does religion cause wars?

Does religion cause wars?

Is there any clear evidence?

Critics often argue that religion causes wars and thus human suffering. But does history support this, or not? Here I examine the most well-researched facts I could find.

What the critics say

Professor of Religious Studies, Charles Kimball: "More wars have been waged, more people killed, and more evil perpetrated in the name of religion than by any other institutional force in human history. The sad truth continues in our present day."
Richard Dawkins: "My point is not that religion itself is the motivation for wars, murders and terrorist attacks, but that religion is the principal label, and the most dangerous one, by which a "they" as opposed to a "we" can be identified at all."
Anonymous atheist on About.com: "we see religion regularly used for war, mass murder, terrorism, and even genocide"

Historical studies of war and its causes

It is obvious that many factors lead to wars, and thus testing the claim that religion causes wars is difficult. Here is a summary of the best studies I could find:

University of Bradford

Researchers from the Department of Peace Studies, University of Bradford were commissioned by the BBC to summarise the historical evidence. Their findings were published in God and War: an Audit & an Exploration (2003).

The audit considers 73 major wars in the past 3 millennia, 32 of which took place in the twentieth century. It tests whether religion had a part in causing each war by examining factors such as support for the war by religious leaders and the use of religious motivation by political leaders. This is the most thorough and expert assessment I could find. Its assessments are subjective but the results are clear, and perhaps surprising:

Only 7 (10%) of all the wars (and the same percentage of 20th century wars) had clear religious motivation, and most had no detectable religious motivation at all. Even the Arab-Israeli wars, which had a religious component, were judged to be not primarily religious, but nationalistic.
The 20th century war with the greatest religious motivation (as stated by US president George W Bush) was the second Gulf War when the US and allies invaded Iraq.
In the 20th century, "Atheistic totalitarian states (Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China) have perpetrated more mass murder than any state dominated by a religious faith.". The worst war in this century, the Second World War, was judged to have only minor religious causes.
The authors also note the positive role of religion in the past century in pressing for non-violent resolution of conflicts.

The study concludes:

this study has concluded that very few if any wars in the past 100 years have been purely religious wars. ..... Despite the negativity around the role of religion in violent conflict, this study has demonstrated that the picture is much more complicated.

Matthew White's assessment

Matthew White has done an assessment of killings from wars and genocide (not exactly the same question as we are considering, but related). I don't know anything about Matthew, but while he hasn't documented his information as well as the above study, he appears to be a fair minded atheist whose conclusions are worth considering.

If we take only those events that can be classed as wars (not an easy distinction to draw - I have included the crusades and several civil wars), his figures show that christianity is culpable in 3 major wars in which about 10 million people died, non-christian belief systems (Nazism and Communism) are culpable in 2 wars in which 45 million people died, and a further 6 wars in which about 40 million people died have unclear culpability.

It seems to me that his figures over-simplify culpability, and he certainly considers far fewer wars than the previous study does, but his conclusions are not all that different to the above study: wars can be caused by religion, irreligion, or by forces where religion is irrelevant, but the worst wars (in terms of deaths) have not been caused by religion.

Other assessments

Many modern assessments of the causes of war address mainly political factors, and hardly mention religion at all:

Historian, Professor Geoffrey Blainey's The Causes of War discusses a range of alleged causes of war which he considers are not supported by the facts, and a group of pragmatic causes which he considers to be the true causes. Religion is not among either of these groups. He references Lewis Richardson in support of a conclusion that common religious belief does not promote peace, which means differing religions do not lead to greater probability of war.
Other textbooks likewise do not list religion as a significant cause of war - e.g. Greg Cashman's What Causes War?: An Introduction to Theories of International Conflict and Stephen Van Evera's Causes of War.

Meic Pearse, in The Gods of War: Is Religion the Primary Cause of Violent Conflict? argues that:

The two principal causes of war are culture and greed for territory, resources or power. Wars fought for culture often wrongly appear to be fought for religion.
'Irreligion' is a greater cause of war than religion.

A study of the psychology of religion and violence, Effect of Scriptural Violence on Aggression concluded that focusing on violent sections of religious scriptures can increase a person's willingness to participate in violence: "People who believe that God sanctions violence are more likely than others to behave aggressively themselves."

Studies of terrorism also show that religion is not a major cause, though it can strengthen resolve to commit an act of terrorism for political reasons or a sense of injustice - see Does religion cause terrorism?

Conclusions

It seems clear then that the claim that religion causes war is not supported by the historical or contemporary evidence. Very few wars have a significant religious cause, and most have significant other causes.
Religion has been assciated with war in some time periods (e.g. in the Middle Ages) when it was allied with powerful governments, but both early and modern christianity have tended to be promotors of peace.
Atheism has been associated with more killing in war than religion, and is most dangerous when associated with a totalitarian state.
Thus religion, or non-religious 'causes' such as atheism, communism, nationalism, etc, can be used to sanction violence and war, and are at their most dangerous when combined with authoritarian or aggressive governments.

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