and thus same can be applied to get rid of the differences created between the religions.

FAQs: Frequently Asked Questions

Ans . Religious wars constitute to 6.98% of the total wars in history.

Ans . The ideology change was the major cause of dispute among the people of different religions.

Ans . Hinduism that has evolved more than 4000 years back is said to be the oldest religion on earth.

Ans . Christianity is a highly followed religion in the world.

Ans . Shintoism is followed in Japan.

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Most Israelis dislike Netanyahu, but support the war in Gaza – an Israeli scholar explains what’s driving public opinion

Director of Security Studies and Professor of Criminology and Justice Studies, UMass Lowell

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Eight months after Israel invaded the Gaza Strip, some critics observe that the Israeli military hasn’t met either of its goals of destroying Hamas and rescuing all of the remaining 133 hostages Hamas is holding.

Yet two-thirds of Israelis still support their military’s aggressive approach in Gaza – including limiting humanitarian aid to Palestinians.

While many Israelis support the military’s war in Gaza, most Israelis have also lost confidence in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and would like to see new political leadership.

As someone who has studied Israeli politics for almost three decades , I believe it’s important to understand what elements contribute to Israelis’ collective mindset to explain these seemingly contradictory dynamics and views.

A familiar feeling of persecution

Hamas militants killed an estimated 1,200 people in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and took 240 hostages back to Gaza.

The brutal Oct. 7 murders and the extermination of entire communities in southern Israel left Israelis feeling shocked, vulnerable and insecure. The attacks reminded Israelis that the country faces existential threats, which they believe need to be eliminated in any way possible .

Jewish people have long been persecuted, dating back from the biblical era to the Holocaust during World War II. Some scholars call this feeling of a constant, looming risk of persecution the “Masada syndrome .” Masada, an ancient fortification in southern Israel, was where the ancient Kingdom of Israel waged a final battle against the Roman army in A.D. 73 . Masada was eventually destroyed and all its Jewish inhabitants committed suicide in order to avoid becoming enslaved by the Romans. Jews then lost their political independence for almost 2,000 years, until Israel was established in 1948.

The story of Masada is still taught and remembered in Israel as a constant reminder that Jewish people cannot ever fully rely on the mercy or help of other countries – and that Jewish identity and independence are always at risk of persecution. For a long time, the Israeli Defense Forces held induction ceremonies atop Masada, which is also a popular tourism site.

As a ceremonial text used during the Jewish holiday of Passover says, “ Each and every generation they rise up against us to destroy us .”

The Masada syndrome has been less pronounced among most Israelis in recent decades. This is partially because, up until recently, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been relatively muted since the second intifada , a violent uprising by Palestinians in the early 2000s. Israel also signed peace treaties with Arab countries including the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco over the past several years.

The Oct. 7 attacks resulted in widespread national trauma and pushed many Israelis to re-adopt the Masada mentality .

Alone again

The global response to Oct. 7 is another important factor that pushed many Israelis to retreat to old feelings of persecution and a perceived need for self-defense.

While the United States, the United Kingdom and France expressed strong support for Israel shortly after Oct. 7, other countries , like Russia and China, did not condemn the Hamas attacks .

It also took United Nations experts about five months to recognize the systematic sexual violence committed on Oct. 7 .

Further isolating Israelis was their widespread rejection that Israel is committing war crimes , as the International Criminal Court recently alleged in a request for arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant . Some Israelis have also questioned the accuracy of information about civilian death tolls in Gaza.

Most Israelis see these allegations of genocide as an example of global bias against Israel and as a new form of antisemitism.

Netanyahu has exploited these feelings of persecution to both legitimize Israel’s war in Gaza and to downplay any criticism of his own leadership.

Netanyahu’s downfall

Since the beginning of the war in Gaza, polls consistently reflect Israelis’ declining support for the conservative political parties that make up Netanyahu’s ruling coalition .

A May 2024 poll shows that if elections were held today, Netanyahu’s party would lose almost 40% of the seats it has in the Israeli Parliament. The same poll also found that just 35% of Israelis think that Netanyahu is fit to be a prime minister.

In January, just 15% of Israelis thought Netanyahu should stay in office .

Several factors help explain Israelis’ overall support for Netanyahu’s policies in Gaza, but their growing distrust of him as a politician and leader.

First, most Israelis blame Netanyahu’s government for Oct. 7 . They see Netanyahu as primarily responsible for the fact that Israel did not address Hamas’ strengthening military capabilities in the past decade, including its creation of underground tunnels in Gaza.

There are also damaging issues that predate Oct 7. Netanyahu has tried to undermine the independence of the country’s judicial branch and passed legislation in 2023 that limited courts’ judicial review powers over legislation and government policies. This sparked widespread protests in Israel .

Israelis are also concerned that Netanyahu’s approach to the war – and inability to reach a hostage deal or agree to some kind of cease-fire – may be affected by his desire to stay in power. Netanyahu is facing several corruption-related charges and wants to delay these criminal trials – his defense team has said that the war leaves him with little time to attend the trials. Netanyahu also wants to appease his radical right-wing supporters, who want the war to continue.

Israelis’ concerns about Netanyahu over the past few months manifested in an outbreak of mass demonstrations in different Israeli cities. These protesters, including families of the hostages, are demanding that Netanyahu reach a deal that will free the remaining hostages – even if that means agreeing to a long-term cease-fire.

But it is not clear if these protesters make up the majority of the public opinion – and it is important to not confuse this protest with most Israelis’ desire to see Hamas defeated.

Israel’s dilemma

Israel’s path forward is unclear, and it will be influenced by a few issues. An increase in public pressure on Netanyahu may force him eventually to take responsibility for not preventing the Oct. 7 attack and resign.

The growing intensity of Israelis’ demonstrations demanding his resignation show the increasing possibility of such a scenario.

At the same time, growing international pressure on Israel to end its war in Gaza may lead Netanyahu to have more conflicts with far-right members of his coalition, eventually causing the disintegration of his administration and his fall from power.

Finally, the possibility of the war expanding into a broader regional conflict would dramatically change the region’s current dynamics in ways that are difficult to predict. Nonetheless, this development could force Israel to end the war in Gaza in order to address other emerging military threats.

• Benjamin Netanyahu
• Israeli politics
• Likud Party
• Israel history
• Israeli hostages
• Israel-Hamas war
• Israeli psyche
• Jewish people
• Jewish memory
• Oct. 7 attack
• Gaza conflict
• Israel-Hamas
• Israeli public opinion
• October 7, 2023
• Israel-Hamas conflict

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Is the Israel-Palestine conflict a religious war or struggle by the colonised against the coloniser?

It is often said that the bloodiest wars in history were fought in the name of religion. In fact, the opposite is true.

The most inhumane conflicts in history were all secular, modernist, and conducted according to the logic of the rational sciences. While it is true that the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition , and other holy wars dragged on for centuries in the medieval world, these were always interlaced with “secular” interests like economics and politics of power, and their death tolls (if known) pale in comparison to those of modern warfare.

Forty million people were killed during World War I, over 50 million during World War II, the great atheist Stalin killed millions during his reign as General Secretary of the Soviet Union (even if the standard 20 million number may have been American propaganda), and Pol Pot was responsible for the genocide of two million of his fellow Cambodians (again, the numbers are disputed).

The exact number of casualties in all the wars varies, but when we enter the language of “giving or taking” a few million here and there, we have already entered the realm of humanity reduced to bare life.

Counting souls, not bodies

By comparison, the so-called religious conflicts of recent history were much more benign. The Yugoslav wars, ostensibly rooted in an immortal Catholic/Orthodox rivalry, saw around 140,000 deaths , and Islamic State terror in Iraq and Syria did not top 35,000 casualties (at the highest estimate).

Even the Hindu/Muslim fratricide during Partition “only” resulted in around one million deaths ; a “small” number compared to the 20th century’s secular world wars, but perhaps more painful because it was brother against brother, neighbour against neighbour. Its pain can still be felt in a way that the spectacular numbers of the world wars’ military casualties perhaps cannot be.

There are two points to be taken from the discussion so far. One, it is simply not true that religion has been the cause of the most inhumane wars and killings in history. The facts clearly illustrate an inverse situation, to the extent that one might wonder who or what benefits from this often-repeated myth.

Moreover, whereas secular politics driven by Enlightenment ideals or utopian projects like communism have regarded human life as a statistical fact subordinate to a greater imminent good, it is religion that has maintained its fidelity to the idea of a soul, that which uniquely inhabits each and every body. The soul, in its afterlife, designates a place for the individual beyond the collective good, as seen in concepts like martyrdom — a theology for which secular ideologies have no viable alternative.

And, two, the pain caused by violent conflicts cannot be measured in numbers. If this were true, then our capacity to feel pain from the deaths of our loved ones would be trivial compared to the pain felt from knowledge of distant wars. No amount of solidarity in the world can move us to such extremes of empathy.

Secular vs religious

I offer these thoughts now in a time of great suffering in the world — in Palestine — where secular and religious ideologies meet in complicated and often contradictory ways.

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There is no mistaking that the Israel-Palestine conflict is a colonial conflict, meaning that it is a secular conflict in which the colonised refuse the terms laid out by the coloniser on basic principles of human dignity and justice. But this basic framework is also imbued with significant religious overtones, and a kaleidoscope of other undertones.

For half a century, leftist internationalists have invested in the Palestinian revolution as a litmus test for a potential world revolution. Similarly, for over a century, Muslims have viewed Palestinian suffering as synonymous with Muslim suffering, and Jewish dominance over Palestine as representative of diminishing Muslim sovereignty.

Israelis, too, construct their unique form of colonialism not on scientific concepts of racial superiority (akin to Nazi Germany’s colonial aspirations) but on Jewish supremacy derived from biblical prophecy.

Regardless of the efforts made by secular Jewish intellectuals, both in the past and present, to dissociate Zionism from religious influences, the fact remains that the millennia-old Jewish connection to Palestine finds its foundation solely in the Torah, the Mishnah, and the Talmud — the sacred texts of Judaism.

At the same time, to Israelis who are convinced that their colonised subjects are inherently antisemitic Jew-haters, the question must be asked: Would Palestinians hate their colonisers any less had Israel been a Hindu or Christian settler colony? A related version of the question can also be posed to Muslim publics around the world who pray for Palestinians because they are (mostly) Muslims: Would the Ummah abandon Palestine if its inhabitants were Buddhists or Sikhs?

These are difficult questions, but we are in difficult times. Israeli soldiers have consistently used Jewish symbols during the genocide in Gaza, from erecting menorahs in bombed-out neighbourhoods to underwriting a genocidal subtext into Jewish holidays.

True, this is a perverted Judaism that does not speak for all Jews, in the same way that Islamic militancy does not speak for all Muslims, but the religious nature of Israel’s war cannot be brushed aside as a mere curiosity.

One can see shades of the militant Islamic State (IS) in videos of Israel’s conduct in Gaza and the West Bank. A particularly disturbing instance that comes to mind is a recent video in which an Israeli soldier shoots an elderly Palestinian man — a convert to Judaism — for not being sufficiently Jewish.

The video shows the soldier interrogating the elderly man’s religion and then cuts out before he is shot at point-blank range. Its cruelty jolts the memory of videos that surfaced from Raqqa and Sinjar a decade ago. So the question then becomes: Is the genocide in Gaza a religious one or a secular one? And if it is both, as is probably the case, where does one seep into the other?

The evolution of Zionism

Zionism is a project with many faces, currents, countercurrents, and evolutions. In the past two decades, its way of self-narration has adapted to global sentiments, but without sticking to any one of them exclusively. The basic frame narrative of European Jewish settlers establishing a state on the fringes of Arabia has gone from a story of utopian nation-building in a barren desert to a bellicose narrative in which there was a war with the Arabs and the Jews fairly won their spoils.

More recent shifts use the language of decolonisation and indigeneity, purporting to depict the Jews as indigenous people shouting in the wilderness for their ancestral land rights (as if they were the Navajo nation) but nobody hears them.

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These shifts indicate that Israel is not immune to changing global sentiments, and that adapting to these new horizons is hard and constant work. But because the Palestinian story is now known to the world, and because this story touches the hearts of whoever hears it, Israel has had to search for new discursive strategies to situate itself in this changing world.

A new kind of narrative voice has emerged in Israel since Hamas’s uprising on October 7 . This is one that acknowledges the dark matter of Israeli history that were long circumvented: massacres of Palestinian villages in 1947 and 1948, collusion with succeeding imperial powers like Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States, manipulating peace treaties signed on lavish lawns of Western capitals, and so on.

Perhaps because it is no longer possible to conceal truths in the age of the internet, perspectives that were once taboo in Israeli society are now game for legitimate discussion.

Another reason for this new voice is that Palestinians have also changed. Long having favoured some version of a binational model as a solution to the Israel-Palestine impasse, younger Palestinians have shifted to a revolutionary Algerian model, one in which there is no solution but driving the colonisers out of the homeland, en masse, and even after generations. Not aloof to this new world order, the new Israeli voice says: “We are refugees, and should the Palestinian resistance win, we would have nowhere to go.”

There is a tragic sincerity in this voice. Yet, when I watch the videos from Gaza, it is difficult to empathise with Israelis who believe that genocide is the only solution to permanently safeguard their own existence on the land. We know from psychoanalysis that the death drive, as Freud called it, meaning the human pulsion toward sadism and destruction, is as natural as our pulsion toward pleasure, and Gaza has become a museum of the death drive. But it does not have to be this way.

Can the Israeli youth contemplate an exit from violence?

In a fascinating recent book on genocide, the anthropologist and psychiatrist Richard Rechtman draws from years-long research with asylum seekers in France to reach a highly original insight — that the millions of asylum seekers from Afghanistan, tribal areas of Pakistan, and Iraq who have flooded Europe over the past decade are, in many cases, not seeking asylum because they are afraid for their own lives.

These men often belong to the same religion and sometimes the same tribal lineages as the jihadists from whom they seek asylum, and therefore the probability that these men would be killed is low. Rather, they are fleeing their villages, families, and lifeworlds because they do not want to be recruited by jihadist groups that would essentially oblige these young men to become killers.

In other words, they leave everything and flee because they refuse to kill. To contain their experience to the generic category of “migrant” is a lack that does not adequately capture the ethical sacrifice that these men have made.

In lieu of such an insight, one wonders what would happen if, as the world changes around them, a generation of Israeli reservist soldiers and conscription-age teenagers wake up one morning and decide not to kill; to not participate in a holy war.

They would indeed have to leave Israel under these circumstances, but this would be an exit not as disgraced colonists but as asylum seekers — like the hundreds and thousands of young men resettled in monotonous small towns in Germany, Austria, Sweden; building new lives in distant places — who refuse to participate in a genocide in the name of religion.

Header image: Women and children mourn people killed in Israeli bombardment, at a health clinic in the area of Tel al-Sultan in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. — AFP

Arpan Roy is an anthropologist researching in Palestine and currently based in Berlin. His book Relative Strangers: Romani Kinship and Palestinian Difference will be published in 2024 by University of Toronto Press.

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Guest Essay

What Do I Owe the Dead of My Generation’s Mismanaged Wars?

By Phil Klay

Mr. Klay is a novelist and a Marine Corps veteran of the Iraq War. His most recent book is the essay collection “Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War.”

About 10 years ago, as the war in Afghanistan was slowly, painfully winding down, I walked through Arlington National Cemetery with a fellow Marine veteran and a relative of mine visiting from Ireland. We passed row after row of pristine white tombs, the dead of all the just wars and unjust wars that made and remade this country, and my relative told us he found it quite moving; he hadn’t been expecting that. Perhaps he thought it’d be more bombastic, or obviously militaristic, and he was taken by the beauty and serenity and quiet dignity of the place.

So we brought him to Section 60 to see some of the newest graves, of kids born in the ’90s, and I told him the sight filled me with rage, these young lives thrown into a mismanaged war, where even their deaths, at that late stage, were mostly ignored. Just the background hum of a global superpower.

A couple of years later, in 2021, the Afghan war finally ended, taking with it a few American children of the 2000s, and, in a moral failure laid on top of the military failure, leaving tens of thousands of Afghans who worked with us at risk in the now completely Taliban-controlled country. The last Marines to fall died in a suicide bombing at a gate to Kabul’s airport, a blast that killed 11 Marines, one Navy medic, one soldier and about 170 Afghan civilians. The Marines were trying to manage the chaos of the poorly planned evacuation of Afghans from Kabul — a humanitarian mission at heart, trying to help those we were abandoning. A week before she died, one of the Marines, Sgt. Nicole Gee, posted a photo of her cradling a baby in Kabul and captioned it, “I love my job.”

America responded to those deaths with a drone strike against a Kabul vehicle the military claimed was transporting ISIS members who were about to carry out another attack, but that, in a twist that felt grotesquely emblematic of so many of our failures, turned out to carry an Afghan aid worker. The blast killed the aid worker and his relatives, seven of whom were children. The sort of people those Marines died trying to help.

How do you memorialize the dead of a failed war? At Arlington, it’s easy to let your heart swell with pride as you pass certain graves. Here are the heroes that ended slavery. Here are the patriots who defeated fascism. We think of them as inextricably bound up with the cause they gave their life to. The same can’t be said for more morally troubling wars, from the Philippines to Vietnam. And for the dead of my generation’s wars, for the dead I knew, the reasons they died sit awkwardly alongside the honor I owe them.

I watched a lot of Marines go off to Afghanistan, a war that I could have gone to but that I chose to avoid. Mostly, they were young. That’s the thing Hollywood most often gets wrong about war when they cast grown men to portray America’s finest killers. Look at a Marine infantry platoon, so many of whose members joined at 17 or 18, and you see boys. Boys who haven’t grown into cynicism yet. Some find it in the middle of their tours. Some keep that idealistic flame burning through multiple deployments. And some die before it can be extinguished.

For so many of the kids I saw, their mission mattered to them, and so their mission should matter to all of us when we remember their deaths. And the mission was a catastrophe. Memorial Day should come with sorrow and patriotic pride, yes, but also with a sense of shame. And, though it has faded for me over the years, with anger.

A few months after Kabul fell I went to the Bronx to see a war photographer I admire, Peter van Agtmael, taking a group of adult learners through a display of his photography from 9/11 to the present at the Bronx Documentary Center, photographs now collected in the book “ Look at the U.S.A. ”

“I just got back from Afghanistan, and it’s controversial to say, but it’s beautiful,” he told the group. “It’s beautiful to see Afghanistan at peace.”

Beautiful . I thought of a Marine in 2009, just back from Afghanistan, hollow-eyed, telling us in a monotone about his best friend taking a bullet to the head in these beautiful regions of the country, now at peace. What would he make of such a claim? Around me on the walls I saw a burned soldier in a combat hospital, the arm of a Trump supporter climbing over a wall by the Capitol on Jan. 6, the dust cloud of an improvised bomb detonation in Iraq.

Toward the end of the gallery, there was a huge print hung high up. You craned your neck and saw a homeless encampment in Las Vegas, and then, craning further, you saw an F-16 fighter jet, an aircraft that costs tens of millions of dollars, flying above. Amid our national forgetting of the wars, there was something powerful about seeing this accounting of America in the South Bronx, in a community whose struggles have so often been subject to forgetting, effacing, indifference. And, God, it was painful.

In the past when I’ve thought about the recent dead, I’ve told myself that service to country, service unto the point of death, is a momentous enough sacrifice to overshadow all other questions. The cause doesn’t matter so much if the fallen I knew served courageously, looked after their fellow Marines and kept their honor clean. But I’ve come to feel that airbrushing out the complexities of their wars is, ultimately, disrespectful to the dead. We owe it to the dead to remember what mattered to them, the ideals they held, as well as how those ideals were betrayed or failed to match reality.

This Memorial Day, as I get ready to take my sons to march in our local Memorial Day parade, our country is in the midst of the most divisive antiwar protests since the early days of the Iraq war, protests my friends characterize as either “objectively pro-Hamas” or as “opposing undeniable genocide.” Questions long dormant, about how we use our might and whom we help kill, feel like live political questions once again (even if we’re not talking much about actual American military deployments, or the troops who have most recently died at the hands of Iranian proxies). The debate is raw and angry.

Good. What a good, uncomfortable, painful national mood for remembering the dead. This year, when I remember them, I will not just remember who they were, the shreds of memory dredged up from past decades. I will remember why they died. All the reasons they died. Because they believed in America. Because America forgot about them. Because they were trying to force-feed a different way of life to people from a different country and culture. Because they wanted to look after their Marines. Because the mission was always hopeless. Because America could be a force for good in the world. Because Presidents Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden didn’t have much of a plan. Because it’s a dangerous world, and somebody’s got to do the killing. Because of college money. Because the Marine Corps is cool as hell. Because they saw “Full Metal Jacket” and wanted to be Joker. Or Animal Mother. Because the war might offer a new hope for Iraq, for Afghanistan. Because we earned others’ hatred, with our cruelty and indifference and carelessness and hubris. Because America was still worth dying for.

Phil Klay is a novelist and a Marine Corps veteran of the Iraq War. His most recent book is the essay collection “ Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War .”

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