The Faith Instinct (35 page)

But though religious behavior has been deeply shaped by warfare, it is not inseparably linked to it. Religion provides a social cohesion, militant if necessary, which a society or its leaders may use to support an aggressive or pacific policy. The adaptable nature of religion is evident from a consideration of how each of the three monotheisms has resorted to warfare over the centuries.

Consider Judaism, a religion first shaped as an aggressive advocacy of a promised land for a chosen people. “When thou goest out to battle against thine enemies, and seest horses, and chariots, and a people more than thou, be not afraid of them,” advise the writers of the book of Deuteronomy, “for the Lord thy God is with thee, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.... But of the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give to thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that b
reatheth: But thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hittites, and the Amorite
s, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jeb
usites, as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee....”
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The divine directive for a thorough ethnic cleansing could scarcely have been clearer. With a sacred text designed to support an expansionist political agenda of the seventh century B.C., the Israelite religion proved all too effective at mobilizing the population for war, which it did time and again despite one sanguinary defeat after another. The early Israelites fought unremitting battles with the large Egyptian and Assyrian empires that were their neighbors. Jews mounted at least three serious revolts against Roman rule—the Romans lost a whole legion during Bar Kokhba’s revolt of A.D. 132—135—but the outcome was always disastrous for the Jews.

When the Jews’ territorial ambitions were at last abandoned, Judaism turned inward and underwent a remarkable transformation, demonstrating how effectively a religion can be shaped to new circumstances. The focus shifted away from sacrificing hecatombs of domestic animals at the Jerusalem temple and toward the reading of the Torah. Judaism proved as potent at generating internal cohesion as it had previously been at energizing people for offense. Far-flung communities of the Jewish diaspora, from Spain to India, preserved their ethnic and cultural identity for generations. Lacking a country of their own, Jews defined themselves by their religion, to which they clung tenaciously. Without their religion, the Jewish communities of the Mediterranean would surely have been absorbed into the general population of the Roman empire, and would have quietly disappeared from history like so many other peoples of the ancient world.

Jews’ survival thus depended on the adaptability of Judaism, on its abrupt switch from aggressive defiance to the entirely pacific religion of defenseless populations who had to get along with unpredictable hosts. Judaism has remained a nonviolent religion, with the exception of its practice in the state of Israel, founded in 1948, which quickly developed and maintains one of the world’s best professional armies.

Unlike Judaism, Christianity began as a religion of nonviolence, as befitted a small sect subject to intermittent persecution by Roman authorities. “All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword,” Jesus had told a supporter who drew a weapon in his defense. Citing this directive, the early church at first forbade Christians to join the Roman army. But this prohibition changed after the emperor Constantine made Christianity a legal religion of the Roman empire, no longer subject to persecution. The night before the battle of the Milvian bridge in A.D. 312, Constantine is reported to have seen a cross in the sky with the Greek words “’εν τoυτω νικα—In this [sign], conquer.” Thereafter Byzantine soldiers carried on their shields the labarum, an emblem combining the Greek letters chi and rho, indicating an abbreviation for Christ.

Around 350 Athanasius, the Patriarch of Alexandria, decreed that though it was wrong to kill, it was lawful for a soldier to kill the enemy. As it began to share in the responsibilities of empire, the once peaceful church became habituated to the use of force in the state’s interest.

The church long insisted that at least its bishops and priests should not shed blood, a prohibition that lasted until the Middle Ages when bishops, who ran many European cities, became military leaders as well. In the early sixteenth century, Pope Julius II twice led armies in attacks in northern Italy. Nonetheless, sects like the Anabaptists and the Quakers kept alive the ancient concept that Christians should not kill.

Even the official church did not entirely forget its early renunciation of force. The Lateran Council of 1139 condemned a deadly new weapon—the crossbow—as immoral, and forbade its use, at least against Christians. It could, however, be used against Saracens.

Before it foreswore pursuit of temporal power, the Catholic church was no stranger to the use of force in statecraft. It was a pope, Urban II, who launched the first crusade in 1095, and his successors continued the tradition. The fourth crusade, managed by the doge of Venice, was diverted into an attack on Constantinople and the Orthodox church.

With the crusades abandoned, Christian violence turned inward and a long series of wars within Europe took place between Catholic and Protestant powers. Christian states then gradually learned an important lesson, that wars fought in the name of absolute beliefs are hard to settle by negotiation. From this experience emerged the solution of separating the powers of church and state, beginning with the Peace of Augsburg of 1555; under the formula
cuius regio, eius
religio, each ruler was allowed to choose the religion for his region. With another treaty, the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, the European wars of religion came at last to an end.

Religious commands not being easily subject to debate, whoever got to speak in the religion’s name wielded considerable influence in the decision to go to war. In a secular state the ruler had to make the case for war on more rational grounds. Separating religious and secular powers in a state was thus a significant stride toward loosening the potent union between religion and warfare.

Turning to the third monotheism, Islam has generally proved somewhat less adaptable than Christianity. Far from beginning as a persecuted sect, Islam was shaped as a religion of empire, with Muslim Arabs as the rulers and conquered peoples subjected to various forms of discrimination. Jews and Christians were allowed to practice their religions but accorded a second-rank “protected” status which, though it conferred certain rights, still left them subject to a poll tax and other burdens; many eventually converted to Islam.

Qur’anic discussions of fighting “made it clear that religious rewards, that is the joys of paradise, were more important than material suc
cess,” writes the historian Hugh Kennedy. “In these ways, the Koran provided the ideological justification for the wars of the Muslim conquests.”
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The ethnicity of Muslim rule changed when Seljuk Turks, then Mongols and later Ottoman Turks invaded the territories of the early Arab caliphate. But the invaders adopted their subjects’ religion and the character of Islam did not greatly change.

Islamic countries have had difficulty in separating church and
state. One reason, perhaps, is the nature of Islam. Unlike the
case with Judaism or Christianity, its founding prophet was presented as a temporal
ruler who commanded armies and set social policy. The religion
specified only an Islamic state, not a separate church within it. “The idea th
at any group of persons, any kind of activities, any part of human life is in any se
nse outside the scope of religious law and jurisdiction is alie
n to Muslim thought,” writes Bernard Lewis, a leading scholar of Islam.
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For over a millennium Islamic countries used the shari’a,
regarded as divinely inspired, as their only source of law. It
was only after the expansion of Islam had been firmly checked and reversed that ref
ormers started to urge separating the state from religion, but
they confronted deep resistance. “The general failure of liberal democracy to
take hold in Muslim societies is a continuing and repeated phenomenon for an entire
century beginning in the late 1800s. This failure has its source at least in part in
the inhospitable nature of Islamic culture and society to West
ern liberal concepts,” writes the political scientist Samuel Huntington.
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Mustafa Kemal succeeded in secularizing Turkey, after the fall of the Ottoman empire in 1918. More recently secular leaders have emerged in countries like Egypt and Syria, but they are far from being fully secure. Radical fundamentalist movements agitated for a restoration of Islamic rule. Such movements have come to power in Iran and, for a time, in Afghanistan, and pose a serious threat to the stability of governments in Pakistan and Egypt.

Still, it’s far from clear that Islam is the cause of Islamic countries’ discontents. Although shari’a was presented as divine law, it was nonetheless administered and interpreted by Islamic scholars, known as the ulema, who for centuries served as a check on the absolute authority of the caliph. The ulema did not have formal rights of judicial review, as in western countries, but they gave the ruler legitimacy and he required their support.

Ottoman reformers replaced the ulema with a Western-style legislature, but Caliph Abdulhamid II abolished the legislature in 1878 and the caliphate itself was abolished in 1924. Islamic countries for most of the last century have been ruled by absolutist modern rulers, unchecked by either the ulema or a functioning legislature.

Calls to bring back the shari‘a, with its medieval penal code of stonings and amputations, alarm Western observers but reflect the deep-seated desire of many Islamic populations for the rule of law and an
institution for restraining the arbitrary power of unjust rulers. “The distin
ctive distortions of many Muslim states in this era were products of unchecked execu
tive authority,” writes the legal scholar Noah Feldman. “
The call for the restoration of the shari’a in contemporary Islamist politics may be
seen in substantial part as a response to this constitutional defect.”
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In two important exceptions, the voice of the scholars in polit
ical affairs has remained strong, but in neither case with enti
rely happy results. In Saudi Arabia, the royal family has a historic alliance with t
hat of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, a fundamentalist religious leader. In principle the schola
rs, on whom the Saudi rulers depend for their legitimacy, shoul
d hold them answerable to the people. In practice, the gushers of oil money have fre
ed the rulers of many ordinary political constraints, and the
Wahhabite ulema is under no compulsion to operate for the public benefit, Feldman argues.

In Iran the scholars are in control but too much so. When the s
hah was ousted, the Ayatollah Khomeini could have restored the
ulema to its former role of advising and curbing a secular ruler. Instead, he instit
uted the unprecedented office of a scholar-jurist who was to be
the supreme ruler. “The idea that the scholars as a class would rule directly was w
ithout precedent in Islamic history,” writes Feldman.
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Since the Iranian parliament is subject to review by the scholars’ Council of Guardians, the system is close to being a dictatorship of the ulema, which is no better than any other kind.

A striking feature of all Islamic countries is the prominent place that Islam plays or is expected to play in national politics. Even in Turkey, the most secular of Islamic countries, a party with Islamist sympathies has gained power through its parliamentary majority. The point could not be clearer: in countries that have not had time to develop robust secular institutions, religion is often the only organizing principle, other than autocracy, to which people can turn.

All state religions are capable of supporting warfare, but Islamic countries, whether or not because of their apparently deep-seated unease with secularization, seem to some observers to have become embroiled in warfare with more than usual frequency. Along the fault lines between Islamic countries and the rest of the world, strife has been common. “Violence also occurs between Muslims, on the one hand, and Orthodox Serbs in the Balkans, Jews in Israel, Hindus in India, Buddhists in Burma and Catholics in the Philippines. Islam has bloody borders,” Huntington observed in 1993.
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Though almost all Muslims are of course peaceful citizens, the recent terrorist activities by members of Muslim communities against their host European countries of Germany, England, Spain and Holland have added to the perception of Islam as a religion of violence. Religious behavior in itself prompts only social cohesion and purpose, but these can be shaped by leaders toward aggressive ends, as was the case with the Aztec religion. There are many Islams, just as there are many Christianities. Thos
e who shape a sect’s beliefs are probably responsible in some degree for what its followers do in the sect’s name. Violence, in other words, is behavior more appropriately attributed to societies, not to the religion they may use to justify or incite it.

Looking back at the relationship between religion and warfare, each of the three monotheisms has followed a different course. Judaism started as an expansionary creed and transformed itself into a pacific one after defeat. Christianity began as nonviolent, became an aggressive religion of empire, and was then somewhat neutralized after the rise of secular states. Islam was created as a religion of empire but has generally not yet found an easy role in a secular state.

No consistent relationship emerges between religion and warfare, other than that religion is a potent instrument that can be wielded by rulers in many ways. This is as would be expected from the evolutionary perspective that religion emerged from the unremitting strife between early human societies. Religious behavior helped energize a society for war, induced people to endure privation and prepared men to sacrifice their lives in battle. But warfare is only one aspect of religion’s cohesive powers. If a group needs to live peacefully with its neighbors, or within a more powerful host community, its religious behavior can be adapted to its needs.