Wars are complicated things. They rarely have a single cause and often have many.
The Russo-Ukrainian conflict currently winding down (we hope) has layers of
potential causes, and peeling them back one by one will take you places citizens of NATO-aligned countries probably don’t want to go. Let’s just say that the
superficial explanation offered by the Western media — “Putin is evil!” as the
Likewise, Hamas supporters all over the West demonstrate a level of pathological hatred for Israel that goes miles beyond politics as usual. Douglas Murray says, “Nobody is marching for dead Muslims in Yemen. What do they mind? One thing: Jews living.” Glibly attributing the current conflict in Gaza to Israeli oppression, provocation and even “apartheid”, as many in the media do, ignores thousands of years of Jew-focused hatred, the cause of which is ultimately spiritual and the basis for which is far more ethnic than religious. Attempts to assign purely rational or political motivations to last October 7’s Palestinian invasion of Israel all come up short.
Simply … Wrong
Still, because people prefer simplistic answers to complex questions, that tends to be what the “experts” give us when two ethnic groups come into conflict. From 2007’s The End of Faith, by self-described neuroscientist Sam Harris:
“A glance at history, or at the pages of any newspaper, reveals that ideas which divide one group of human beings from another, only to unite them in slaughter, generally have their roots in religion.”
Get rid of religion and you get rid of war, a thesis on the profundity level of John Lennon’s “Imagine”.
Harris is more fun to quote than Richard Dawkins, whose fifteen minutes in the media spotlight have been up for over a decade. Plus Harris is a “scientist”, and science is evidence-based where faith is not, as we are so often told.
Well, not always. In 2008’s The Irrational Atheist, Vox Day comprehensively demolished the myth that religious differences are the primary cause for wars. He did it with the nastiest possible weapon — statistical evidence from well-reputed secular historians — demonstrating that under 7% of the world’s wars have had genuinely religious causes, and only a little over 3% can legitimately be laid at the feet of self-described Christians.
Chopped Liver, or Worse
Day’s argument was so persuasive that four years later Alan Lurie, writing for The Huffington Post, cited his statistics (sadly uncredited), drawing the conclusion that “greed, unbalanced power, and causeless hatred — not religion — are the causes of most wars” and that eliminating them should be mankind’s focus. When a Leftist newsrag makes that level of concession, then leaves it up on their website for the next twelve years rather than memory holing it at the first sign of pushback from the atheists, we should properly consider the causal association of religion with wars the intellectual equivalent of chopped liver.
It’s actually worse than chopped liver. I’m not even sure the 3% of wars attributed to Christians have much of a religious basis at all. The church controversies alleged to produce war, it turns out, were far more ethnic than genuinely religious. Wars over ideas, especially religious ideas, are exceedingly rare, but the accusation of heresy makes a much more compelling justification for attacking your neighbor than garden-variety bigotry, old grudges or greed, even when those are your actual motives. More importantly, it provides a sheen of moral superiority for which young men may be persuaded to give their lives.
Aligning with the Zeitgeist
If the real motivation behind any given war were primarily theological, you would expect to find people from diverse ethnic backgrounds standing shoulder to shoulder on each side. That is the mark of a truly persuasive idea: it transcends petty prejudices and tribalism, uniting unlikely allies and dividing families, as Christ himself prophesied. Yet even in the few so-called religious wars of history, this is almost never the case, leading the attentive observer to question whether the instigators of war were honest about their motives, or if other factors were actually more important to them than theology. The late C.W. Previté-Orton comments on the Constantinian “Christianization” of the Roman Empire in the fourth century:
“When the profession of Christianity became profitable and fashionable, swarms of converts entered the Christian community, bringing with them a general decline in Christian morals and behavior. When all the Roman world had become Christian, it seemed much the same world as it had before conversion.”
In other words, the original movement toward Roman Catholicism was far more Roman than Christian, producing so many new weeds among the wheat that the Christianized Roman world remained a wheat field only in name.
Christians ought to be highly suspicious of professions of religious belief that perfectly align with ethnicity and the cultural zeitgeist. From Constantine on, we have solid reasons to question the spiritual genuineness of any expressed religious motivation for the wars that subsequently ensued, no matter how loudly their proponents trumpeted their faith-based credentials. For wars allegedly inspired by Heaven, they seem almost uniformly devoid of apostolic conviction and devotion to Christ. Moreover, once the Gauls, Franks, Goths and Vandals began to “convert” in large numbers, the pretense that their conflicts with Rome were primarily over doctrinal issues becomes increasingly hard to sustain.
Religious Conflicts with a Suspiciously Ethnic Component
The early fifth century conflicts allegedly prompted by the Arian heresy (that Christ was a created being) also had a significant ethnic component. Previté-Orton writes, “Arianism divided Roman from Germanic barbarian, but its supporters among the Romans were a dwindling remnant.” How much, then, did theology actually contribute to the motivation for the ensuing conflicts? It seems to me they were ethno-political, with the Arian heresy employed as a rallying cry of convenience for the troops. Did Arianism divide them, or were they already divided along ethnic lines?
Next, it was the Monophysite controversy (that Christ had a single nature, divine, not human). Previté-Orton notes the heretical doctrine set the non-Greeks in the Eastern Empire, particularly the Egyptians and Syrians, against the Hellenists. Again, it gives us reason to wonder whether the nature of Christ was all that important to the two sides, or whether it simply provided a convenient excuse to rehash old ethnic grudges.
Strangely, these conflicts did not play out with anything like the same vitriol in the Latin West. Why? The Latins had stopped learning Greek by then, and had no idea their fellow Catholics were using Christology as an excuse to take up the sword against each other. Again, ethnicity trumps theology, but this time theological ignorance was preferable to the alternative.
One more. The Visigoth revolution of the late sixth century came about when King Recared I determined to Romanize the Gothic minority in Spain, who were nominally Christian but theologically Arian. The provocation was religious on its face but thoroughly political in its ambitions. Like Nebuchadnezzar a thousand years earlier, Recared simply wanted an enduring kingdom and believed it impossible without political unity. He used the same method the Babylonian king had tried on Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, with limited success and lots of bloodshed along the way.
Ethnicity and Politics
The reasons for each of these historic conflicts and many more goes down in the books as “religion”, but there are good reasons to doubt the reality of those claims. From the Tower of Babel on, ethnicity and politics have been the primary drivers of war. Theology just provided a convenient means of firing up the troops and pointing them at one another.
Even for the 3% of wars that list Christianity as a contributing cause, it was only one among many. Rarely was it the most significant.
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