Guns, Glory, and Greed: Most wars were not caused by religion (but they weren’t prevented by it either)
TL;DR
- Lots of people say things like ‘religion causes war’
- But looking at a list of wars shows that relatively few are ‘caused’ by religion
- Religion does not stop wars and is often used to bolster the case — but it is rarely the primary causal agent
- What causes wars is: 1) Guns: Availability of means to wage war (not literally guns) 2) Glory: A framework within which the war makes sense (makes people feel good about fighting it) 3) Greed: A desire for resources
- But all of this is even more complicated because neither war not religion are straightforward concepts that can be easily entered into some sort of causality identification algorithm.
Historical Note
I wrote this about 2 years ago but I felt it needed more thought. Now, that I’ve reread it with some distance, I find that I have very little to add. I have found a few new things (for instance about the religious discourse around many of the Persian wars) but nothing that would make me alter the basic outline. So, here it goes.
Background
This post has been a long time brewing — first triggered by a Bill Maher routine which pretty much says ‘all wars are caused by religion’ but not seeing a noticeably improved level of nuance in the God Delusion, I got to thinking.
After finishing the post, I did a quick search on Google and found that ‘religion causes *‘ automatically fills in war, conflict, prejudice. But the top three links or so debunk the notion. So I could have saved myself the time. But despite the plethora of evidence against the religious roots of all conflict, the myth persists. I even heard Karen Armstrong, the ecumenical God peddler, not being able to answer a question on Start the Week with a simple denial of this nonsense. She just waffled about how religion also causes a lot of good (which it also doesn’t in comparison to other institutions or belief systems).
So here’s the thing…
For a breed that just loves evidence and science, the New Atheists (and frankly most scientists) are just as good at wilfully ignoring what’s right in front of their noses as everybody else. Especially, if it does not fit their grand narrative. New Atheists claim religion causes wars and suffering and will go as far (in offhand moments) to say things like “most wars were caused by religion”. But that’s so patently untrue, it took this old atheist only five minutes of reflection, 10 minutes of research (and admittedly years of peripheral study of history) to completely disprove.
When I tried this argument on an agnostic friend, she took a lot of convincing. Surely, you’re forgetting some major wars caused exclusively by religion. Maybe religion played a backdoor role. Etc. The argument that religion is at the root of all war is so pervasive that it is almost like an axiom on the order of ‘things fall down when you drop them’. But there is no doubt, religion does not cause wars any more than any other human institution causes wars. The biggest blame we can lay at its door is that it sure does not stop wars, violence and other kinds of suffering. But that’s why we’re atheists, after all. Only, when it comes to causes of war, that’s on us, people. Religion, just like profiteering and prostitution, is just along for the ride.
This post comes in two parts: 1) A basic overview of the major wars in history and the role religion played in them. 2) A quick look at what caused many of these wars. So strap in, this is going to be fun…
The argument: It’s not that religion can’t cause wars, it just usually doesn’t
Let’s just look at some of the major wars of history and classify them into three categories:
- Not having to do anything with religion (although ideology — and fervor will have played a part)
- Not really caused by religion but having a significant religious dimension or some relation to it
- Being directly caused by religion or completely about religion (leaving aside the fact that ‘religion’ is not really a useful category)
I’ll list them in reverse chronological order (I’m going mostly from memory, assuming that this will capture the biggest ones, Wikipedia, as always will oblige with a complete list. A quick glance at those lists shows (not unexpectedly) that my own list is pretty Eurocentric and subject to the availability heuristic, but not particularly unrepresentative.
Wars with no religion
It would be a massive stretch to think about these wars as having been caused by religion. Sure, religion was around but so was humanism and rationality. Neither helped much.
The only controversial one here could be the Taiping Rebellion (which was really a 19th century Chinese civil war with outside intervention). The guy who was one of the instigators was so exhausted from failing the imperial examinations that he developed visions in which Jesus came to him and told him he was his brother (he did this to lots of people including old Mane leading to Manicheanism). And the leadership had some cult properties reminiscent of the early protestant excesses. But the war itself was not about religion in any meaningful way. It was all about political control. But if you want, you can stick it in the religion pile — it would be the biggest war ever to be caused by religion.
So here’s a list of wars with no religion involved. No links, if you don’t know one of them, google it.
- War in Iraq 2
- War in Afghanistan
- African wars in the Congo (DRC)
- Genocide in Rwanda
- War in Iraq 1
- Iraq/Iran war
- All those civil wars in Latin America in the 70s and 80s
- Civil war / genocide in Cambodia
- China-Vietnam war
- USA/France-Vietnam war
- Korean war
- Chinese civil war(s)
- World War 2
- Japanese invasion of China
- Russian revolution (and related wars)
- World War 1
- Scramble for Africa
- Franco-Prussian war
- Crimean war
- Taiping rebellion (Chinese civil war — although the main protagonist had crazy religious visions)
- US Civil War
- War of 1812 (and all the US wars of that time)
- Opium wars
- Napoleonic wars
- Wars of the French revolution
- Prussia’s wars of expansion (Silesia, etc. — Friedrich the Great)
- Ottomans’ wars of expansion
- Aztecs’ wars of expansion
- Wars of the Roses
- Ghenghis Khan’s invasions (and those of his descendants)
- 100-year war
- Viking ‘raids’
- An Lushan ‘Rebellion’
- Nomadic tribes’ wars against Rome, China, Central Asia
- Roman wars of expansion and extermination
- Asoka’s (and others’) wars of domination on the Indian subcontinent (though Asoka apparently had a religion inspired change of mind about all this killing)
- Alexander the Great’s campaigns (although he started to think of himself as a God)
- Chinese warring states period(s)
- Persian-Greek war (although the Persians did have some religious justifications)
- Egyptian wars and wars of Mesopotamian states (covering several thousand years with the proviso that Gods went hand in hand with all this)
Wars with some religion involved
These wars had religion somewhere in them but it wasn’t the primary cause, nor was it the main mover. It may have flared up as part of the conflict or sectarian divisions could have been marshalled as ways of motivating some fighters or the population.
- War in Syria
- Wars in Former Yugoslavia
- Russian war in Aghanistan
- Iranian revolution
- 30-year War (this one may be controversial because it sort of seamlessly blends into the ‘wars of religion’)
- Arab civil wars (of 800s and 900s)
Wars primarily about religion (although no war was ever solely about religion)
These are the wars where religion was the undisputed trigger. Arguably, IS campaigns while fought by people motivated by religion could not have taken hold without the groundwork laid by the previous secular invasion and post-war mismanagement.
But other than that (and doubtless loads of smaller conflicts here and there), we haven’t had a major religious war in recent centuries. The European Wars of Religion are the only ones to make it in the over 1 million death toll list. I suppose you could argue about the 30-year war as being just an extension of this same conflict but that was a much more geopolitical affair rather than a purely religious one.
In fact, if you scratch the surface, most of these religious wars had a lot more complicated causes. Just think of the Crusades which are often given as an example of a war caused primarily by religion. And they were full of warlike actors filled with religious zeal and sincere Biblical motivations. But they still found plenty of time for pure political intrigue and once the Crusader states were established, religion became little more than a convenient propaganda tool. But we often forget that people really do believe things sincerely and shape their interpretation of their actions to be consonant with those beliefs. But from outside of somebody’s head, it is impossible not to notice that the social trends proceed in very secular ways of competition for power and resources. Columbus, may he burn in hell, was primarily motivated by a desire to ‘free’ Jerusalem again. But it didn’t stop him from commercially exploiting the peoples he found along the way. And it would be a very brave historian who would claim that the subsequent murderous conquest of the Americas and all the things that came from it was caused by or even primarily associated with religion. Of course, most of the warlords and killers involved in it were deeply religious and religious institutions benefited from and encouraged (as well as moderated) their actions. But so did lots of other institutions — it’s just that in their case, we’re not as struck by the sheer hypocrisy of their actions and claims.
- IS campaigns (but precipitated by and in the middle of larger non-religious conflicts)
- European wars of religion (intermixed with non-religious concerns)
- Hussite wars (proto-nationalistic wars but with a strong religious component) — also part of the broader Crusade ethos
- Crusades (religion played key role but neither the ultimate cause nor the only driver)
- Arab conquests of 600s (purely religious but fairly quick and relatively bloodless in many places — religion was the key motivation and impetus but they were not doctrinal so much as ideological — similar to spread of democracy)
- I can’t think of any earlier purely religious wars (other than those in the Old Testament) although the Persians certainly had a lot of religious zeal as did their prececessors when it suited them
So we can see that it has been hundreds of years since a major war was fought purely over religion, if it ever really was.
What causes wars?
Having looked at the wars on my list, there are things they have in common. Thankfully, they turned out to be alliterative. They are guns, glory and greed. With a bit of gullibility thrown in. I’m not sure wars really need causes. Or that it makes sense to talk about causes any more than it makes sense to talk about causes in weather. Lots of little causes are easy to see, but they don’t add up to one big one. But these three are certainly a part of the grease that makes war machines grind along. So lets take them in order.
Guns
Guns, as we know, don’t kill people. People kill people. This is not a bad slogan and it’s not too far off the truth. You can give people who don’t want to kill other people all the guns you want, and they won’t kill with them. Switzerland is given as the shining example. What people don’t tell you about Switzerland is that while the proportion of murdered people is about the same as the rest of Europe, the proportion of the people who do get murdered that get murdered by a gun in about the same as in the US. So having guns or weapons of any kind makes war possible.
But people still have to want to use those guns, even at the risk of having other guns used against them.
Crusades could be given as an example of how guns are involved in war (metaphorical guns, of course). The Crusaders were knights which started to cause real problems around Europe around the 11th century- think Latin American drug cartels. So having them around made it natural to think of using them to achieve other goals. Sometimes this is portrayed as if the Cursades were started explicitly to give the knights something to do (preferrably outside Europe) but that could hardly have been the case. However, had the knights not been available (as well as a problem), the Crusades could not have started. Also, it is not uncommon for people to justify military service as a way of giving young men discipline.
World War I is often given as an example. All the European powers were armed to the teeth — Russia, France, and Germany, so that it was inevitable one of them would use their armaments. They didn’t have to. But they did.
It’s no coincidence that victorious parties often want the losers to disarm. It’s no coincidence that people want to reduce the spread of nuclear weapons even if nobody wants to use them. Having ‘guns’ is the sine qua non of war.
Note: I cannot overemphasize how metaphorical ‘guns’ are here. Actual guns are often much less important when there is no good tactical advantage. They were NOT the thing that swung the big civilizational conflicts between Europe and the Americas, Europe and Africa and Europe and Asia — at least not until the 1800s by which point the damage was done. Even when they did make a difference, their effects were not predictable. Both Japan and China had to bow down (for a while) before the might of Western weaponry but neither ended up like the Americas. Even the use of a machine gun (invented to end all wars because the horrors they would unleash would make us think twice about starting them) took decades before they offered an unambiguous advantage. Nuclear weapons on the other hand, are a clear tactical winner, but any actual use is such crappy strategy, that we can imagine their use only by accident or as a result of mental derrangement. So, in short, weapons do matter. Better weapons are better than bad weapons. But (as the US found in Vietnam and Russia in Afghanistan — and much earlier Spain in the Canaries or the French at Agincourt) they’re only the decisive factor if you can find strategic uses for the tactical advantages superior weapons give you.
Glory
“There are certain things worth dying for.” said the celebrated Czech philosopher Jan Patočka. This is often given as an example of his love of freedom and personal courage. (He caught a chill when visiting a proscribed event, was held by the police for a few hours and died a few days later a few months short of 70th birthday). If this is an example of anything, it is an example of how much bullshit philosophers are allowed to get away with. This is the motto of every freedom fighter with case of explosive strapped around her chest. Of course, it’s only a short way from that to ‘there are things worth killing for’ after all. But it is an example of a type of glory.
The Romans had their triumphs — big marches in Rome to celebrate victorious campaigns. Many Celtic tribe was exterminated just so that a general could get a triumph. But these ‘triumphs’ can be more symbolic than that.
Honor is another type of glory. The conflicts that kicked off World War I were justified by appeals to honor. English public opinion changed around from anti to pro war in a matter of weeks once appeals to honor started being bandied about. And once you have honor, you have duty. Duty to ‘serve your country’ — ideally by killing as many other people as you can.
And the argument could be made that the long periods of European ‘peace’ were mostly due to the case for glory being discredited by first Napoleonic Wars and then WWI and WWII. In the US, it was first the Civil War and later Vietman. This discreditation of ‘war is glory’ trope seems to last one to two generations (40–80 years) but eventually fades away and new wars are started.
Greed
We think of greed as a negative value — unless we’re deranged free-marketeers. But greed is wanting more than you need — or reimagining your wants as needs. For millenia, many wars were fought acquisitively. The Romans, the Mongols, the Jurchen — they all fought regular wars (sometimes described as raids by historians) just to get stuff. For Mongols it was because they had very little stuff to start with. For the Roman and British empires it was a way of generating growth — ensuring sources of raw materials, food and taxes on the one hand, and new markets for goods on the other. There was plenty of other rhetoric mixed in with all this, but getting the stuff mattered.
The Crusades and the Mongol conquests destroyed a lot of established systems but by that they also opened up new opportunities for growth. As did the American conquests from 1500s all the way to the 1890s. The early Arab conquests were purely instigated by religious zeal — doing God’s work — but they used a lot of the old raiding systems to do it. Warriors got booty according to old raiding traditions, tribal rivalries flared up in the distribution of conquests — all mixed up with emerging new structures that eventually resulted in the glorious caliphates heights of science, commerce and art — and an imperial style of governance.
WWII was purely motivated about acquisition of resources — the vaunted lebens raum had a lot of wheat and oil fields in it — on the side of the instigators. A lot of other ideologies were mixed in. And what were they? Honor and glory, of course. And glorious feats of engineering producing better and better guns.
Myopia of history for the greater glory of war
It is interesting to read historians describing their favourite subjects’ wars. Everyone likes a winner. Egyptologists squable with Hettitologists over who won the battle of Kadesh. Roman historians weep over the lost glory of Ceasar’s conquests. Mongolologists point to the amazing feats of Ghengis Khan. Sinologists praise the expansions of the Han, Japanologists like their Tokugawa. Napoleon also gets his share of defenders.
It’s only the historians of the WWI and WWII losing sides, who get to — or are required to — dislike the subjects they study (they can’t get away with just a polite tsk, tsk). But imagine looking at those from the remove of 200 years. No survivors or direct descendants of survivors are around any more. Some old memories may still rankle, just like some Civil War grievances still rankle in the US. But the further removed, the less visceral these are. Even those defeated by Napoleon are now putting plaques on houses where he might have once slept. Some historical villains still persist — Attilla the Hun, Xerxes, Nero but most of the former villains are either plucky heros (Hannibal) or outright models to emmulate (Ceasar). Even more are just forgotten by the general public, their deeds recorded by a few specialists. But so many of those who we remember were not nice people, they had blood on their hands.
There’s also the glorification of war by the back door. Look at all the technological progress military research gave us. Drones, encryption, DARPANet. Or even, just look at all the peace war gave us. Respectable peaceful people have said all these things (not necessarily wrongly) in genteel society. Once it enters the area of politeness, it is hard to dislodge. In the US, people thank anybody in the military for ‘their service’, in the UK, people sing in choirs to get Help for Heros and everyone wears red poppies in November to remember how their ancestors killed to save democracy.
And at the same time we all chant ‘give peace a chance’,’violence never solves anything’, ‘if only people would sit down together and talk like adults’. What makes war possible is our ability to at the same time believe that killing someone is wrong under any circumstances and that killing someone near our target by a bomb is collateral damage. Now this is not a case of hypocrisy. It is a fundamental paradox of human existence.
So if we wonder who causes wars, the answer is clear. It is not religion. It is not even guns or glory or greed. It is heroes. Like us.
What is religion? Oh, sorry, there’s no such ‘thing’
We take it for granted that we know what religion is or even that there is such a thing exists. I wrote a long time ago that I know there’s no God, but I don’t believe religion exists.
Since then, I’ve come across a lot more writing by scholars of religion that confirmed my intution. The notion that there is such a thing as religion or faith that is separate from other institutions or mental states is just a relatively recent invention. We just label practices and beliefs around things to do with supernatural justification of X as ‘religion’ but don’t notice how close they are to other semi-natural beliefs and practices. We think of witchcraft as religion but alternative medicine as a health movement. We talk about Shinto as a religion but not national parks or ‘areas of special natural beauty’ as religion. Neo-pagans strike us as something wrong because of a strange sense of inauthenticity not quite like Jedi but close. But when we look closely all of these, we find that the beliefs and actual practices are very similar. Even in science a lot of practices and beliefs are much closer to organized religion than we might think. But because for us, religion is this newly separate category, a statement like this immediately makes us draw up a list of differences between ‘religion’ and ‘science’ and adopt a defensive (apologetic) posture. But the question is not are ‘religion’ and ‘science’ the same. But rather are they more different from each other than individal scientific disciplines or individual religions are different from each other? How is ‘string theory’ different from ‘scholastic Christianity’, how is ‘ornithology’ different from ‘shamanism’, how is ‘political science’ different from ‘Confucianism’? These questions give us one set of answers. But how is ‘string theory’ different from ‘ornithology’ and ‘scholastic Christianity’ from ‘Confucianism’? That gives us another set of answers.
But if we put those answers side by side, we begin to see that the artificial categories of ‘science’ and ‘religion’ are not very useful. It is possible that ‘ornithology’ has more in common with ‘witchcraft’ than ‘string theory’ which in turn has less in common with ‘political science’ than ‘Daoism’. We certainly know that holding deeply supranatural beliefs is no impediment to doing theoretical physics — witness Newton and others.
But even distinctions between religions themselves can be artificial. In practice, you can see Budhists involved in a lot of Shinto practices or Hindus venerating Muslim shrines. Even things like Christianity and Islam only seem irreconcilably different to us because of historical and political reasons. Doctrinally, Islam could easily be seen (and was seen by many) as a reform version of Christianity and/or Judaism. Just as many early Christians thought of themselves as reformed Jews.
People often point to the minute doctrinal or liturgical differences between warring factions to illustrate the ‘irrationality’ of religion. But that is only because they are completely ‘irrationally’ using a category outside its context. Because these differences are easily visible, they get elevated to forefront, but other non-doctrinal or non-liturgical diferences are their foundation. Northern Ireland is a great example. Catholics and Protestants are just the ‘religious’ labels given to different sides in a political-military conflict. So are the many factional wars in the Middle East. Sunni and Shi’a have been labels for political differences over leadership of the community from the very beginning. Not in the least over the nature of doctrine (just over who in the community is responsible for its interpretation). Of course, over time the divergences became greater but still relatively minor. The other political differences, however, are huge. And they are different in different regions where Sunni and Shi’a interact — though sometimes conflicts are exported.
But the point is that people are involved in a number of personal and institutional relationships as well as experiencing a range of mental states and discoursive events. Arbitrarily cutting off some as religion and others as non-religion obscrures more than it reveals. Religion can be a useful shortcut to certain institutions such as ‘Catholic religion’ historically associated with certain type of meta-natural doctrine and some institutional structure but outside of this usage, we are much better off acknowledging that it does not exist as an actual ‘natural’ category.
Just because we have ‘religion studies’, it doesn’t mean there is such a ‘thing’ as religion. When we compare the big ‘World Religions’ such as Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Budhism, Confucianism with each other, they end up being called ‘religion’ because we artificial extract the sort of similarities that matter to us (mostly with the lenses of Christianity on). But look much closer inside and you’ll see more differences and some surprising similarities. On the one hand, doctrinally, Islam could be seen as one branch of reformed Christianity. On the other, it has none of the institutional structures various Christian denominations have. Hinduism looks very similar metaphysically but is nothing alike in actual doctrine or organization. And what about the various Budhisms? Even more important is actual practices around the world and across time are much more complex than our ‘one man, one God’ perspective. People have always fluidly associated themselves with elements of different ‘religions’ — Hindus going to Muslim shrines, Budhist marriages and Shinto funerals in Japan, etc. It’s not unlike the old Pagan days, except that the meta-discourse filters these aspects out through all sorts of essentializating ecumenical rituals (looking at you Karen Amrstrong….).
Is there such a thing as war?
Yes, why else would there have been ministries of it? But the problem is not whether there is war but what should be counted as war. There are legitimate suggestions to count WWI and WWII as simply one war with some breaks — a longer one in Europe but a much shorter one in other parts of the world (such as China). But at the same time we could also say that it was a period during which many conflicts were going on around the world which we are conveniently referring to as World War — but actually most of the world was at peace during that time (India, South and Central Americas, much of Africa and lots of individual regions in Europe and Asia). And even though Canada and the US as well as Australia were combatants in the wars, they suffered no direct infrastructural damage and their civilian populations were not directly exposed to the ravages of war.
How should we count the Mongol wars of expansion? One war or many? The Crusades? Roman wars of conquest? Persian campaigns East of the Greek penninsula? Arab conquests? Thirty-year war? If we look at the Encyclopedia of Wars, we’ll see that some entries cover complex conflicts that last decades to those that are over in weeks or days. So while there’s always some armed conflict going on, when does it slip over into war? In our definition, we sort of assume state actors and formal armies but most wars elude some part of those assumptions (such as use of mercenaries, assymetry between organizational status of combatants, etc.). We also slip and slide between metaphorical and literal wars with ease. The Cold War was a metaphor but involved lots of proxy wars (US in Vietnam, USSR in Afghanistan, etc.) War on drugs or crime is also a metaphor but slides into armed conflict — often involving state actors, armies and sever consequences for local populations. But we also have war on poverty, which generally stays in the metaphorical realm, as do the culture wars, etc.
This means that if we want to be formal and count wars and their causes we’re going to be making some subjective decisions that will very much influence the outcomes.
