The Gods of War: Is Religion the Primary Cause of Violent Conflict?

by Meic Pearse

Book Overview

Does religion cause war? It is often claimed that religion is responsible for more wars, more global conflicts and more deaths than any other factor. After all, the world has seen its share of crusades, inquisitions and jihads. Enlightened, modern people assume that if we could only discard primitive religious belief, the world would be a better place. Alas, the picture is not quite so simple. "Indeed," writes Meic Pearse, "there is only one thing...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1844742261
• ISBN13: 9781844742264
• Release Date: November 2007
• Publisher: IVP
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.4" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

A Sane and Balanced Account

This a sane and balanced account of the oft-heard complaint that "religion is the cause of all the world's wars." The author of "Why the Rest Hates the West," I had the pleasure of working with Meic Pearse when he was a visiting lecturer at Kingsley College last year. He is honest about religion's implication and involvement in violent conflicts but rejects the idea that wars are normally fought on religious grounds. He has a strong preference for Anabaptist thought without adopting the kind of thorough going pacifism that does not really work in the real world. His experience living in Croatia has given him some important firsthand insights into the roots of multi-generational enmities. A valuable piece of Apologetics and highly recommended.

Debunking a secular myth

A common charge made by atheists is that religion is the primary cause of war, violence and bloodshed. If we could eliminate religion, we would be well on the road to peace on earth and good will toward men. Dawkins could seriously write, "to fill a world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns". John Lennon of course asked us to "Imagine" a religion-free world, where there is "nothing to kill or die for". Pearse takes these charges head-on. As a historian with degrees from Oxford, he is well-placed to do it. And his overall thesis is this: while religion certainly has played a role in warfare and violence, the "two principle causes of human warfare are human greed and culture". Greed for territory, political power, or resources, and the cultural, national and social fabric that glue a people together are the major components of why nations go to war. He certainly does not deny or downplay conflict that has been primarily religious in nature. But in something as complex as war, monocausation is rarely the case. Usually there is a mixture of motives. Thus Pearse looks at a whole range of war and conflict over the past several millennia, and concludes that while some were mainly caused by religious factors, the majority were not. "The secularist establishment's accusations against religion as the primary cause of war are simplistic and ill-motivated" he says; "they have some important superficial validity but are far from the whole truth." A large part of this book is a historical examination of war and the complex set of reasons for it. He argues that there were really only two main periods in history where religion was the driving force of war: in the Middle Ages, especially between Christians and Muslims, and in the sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth centuries, with Catholics versus Protestants. Other conflicts which may seem to be primarily religious-based, turn out, upon closure inspection, to be a real mix, with secular factors as important, if not more so. For example, the Hundred Years War was mainly a contest over possession of feudal property. In the same vein, the numerous wars of the eighteenth century, the Napoleonic Wars, and the American Revolutionary War, were mainly nonreligious in nature. Pearse also reminds us that the real perpetrators of blood and war in recent times have been the secularists. Last century was the bloodiest century on earth, and this belligerence was due to secularist creeds. Fascism and communism - both secular, atheistic tyrannies - saw war and violence as fully justified if they served the cause. And because both systems saw nothing unique in humanity, they were quite happy to slaughter millions in the interests of their ideologies. Pearse reminds us that secular revolutions, going back to the French Revolution, were always ready to sacrifice human life, since it possessed no innate value other than to serve the collective. Nationali