Questioning Religion and War (PDF)

2/1/24, 2:12 PM Questioning religion and war | War and Religion: A Very Short Introduction | Oxford Academic CHAPTER p. 95 6 Questioning religion and war  Jolyon Mitchell, Joshu...

2/1/24, 2:12 PM Questioning religion and war | War and Religion: A Very Short Introduction | Oxford Academic CHAPTER p. 95 6 Questioning religion and war  Jolyon Mitchell, Joshua Rey https://doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9780198803218.003.0006 Published: March 2021 Abstract ‘Questioning religion and war’ explains how each faith— particularly Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—has a complex relationship to war and peace. It assesses whether or not religion in general does or does not tend to cause and intensify war in general. Those who are hostile to religion often claim it is inherently warlike. Those who favour religion conclude that it is a force for peace or, where it is implicated in war, it has been misunderstood and warped. Those who think religion inspires both war and the pursuit of peace want to promote the latter and discourage the former. These views have something in common: the idea that war is bad. Keywords: Christianity, Islam, Judaism, peace, religion, war Subject: Religion Series: Very Short Introductions Collection: Very Short Introductions If you have a chance to visit Jerusalem, take some time to consider religion and war from a suitable vantage point in the Old City. In the air around you, you will hear the bells of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the call to prayer from half a dozen mosques, and perhaps the sound of an extended Jewish family playing music and singing as they bring a child to the Western Wall for Bar or Bat Mitzvah. Then ascend above the crowded, tunnel-like streets of the Souk and look for the Temple Mount and the Haram esh-Sharif (Figure 16). If https://academic.oup.com/book/32799/chapter/274544017 1/20 2/1/24, 2:12 PM Questioning religion and war | War and Religion: A Very Short Introduction | Oxford Academic you can see one you will see the other, for they are the same, highly contested space. The Temple Mount is the site of a series of structures, culminating in Herod the Great’s Temple, which was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE. The Haram esh-Sharif (‘Noble Sanctuary’) is, for Muslims, the location of the Prophet’s Night Journey, and the third holiest site in Islam. Not strictly a holy place for them, this space is of keen interest to Christians too, since Jesus walked, prayed, and taught here: and this was one reason the crusaders came. 16. The Dome of the Rock, the shrine believed by Muslims to mark the site from which the Prophet began his Night Journey to heaven. The third most holy place in Islam, it is built at the centre of what was formerly known—and continues to be known by some—as the Temple Mount and by others as Haram esh-Sharif. In the foreground can be seen the Western Wall which, being the only part of the original structure still readily accessible, has become an important place of Jewish prayer. It is also believed by Muslims to be near to where Muhammad tied his steed. Jews, who have fought wars of determined ferocity for millennia over this particular piece of land which the God of the universe gave them. Muslims whose Prophet was himself a warrior, who are called to p. 96 jihad, who conquered and brought peace and order to this place in the name of their universal faith. Christians, who believe God came from the realm of the infinite into this world to renounce violence, https://academic.oup.com/book/32799/chapter/274544017 2/20 2/1/24, 2:12 PM Questioning religion and war | War and Religion: A Very Short Introduction | Oxford Academic but who themselves visited this place with apocalyptic fury in the crusades. Each faith has a profound, complex, and distinctive relationship to war and peace. Note, too, that of all world religions, these three have perhaps most in common. They have a shared inheritance of overlapping texts, language, place, and architecture. As you sit in your corner of the Souk, Japanese and Chinese tourists will pass by, some doubtless Buddhist, some practitioners of Shinto, others perhaps Confucians. Think how Muslims, Jews, and Christians may look to them: branches of the same, alien tree. p. 97 It takes a real imaginative effort to enter into the mindset of someone who adheres to a different religion or belief system from our own. This is true if you adhere to a religious tradition of great antiquity, or if you belong to that fast-growing sect who put their faith in No Religion. And the challenge is an order of magnitude greater if we seek also to enter into the outlook and experience of someone from centuries past. Imagine going on pilgrimage to Roman Jerusalem shortly after the legalization of Christianity in the 4th century. Temples to the old gods of the empire are still being demolished. Eastward in the desert tribal polytheism flourishes, as yet unchallenged by the Prophet Muhammad. Visit again in the 11th or 12th centuries at the height of the great clash between Christendom and the Umma: stand on the walls looking out, or on the hillside looking up, at the alien and warlike face of your implacable enemy with whom you share scriptures and an unshakeable belief in the one God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, in a world where the very idea of atheism is unknown. After four chapters in which we have done little but tell stories and ask questions, you may be hungry for overarching theory. To what extent does religion predispose its followers to war or to peace? What is the fundamental relationship between war and religion? In this chapter we shall probe how far one can go in seeking such general conclusions. We shall press this enquiry quite hard. We may not, however, be able to take it as far as the tidy-minded would ideally wish. And the reason for this is bound up with the unfathomable richness and variety of life you have seen and imagined, from the stone bench where you sat sipping mint tea in the half light of the Suq el Qatanin. https://academic.oup.com/book/32799/chapter/274544017 3/20 2/1/24, 2:12 PM Questioning religion and war | War and Religion: A Very Short Introduction | Oxford Academic Concepts and categories If we seek general conclusions about war and religion, it may help to become familiar with some of the framing concepts offered by the study of religion. If we come up with conceptual categories that make p. 98 sense of the history, that may tell us something about ‘religion and war in general’. If we fail in the attempt, that may tell us something else. One influential, and highly generalizable, notion of religion is that of the German philosopher of religion Rudolf Otto (1869–1937). Otto taught that the core of religion, what is common to all religions, is ‘the holy’. The holy might be described as a human experience of something beyond human experience. This experience of the holy is powerful, and, when we are in its grip, we are both drawn to it by its immensity and beauty, and daunted by its scale and implacability. The fusion of these two qualities gives rise to the ‘numinous consciousness’ which Otto held to be the central feature of religion. The sociologist Max Weber offers a different, but likewise highly generalizable concept of what religion is. For Weber, religion is a system of meaning or symbols central to the functioning of a society. Religion here is something substantive, expressed in particular ways and making particular claims on its adherents; but it can be fully analysed by the sociologist. Both these approaches think of the core of religion as being something abstract, something which drives the actions of its adherents, and to which these actions point. An alternative approach is to ask, for example, ‘How does this particular religious person actually live? What rituals does he or she join in, and how? What is it like to live in this way?’ This approach identifies religion as primarily something that is lived out. Understanding religion in this way tends to put the focus on the individual or the informal community, rather than on the institution and the stated theology. It is not a question of what people should think, do, or feel in order to be consistent with the historic, published statements of religion; it is about how they actually do think, act, and feel. Thus in very general conceptual terms, we can distinguish two very p. 99 broad groups of approaches to religion. The first might for example be called a ‘credal’ or ‘substantive’ approach. The second https://academic.oup.com/book/32799/chapter/274544017 4/20 2/1/24, 2:12 PM Questioning religion and war | War and Religion: A Very Short Introduction | Oxford Academic might be described as ‘functional’ or perhaps as a matter of ‘lived religion’. Within each of these groups there is room for a good deal of nuance. But there is an important distinction between theories of religion that focus on the core notions, experience, or belief; and those which start with instances of how communities of faith live. In ‘credal’ terms, perhaps the most heavily freighted distinction that is often drawn between religions is between monotheisms and other religions. The key feature of monotheisms is that there is only one God, who is universal, infinite, and eternal. It has often been observed that over the last 2,000 years monotheism has very much increased in dominance, with the growth of Christianity and Islam, and some commentators have seen in this a natural progress or development towards a more universal outlook. Distinguishing monotheisms is, however, harder to sustain if you take a ‘lived religions’ approach. For example there are some striking similarities between some of the devotional practices of Hindus and Christians. They have different theological rationales, but the veneration of particular saints in a Warsaw church may look and feel quite similar to the worship of particular gods in a Madurai temple, and very different from what happens in a Riyadh mosque. Besides these general concepts for thinking about religion, it is also possible to make some general observations about developments in religion and war in recent years. From 1945 to 1989, war and politics was dominated by the tension between two world views, embodied by the USA and the USSR. Then, to the surprise of many, the Cold War ended—not least because the Afghan Mujahideen defeated the Red Army. Moreover, the postmodernist outlook, with its rejection of grand narrative, was also gaining popularity in the Western world. Thus many who sought an overarching story within which to live p. 100 their lives turned more and more to religion, and sometimes to particularly fundamentalist forms of belief. At the same time many of the states founded as colonial empires were struggling to hold together. Common purpose was hard to find, and many suffered from inherited poverty and corruption. Cold War superpowers had propped up authoritarian regimes which weakened after 1989. When the hard edges of dictatorship wore thin, other forms of loyalty, older and more deeply felt, re-emerged. They were often religious. https://academic.oup.com/book/32799/chapter/274544017 5/20 2/1/24, 2:12 PM Questioning religion and war | War and Religion: A Very Short Introduction | Oxford Academic This period also saw increased movement of people around the globe. This has had two contrasting impacts. It has led some people to identify less with those beside whom they live than with those with whom they share religion and culture. It has also encouraged the strengthening of religion as a marker of local, national identity, conferring ‘in-group’ status, in a reaction against globalization. All these trends have combined in recent decades to bring religion back into the foreground, giving it again a power in international affairs which it has in fact almost always possessed through the broad sweep of history. Does religion make for war? There are indeed, then, general terms in which we can try to think of religion and war. The aim of speaking in these terms is to see if we can draw broad conclusions about the big questions. As in many fields of academic enquiry, there is some merit in searching for propositions that may be generally true, that can begin to make sense of a wide range of circumstances, and offer a single answer to a question that arises again and again in different situations. As we have seen, in relation to religion and war, the question that keeps coming up, and p. 101 which many take to matter the most, is whether or not religion in general does, or does not, tend to cause and intensify war in general. Strong arguments are put forward on both sides. If you think religion makes for war, you may start by saying that religion makes claims about ultimate values. Thus religious people tend to think the ends justify the means: war may even be an evil, but not as bad as defying God’s purposes. And however terrible war may seem in the here and now, religious people may say that the sorrows of war are balanced by a reality beyond the material world. As we have seen, some religions can energize their followers to fight with fearless ferocity, sure in the hope of an eternal reward. If on the other hand you think religion makes for peace you may start from the observation that religion is concerned with a search for the good, and strives to broaden connectedness among human beings. Religious concern with the ultimate and universal prompts us to look beyond the interests of our own tribe or nation to the needs of others. https://academic.oup.com/book/32799/chapter/274544017 6/20 2/1/24, 2:12 PM Questioning religion and war | War and Religion: A Very Short Introduction | Oxford Academic Moreover, religious people are subject to the judgement of God, who is concerned with order and good. And true religion helps its adherents endure the risks of refusing to fight, sure in the knowledge that thus they tread the path of eternity. Those who take this positive view of their religion or religion more generally, where they see it implicated in warfare (as in the crusades, or as a motive for terrorism) will argue that religion has here been misunderstood or misappropriated. There is another view, a subset of the first, which we must note briefly. It is that religion is uniquely warlike, that the history of war is the history of religion, and that the best way to reduce or eliminate war is to supplant religion with a secular outlook. This view has gained a good deal of publicity through the articulate advocacy of p. 102 ‘New Atheists’ such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. An alternative perspective is to be found in William Cavanaugh’s Myth of Religious Violence, and Fields of Blood by Karen Armstrong, which makes the detailed historical case that religion is not in itself distinctively and uniquely warlike. Perhaps the most compelling evidence in this strand of the argument is the middle years of the 20th century. Organized religion had but a minor role in the Second World War and the conflicts surrounding it. It is hard to say that secular warfare was gentler or less destructive than the religious variety. Another strong general conclusion that we might seek to draw is that there is something distinctively warlike about monotheistic religion. It is certainly true that star billing in Chapter 2 went to Christianity and Islam. Both are committed to a God who is explicitly the God of everything, everywhere. It is hard to say that this commitment did not contribute to the energy with which adherents of these two closely related faiths fought territorial wars in the late first and early second millennium. Against this argument we could notice that Judaism, historically perhaps the most influential of monotheisms, doesn’t fit the pattern. Judaism has often been warlike. But the motivation to fight does not come from universalism. The God of Judaism is indeed the God of all. But of the Jewish people he demands particular things, and to them he makes promises, in particular the promise of a land, for which they have often fought. It is these particularities, rather than the https://academic.oup.com/book/32799/chapter/274544017 7/20 2/1/24, 2:12 PM Questioning religion and war | War and Religion: A Very Short Introduction | Oxford Academic universality of God, which are arguably involved in Jewish religious warfare. Another problem with the theory of warlike monotheisms is that our examples are a biased sample. Freddie Mercury, lead singer of Queen, was born Farrokh Bulsara, in a Parsi family. Parsis practise the Zoroastrian faith, perhaps the oldest monotheism, exalting Ahura Mazda, the ‘Wise Lord’, creator of all. In 2001 there were about p. 103 70,000 Parsis in India, and a similar number in the rest of the world. Why are they known as Parsis? Because their forebears were exiles from Persia. For a thousand years Zoroastrianism shaped the culture and way of life of a vast empire in and around modern-day Iran until in the 7th century both religion and empire were struck down by a new and more militarily efficient monotheism: Islam. Perhaps, then, monotheism is not inherently warlike, but the monotheisms we know best are those that happened to win wars. Christianity and Islam do have a history of warlike conquest, but this may say less about the link between monotheism and war than about the link between war and power. There is a strong case both for and against the idea that religion in general drives war. The New Atheist argument that religion is uniquely warlike is hard to sustain. It is not clear that monotheisms have a particularly strong tendency to fight. What can we hope to say that is broadly true? One influential and stimulating approach to this question is that of Scott Appleby. He sums up his attempt to grapple with the question whether religion is or is not inherently warlike in the phrase ‘the ambivalence of the sacred’, which he expands in an influential book of the same name. Appleby draws on the idea of ‘the holy’ we met earlier, the central concept in Rudolf Otto’s understanding of religion. Appleby uses the term ‘the sacred’ interchangeably with ‘the holy’. He defines religion as ‘the human response to a reality perceived as sacred’. Because of the great power of the experience of the holy/sacred, this response can be very powerful. Because this response is a human response, it can take many different forms. This is not to presuppose anything about the nature (or existence) of God. God may be peaceful, yet our holy/sacred experience may come into lives that are not peaceful, and our encounter with the holy/sacred may move us to violence. This could be an authentically https://academic.oup.com/book/32799/chapter/274544017 8/20 2/1/24, 2:12 PM Questioning religion and war | War and Religion: A Very Short Introduction | Oxford Academic religious response, even if in some theoretical, theological sense p. 104 erroneous. Appleby’s key point is that in the human experience of that which is beyond the human, there is both power and ambiguity. Thus authentic religion has great power both for war and for peace. Appleby’s approach does seem to offer to say something generally true about the relationship between war and religion. He does not, however, claim to resolve the question whether religion does or does not make for war. What does this ambiguity tell us about the question? Religion is inherently warlike. Religion is inherently peaceful. Religion incubates under its ambivalent wings the possibility of both war and peace. What do you think? This book is not meant to get you off the hook of forming your own opinions by a diligent weighing of facts and concepts, but rather to furnish you with history, concepts, and insights with which to work. In that spirit let us challenge you to take one further step back, to look at the scene in a broader perspective. We have found no consensus on the question whether religion in general is or is not warlike in general. And this, you might think, is strange. For the materials needed to form such a judgement are not hard to find. This is not an obscure question about the nature of life at the bottom of the Marianas trench, or concerning sub-atomic particles without mass or charge. It is a question related to some of the largest and best-documented events and institutions in the history of the world. Can it be, then, that our very failure to reach concrete general conclusions tells us something about the subject? So leave aside whether religion is warlike or peaceful. Ask a bigger question. A question that should be implicit in all we have been talking about. A question we have to ask unless we are to smuggle a p. 105 big idea into the debate without any justification at all, which may confuse us deeply. The question is, ‘is there any such thing as religion-in-general?’ Is there a generic religion-in-general which we can examine to determine whether or not it is warlike? https://academic.oup.com/book/32799/chapter/274544017 9/20 2/1/24, 2:12 PM Questioning religion and war | War and Religion: A Very Short Introduction | Oxford Academic Turn back to the preceding four chapters. What did we find? In Chapter 2 we saw cases where religion created and inspired terrible wars: through history and across the globe, wars have been fought in pursuit of religious objectives, as the fulfilment of religious duty, and as the expression of a religious way of life. In Chapter 3 we saw situations where religion acted as a flag of convenience for wars fought in pursuit of non-religious objectives, rallying armies and populations to achieve territorial or dynastic goals. In Chapter 4 we saw how religion has softened the terrible harms of war, protecting the innocent and challenging the combatants to restraint. In Chapter 5, we saw religious people and groups steadfastly resisting the temptations and threats of warfare, and becoming, sometimes at great cost, bringers of peace. In each case something we would want to call religion is involved. In many cases, the same religion. The Buddhist Samurai ethic that steeled the nerves of Japanese soldiers in the Second World War is in some respects the same Buddhism that informs the peaceful teaching and practice of the present Dalai Lama. The Christians of pre- Constantinian Rome and Reformation-era Anabaptist communities rejected all forms of warfare, as the expression of a Christian faith no less sincere that that in which the crusaders did deeds of unimaginable violence. The notion of the ‘ambivalence of the sacred’ is perhaps the closest one can come to a general statement about the relation between religion and war. But there are two problems: an issue to do with the experience of different religious people, and a more structural issue about the frame of reference in which these questions are considered. p. 106 We look at these two problems in the next two sections. The need for a religious perspective Consider Mohamed Atta and Franz Jägerstätter. Jägerstätter was an Austrian farmer who refused to serve in the German army during the Second World War and was thus executed on 6 July 1943. Mohamed Atta was an Egyptian graduate student and urban planner who piloted the hijacked American Airlines Flight 11, crashing it into the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001. Both men professed themselves https://academic.oup.com/book/32799/chapter/274544017 10/20 2/1/24, 2:12 PM Questioning religion and war | War and Religion: A Very Short Introduction | Oxford Academic to be moved by their religious faith: Jägerstätter was beatified by the Roman Catholic Church in 2007. More recently, film-maker Terrence Malick translated Jägerstätter’s story into a film: A Hidden Life (2019). To make sense of the idea of religion-in-general it would be necessary to say that both these men were responding to and living out in some ways the same thing. The idea of ‘the ambivalence of the sacred’ is exactly that: the lives and deaths of Mohamed Atta and Franz Jägerstätter were both authentic responses to the sacred. There is some power in this idea. Both men faced danger and death with a fortitude many of us would find hard to summon. Something powerful was at work in their lives. Their responses were different in quality, reflecting their own life experience; their responses had a similar magnitude and power, reflecting the holy/sacred core. Perhaps we can think of the holy/sacred as like the process of nuclear fission, which can find expression in a power station or a bomb. The difference between nuclear fission and the holy/sacred, though, is that nuclear fission is a physical process which we harness as our moral purposes dictate. Whereas both Jägerstätter and Atta, so far as we can know, took it for granted that the holy/sacred, the experience of which drew forth their very different responses, was itself filled with purpose. The holy/sacred is not just power; it is also purpose. The element of value and purpose is central to Rudolf Otto’s original p. 107 idea of ‘the holy’. The holy compels us not just because of its fascinating and tremendous might: it has ‘a might that has at the same time the supremest right to make the highest claim to service…’ It has ‘objective value that claims our homage’. That Jägerstätter and Atta were motivated by something which had for each of them a power of similar magnitude seems at least eminently arguable, if not obvious. But was what compelled them to act similar not just in power but in purpose too? This is what we have to say if we are going to argue they both responded to the same thing. Is this to make the notion of the holy/sacred so elastic that it ceases to be helpful? Moreover, if we want to make this judgement, we have to recognize that we are claiming to understand something about both Jägerstätter and Atta and their religious experience which they themselves did not know. For it seems very likely that Jägerstätter and Atta would each have thought the other very different from himself. And this is a https://academic.oup.com/book/32799/chapter/274544017 11/20 2/1/24, 2:12 PM Questioning religion and war | War and Religion: A Very Short Introduction | Oxford Academic problem across the whole spectrum of lived religious experience wherever we want to keep hold of the notion of religion-in-general. What do you think? Do you know more about the fundamental nature of religion than a Seventh Day Adventist confined in a military jail for refusing to fire a gun? Or than a Jewish Zealot hurling himself against the ordered and implacable spears of a Roman legion? It is defensible to answer ‘yes’. But even if we think we know more about religion than the individual religious person, we have to be careful not to devalue the religious perspective altogether, if for no other reason than because we may thus miss data which can help form a balanced view. If the ‘ambivalence of the sacred’ is a call to investigate and enquire into the breadth and variety of religious commitment in the crucible of war, well and good. If it is a way of understanding religion-in- general as one thing, we need to consider carefully whether it is a p. 108 useful concept. The question is, can we say anything accurate about the nature of religion-in-general, without claiming to know more about it than practitioners of any particular religion know? And are we prepared to do this? Presuppositions in our ideas of religion and war If on the other hand we do recognize that we need a religious perspective to understand religion, then that is obviously going to make it harder to come to general conclusions about these questions. They are simply questions it is very hard, perhaps impossible, to stand outside. We seek an objective vantage point, but if we are honest in our enquiries we have to engage with the possibility that an objective perspective may not exist. This brings us to the second problem with making general statements about the relation between religion and war: the structural issue of the frame of reference in which we ask these questions. We have seen that general conclusions in this field are hard, if not impossible, to formulate. This seemingly negative result, if we press it hard enough, may disclose something interesting. Perhaps our failure is not the result of a contingent lack of effort and imagination, https://academic.oup.com/book/32799/chapter/274544017 12/20 2/1/24, 2:12 PM Questioning religion and war | War and Religion: A Very Short Introduction | Oxford Academic but of something necessary and structural in the nature of the topic. Perhaps if we can’t reach a general conclusion about war and religion, we may learn from our failure something worth knowing about the debate and how it is framed. Reverse the telescope. What does our search for religion-in-general tell us about the context in which we search? Go back to some of the things religion-in-general, might be: we drew the distinction between substantive/credal notions of religion, and the functional/‘lived religion’ understanding. The first way of understanding religion often leads to describing religion as belief in something: the supernatural, the eternal, the transcendent; or as a shared experience of something beyond: the holy or sacred. And the really interesting distinction between religions in this perspective is p. 109 that between monotheism and the rest. And even when we come to speak of religion in functional terms, and look at how it is lived, this has often been in terms of how it establishes norms of behaviour through symbolism and shared ritual. Although specialists in the field may not find it so, the idea that religion is about belief in something infinite that forms our behaviour through shared stories and symbolism will sound uncontentious to many. Even the atheist, who rejects religion, often has this kind of thing in mind as what he or she is rejecting. But it is really a very specific idea of religion. Unsurprisingly it is a general notion of religion that looks a lot like the very particular religion practised in those communities that for the last 500 years or so have been geopolitically dominant. It is a general statement of Western Christianity, particularly its Protestant variety. This is not a novel observation. Identifying our received ideas of religion and refusing to buy into them perhaps lies behind some of the most interesting thinking about religion. The ‘lived religion’ school is among those approaches that insist on the lively plurality of religious forms, which have to be understood to a degree in their own terms. It insists on paying careful attention to the experiences and practices of particular religious people and communities. The ‘lived religions’ approach is much less likely to describe religion in terms of belief in the supernatural expressed through normative symbols. But the ‘lived religions’ school is also much less likely to offer a notion of religion-in-general. https://academic.oup.com/book/32799/chapter/274544017 13/20 2/1/24, 2:12 PM Questioning religion and war | War and Religion: A Very Short Introduction | Oxford Academic There is, thus, a fundamental structural problem with the question about religion and war. It is that our general notions of religion, in terms of which we tackle the question, are really the terms of one particular religion. Take the ‘ambivalence of the sacred’. This was perhaps the most promising approach to thinking about religion in general. But note the terms in which it is stated. Religion is a response to ‘the sacred’. p. 110 ‘The sacred’ derives from Rudolf Otto’s concept of ‘the holy’. And Otto stands in a long academic tradition, shaped by Friedrich Schleiermacher a hundred years earlier, of rooting theology in religious feeling. Schleiermacher in turn built on the foundations of his upbringing in Pietism, a Protestant sect that emphasized personal religious experience. All of these deep thinkers did their thinking within the framework of the Enlightenment, itself a reaction against —but also a product of—Western Protestantism. Immanuel Kant, the godfather of the Enlightenment, whose ideas shaped the thought world in which Rudolf Otto lived (and in which we today live), was, like Schleiermacher, brought up a Pietist. This may go some way to explaining why a concept of religion-in- general is so hard to pin down. Our concepts of religion-in-general are framed by the presuppositions of one religion in particular, the religion of the geopolitically dominant culture of the last four or five hundred years: Western, particularly Protestant, Christianity. If this be so, then it might also be worth interrogating the other term in our equation. What is war, in general? Typically, to answer this question we distinguish between war and other kinds of violence. This can be controversial: everyone wants to say that their violence is war, whilst the other side is doing terrorism or murder. But there is a distinction to be drawn. Most would agree that the armies of Wellington and Napoleon at Waterloo were fighting a war, and that a robber who stabs a passerby for her mobile phone is not. Wars are customarily taken to involve states and armies, which is why pacifism is a political stance: the pacifist is not just rejecting violence, but challenging the policy of the state. When ‘war’ is used in other contexts it is with a conscious sense of metaphor: the ‘war on drugs’ was a striking phrase precisely because it clashed with usual notions of war. https://academic.oup.com/book/32799/chapter/274544017 14/20 2/1/24, 2:12 PM Questioning religion and war | War and Religion: A Very Short Introduction | Oxford Academic Again, this all sounds fairly uncontroversial: violence, with a state p. 111 and an organized army on one or both sides. But, like the pervading understanding of religion, these ways of thinking about war are specific to a time, a place, and a culture. The nation state in the form we take for granted today only started to develop 500 years ago in Europe during and after the Reformation. A particular religion was central to the identity of nation states as they coalesced: Roman Catholicism and the Protestant and other Churches that descended from or rebelled against it. Dial back the calendar a further few centuries, to the high point of classical Islam on the eve of the First Crusade. What did ‘war’ mean here? Was it a matter of armed conflict between states? Probably not. A recurring motif in Islam is the Umma. There have been conflicts between different Muslim polities in the last millennium, but these were not, at least until the modern era, conflicts between nation states. Not only that, but for many Muslims war is both a broader and a more positive concept. Islam has a long-established notion of war which has nothing to do with armies, states, or violence of any kind. This is the greater jihad, the spiritual striving for self-mastery, which we saw in Chapter 2. Jihad is war, in the fullest acceptance of the word, not a mere metaphor as in the ‘war on drugs’. But war is not just armies fighting. For many Christians, and secular people whose thought-world has been partly shaped historically by Christianity, this stretches the concept of war beyond breaking point; whereas for the Muslim the greater and lesser jihads can be two parts of a single concept. This is not to say one of these perspectives is correct and the other mistaken. It is to notice that they are different; and that the one with roots in Christianity is the one that is used in modern discourse about war. If you had found this book on religion and war to be about the relationship between religion and striving after purity and self- mastery, you might have wanted your money back. There are few War Studies doctoral candidates writing theses on purity and self- mastery. But a distinction between the study of armed conflict p. 112 between states, and the study of spiritual striving for purity and self-mastery, is not written into the structure of the universe. It is a distinction made by a particular culture with its roots in a particular religion, namely Christianity. For many Muslims, who belong to a https://academic.oup.com/book/32799/chapter/274544017 15/20 2/1/24, 2:12 PM Questioning religion and war | War and Religion: A Very Short Introduction | Oxford Academic community of more than 2 billion people, fighting between armies and striving for self-mastery are, by contrast, parts of the same concept. Only, the conceptual categories in which today’s academic debate is conducted were not primarily framed in that community. This is in no way to make a value judgement between Christianity and Islam. If anything, it is to be critical of Christianity, which has smuggled its particular presuppositions into a debate with pretensions to universality. Even those hostile to Christianity recognize that it has shaped, sometimes by violence, the mindset of much of today’s world. But the upshot is that the debate over war and religion is rigged. The terms in which it goes on are not universal and neutral. They descend to a disproportionate degree from one particular religion. If this is true, then the search for general conclusions about war and religion is not going to succeed. Rather, in order to pay due regard to the particularity of different religions we may need to abandon the idea of religion-in-general altogether. This is the logic of the ‘lived religions’ school, one of the considerable merits of which is that it does not aspire to a generality that is never going to be available in this field. The ends of war Now—take one last step back. Grant that there is no such thing as religion-in-general and war-in-general. Grant that most of our general conceptual categories about religion, and about war, have been formed by one particular religion, and are thus not nearly as general as we hoped. If this is how things are, it brings us face to face with one more unspoken presupposition in the war-and-religion debate, which we have to test and challenge. p. 113 Those who are hostile to religion often claim it is inherently warlike. Those who favour religion conclude that it is a force for peace or, where it is implicated in war, it has been misunderstood and warped. Those who think religion inspires both war and the pursuit of peace want to promote the latter and discourage the former. Do you notice, however, what these points of view have in common? They have something in common that is so thoroughly taken for granted that we https://academic.oup.com/book/32799/chapter/274544017 16/20 2/1/24, 2:12 PM Questioning religion and war | War and Religion: A Very Short Introduction | Oxford Academic are scarcely aware that it is an idea. But it is an idea. And like any other idea it needs examination and justification. It is the idea that war is bad. This is not obvious. We have seen, in Chapter 2, times in history when people have thought war was good. War is the crucible in which the virtues are forged, in which courage, skill, love for comrades and tribe are given full expression. War is where we risk all in the cause of God, the highest form of devotion. You may not agree with these ideas: but they are not obviously incoherent, and many peoples in history have lived by them. Perhaps there is something fundamentally bad about war, which is slowly becoming clear to us as a species. Perhaps aversion to war, even a recognition that it is wrong, lies deep within the human condition. There is some support for this idea in evolutionary anthropology. The change in body composition and face shape from the higher apes to Homo sapiens—to softer skin, blunter teeth and claws, lower brow-ridges—may have been part of an evolution away from violence. As we got better and better at cooperating in sophisticated ways to hunt, gather, build shelter, and raise children, the success of individuals became bound up with the success of the group. The groups that succeeded were those that weeded out the violent and disruptive. Social and biological evolution thus intertwined, ensuring the success of the gentler ones who remained. We may hear an echo of this evolution in the words of Vera Brittain. In p. 114 Testament of Youth she writes of being a young woman, unquestioningly patriotic, casually militaristic, at the start of the First World War. But as the war progresses, working as a nurse, seeing her male friends and relations go off to the trenches and come back, if at all, horribly wounded, she begins to perceive a fundamental, universal truth: I wish those people who write so glibly about this being a Holy War…could see a case…of mustard gas in its early stages —could see the poor things burnt and blistered all over with great mustard-coloured suppurating blisters, with blind eyes…all sticky and stuck together, and always fighting for breath, with voices a mere whisper, saying that their throats are closing and they are going to choke…and yet people https://academic.oup.com/book/32799/chapter/274544017 17/20 2/1/24, 2:12 PM Questioning religion and war | War and Religion: A Very Short Introduction | Oxford Academic persist in saying that God made the War, when there are such inventions of the Devil about… No matter how we may think God is marching ahead of our armies, if we are deeply enough immersed in war we will come to know that it is, fundamentally, wrong. Perhaps, then, the presupposition at the heart of our debates on war and religion is, in some way, fundamental, and stands in need of no justification. On the other hand, Vera Brittain was reflecting on a very large recent war. No matter how pacific we may have evolved to be, time and again we do fight wars. The weeding out of violent individuals laid the foundations for organized violence of a severity unparalleled in the animal kingdom. Some of the most terrible wars have been fought by nations who at home appear to be the acme of refined civilization. Can we really say, then, that the idea that war is bad needs no justification? Vera Brittain concludes from her own experience that it is just obviously bad, though it was not until the late 1930s that she became a fully-fledged pacifist. But how would Vera Brittain have viewed the matter had she been a Viking or an Attic Greek, in a culture framed by religion that saw war as good and ennobling? Notice, p. 115 further, that she uses religious terms in her rejection of war. She does not say this is a holy war and holy war is wrong: she says war is unholy and God is not in it. In this she is being quite orthodox, as a woman brought up in the Christian tradition. It is true, and it bears repeating, that Christians have fought as many wars as anyone and more than most. But it is also true, as we saw in Chapter 5, that for 300 years, until its Faustian bargain with Constantine’s Rome, Christianity was an almost entirely pacifist faith. Echoes of this pacifism resurface again and again. This is not to say that Christianity is the only religion that teaches peace. Only that, as we argued above, many of the ideas that underlie much of liberal discourse do largely have their origins in Christianity. One of these ideas is the presupposition that war is undesirable. Neither is it to claim moral superiority for Christianity. Rather the reverse: if the idea that war is bad is a Christian idea, then Christians who fight an unjust war are twice guilty: of fighting, and of perjury. What we do want to put front and centre in conclusion, though, is that war and peace are religious values. As we have seen, it is fruitless to speak of religion-in-general: different religions are different. They https://academic.oup.com/book/32799/chapter/274544017 18/20 2/1/24, 2:12 PM Questioning religion and war | War and Religion: A Very Short Introduction | Oxford Academic are also internally fragmented and plural. Nevertheless, the value we place on war and peace has to come from somewhere. If we long for peace, that longing must have roots, and open space into which it can grow. Wars are spectacular, attracting the attention of historians and commentators. They understandably make news at the time they are happening and are often ruminated upon in the decades and centuries that follow. Wars become markers in time, commonly altering the course of local, national, and international history. They are inscribed on landscapes, buildings, and collective memories. As we saw in Chapter 1, images of war are graven in memorials and painted on walls. Wars are reprised in films and plays, novels and poetry. They p. 116 leave debris and traces for future generations. It takes decades or centuries to heal the wounds of war. By contrast the formation of the values of peace is a slower process, often hidden, often overlooked. The paths to peace are narrow and winding. Those who tread them, those who work for peace, often go unnoticed. Peace does not come easily. Watching it can be slow and tedious. The role of lived religions in promoting peace is likewise often overlooked. The traces and origins of such peace-building practices are harder to discern. Nevertheless religious actors and communities are integral to peace-building. It is true, shamefully true, that religious people, even those who profess a faith with a commitment to peace at its heart, have fought, do fight, and will fight. But the fundamental intuition that war, whether fought for religious or secular reasons, is wrong: this too has religious roots. We conclude with the words of a pacifist, deeply influenced by Christianity, a mystic, and a former soldier, Leo Tolstoy. In War and Peace he describes the experience of Prince Andrei Bolkonsky at the Battle of Austerlitz, lying where he has fallen wounded as he attempts to stem the Russian retreat: Above him there was now nothing but the sky—the lofty sky, not clear yet still immeasurably lofty, with grey clouds gliding slowly across it. ‘How quiet, peaceful, and solemn; not at all as I ran,’ thought Prince Andrei—‘not as we ran, shouting and fighting…how differently do those clouds glide across that lofty infinite sky! How was it I did not see that https://academic.oup.com/book/32799/chapter/274544017 19/20 2/1/24, 2:12 PM Questioning religion and war | War and Religion: A Very Short Introduction | Oxford Academic lofty sky before? And how happy I am to have found it at last! Yes! All is vanity, all falsehood, except that infinite sky. There is nothing, nothing, but that. But even it does not exist, there is nothing but quiet and peace. Thank God!…’ Wars have been fought and will be fought for religious reasons. Yet the revolt against war is also a religious impulse. There are forms of religion that can pierce the fog of war, so that in bright light under broad heavens we may forge the reality of peace. https://academic.oup.com/book/32799/chapter/274544017 20/20