Is Religion A Major Cause Of War?
Or is it a faux justification for brutality?
It is hard to imagine a world without religion. Religion is almost as old as humanity itself. It is often considered a part of a person’s central identity. Perhaps it’s because we attach so much importance to it that even a small threat to our religious beliefs is considered a great threat to ourselves and our identity.
It is surprising that even though peace is viewed as an ideal state by most, in situations of war, both mass support and participation are present. Man has evolved from being a savage brute to a civilized social being. But glimpses of our previous condition are still visible when we fight wars against each other. Wars incur large scale destruction to life and property. Only an extreme situation can drive humans, the rational animals, to accept and inflict violence and death. This situation can arise from reasons ranging from the desire for power and influence to protecting one’s religion.
Humans have made religion a dogmatic domain. Every religion is portrayed to be inflexible and intolerant to some extent. This is a major reason for religious conflicts. Most religious disputes are resolved through dialogues. Since most people identify as moderates, complacency is preferred to violence. But extremists can be found in every field, and are harder to pacify. They are responsible for inciting violence by interpreting ‘God’s Will’ in their extremist ways. They take radical measures, like war, to support and establish their dogmatic beliefs. In the modern era, acts of terrorism are attributed to religion. Religion has become corrupted by man’s gluttony and brutality. In some twisted way, warfare is deemed as a way to ‘redeem’ oneself, and protect one’s ‘honor’. Religious warfare makes its advocates think that they are dying for ‘the greater good’, when, in reality, they are abandoning the very concept of religion, which is to promote harmony. It is ironic that the concept of religion, meant to make us selfless and forgiving, has instead become a ground for conflicts and hatred.
Humans are always in conflict, but only serious conflicts escalate to wars. History is filled with instances of religiously sanctioned violence. These are often termed as ‘Holy Wars’, which is an oxymoron in itself because nothing about mass violence is ‘holy’. These wars have three common attributes. They are sanctioned by religious leaders, aim to fulfil a religious goal, and regard the supporters and participants as ‘spiritual’ and ‘honorable’. The religious goal can be propagation of faith, ‘recovery’ and ‘purification’ of ‘sacred’ lands and elimination of groups with contrasting faith.
The first ‘Holy War’ is reported to have been fought in October, 312 C.E., instigated by Constantine. Since then, thousands of conflicts, like the India-Pakistan wars, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Syrian civil war have been fought on religious grounds. Millions of people have died in the name of religion.
George Carlin once said, “More people have been killed in the name of God than for any other reason,”. This declaration has been accepted as a fact by most people and for justification, examples including The Crusades and 9/11 are given.
But history does not corroborate this statement. Statistically speaking, only 7% of a total of 1763 wars recorded in the Encyclopedia of Wars have been fought on religious ground. And while 3 million people died in the religion centric Crusades, more than 35 million people died in World War 1, which had nothing to do with religion and was ignited purely because of politics. The Bosnian War, the Rwandan Civil War and The Sri-Lankan Civil War have this misconception in common. They are believed to have religious causes, but in truth, their primary motives were social, economic and political. The Holocaust was genocide, not religious violence. This can be proved by the fact that Hitler hated all non-Aryans, including Jews and Christians. That makes it more of an ethnic genocide than Jewish and Christian violence.
History proves that anti-religion violence has taken more lives than religion-related violence. Communist dictators like Mao and Stalin, who promoted religion-free society, are responsible for more than a hundred million deaths. Even today, Christians are being killed, exiled and imprisoned in North Korea. Anti-religion violence is perhaps most livid in the Indo-Pak partition, in which up to 2 million people were killed and around 20 million people were maimed and displaced.
Religion is used as a cover by the callous to promote cold-blooded violence. It is used to legitimate massacres and assassination of leaders. It is nothing but a pretext for savagery. Therefore, most of the wars fought in the history of mankind have political and ethnic conflicts and an east-west dichotomy at their core.
It should be noted that although religion pits believers of contrasting faith against one another, it does not exactly ‘cause’ wars. Instead, it facilitates them, with other major factors of economics, politics and power present. Religion is used as a tool by politicians to pit different groups against each other. So to call religion the root cause of all major conflicts in the history of humanity is not only an exaggeration but also a factually incorrect statement. Religion does not cause humans to kill each other, in the same way, it does not prevent us from it. Every religion propagates peace and non-violence. It tries to set a certain moral standard for humans to coexist in, and breach of this moral standard by bouts of violence can only be termed as sacrilegious. It should be noted that wars are ‘fought’ between governments, rather than the population. Politics has caused more wars than religion ever will. Greed and cruelty cause wars, not ‘God’. All religion does is create an image of a utopian world, in which vices like greed and belligerence are eliminated. War has no place in religion.
