The idea that Christianity or "religion" causes wars, and either should be left out of the public square, or should be disavowed altogether belongs to a narrative intrinsic to the modern liberal Western culture.
The argument is run that religion breeds an irrational and dogmatic certainty, a worldview of absolutes, an ethic of intolerance; it causes "the other' to be demonised. What we need is an enlightened, secular public space, where reason not religion prevails. Then we will be safe from fanaticism and able to make for peace and tolerance - not war.
The crusades and the "wars of religion" demonstrate the evil of mixing religion and politics, and show just how bloodthirsty religion is. Similarly, the argument might run, pre-modern religions in the current day are just as dangerous.
Fundamentalisms show the disaster of indoctrinating children with dogmas and certainties. The problem with all religions - from the suicide bomber's, to the Religious Right in the USA " is that when they are taken to the extreme, they inevitably produce violence.
The problem then is either with religion's "invasion" of the public square and its interference with government, or in zoologist Richard Dawkins' viewpoint with its very existence. It should be eradicated.
Catholic theologian William Cavanaugh notes that the invention of the idea of "religion" " as a private, individual and separate set of beliefs apart from politics - was correlative with the invention of the state in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. With the rise of the state came a new way of defining sovereignty (in terms of territory and borders), and belonging (in terms of citizenship and residence within the territory). The liberal (small l) view of history is that this new
secular statehood saved us from wars:
Cavanaugh quotes liberal theorist Judith Shklar:
"liberalism" was born out of the cruelties of the religious civil wars" If faith was to survive it would do so privately."
Cavanaugh argues that this puts the matter backwards. He says:
"To call these conflicts "Wars of Religion" is an anachronism, for what was at issue in these wars was the very creation of religion as a set of privately held beliefs without direct political relevance. The creation of religion was necessitated
by the new State's need to secure absolute sovereignty over its subjects."
Cavanaugh is, you may have noticed, a Catholic and a radical pacifist. He questions the whole "given" that the state saves us from religious war, and turns it upside down, arguing we need a stronger church to resist state-sponsored violence.
Even if we put aside Cavanaugh's own project for a while, he shows just how historically contingent is the view that "religion causes wars". Re-examining the emergence of the state in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, he argues that the view is really liberal mythology. He ironically uses the Christian theological term "Soteriology" (the study of salvation) to describe the optimistic liberal belief in the state's saving ability.
While Cavanaugh focuses on the sixteenth and seventeenth century, one only needs to glance at the record of the state in the twentieth century to see whether it has saved us from violence, or caused it " Gallipoli, Passchendale, the Somme, Hiroshima, Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Normandy, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq.
In a recent lecture in Sydney, Cavanaugh went further and argued that the myth of religious violence is actually dangerous. By portraying Islamic nations as pre-modern and other, the liberal myth has demanded that these people modernize, and create secular democracies " even if they don't want to. In fact if they don't want to " we might have to encourage them with a few bombs, a bit of force to help the birth pangs of democracy. And of course, we need to protect ourselves from these obviously crazy religious fanatics. Self-defence (even if its pre-emptive) is justified - these people are dangerous. How can you trust them, the argument would run.
And thus in an irony so typical to human history, the myth of religious violence when invoked as a license for liberal democracies, ironically creates more violence than it prevents. The secular state becomes a killer after all.
I'm not sure I'd agree with Cavanugh's specific politics over what the West should do in relation to terrorist attacks and threats. But as cynical and radical as his reading sounds, I love the fact that it serves to relativise and question the
presumed sanctity of the nation-state. For Christians it is a critique we ought to listen to.
So the question "Does Christianity cause war?" is necessarily modern and liberal one.
This is not to dismiss the claim, but rather contextualise it.
Sociologist David Martin's critique of Richard Dawkins's popular argument is actually patient enough to approach and analyse its logic.
For Martin the problems with Dawkin's claim, aside from the fact that an enormous amount of conflict occurs without the involvement of religion at all, are:
1. the extraordinary variety of reasons for war at any time, including the so-called wars of religion
2. the relative unimportance of religious "certainty" among such reasons
3. the problem of defining religion so as not to merely argue in a definitional circle
The first objection is most pertinent from my point of view.
No historian would in any way be able to establish religion as a sole and specific cause of war in any example, let alone as a general pattern.
The problem is particularly acute in relation to twentieth century warfare, which after all is the bloodiest and most advanced the world saw.
One needs to recognize the self-interest of the state, and the complex "calculus of international advantage."
The First World War is the most obvious example where imperial interest, collective state anxieties, and a series of entangling alliances allowed for a global disaster. Of course, the "cause" of the war may be said to be the assassination of
Arch-Duke Franz Ferdinand in the Balkans.
But of course its simply foolish to go for one "cause" in explaining historical tragedy, isn't it.
Martin pushes the logic further to an individual level and says, "One might ask whether Gerald Adams with his IRA colleagues and their mirror images in the loyalist paramilitaries are specially marked out by personal piety and prolonged prayer.
Or, it could work the other way: "Another line of questioning might focus on the pronouncements made by functionally specific ecclesiastical bodies (for example, the World Council of Churches) to see how far they contain exhortations either to secular nationalist conflict or to the kind of antagonism toward other religious bodies which might lead to overt conflict and war."
Yet the question of "Does Christianity Cause War" is still a question worth asking, despite its logical flaws and historical novelty.
Martin does actually take it seriously. He chiefly looks at the role of religion in creating ethnic difference. Religion's relationship with ethnicity may create a precondition, he argues, which when combined with other cataclysmic crises "
like the collapse of an empire - may be used to legitimise war. This may be argued from the collapse of the Yugoslavia, for instance.
Whereas Martin focuses on ethnic difference, I wish to ocus on the sacralization of the nation-state in legitimizing warfare.
Here is my go at a general answer - in terms of modern history:
The question is "Does Christianity Cause War"?
Answer: No, nation-states do. Usually out of collective self interest.
But their actions are often enabled and legitimised by ideologies and claims of a sacred nature.
In 1931 Reinhold Niebuhr then a socialist, pacifist, and Christian, wrote in his famous work Moral Man and Immoral Society of the nation's compulsion to "claim general and universally valid objectives" for itself. According to Niebuhr, "In the imagination of the simple patriot the nation is not a society but Society." And here is where the underlying structure of this error is laid bare: "Though its values are relative, they appear" to be absolute." In this sense, nationalism has a religious potency in its "instinct' for the absolute, and thus patriotism and religion may become intertwined.
Has Christianity at certain times and places been complicit in this process?
That's the question.
Nation-states haven't needed Christianity to wage violence" Japan invading Manchuria, Khmer Rouge or Communist revolutionaries in China purifying their peoples" but in the English speaking West, more so in the USA than elsewhere
we do need to examine the relationship of Christianity to war.
So my new question is: within the United States has Christianity been complicit in a national ideology which causes wars?
The short answer is yes. In some sense, it has been historically complicit " for e.g. in the American Revolution against a "tyrannical England," in the "Manifest Destiny" and Westward Expansion movements of the nineteenth century, in turn
of the century US Imperialism when the world was to be civilized and "Christianised", in US entry into World War I "to make the world safe for Democracy", and in US anti-Communism in the Cold War.
But it is complex. The point to be made about this is that we are dealing with a cultural phenomenon, not an essentially Christian phenomenon. To highlight the complicity of Christianity in each of the above conflicts is not to say that the leaders and architects of the conflict were necessarily Christian believers, or that the people were motivated by a religious or Christian motive.
We are dealing here with deep cultural assumptions about the nature and purpose of America's role in world history, that have borrowed from Christian traditions and been translated to a secular and national context. Thus they are double-dangerous. The point is that non-Christians and Christians (sometimes not even Christians) are affected by the dominance or "hegemony" of these ideas.
Recommended Reading
"¢ George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 2nd ed., Oxford University
Press, 2006
"¢ Mark Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 1994
"¢ David Martin, Does Christianity Cause War? Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1997
"¢ Timothy P Weber, On The Road to Armageddon: How Evangelicals Became Israel's Best
Friend, Baker Academic, 2004
"¢ John Judis, The Chosen Nation: The Influence of Religion on U.S. Foreign Policy,
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Policy Brief No. 37, March 2005, found at
[url=http://www.carnegieendowment.org/files/PB37.judis.FINAL.pdf]http://www.carnegieendowment.org/files/PB37.judis.FINAL.pdf[/url]
"¢ Ernest Tuveson, Redeemer Nation, University of Chicago Press, 1968
