It’s Not About Religion
Don’t be so quick to blame religion for warfare.

By Vincent Carroll, editor of the editorial pages at the Rocky Mountain News & coauthor, with Dave Shiflett, of Christianity on Trial: Arguments Against Anti-Religious Bigotry, to be published in October by Encounter Books.
September 26, 2001 9:00 a.m.

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.