The Faith Instinct (37 page)

Second, people in modern societies are probably easier to discipline and mold into a cohesive fighting force than were people in early societies.

A third reason that modern societies have been able to train soldiers without depending on the old religious methods is that they have in fact borrowed and built on a central feature of religious training for war, that of music and dance.

The historian William McNeill has traced how early armies, such as that of the Spartans, practiced marching in unison to music and entered battle to the sounds of flutes, executing precise maneuvers. The importance of moving in unison was rediscovered from ancient Roman sources by Prince Maurice of Nassau, captain general of Holland from 1585 to 1625. His cousin Johann of Nassau had analyzed the motions necessary to reload a matchlock and found there were 42 postures required. Maurice trained his soldiers to move in unison through each of these actions and found, after endless practice, that a lot more lead could be delivered on the enemy through rhythmic coordination.

Training, drill and movement in unison proved very effective at making even the roughest classes into soldiers. “I don’t know what effect these men will have on the enemy but, by God, they terrify me,” the Duke of Wellington remarked on a draft of Irish troops sent to him during the Peninsula War in Spain in 1809.

Maurice made no secret of his methods, which were widely copied. Both in Europe and independently in China, McNeill writes, “prolonged drill created obedient, reliable and effective soldiers, with an
esprit de corps
that superseded previous identities and insulated them from outside attachments. Well-drilled new-model soldiers, whether Chinese or European, could therefore be counted on to obey their officers accurately and predictably, even when fighting hundreds or thousands of miles away from home.”
²⁹⁰

Acceptable as these modern armies were in fighting other European states, they were not nearly as good, in terms of martial valor, as the war machines of primitive societies that trained their warriors with purely religious methods. Despite their technological superiority, European armies did not always prevail. In 1879 the British army in South Africa was defeated by Zulus not once, but three times, at the battles of Isandlwana, Myer’s Drift and Hlobane. Against the British artillery and Gatling guns the Zulus possessed only spears and ox-hide shields, although they enjoyed superior numbers.

In its wars with the Indians, the U.S. Army was usually defeated when caught in the open, such as by the Seminoles in 1834, and by the Lakota and Northern Cheyenne at the battle of Little Bighorn in 1876. The southern San or bushmen of the Sneeuberg Mountains in South Africa halted the advance of the armed and mounted Boers for 30 years.

Western armies won in the end, but because they had larger populations and more effective logistics, not because their soldiers were better warriors. It is remarkable that religion prepared primitive warriors for battle so well, and maybe equally remarkable that European countries succeeded in devising a secular alternative for inducing the strangest but most necessary of all human behaviors, the willingness to sacrifice one’s life in warfare.

Critics sometimes point to religion as a source of war and strife. “Indeed, religion is as much a living spring of violence today as it was at any time in the past,” writes the philosopher Sam Harris, listing the wars between religiously defined groups in Palestine, the Balkans, Northern Ireland, Kashmir, Sudan, Ethiopia and Eritrea, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and the Caucasus. “In these places religion has been the
explicit
cause of literally millions of deaths in the last ten years.... Add weapons of mass
destruction to this diabolical clockwork, and you have found a
recipe for the fall of civilization,” he says.
²⁹¹

The vivid presence of religion in all these conflicts certainly raises the question of whether some of them might have been reduced or avoided did religion not exist. But the issue is not as straightforward as it seems.

Before the modern state was secularized, religion, politics and warfare were much more intimately intertwined and it was scarcely possible to separate them in many circumstances. The ritual wars of the Maring were governed by the build-up of the pig population; once the pigs were sacrificed and the sacred tanket tree was uprooted, the cycle of war inevitably resumed. But even with the Maring, although religion drove the cycle of warfare, the function of each war, whether the Maring realized it or not, was to readjust the populations of pigs and people to the carrying capacity of the land.

Religion appears to be the prime driver of the Aztec wars, given that the Aztecs’ assaults on their neighbors were driven by the need for captives to sacrifice to their bloodthirsty god. But a deeper analysis is that the Aztec religion furnished the expansionary ethos through which the Aztecs prevailed over their neighbors, rather than letting their neighbors conquer them. The Aztec empire was about survival, and religion merely provided the means.

“The peculiar Aztec merger of religion, politics, and war
was, in fact, probably closer to the human norm than the separation between religio
ns and politics to which we are accustomed,” writes McNeill.
²⁹²

The inextricable mixture of politics and religion is evident in
the first crusade, launched with the apparently purely religio
us objective of recapturing Jerusalem from the Saracens. But there was another motiv
e. The church was troubled by the outbursts of religious hyster
ia that were perturbing church authorities all across Europe. Led by their priests,
crowds of flagellants marched from town to town, lashing themse
lves to afrenzy. Zeal leads inevitably to schism and is a constant threat to any est
ablished church. How better to cope with the masses of the ultr
a-faithful than to march them to the sunburned deserts of the Near East, at the end
of an impossibly long supply train, in the expectation that few would return?

“It is, in fact, a misleading over-simplification to see
the crusade simply as a confrontation between Christian Europe and the Moslem East,”
writes Paul Johnson. “The central problem of the institutional church was alw
ays how to control the manifestations of religious enthusiasm,
and divert them into orthodox and constructive channels. The pr
oblem was enormously intensified when large numbers of people were involved.... Some
times they attacked the Jews, regarded as devils like the Moslems, but more accessib
le. But if no Jews or Moslems were available, they nearly alway
s, sooner or later, turned on the Christian clergy. Hence the anxiety to dispatch th
em to Jerusalem.”
²⁹³

Researchers at the University of Bradford in England assessed 73 major wars for the role played in them by religion and concluded that only in three did religion play an extremely intense role—the Arab conquests of 632-732, the crusades of 1091-1291 and the Protestant-Catholic wars of the Reformation. In 60 percent of wars, they found that religion played no role at all. Wars were scored according to a 6-point list including such factors as whether religion was used to mobilize nations for war, whether political leaders cited a religious motivation and whether one side’s goal was to convert the other to its religion. “There have been few genuinely religious wars in the last 100 years,” the researchers say.
²⁹⁴

Religion may play a less central role in many modern wars, and secular powers conduct many wars without any official citation of a religious pretext. But religion, in addition to its offstage role even in modern countries in preparing soldiers for battle, is frequently evoked as a rallying cry. The struggle between Jews and Palestinian Arabs is primarily about land, but both sides seek to strengthen their claims and their populations’ resolve by citing the imperatives of their respective religions.

In contexts like these, religion seems more a means of war than an end, and its contribution to causality is much like that of weapons. Weapons may provoke a war if one country’s build-up of arms is deemed an intolerable threat by its adversary. But in general weapons are seldom considered a prime cause of war, and much the same is true of religion.

Religion, however, can be shaped to support aggressive or pacific policies. The implicit premise of those who criticize religion for fomenting warfare is that all wars are wrong. But this of course is not the case. Some wars are just—most Americans would say the majority of their wars have been so, particularly the War of Independence and the Second World War. Many wars are regarded as defensive, at least by the country that is attacked. Many are unavoidable, especially for neighbors of an expansionist power. Religion’s contribution to just and defensive wars should surely be regarded as positive.

It may therefore be a wasted effort to draw up a scorecard for religion and its positive or negative contributions to warfare. As argued in an earlier chapter, religious behavior evolved to induce social cohesion and thereby to govern two essential human social behaviors, self-restraint within a society and aggression, if necessary, toward members of other societies. Religious behavior evolved in a dangerous world, amid hunter gatherer societies that did not hesitate to attack and sometimes exterminate their neighbors. The groups whose members developed the strongest emotional ties among one another were best able to prevail. These ties, forged in religious training and ritual, embedded in human nature its contradictory qualities of self-restraint and aggressiveness.

People today are the descendants not of those who lost out in these unremitting struggles but of the victors. We have inherited the capacities for extreme hostility, cruelty, even genocide, toward those who thr
eaten us, along with the capacities for loyalty, love and trust toward members of our own community. That is why human nature is part angel and part brute. An individual may be either one or the other, but societies and nations are inextricably both.

KEVIN PHILLIPS,
The Cousins’ Wars
²⁹⁵

ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE,
Democracy in America
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A
s long as kings ruled by divine right, religion and politics were essentially one and the same. The king’s decrees had the sanction of heaven, from which there was no dissent. With the separation of church and state in modern societies, religion and politics started to occupy distinct realms. Many European countries largely exclude religion from their domestic politics. As for international affairs, nations usually calculate their self-interest coldly, leaving no apparent role for religion in statecraft. In the index of Henry Kissinger’s book
Diplomacy
there are 49 ref erences to
Realpolitik,
none to Religion.

The steady growth of secularization in most Western countries has further eroded the political sway of religious authorities. At the beginning of the twentieth century sociologists predicted that religion would eventually disappear; at its end,
The Economist
magazine cheekily published God’s obituary.
²⁹⁷
Secularization has indeed advanced in par
allel with education, modernity and political security, particu
larly in Europe. Yet religion as a political force is far from spent. Religious behavior continues to be a primal glue of all human groupings, from tribal band to civilization. Religion remains central to the definition of culture, and it is culture that forms the fault lines between the world’s major civilizations.

Religion is integral to the cohesion of groups, and hence to their power and to the competitive relationships between them. In hunter gatherer societies, religion was aligned with several other powerful social glues, notably those of kinship, ethnicity, language and culture. After people abandoned foraging and settled down, their communities became much larger. The degree of kinship was much diminished in these more populous societies but religion, in the form of ancestor cults, may have instilled the idea of common descent and a shared origin.

Religious behavior can be stronger than the other social glues because it creates bonds at an emotional level. Its reach is broader than that of language and ethnicity since it can draw together people of many different tongues and nationalities. The nation state—people of the same language, ethnicity and religion living in the same region—may be coming back into vogue in the wake of the Cold War: Czechoslovakia has fissioned into the Czech Republic and Slovakia ; East and West Germany, despite different ideologies, have reunited. But for most of history many people have lived in large polyglot empires, whether of the Romans or the Holy Roman Empire or the Chinese imperium.

In these structures religion has played a central though double-edged role since it can both unite and divide. When Roman religion proved uncompelling as an imperial creed, Constantine and his successors chose Christianity to replace it as the empire’s unifying force. The Holy Roman Empire, on the other hand, was hastened to its demise by the religious divisions ignited within it by Martin Luther and the Reformation.