Religion

It slips so easily off the tongue. In fact, it’s a modern mantra. ‘Religion causes all the wars.’ Karen Armstrong claims to have heard it tossed off by American psychiatrists, London taxi-drivers and pretty much everyone else. Yet it’s an odd thing to say. For a start, which wars are we talking about? Among the many causes advanced for the Great War, ranging from the train timetables on the continent to the Kaiser’s withered left arm, I have never heard religion mentioned. Same with the second world war. The worst genocides of the last century — Hitler’s murder of the Jews and Atatürk’s massacre of the Armenians (not to mention his expulsion and massacre of the Greeks in Asia Minor too) — were perpetrated by secular nationalists who hated the religion they were born into. The long British wars of the 18th and 19th centuries — the Napoleonic wars and the Seven Years’ War — were cheerfully fought by what Wellington called ‘the scum of the earth’ for land and empire, not for the faiths to which they only nominally belonged.
We have to go back to the 17th century and the Wars of Religion to find a plausible candidate. Hobbes certainly believed that the preachers had been ‘the cause of all our late mischiefs’. But modern historians are more inclined to describe the English civil war as the War of Three Kingdoms and/or as a struggle against the autocracy of Charles I. The Wars of Religion on the continent do look like a fall-out from the cataclysmic split of the Reformation, though Armstrong points out that there too dynastic rivalry came to predominate. Pope Paul IV went to war against the devout Catholic Philip II of Spain. The Catholic Kings of France allied with the Ottoman Turks against the Catholic Habsburgs and fought for 30 years on the same side as half the Protestant princes of Germany.
Skipping lightly over the non-religious Wars of the Roses and Hundred Years’ War, we have to reach back seven centuries to the last Crusades to find bloody and unremitting wars that were quintessentially religion-driven, not to mention genocidal (before setting out, the Crusaders usually massacred the local Jews as an hors d’oeuvre).
There at last we find a conflict in which the throb of religious passion never faded, even if compounded by greed and sheer bellicosity. Of all the gaffes uttered by that master of misspeak, George W. Bush, his description of the War on Terror as a crusade takes the bloody biscuit.
On the whole, though, for a millennium in which religion has loomed so large, as a motive for actual war it seems to have been rather secondary. What then explains this obstinate modern conviction that religion is the driving cause of organised bloodshed? Karen Armstrong, a former nun, has built up a formidable reputation as a scholar of world religions who is eloquent and empathetic, which is rare, and impartial, which is rarer. In trying to disentangle the fateful intertwinings of religion and violence, she ranges across the great empires and leading faiths of the world. Fields of Blood is never less than absorbing and most of the time as convincing as it is lucid and robust.
Armstrong starts off, though, on rather shaky ground. She tells us that ‘there is little evidence that early humans regularly fought one another’. It was when they stopped hunting and foraging and started farming that the competition for land, women and cattle began: ‘With agriculture came civilisation, and with civilisation warfare.’
This is essentially the noble-savage story familiar to us from Rousseau and Margaret Mead, not to mention Marx and Engels. Yet it is now fiercely contested. Steven Pinker, following the anthropologist Lawrence Keeley, claims in The Better Angels of Our Nature that the chances of a violent death were far worse for prehistoric hunter-gatherers than for us — 30 times worse, according to Keeley. Other anthropologists still claim that our remotest ancestors spent their time laughing, making love and playing non-threatening games. Hard to say who’s right. It seems to be a question of counting axe-gashes on an unreliable sample of skeletons. I must say, though, that Pinker’s overall thesis, that the world is steadily getting more peaceful, does seem a trifle unpersuasive just now.