Generally, then, I tend to accept claims of “wars of religion” at face value. On the other side of the argument, I’d also note that over the past century or so, militantly secular and anti-religious regimes have caused far more bloodshed and carnage than all the crusades, jihads, and wars of religion combined.

What are religious wars really about?

I’ve been posting recently about the relationship between war and religious history, chiefly in the context of how warfare can shape religious change. Sooner or later, though, we encounter the familiar argument about what motivated a given cause, what drove a particular side in a war that they claimed as religious in nature.

Modern observers are deeply skeptical about such claims, even in conflicts that contemporaries had absolutely no doubt were matters of faith, where each side labeled itself with a religious or denominational label. When Christians and Muslims fought each other in the Crusades, when Protestants and Catholics were slaughtering each other in sixteenth century France or the Netherlands, when Anglicans and Puritans struggled in England’s Civil Wars – even when Protestant and Catholic militias were at daggers drawn in Northern Ireland in the 1970s.

That war? It certainly wasn’t religious, we hear: governments just used religion cynically to disguise their vested interests. Religion (Christianity) had nothing to do with that war: it was really about natural resources/oil/land hunger/surging nationalism/racial hatred…. Add whatever explanation you like. We reach the point where it seems hard to describe any war as genuinely the outcome of religious motivation. The same point applies to internal campaigns against minorities, whether Jews or heretics, or to witch-hunts. However starkly religious the rhetoric, moderns are tough to convince.

Partly, I suppose, that skepticism has a rhetorical function, in rebutting secularist claims that religious passions drive war, conflict and persecution.

But I am skeptical about the skepticism.

I would actually turn the question on its head. Prior to the modern era at least, I find it difficult to imagine any war that is genuinely secular in nature. Nor can I say with any confidence whether any particular individual or regime acted from religious motivations – if such a phrase makes any sense. And those comments apply across the faith spectrum. Note that I am not saying the Christianity or Islam or Judaism had any particular tendency to stir conflicts, rather that people operated from a religious mindset that is very difficult to reconstruct today.

Suppose we are looking at the era of the Crusades, or the sixteenth century Wars of Religion. The vast majority of people at those times, educated and ignorant alike, believed in providential views of the world.  They believed firmly that wrong conduct or heretical belief stirred God to anger, and that such anger would be expressed in highly material terms, in earthquake and fire, invasion and military defeat, famine and pestilence.

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