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  eligious
fanatics are the worst fanatics," the critic Garry Wills once
declared, and who would want to argue after the events of Sept.
11? Yet is it really true? Are zealots motivated by religious belief
more absolutist, intolerant, and, yes, violent than zealots motivated
by nonreligious aims?
Is the biologist
Richard Dawkins correct when he denounces religion because it "causes
wars"? Does it even cause "most wars," as Paul Harvey
asserted in a 1998 broadcast?
Such sentiments
are virtually conventional wisdom in America, and they will become
even more deeply entrenched given the facile pronouncements of the
past two weeks. One TV network's expert analyst, a former federal
agent, marveled at the hijackers' capacity to live in this country
for many months and not be seduced by middle-class materialism.
Only a singular sort of indoctrination could produce such automatons,
he suggested, the long-term treachery of Communist moles somehow
having escaped his attention.
It so happens,
of course, that religious enthusiasm probably does cause wars. And
it probably also prevents them. Or at least that has been the case
with Christianity, which itself is often accused of the same sort
of fanaticism that brought down the World Trade Center.
"More
people have been killed in the name of Jesus Christ than any other
name in the history of the world," maintains Gore Vidal. Such
anti-Christian bigots usually have in mind the religious wars of
the 16th and 17th centuries — and of course the Crusades. These
are fat targets, to be sure, although perhaps not quite so fat as
many of those who cite them imagine.
For one thing,
even at the height of the post-Reformation bloodletting between
Catholics and Protestants, secular motives were everywhere at play,
and often held the upper hand. They involved rival rulers contending
for power, local leaders resisting central government or a foreign
state, and one class or region pitting itself against another. The
suppression of the Irish under Oliver Cromwell, for example, looks
a lot like a religious war from one perspective. From another, it
looks like nothing so much as an old-fashioned imperial conquest
in which the natives are dispossessed and massacred while the victors
seize the spoils.
This is not
to discount a genuine religious factor even in some of the worst
atrocities. Pope Gregory XIII was so impressed by the Saint Bartholomew's
Day Massacre of French Huguenots by Catholic mobs in 1572, for example,
that he actually commissioned a commemorative medal. Religious sentiment
was perhaps even more prominent in the Crusades — although
it is usually forgotten, as Piers Paul Read has pointed out, that
"the Christians' perception was that wars against Islam were
waged either in defense of Christendom or to liberate and reconquer
lands that were rightfully theirs." Still, there is no getting
around the fact that Pope Urban II galvanized the church's first
holy war with his speech at Clermont in 1095, that St. Bernard exhorted
the faithful to join the Second Crusade some half century later,
and that popes such as Gregory VIII and Innocent III drummed up
combatants for subsequent campaigns. There is equally no doubt that
the ensuing slaughter could be breathtaking — and that the
Crusades involved, in the words of the historian Stephen Neill,
"a lowering of the whole moral temperature of Christendom."
The catalog
of Christian aggression includes many entries besides these highlights,
of course. Some are well-known abominations, such as the Inquisition;
others have been widely forgotten, such as the forced conversion
of the Saxons in the Eighth Century. Yet there are at least four
reasons why it is nonetheless reckless and misleading to label Christianity
a warmongering faith.
The first is
that most of the important opponents of war, persecution, oppression,
and slavery in the history of the West have also been driven by
religious conviction. It was churchmen, after all, who often restrained
the worst instincts of the converted barbarian kings, counseling
mercy where none had been known. It was mainly church officials
who sought to suppress private violence and impose rules on the
conduct of war. And it was church canon law, reinforced by the code
of chivalry, that provided the basis for a right of immunity for
noncombatants.
Even the original
Christian ethic of total nonviolence — "Put your sword
back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the
sword" (Matt. 26:52) — survived and was carried forward
through the centuries: here by Catholic monks, there by Anabaptists,
Mennonites, Moravians, Quakers, Dukhobors, Brethren, and many others.
It was religious agitation that convinced the British government
to grant exemption to military service for reasons of conscience
as early as 1802. And, as secular governments embarked on imperial
adventures that eventually circled the globe, it was men and women
expressing their Christian conscience that decried the often-naked
exploitation of these enterprises.
"The Christian
acceptance of warfare was always somewhat conditional," observes
historian James Turner Johnson. "The use of force was justified
only if it was undertaken against evil, and the soldier was enjoined
to hate the sin against which he was fighting, not the sinner."
The second
reason is one well known to anthropologists: The vast majority of
societies everywhere have engaged in warfare, and many have done
so on a continual basis. One study of 186 societies found war "rare
or absent" in only nine percent of them. The most common reason
for conflict? Not religion, but fear of shortages or impending natural
disaster.
The third reason
is that other ideologies wedded to state power, including nationalism,
seem equally ferocious with or without a religious component. Even
the brutality of ethnic rivalry often appears unrelated to religious
differences. The worst explosion of violence in modern Africa, for
example — in Rwanda — occurred without the goad of religious
animosity. And where religious difference does seem to heighten
ethnic conflict — in Sudan, for example — it is difficult
to believe that the clashing groups would have been holding hands
had they shared the same faith. After all, as the British sociologist
David Martin has observed: "Turks, Iraqis, and Iranians can
slaughter Kurds, and vice versa, with an enthusiasm entirely unaltered
by the presence or absence of religious difference. In Turkey Turks
are largely Sunni, Kurds often Alawite. In Iraq Kurds are Sunni,
like most Iraqis, and in Iran they are Sunni and the Iranians mostly
Shia. But the degree of conflict remains fairly constant."
The final reason
is as obvious as it is irrefutable: Religious zealots have not in
fact been the biggest butchers in Western history, or even close
to it. The body count of corpses from the two great secular barbarisms
of the 20th century, Communism and Nazism — both of which were
hostile to the religions in their midst — runs to well over
100 million.
"For the
historian of the year 3000, where will fanaticism lie? Where, the
oppression of man by man? In the thirteenth century or the twentieth?,"
Regine Pernoud aptly wondered a quarter of a century ago.
Each religion
is a separate story, admittedly, and the motives at play throughout
the history of Islamic jihad have been notoriously difficult to
disentangle. Yet even suicide terrorists, seemingly so foreign to
the West, are not exactly unknown, even in the American heartland.
Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold strode into Columbine High School
knowing full well it was their final act, and neither cared a fig
about religious faith.
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