Religion and War

In its frequency, its conduct, and its consequences, warfare has always been a matter of great significance to the world's major religions, and the study of warfare in human history has often led to the conclusion that religious differences lie at the heart of many or most conflicts. There has been nothing approaching a consensus either among the faith traditions collectively, or within each one individually, as to how war should be viewed from a religious perspective. Many religions have a strong strand of pacifism and at times have rejected and condemned war as spiritually misguided and morally wrong, but just as often have acknowledged that since war nevertheless takes place, the mere act of condemnation may be redundant, could open the faith tradition to the criticism that it prohibits the defence against evil and aggression, and may risk excluding moral and spiritual considerations from subsequent debate on war and its effects. This realization has drawn the various faith traditions into the more instrumental discussion of the rights and wrongs of the resort to war and its conduct. The development of Christian thinking on just war offers a useful illustration.

War has not always been considered a problem, however. On many occasions war has been seen as an opportunity and has been actively promoted by religious and spiritual leaders. For example, in the 1970s Imam Khomeini of Iran looked forward to the success of the Islamic revolution in Iran as the first step in a holy ‘war of conquest whose final goal is to make Koranic law supreme from one end of the earth to the other’. It was rhetoric of this nature, with its similarities to the medieval Christian Crusades, which led to the growing fear in the West of aggressive ‘Islamic fundamentalism’. And there have also been occasions when military commanders have found a space for religion in their armoury, either on spiritual grounds or for more pragmatic reasons. Philip II of Spain (1556-98) and leader of the Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation was convinced, throughout his campaigning life, that he was doing God's work and saw no distinction between religious and strategic goals. Ultimately, his religious zeal caused a loss of strategic judgement when he attempted to crush English Protestantism, and failed. Cromwell, parliamentarian general in the English civil wars and then Lord Protector of the Commonwealth, was a devout Calvinist who believed profoundly in the involvement of divine providence in all that he did both as a soldier and as a politician.

The search for a single, synoptic view of the relationship between religion and war must be fruitless. What the world's major faith traditions do have in common is a profound debate on this subject, with conclusions and teachings which prove to be ambivalent to varying degrees. In Hinduism, the moral repudiation of actions which deliberately injure other living beings, is set alongside a socio-religious structure in which the warrior occupied a recognized class or estate, and had certain obligations to fulfil. The tension between non-violence on one hand and the warrior's duty to fight on the other is explored in the Bhagavadgita, Hinduism's most important sacred text. Here, the Lord Krishna teaches the warrior Arjuna that a devout man is one who is ‘without hatred for any creature, friendly and compassionate’, and who ‘does not afflict the world’. But in the same text, Krishna advises Arjuna to fight because it is his inherent duty to fight, and that in so doing he will be acting as God's instrument: ‘Recognising your inherent duty, you must not shrink from it. For there is nothing better for a warrior than a duty-bound war’. Other Hindu texts and codes contain writings which approximate closely to what was to become the jus in bello strand of Christian just-war thinking. Thus, the Mahabharata requires both proportion, in that it prohibits excessive injury to an enemy, and discrimination, in that it condemns the killing of the disabled, women, boys, and old men. The choice of weaponry was also a matter of concern: battles should not be fought with concealed weapons, or with weapons which are barbed or tipped with poison.

With its mendicant and ascetic traditions, Buddhism has always been associated with non-violence, non-confrontation, and the inner or spiritual life. However, Buddhism has also always engaged with the real world, and has placed clear emphasis on hierarchy and the political and moral ordering of society, and has always been conscious of the tendency to violence in international and national life. It would be wrong to describe Buddhism as a martial religion, nevertheless it is significant that one of the most ardent champions of Buddhism was the Indian Emperor Ashoka in the 3rd century bc, famed for his conquest of much of the Indian subcontinent. In the 20th century, Buddhism became closely and often militarily involved in resistance to colonial domination and imperialism in such countries as Sri Lanka, Burma (Myanmar), and Vietnam. Zen Buddhism, the variant of Buddhism introduced into Japan in the 7th century, saw its role, in part, to help defend the state and teach the martial arts. Bushido, the code of conduct of the samurai warrior class, reflected most closely the relationship between Zen spirituality and the Japanese martial spirit.

In the Judaic tradition, the martial connection is especially strong. Yahveh, the God of the Israelites who revealed his name to Moses, was Yahveh Sabaoth, the God of armies. The God of Moses was both martial and partial, siding with his chosen people in their great conflicts. The Old Testament offers plenty of apocalyptic and warlike visions, and called for crusades against the heathen. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that milmahah (Hebrew, war) occurs more than 300 times in the Old Testament account of God's involvement with his chosen people the Jews. Yet, awesome and magnificent though he was, Yahveh was also the God of all creation who demanded restraint even in crusades against the heathen. In Deuteronomy, Israelite soldiers are instructed that while they may eat fruit from captured Canaanite orchards, they should not destroy the orchards, while in the Second Book of Kings, the Israelites are urged to care for their prisoners rather than slaughter them.

Beginning in northern India in the late 15th century, Sikhism combined a tendency towards pacifism, mysticism, and asceticism as found in the teachings of the first guru, Nanak, with a more worldly and martial approach. In the early 17th century, the sixth guru, Hargobind, threatened by Moghul authorities, sought refuge in the mountains where he learned the skills of hunting and warfare, and thereafter became both a spiritual and a military leader. The synthesis of spiritual and military leadership was perfected by the tenth and final guru, Gobind Singh, who is known to Sikhs as the ‘soldier-saint’.

Having begun as an absolutely pacifist religion, early in the 4th century Christianity began to take on a more militant and activist character. Christianity's contribution to thinking about warfare was twofold and in certain respects self-contradictory: on the one hand the early and medieval Christian Church developed doctrines of restraint and discrimination, while on the other hand the brutal and bloody crusade became the preferred means by which to spread the faith and punish non-believers. Some historians have also argued that the Christian Crusades were little more than early demonstrations of the European tendency to hegemony and imperialism. But for their part, the crusaders seem to have been convinced that they had God on their side. The First Crusade, proclaimed by Pope Urban II in 1095, had as its holy objective the liberation of Jerusalem and was at one point directly assisted in battle by a divine cavalry force.

The Crusades brought Christianity into a direct conflict with Islam, though not for the first time. The prophet Muhammad was a successful military commander and Islam had been spread by the sword, including the conquest of Spain at the beginning of the 8th century. A religious war by Muslims against unbelievers is called a jihad. Those who died in the service of the one God would go straight to paradise. It was a simple doctrine, and similar to the Christian view. Whereas restraints then applied in war between Christians, or between Muslims, there was less in war between Christian and Muslim. Yet in spite of the fanatical beliefs of both sides, there were examples of restraint and even of chivalry in the Crusades. This must be put down to the natural respect which soldiers have for brave and competent opponents, which may override uncompromising religious attitudes. The Crusades also provided many examples of Christian fighting against Christian. The schism between eastern and western Christendom was often replicated in friction between crusaders and the Byzantine authorities, and on their way to the Middle East the crusaders sacked Constantinople. Crusades were also mounted against east European peoples, some of whom were still pagan, but some of whom, including the Russians, were Christian orthodox. The Teutonic Knights—a medieval military monastic order—went from the Holy Land to a mission of pacification and conversion in the region. The split between Shiʿa and Sunni Muslim, leading to the establishment of Shiʿism as state religion in Persia in 1512, provided a similar division within Islam. The hatred of Shiʿa for Sunni found its most violent expression in the wars between Persia and its neighbours, and especially in the 1980-8 Iran-Iraq war.

However, in Europe and the Middle East religion, as a motive for war, was also inextricably entwined with politics and national self-interest. When combatants were of exactly the same faith, as in the 14th- and 15th-century wars between England and France, they could be conducted according to Christian rules. The Hussites, on the other hand, who broke away from the Holy Roman Empire in both political and religious senses, were heretics. After Martin Luther nailed his theses to a church door in 1520, beginning the Reformation, the scene was set for new levels of barbarism. The Counter-Reformation—the Catholic reaction—got going in the 1560s, giving rise to orders like those to the Duke of Alba to kill every Protestant in the Netherlands and to the Massacre of St Bartholomew in France (see French wars of religion).

The struggle between Reformation and Counter-Reformation was compounded by the strengthening of the nation state, and it is impossible to separate the two in the wars of 16th- and 17th-century Europe. This explosive combination climaxed in the Thirty Years War which was both a religious war and a war between ambitious nation states. The Peace of Westphalia which ended it tried to prevent wars being waged for religious purposes only on the principle of ‘cuius regio, eius religio’ (their religion is that of their ruler). This principle, which underlines the reluctance, until recently, to interfere in the internal affairs of nation states, was never fully respected. Furthermore, it did nothing to prevent religion being a cause of civil wars.

Nevertheless, religion largely ceased to be a cause of interstate conflict in western Europe in the 18th century. In the 20th century the rise of communism and its establishment in Russia, then China and Vietnam, had similar effects to that of a new, militant religion, although in theory communist states rejected the idea of exporting communism by force of arms. The establishment of the state of Israel—a Jewish state in the middle of Muslim states—also led to a series of wars which, while primarily secular in their motivation—the Israelis were seen as occupying land which belonged to Arabs—inevitably had a religious element. Religion also played its part in the long-running conflict in Ireland (see Irish rebellions), although, not surprisingly, it became woven into a deeper social and political dispute in which Catholicism or Protestantism seemed little more than a tribal marking.

The end of the Cold War in 1989 brought about a resurgence in religious conflicts, though again, primarily internal. The so-called ‘ethnic’ conflicts in the Balkans (see Yugoslavia, operations in former) are not really ethnic, since most of those involved are Slavs, but religious. The Bosnian Muslims, who originally converted to Islam to work with their Turkish overlords, are distinguished from the Catholic Croats and the Orthodox Serbs by religion more than blood. Muslims from more militantly Islamic countries such as Afghanistan came to help, in small numbers. But in the case of the expulsion of Kosovar Albanians (Muslims), from the former Yugoslavia in 1999, Muslim countries such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia expressed little interest or concern and it was left to the infidels to come to their rescue. As usual, religious considerations could not be separated from political and strategic interests.

— Paul Cornish/Hugh Bicheno

Religion has played many, often contradictory, roles in the history of American warfare. With the conquistadors came Roman Catholic priests and brothers to bless, or challenge, Spanish attacks upon indigenous peoples. Two of the most notable of those clerics based enduring theoretical contributions on their knowledge of colonial warfare: the Dominican Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474–1566) concerning the humanity of Native Americans, and his fellow Dominican Francisco de Vitoria (1483–1546) concerning the ethics of international relations. Warfare between the first generation of English settlers and Native Americans brought out the worst and the best in the colonists' religious leaders. The much respected first minister of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Thomas Shepard, could yet herald “the divine slaughter of the Indians at the Hand of the English” after battle with the Pequots of Connecticut in 1637; the Rev. John Eliot of Roxbury, Massachusetts, experienced his finest hour as “apostle to the Indians” in defending his converts from reprisals after King Philip's War (1675–76). During the eighteenth century, Moravian Brethren carried out humanitarian missionary work in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and the Ohio Territory, where they repeatedly tried to shield their converts (usually pacifists like themselves) from the ravages of war.Deep, if ambiguous, connections between war and religion continue to the present day. Religious values supported American ideology in the Cold War and offered President Ronald Reagan a vocabulary to define the Soviet Union as the “evil empire.” Religious motives often fueled opposition to the Vietnam War, as with the Baptist senator from Oregon, Mark Hatfield, or the efforts of the Catholic priest Daniel Berrigan, the Jewish rabbi Abraham Heschel, and the Lutheran minister Richard John Neuhaus, who in 1965 founded Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam. On the other side, religious motives also led Francis Cardinal Spellman, Catholic archbishop of New York, and the Protestant evangelist Billy Graham to support the war. In the Persian Gulf War, President George Bush consulted the leaders of his own Episcopal Church and invited his longtime friend, Billy Graham, to the White House the night before hostilities commenced. The Episcopalian bishops leaned against considering the conflict a “just war”; Graham offered general support. The most visible connection between war and religion in American history is the intensification of commitment that religious faith brought to combatants and the promoters of war. This link was a particular bequest of the Anglo‐French wars that began in 1689 and ended only with the final defeat of Napoleon. As Linda Colley argues (1992), warfare with France raised the Protestant identity of the British empire to remarkable salience. During King George's War (1744–48) and the French and Indian War (1754–63), colonists from Massachusetts (like the Congregationalist Thomas Prince) to Virginia (like the Presbyterian Samuel Davies) joined their compatriots across the Atlantic in picturing the military struggle as an apocalyptic contest between the universal truth of Protestantism and the corrupt tyranny of Catholicism. With such preparation, it was a relatively easy matter for patriots in the 1770s to depict the struggle for American independence as, in the words of the Presbyterian Abraham Keteltas, “the cause of heaven against hell—of the kind Parent of the universe against the prince of darkness” (God Arising and Pleading His People's Cause, 1777). Loyalists were usually somewhat more restrained in rhetoric, but colonial Anglicans like Charles Inglis of New York and Jonathan Boucher of Maryland were just as convinced that their cause was the cause of God. In hundreds of sermons during the Revolutionary War, Americans became skilled at interpreting biblical passages as types, or anticipations, of realities fulfilled on contemporary fields of battle.

Religious convictions supported political ideology in all major national conflicts through World War I. During the War of 1812, New England Congregationalist ministers could show how Scripture called warmaking into question, while their Protestant confreres in southern and western states could show just the reverse. Before the Civil War, Protestants of both the North and the South sanctified sectional controversy with theological rhetoric; during the war itself, a host of rhetorically accomplished ministers, led by Henry Ward Beecher in the North and Robert Lewis Dabney in the South, grounded their respective causes in universal scriptural imperatives. In World War I, fundamentalists and modernists alike linked German aggression to religious error. According to the revivalist Billy Sunday, “If you turn hell upside down, you will find ‘Made in Germany’ stamped on the bottom.” By comparison with these earlier conflicts, the religious support for World War II was muted. In all American wars, the practice of “civil religion,” especially when presidents employ a general religious vocabulary to reassure or inspire their fellow Americans, has always flourished.

Much less frequently, the universal values of religion have worked against rather than for the military purposes of a particular conflict. During the Revolutionary War, the “father of American Lutheranism,” Henry Melchior Mühlenberg, denounced the armies of both sides for sacrificing Christian principle to military expediency. At the start of the Civil War, the Northern Presbyterian theologian Charles Hodge was called a heretic for suggesting that the formation of the Confederacy was not sufficient ground for expelling Southern Presbyterians from the denomination. At the end of that same war, an anonymous correspondent to a Jewish periodical, The Occident, generated a storm of controversy among his fellow religionists when he wrote that, although Abraham Lincoln was a worthy president, he hardly deserved to be compared with Moses as several rabbinical memorials had recently done.

Beyond acting to sanction or check national bellicosity, religion has frequently influenced strategy and policy. In early 1776, the Continental Congress sent two Roman Catholic cousins, John Carroll and Charles Carroll, with Benjamin Franklin on a mission to Montréal to persuade the Catholic Québecois to join the revolt. The effort failed, in large part because Catholics there were satisfied with the provisions of Britain's Quebec Act (1774), which guaranteed certain traditional privileges to their church. During World War I, the presence in America of both Protestants and Catholics of German stock complicated Woodrow Wilson's diplomatic maneuvering. The international humanitarianism that determined Wilson's war aims originated in nineteenth‐century liberal Calvinism.

Religious influences on the direct experiences of war have often featured the ministry of chaplains. From 1775, when the Continental Congress authorized chaplains for the army and the navy, through the Civil War, when the chaplaincy began to look like a profession, to World War II, when the four army chaplains (two Protestants, one Catholic, and one Jew) who sacrificed their lives to save servicemen at the sinking of the Dorchester in February 1943 inspired the nation, and finally to the efficient mobilization of the chaplaincy in the Vietnam War and the Gulf War, chaplains have largely avoided the glare of publicity while offering a wide range of spiritual and humane assistance to troops on active duty. During the Civil War, an unusually intense series of revivals spread through the camps of both Northern and Southern armies. According to many participants, these revivals acted as an antidote to dissipation, and—especially in Southern armies during the last eighteen months of the war—to despair.

Warfare Affecting Religion

The impact of war on American religion has, if anything, exceeded the effects of religion on war. The American Revolution, and the revolution in social values it accelerated, crippled the Episcopal Church and substantially hindered the Congregationalists, the two major denominations in colonial America; Methodists, Baptists, and indigenous denominations soon prevailed as the nation's most numerous churches. Insofar as the Revolution lay behind the Constitution and its First Amendment guaranteeing religious freedom, that war was also responsible, however inadvertently, for opening up the United States to peaceful settlement by non‐English‐speaking Protestants, non‐Protestant Christians (especially Roman Catholics), non‐Christian adherents of other religions, and finally the nonreligious.

The long‐term religious effects of the Civil War were different. As two authors, George M. Frederickson (1965) and Anne C. Rose (1992), have shown, disillusionment with traditional Protestant faiths and an openness to skepticism grew rapidly among Northern intellectuals as a result of the war. The war's failure to usher in the millennium, as many on both sides had hoped, also contributed to the expansion of otherworldly forms of pietism where the emphasis shifted from the Christianization of society to a fascination with speculative prophecy or a concentration on private as opposed to public morality.

World War I played a direct role in fomenting the fundamentalist‐modernist controversies of the 1920s. George Marsden (1980) has demonstrated that the intensity of that war mobilized populist revivalists who felt that a crisis had been reached in the progress of Christian civilization as well as in the integrity of the Protestant churches. In response, they mounted a defense of endangered “fundamentals,” eliciting outrage from moderates and liberals who hardly appreciated being lumped with the kaiser.

Religious responses to warfare have created institutions of enduring significance. For the profession of nursing, still in the nineteenth century very much a religious vocation for Protestants and Catholics, the Civil War provided a decisive impetus. During World War I, American Roman Catholics founded their first permanent national organization, the National Catholic War Council. This institution later became the National Catholic Welfare Conference (1922–66), which in turn made way for the two federal structures of Catholic organization that exist today, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops and the United States Catholic Conference. For more sectarian and traditional Protestants, World War II hastened the formation of the National Association of Evangelicals (1943) by adding a concern for representation in the chaplaincy to long‐standing disquiet with the theological drift of the more ecumenical Federal Council of Churches. More broadly, the massive commitment of American military forces around the world led to the establishment of a host of U.S.‐based mission and relief agencies.

Because it tends to inflame passions and demand action, warfare only occasionally deepens theological perspective. In the aftermath of World War I, and sometimes as an act of expiation for jingoism, several important religious thinkers, including the Protestant Harry Emerson Fosdick and the Catholic Dorothy Day, published provocative arguments against warfare in any of its modern forms. Another important voice won to virtual pacifism in the wake of World War I was Reinhold Niebuhr; he would, however, return to a defense of Just War theory because of the Fascist threats of World War II and the anti‐Communist crusades thereafter. Reactions to the Holocaust have produced painful theological reflection for Jews and many others. Among Roman Catholics, the experience of both bloody fighting and Cold War nuclear deterrence led to a concentration of sophisticated ethical reasoning that culminated in the Bishops' Pastoral Letter on War and Peace of 1983. That document's acceptance of nonviolence on a par with traditional “just war” claims was controversial among Catholics, in the same way that, among Protestants, the pacifism of John Howard Yoder and careful defense of just war from Paul Ramsey and James T. Johnson were controversial. What these proposals shared was serious ethical reasoning, first‐level theology, and intense analysis of twentieth‐century warfare.

The most notable instance of American warfare deepening theology, however, comes not from an academic theologian or a synod of bishops, but from the sixteenth president of the United States. Abraham Lincoln, who was never a church member, did not espouse traditional Christian faith; yet during the Civil War, his thought grew in biblical depth until, at his second inaugural address in March 1865, he could articulate a more sublime trust in divine providence, and a more charitable attitude to his foes, than virtually any other public figure of his day.

Religious Rejection of War

Rejection of warfare also enjoys a long American history. During the Revolutionary War, neutralism prevailed among New England immigrants in Nova Scotia because the revivals of Henry Alline created what amounted to a pietist pacifism. In the thirteen mainland colonies, Mennonites, German Brethren, some Moravians, and numerous Quakers remained faithful to their pacifist principles, despite fines, imprisonment, and confiscation of property. What would later be called “selective conscientious objection” was also at work among some Methodists, Anglicans, Congregationalists, and Baptists, who concluded that neither patriots nor loyalists convincingly demonstrated the necessity for conflict. A similar phenomenon occurred among some Reformed Presbyterians and Calvinist Baptists in the American South during the Civil War.

The most prominent voices raised against warfare in American history have come from the historically pacifist denominations. World War I proved a particular trial to Mennonites, Quakers, and the German Brethren, since it combined a universal draft with inflamed public sentiment. Members of newer American denominations, including Seventh‐Day Adventists and some Pentecostals, also refused induction and support of the war effort in this same conflict. During World War II, the Selective Service System granted conscientious objection to military service from members of the historic peace churches, but dealt more harshly with newer religious bodies. Members of the Jehovah's Witnesses, who refused both to register for the draft and to swear allegiance to the United States, met with especially severe reprisals. Definite enumerations are elusive, but as many as three‐fourths of the perhaps 6,000 Americans imprisoned for failing to register for the draft or report for military service were Jehovah's Witnesses.

The Vietnam War, which began without the clear‐cut call to arms that the attack on Pearl Harbor provided for World War II, and which occurred during a period of cultural unrest, produced much religiously grounded opposition to warfare. Yet questions about the legality of this particular war, a resurgence of selective conscientious objection, and arguments for the recognition of conscientious objection not based on religion, at once magnified public debate concerning the morality of war and obscured specifically religious considerations.

Since the Vietnam period, historians have joined other academics in documenting the breadth and depth of antiwar sentiment in American history. Nonetheless, religious support for warfare, or the accommodation of religious beliefs to the exigencies of war, has been much more common in American history than religiously inspired rejection of war.

[See also Aggression and Violence; Berrigan, Daniel and Philip; Militarism and Antimilitarism; Patriotism; Peace and Antiwar Movements; Religion in the Military; Vietnam Antiwar Movement.]

Bibliography

• Bertram W. Korn, American Jewry and the Civil War, 1951; 2nd ed. 1976.
• George M. Frederickson, The Inner Civil War, 1965.
• Peter Brock, Pacifism in the United States: From the Colonial Era to the First World War, 1968.
• Nathan O. Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millenium in Revolutionary New England, 1977.
• George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 1980.
• Ronald A. Wells, ed., The Wars of America: Christian Views, 1981.
• John F. Piper, Jr., The American Churches in World War I, 1985.
• Melvin B. Endy, Jr., War and Peace, Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience, 1988.
• Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837, 1992.
• Anne C. Rose, Victorian America and the Civil War, 1992.
• Richard J. Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America, 1993.
• Gerald Sittser, A Cautious Patriotism: The American Churches and the Second World War, 1997.
• Randall M. Miller, Henry S. Stout, and Charles R. Wilson, eds., Religion and the American Civil War, 1998