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War & Religion
Although I consider myself to have absolute faith in a God who is love, I find many of my fellow believers have fallen into a bait and switch trap that has a basic premise that if you believe in God then you must believe in war to protect those beliefs. For me, this is false logic and contradicts my belief that God is love. A God who is love does not murder innocent women and children sleeping in their beds whose only crime is to be born in a nation that is in a war. -Rudi
Rarely if ever is religion the major cause of war, but it is often a critical factor. Faith serves primarily to legitimate, motivate, and increase intensities, whether it is promoting or protesting war. From earliest wars of conquest to colonial wars and contemporary ethnic conflicts, religion is at the core of war making. Although opposition to war comes from many sources, religious traditions provide the most potent and persistent antiwar movements.
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Date: 8/11/2006 9:55:43 AM ( 18 y ) ... viewed 3337 times From Encyclopedia of Politics and Religion, ed. Robert Wuthnow. 2 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, Inc., 1998), 783-789.
War
War is a state of hostility, conflict, or antagonism between peoples and is usually defined as armed conflict between two or more governments or states. Religion and warfare are ancient partners that remain inextricably bound. Virtually every war in human history was supported by at least one religious institution, as were movements of opposition to warfare. The widespread peace movements of the twentieth century were largely initiated and nurtured by the same religious institutions that promoted history's bloodiest wars.
Violence and the Sacred
The moral struggles religious people face in the nuclear age are not new; the ancient Hebrew prophets, the hero Prince Arjuna of the Bhagavad Gita, and early Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, and animists faced them as well. The world's scriptures are replete with stories and lessons about the ethics of force. In the modern world religious elements of the debate are even more significant because of the god-like powers given to those who control nuclear arsenals.
Violence and the sacred are intimately linked. Violence, in religious terms, can be a sacrificial act designed to appease the gods. The same act of violence is at some times considered criminal activity and at other times a sacred duty. Religious thought accounts for acts that are ordinarily forbidden. In societies without developed judicial systems religious institutions regulate problematic behaviors, especially through rituals that provide established scripts for determining when force is forbidden and when it is required. In this respect the modern global social order is similar to hunting-and-gathering societies in that it has no formally binding transnational system of sanctions.
The paradox of violence is that most people both condemn and condone it. Almost universally in modern society, the use of violence is considered taboo yet efficacious, creating a remarkable moral ambivalence. Violence is widely abhorred and yet frequently employed. Elaborate social mechanisms are thus institutionalized to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate violence. The use of violence is a mechanism of social boundary maintenance, a profound expression of power that requires a rhetoric of justification, one found in the ancient warrior motifs of contemporary religious communities.
The Warrior Motif
The dominant theme in most religious traditions is the warrior motif that requires participation in warfare as a religious duty. Virtually every major tradition includes this concept, although it varies widely both within and between religions.
Hinduism and Buddhism, for example, contain nonviolent teachings but also have a long history of legitimating war. The Hindu Bhagavad Gita tells the story of Arjuna, who hesitates to fight against his relatives and is finally convinced to do so by Krishna, an incarnation of the god Vishnu. Krishna persuades Arjuna that it is his sacred duty--his dharma--to engage in battle because he was born a warrior. Moreover, he should not hesitate to kill, nor should he grieve for his victims because violence cannot destroy the soul but affects only the body, which one simply puts on and replaces like a garment. It is, therefore, not merely acceptable to engage in battle, it is obligatory. When the morally forbidden becomes required by the gods as sacrificial ritual, it is imbued with a cosmic justification that serves the purposes not only of the gods but also their alleged representatives.
This duty to fight coexists uneasily in contemporary Hinduism with norms of nonviolence but has driven Indians to war over the centuries and provides moral support for a large military budget and a nuclear weapons program in India, as well as ongoing conflicts between India and its neighbors.
The biblical exodus of the Hebrew slaves from bondage under the pharaoh of Egypt and their entry into a new homeland were eased by considerable violence believed to be perpetrated by God or carried out on God's behalf. The God of the Torah, the Jewish scripture, is perceived as the champion of the oppressed who wages war against the powerful; according to the Book of Joshua (24:8-13), the Lord told the Hebrews that "I brought you into the land of the Amorites who lived east of the Jordan; they fought against you, but I delivered them into your hands; you took possession of their country and I destroyed them for your sake." According to the tradition Yahweh later destroyed the Israelites because of their injustice. Yahweh was perceived as a God who used violence on behalf of justice.
Believers in the Hebrew God of war were, of course, also the inspiration for some of the most eloquent dreams of peace in the ancient world, such as the famous passage in Isaiah (2:4), "They shall beat their swords into plowshares and neither shall they learn war anymore." Indeed, for the ancient Hebrews, dreams of war and peace lived side by side, as they do in contemporary Judaism, in Israel and elsewhere. The ambivalent and often contradictory policies of the Israelis toward Palestinians and other Arab neighbors is, in a sense, an offspring of this ancient tradition; the contemporary rhetoric that justifies military campaigns echoes that in the Hebrew scriptures.
The Hebrew notion of God as warrior was greatly embellished by Christians waging the Crusades in medieval Europe. Although the early church was a pacifist community, the conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine in 312 transformed that institution and its teachings. He reportedly had a vision in which he saw the sign of a cross in the heavens accompanied by the words "In this sign conquer." The cross was painted on his troops' shields, and he won the decisive Battle of Molvena, consolidated his power, and became convinced that the Christian God was a great God of war.
By the eleventh century Christian ambivalence about warfare was nearly eradicated, and Rome aligned with European monarchies to free the Holy Land from the infidels (the Muslims). Armies swept across southern Europe in the name of Jesus, slaughtering many who opposed them. Guns were christened with apostles' names, and swords were engraved with religious scenes; men, women, and children were beheaded and stabbed in the name of Jesus.
The Crusade tradition became deeply engraved in Christian belief and practice in subsequent centuries, and the idea of loving one's enemies gave way to killing them under certain conditions. Early teachings against war gradually gave way as church elites aligned themselves with political and economic powers of Western civilization. The pacifism of the early church never fully disappeared but was marginalized, just as the emphasis on nonviolence was subordinated to the warrior dharma within Hinduism.
Nineteenth-century Europeans conquered most of the globe with guns and Bibles, twentieth-century troops are blessed by priests, and Christians around the world continue to pray for victory in battle. In a more subtle way the U.S. military's global policing efforts are embedded in the Crusade tradition, despite the secularization of official government policy. It is no accident that the most interventionist nation in the late twentieth century is a cultural heir of the Crusades.
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Taboos
Religious institutions and leadership are not always rallying the troops to battle and justifying war campaigns. They also define the boundary lies drawn around both the decision to go to war and the conduct of war, promoting prohibitions against or limitations of spoils, establishing social boundaries around killing, and defining what constitutes a just war.
Legitimate war is allegedly conducted for selfless purposes, so limits are placed on ways in which soldiers can profit from their plunder. Efforts to draw taboo lines around warfare can diminish the carnage, at least initially, but can also lead to unanticipated consequences by providing the ultimate justification for the use of force: if it is not for political or military leaders who make the decision, but only for the glory of God, how could it be morally wrong? Rules against spoils can actually increase the violence of warfare; the ancient Hebrews, for example, were instructed to "destroy every living thing" in city after city, leaving no survivors to prevent the taking of slaves and other forms of booty (Jos. 10:39).
Taboo lines are sometimes created to protect the religious community from violence by its own members, so that warfare can be waged only against outsiders. The Islamic jihad, for example, is to be carried out within very strict guidelines and prohibits violating the rights of others or destroying their property. Originally developed as a way to minimize violence among warring Bedouin tribes, the rules of the jihad allow violence only against those who rebel against the imam, or head of the Muslim community, protected minorities who violate the conditions of protection, and hostile unbelievers. It cannot be conducted during the sacred month of Ramadan and must be undertaken within the bounds of rigorous criteria. Such boundaries are often redrawn and redefined, of course, to sacralize acts of violence and warfare, as they were in the Iran-Iraq war between two Muslim nations, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the Euro-American allies' military actions in the Persian Gulf, Palestinian struggles with Israelis, Pakistan's quarrels with India, and so on.
Prohibitions against killing members of one's own religious group are found in many traditions but are often more complex then they originally appear, as one can see in the commandment against killing included in the Decalogue given to Moses on Mount Sinai. When Moses returns to the camp he finds the Hebrews engaged in forbidden worship practices. According to the Torah, he angrily shatters the tablets and instructs the Levites to "go through the camp from gate to gate and back again. Each of you kill his brother, his friend, his neighbor" in order to punish transgressors (Ex. 32:28).
Religious prohibitions thus include an exception clause that requires killing believed to be commanded by the deity. Thus even religious teachings that appear to prohibit war may be reinterpreted to legitimate it; such is the case with the Christian just war tradition.
Saint Ambrose (340-397), bishop of Milan, prayed for the victory of the Roman armies in the wake of Constantine's Christianization policies. He developed a Christian ethic of war later embellished by Saint Augustine (354-430), bishop of Hippo (in what is modern-day Algeria), that has become the cornerstone of Western debates about the morality of war, including an evaluation of the nuclear arms race in the 1980s and the Gulf War in 1991.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops reexamined the just war tradition during heated debates about nuclear war in the 1980s. They insisted that the doctrine begins with the presumption that Christians should do no harm to their neighbors and that how they treat their enemies is the true test of whether they love their neighbors. A just war thus has to meet two types of criteria: those relating to the decision to fight (jus ad bellum) and those regarding the conduct of the war (jus ad bello). A decision to wage war is just only when it meets the following conditions: just cause, competent authority, comparative justice, right intention, last resort, probability of success, and potential good. The decision to go to war must be decided primarily on the last principle: potential good from a battle must exceed its cost, a principle that must also apply to each act of war. The bishops conclude that these criteria call modern warfare into serious question because war does not discriminate between combatants and noncombatants and the harm caused would far outweigh any good accomplished even in the most optimistic scenarios of nuclear war.
Nuclear winter theories, moreover, suggest that even a relatively limited nuclear exchange could create fires that would block out the sun's rays to such an extent that plants could not undergo photosynthesis, and eventually the entire ecosphere could be destroyed, thus outweighing any possible objective gained by a nuclear confrontation. Ironically, the Pentagon used just war arguments in 1984 to promote new nuclear weapons programs following the bishops' condemnation. New smart bombs, it argued, are moral because they can be targeted more precisely at military targets rather than at civilians. Christianity traditionally included three approaches to the morality of war: the just war, the crusades, and pacifism. With the first two seriously challenged by many religious authorities in the modern world, many Christians are reconsidering the pacifist stance, relegated to a small minority for about fifteen hundred years.
The Pacifist Motif
All of the world's ethical systems raise questions about killing; some go so far as to forbid it under any circumstances, a position known as pacifism. The total rejection of warfare is relatively rare but is nonetheless significant in a number of traditions, notably the Buddhist and Christian.
The early Christian church was essentially a pacifist community that for four hundred years rejected killing humans for any reason. The early church fathers wrote about this problem extensively. Tertullian (160?-220?), the first important Christian ecclesiastical writer in Latin, for example, believed that killing and loving were incompatible with one another and that the injunction to love one's enemies was the most important test of one's relationship to God. He opposed the use of violence even in self-defense. Soldiers who converted to Christianity were allowed to remain in the military but under the strict condition that they were not to kill.
Contemporary Christian pacifism emerged from the biblical and early church traditions and from the historic peace churches, the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), the Brethren, and the Mennonites. The nonviolence of these small groups has been embellished in the latter half of the twentieth century through the church itself but also through a burgeoning global peace movement and the inspiration of contemporary advocates of nonviolence such as Indian independence leader Mohandas K. Gandhi, U.S. civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr., U.S. social reformer Dorothy Day, and American Trappist monk and religious writer Thomas Merton. King, Day, and Merton were influenced by Gandhi and the Eastern traditions; Gandhi himself was inspired by the teachings of Jesus, especially in the Sermon on the Mount.
As a result of pacifist convictions many Christians refuse to go into the military. In countries in which there is a legal provision for conscientious objectors to war, pacifists are allowed to work on approved community service projects rather than go into the armed forces. Where there is no such option--and sometimes out of a refusal to cooperate with the draft--pacifists are jailed for resisting the system. A number of pacifists are tax resistors, that is, they either refuse to pay the proportion of their taxes that would go to the military or they keep their total income under taxable levels. The amount of money that is withheld is usually donated to charities. Legislation in the U.S. Congress that would establish a peace tax fund allowing pacifists to earmark their tax monies for nonmilitary purposes has failed to gather sufficient support to be enacted.
Pacifism and nonviolence are not positions that come easily, especially in violent cultures in which people are routinely socialized into using violence to solve major problems. Martin Luther King Jr., for example, obtained a gun to protect his family after his house was bombed during the nonviolent Montgomery bus boycott and struggled mightily with the issue before deciding with the early Christians that it was not moral to use violence even in self-defense.
The Buddha was unequivocal in denouncing the use of violence in any form, although some of his subsequent followers managed to justify killing. The Noble Eightfold Path at the core of Buddhist ethics contains a set of Five Precepts for right behavior, the first of which prohibits killing in war, murder, and even the killing of animals either for food or for ritual sacrifice (although some branches of the tradition are not strictly vegetarian). Taking the life of any sentient being could result in negative consequences, or karma, and thus an inferior reincarnation. The Buddhist emphasis on compassion to all creatures thus leads naturally to an antiwar ethic.
This Buddhist ethic has its roots in the ancient Vedic doctrine of ahimsa (nonharmfulness) prominent in Jainism and Hinduism. A respect for all life and detachment from the world are the core of nonviolence in the Eastern traditions. Respect for sentient beings is a natural outcome of a pervasive belief in the unity of all beings. This idea is in turn related to the concept of reincarnation: all sentient beings have souls and are part of the same reality. To harm another being is thus ultimately to harm oneself and sets off a chain reaction of cause and effect (karma) that multiplies its negative consequences.
Conversely, acts of compassion create a positive karma that also multiplies, increasing happiness for all, including oneself. To escape endless cycles of rebirth into lives of suffering, most Eastern spiritual teachings promote various paths of detachment such as nonpossession and renunciation. Thus when one engages in war or other acts of violence, one may become more deeply enmeshed in the world, magnify one's own suffering, and further entrap oneself in its grasp. The practice of ahimsa, on the other hand, relieves suffering and helps one progress toward liberation (moksha) or enlightenment.
According to Gandhi, ahimsa forbids harming others but also requires active love toward all. For others, however, ahimsa is seen as a relative obligation. For example, a soldier might vow to do injury only in battle. The Buddhist monks of Hiei-zan reportedly covered their eyes when arming for battle. Thus, even in traditions that promote nonviolence and oppose warfare, the warrior tradition persists. Pacifism is very difficult to sustain when a religious tradition becomes allied with a powerful elite. Minority communities, however, sustain pacifist ideals within several spiritual traditions and are influential in modern peace movements.
Nonviolence and Spirituality
Just as history's wars are legitimated by religious traditions, so too are the major movements for peace. A modern theory of nonviolence was developed first by Gandhi, who used nonviolent direct action to fight the colonial system and other systems of injustice by applying nonviolent philosophies from ancient teachings of Buddhism, Jainism, Christianity, and Hinduism and modern exemplars such as American philosopher and naturalist Henry David Thoreau and Russian novelist and social thinker Leo Tolstoy. The nonviolent Indian Freedom Movement that Gandhi led precipitated a worldwide diffusion of nonviolent movements, inspired by Day, King, Merton, American peace activist David Dellinger, Philippine president Corazon Aquino, South African activist and president Nelson Mandela, South African civil rights activist and Nobel laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Burmese leader and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, and many other lesser-known but highly influential people of faith. The peace movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was precipitated and sustained (especially between wars) by countless people with deep spiritual faith who drew on various spiritual disciplines.
Within the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation, the nonviolent Anabaptists gave the pacifist doctrine an institutional home in the post-Reformation Christian church. The peace churches generally opposed all war and violence as part of their effort to restore what they felt was the radical call of Jesus to discipleship. Members of these churches and other sympathetic Christians refused to participate in various wars and called on Christians to lay down their arms and follow Jesus to the cross, if necessary.
American abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and others involved in the abolitionist movement in the nineteenth century denounced both slavery and war as antithetical to the teachings of Christ. They gathered in a peace conference and laid the groundwork for the modern antiwar movement. Tolstoy later praised the peace conference and insisted that Christians were morally obligated to resist participating in warfare.
In the twentieth century the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom and other antiwar groups, founded primarily by Christians and inspired by such leaders as American social reformer Jane Addams, developed a harsh critique of war systems and called on Christians to resist them. German and British Christians founded the Fellowship of Reconciliation during World War I, and at the war's end the disarmament movement spread rapidly as people reacted to the horrors of modern war. Public opposition to war was quickly crushed by Hitler's aggression, however, and as the world mobilized for another war, antiwar sentiment was rare outside of the peace churches.
In 1939 Dellinger founded an ashram, a spiritual community inspired by Gandhi's experiments in India and dedicated to nonviolence. Radical Christian pacifists affiliated with Dellinger's community, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the American Friends Service Committee, and the peace churches laid the groundwork for the Western antiwar movement, the American civil rights movement, and the elaboration of Gandhi's strategies of nonviolent direct action. In the post-World War II period antiwar sentiment was sustained primarily by these small communities of faith in the West and by some Buddhist and Gandhian movements in India, Japan, and elsewhere in the East.
Opposition to nuclear weapons grew in Japan and many parts of the West after World War II. Many of those involved in such groups as the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy and the peace churches formed the core of the movement opposing U.S. involvement in the war in Indochina in the 1960s and 1970s and the growing nuclear arms race in the 1970s and 1980s. Buddhist monks burned themselves to death protesting the Vietnam War, thousands of young Americans registered as conscientious objectors or refused to cooperate with the draft, and many were sent to jail or went into exile to avoid fighting in the war. Many Christians engaged in acts of civil disobedience in opposing war and nuclear weapons, protesting at the Pentagon and military installations and nonviolently invading nuclear weapons tests sites in an eVort to bring the explosions to a halt.
In 1981 a group of women encircled the North Atlantic Treaty Organization military base in Greenham Common, England, to prevent nuclear-armed cruise missiles from being installed there, setting off a series of protests throughout Europe and the United States. Civil disobedience took many forms; in East Germany church groups broke the law and were sometimes harassed by police for simply wearing a symbol on their clothing with the words "Swords into Plowshares" from the biblical prophet Isaiah. Sit-ins and demonstrations at military installations, weapons factories, and embassies often resulted in arrests.
Although not all of the demonstrators were from religious communities, much of their leadership was, and religious groups around the world provided institutional resources for organizing and carrying out the protests. Although initiated primarily by radical pacifists, the peace movement eventually drew in mainstream religious leaders as well. Many religious leaders condemned the Vietnam War and urged their congregations to participate in antiwar protests. A 1982 rally cosponsored by a range of religious groups in New York City (for example, the American Friends Service Committee and the National Federation of Temple Youth) and demonstrating against cruise missiles drew the largest protest crowd in U.S. history.
In the 1980s the Netherlands Reformed Church declared that because multilateral arms negotiations had failed, Christians should support unilateral disarmament. Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen of Seattle called the nuclear submarine base in his diocese the "Auschwitz of Puget Sound" and advocated unilateral nuclear disarmament; the bishop of Amarillo, Texas, declared that the production of nuclear weapons was a sin that should be avoided by Christians, even though the Pantex plant that assembled nuclear weapons was one of the largest enterprises in his diocese.
Besides providing the core of institutional and ideological support for the modern antiwar movement and the central legitimation for warfare, religious institutions also provide the basis for traditional peace cultures. Many traditions offer rituals that sometimes limit and at other times provide what American pragmatist William James called a moral equivalent of war. Many traditional cultures sustain rituals of cooperation and mutual support that mitigate the possibilities of war and enable people to live in peace and to resolve conflict nonviolently, a phenomenon that is the subject of an ongoing investigation by UNESCO's peace cultures project.
Most of the world's spiritual traditions contain an element of universalism that affirms the kinship of all humanity and provide rituals that promote mutual affection and peace. Just as Gandhi used prayer meetings to mobilize people in nonviolent protest against British colonial rule, conflict between Hindus and Muslims, and injustices in Indian society, many people use traditional rituals to promote transnational and interfaith communication and cooperation.
In short, religious beliefs and institutions have promoted both the bloodiest conflicts and the most thorough opposition to war over the millennia and will no doubt greatly influence the path that human conflict follows in the future. Although humans have always faced the possibility of tremendous gains or losses through warfare, the stakes have never been higher, given the destructive capability of modern weapons. Martin Luther King Jr. insisted that the choice is no longer between violence and nonviolence but between nonviolence and nonexistence.
See also Anabaptists; Civil disobedience; Crusades; Day, Dorothy; Friends, Society of; Hinduism; Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand; Jihad; King, Martin Luther, Jr.; Merton, Thomas; Pacifism; Violence.
Author: Lester R. Kurtz
Bibliography
Bainton, Roland. Christian Attitudes toward War and Peace. Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press, 1960.
Boulding, Elise. Building a Global Civic Culture: Education for an Interdependent World. New York: Teachers College Press, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1988.
Ferguson, John. War and Peace in the World's Religions. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Ghandi, Mohandas K. All Men Are Brothers. Edited by Krishna Kripalani. New York: Continuum, 1982.
Girard, Rene. Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.
Johnson, James Turner. Just War Tradition and the Restraint of War. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981.
Juergensmeyer, Mark. The New Cold War: Religious Nationalism Confronts the State. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993.
Kurtz, Lester R. Gods in the Global Village. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Pine Forge Press, 1995.
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