Religion and War Research Paper

In all the Abrahamic traditions there is a positive evaluation of peace, so that ‘Peace be with you’ and ‘Grant us thy peace’ are written into the most sacred parts of the Christian liturgy, while shalom and salaam are peaceable greetings in Judaism and Islam respectively. The Hebrew Scriptures themselves are contradictory. There is a tradition of the trickster deploying deception, such as befits ethnic underdogs, and an ideology of legitimate subjugation. At the same time there is a moral reserve about the taking of blood and a positive evaluation of Israel’s helplessness (and dependence on God). This mutates into Isaiah’s vision of universal peace and of the righteous rule of God so central to the teaching of Jesus.

In the teaching of Jesus there is a radical reversal of values which includes a rejection of the negative reciprocity embodied in ‘an eye for an eye’ and the feud. The Kingdom of God inaugurates a peaceful world empire of love in a harmonious universal city, New Jerusalem, which has its foundation in the self-offering of the Savior as he confronts the powers of violence and injustice. Versions of this approach characterize Christianity in the earliest centuries, resulting in conscientious objection to military action, reinforced by refusal to take an idolatrous oath and expectation of a divine foreclosure of human history.

1. Christianity And War After Constantine

However, with Constantine’s embrace of Christianity as guarantee of victory, the ‘City of God’ has to be firmly distinguished from the ‘City of Man,’ though many Christians came to see the empire as the divinely ordained vehicle of the Christian religion and its triumph. Christianity was now the faith of the majority, including the power holders and senators, not the hope of a minority mostly without access to power. It was implicated in the dynamics of power, even though monks and small groups maintained a devotion to peaceable ideals. Among these small groups were evangelical sects like the Waldensians and dualistic heretics like the Cathars. The church itself iconographically still embodied its original tension with ‘the world’ of power and violence, set over against icons which celebrate the proximity of the powers that be to the mandates of the Almighty. The church also attempted to adjudicate disputes, and even restrict weaponry, more particularly in the feudal period. It sought to enforce a ‘truce of God,’ in part to further its own geopolitical ends in confronting the Holy Roman Emperor and reversing the advance of Islam.

The movements of the late Middle Ages, eventually erupting in the Reformation, disseminated the Christian repertoire of themes beyond effective ecclesiastical supervision. There were intimations of collective peaceability in the Lutheran and Calvinist reformations, though these were rapidly checked by the fusion of reformed faith with the autonomy of monarchs and with national sovereignty. There were similar intimations of peace within the natural law traditions of Catholicism. However, the espousal of peace was inevitably a minority option, for example, among Christian humanists such as the Swiss Conrad Grebel, and the anarchopacifist wing of the Radical Reformation, for example, among Anabaptists and Quakers. These minorities came to represent a sectarian encapsulation of Christian radicalism over a wide range of issues, including corporal and capital punishment, which leaked into the wider society over the next two or three centuries. It was, for example, chiefly among such groups that supporters emerged for the nascent peace societies of the UK and the USA in the early nineteenth century.

2. Proposals For Universal Peace

Ideas of universal peace burgeoned from the fourteenth century on, partly on the model of an imperial Pax Romana, centered on this or that universal monarchy, but also based on projects for an international order. These latter picked up the Christian humanism of Erasmus in his Complaint of Peace (1517) and the notions of natural law articulated by Grotius in his De jure belli ac pacis (1625). One of the most complex of these projects was the Abbe Saint-Pierre’s Projet pour rendre la Paix perpetuelle (1713). The last two great peace plans of this period were Kant’s Perpetual Peace (1795) and Bentham’s Plan for a Universal and Perpetual Peace (1789).

Here one needs to distinguish types of approach and indicate a partial secularization of the religious vision of peaceable social and international order. A notable secularization was embodied in Machiavelli’s statement of Renaissance political realism in The Prince, while from rather different viewpoints, Kant fused rational with Christian motifs and Bentham appealed to criteria of human happiness. This mixture of contradictory religious and secular discourses developed into the liberal internationalism of the nineteenth century. According to this tradition, especially as developed in the USA and the UK, there was a potential harmony of interests through the reciprocities established by free trade.

A parallel fusion of religious and political discourses also occurred in the democratic socialist tradition, by contrast with the Marxist variant predominant on the European continent which consigned religion to a realm of fantastic hopes devoid of scientific understanding. For Marxist-inspired movements, as also for anarcho-syndicalism, violence was a midwife of a new revolutionary order. Out of the currents of liberalism and socialism emerged hopes of universal human and/or working-class solidarity which were articulated in theories of the social sources of war and the structural alterations needed for peace. However, the wars of 1914–18 and 1939–45 suggested these hopes were chimerical and the theories at best flawed, though capitalism was still widely blamed for international disorder and imperialism.

Out of this iron period grew a new realism about the role of national interest in the genesis of war, which was articulated both in religious and in secular form. The major realist theologian was Reinhold Niebuhr in his Moral Man and Immoral Society (1934) and the major exponent of secular realism was the American Hans Morgenthau. At the same time there also emerged fully fledged empirical enquiries into conflict, including ‘peace research.’

3. Forms Of The Peace Sentiment

Thus over the last two centuries or so the ‘peace sentiment’ has been part of overlapping causes of a humanitarian and internationalist kind, simultaneously fed by religious and enlightenment sources. There causes have conjoined the gospels to reason, commonsense, and the quest for human rights in a radical critique of war and militarism. The nineteenth century sociologist Herbert Spencer, for example, had roots both in rational and evangelical nonconformity, and identified the alliance of state, priest, and military as a major nexus of conflict. A leftward leaning liberalism attacked the nation state and established religion in the name of a pacific internationalism. This was often referred to as ‘pacificism,’ meaning it presumed the onus of proof was on the proposers of war and held that the interests of those who stood to gain, for example, the armaments manufacturers, ran contrary to the interests of the majority. Liberal internationalists were not strict ‘pacifists’ however, because there were times when one had to crusade for liberal principles and for liberation—including that other liberal principle, national liberation.

Other humane causes loosely associated with the peace sentiment were reforms of penal practice, above all corporal and capital punishment and a new attitude towards the animal world, which might include vegetarianism, with its objection to meat, machismo, and blood. To these causes might be conjoined a preference for wholesome food to nourish wholesome bodies and lifestyles. All of these had religious roots, even though one cause need not strictly imply another, so that cornflakes were an outcrop of Adventist teaching without requiring pacifism, whereas the Quaker production of chocolate was clearly linked to it by association. Humanitarians opposed all kinds of brutalization, including male violence in the home and the army. A feminization of the psyche occurred, bred in the Sunday School and in progressive education alongside movements for factory reform and the provision of life-enhancing leisure pursuits, preferably in the context of ‘nature.’

The concept of individual conscience took off from religious prescriptions like personal conversion and witness and then mutated into a new sensitivity, including sensitivity towards the effects on other peoples of conquest, imperialism, and exploitation. Thus alongside the nationalistic fervor infiltrating and informing much mass religiosity there ran a counterpoint of moral and political conscientiousness. There were movements for democratic scrutiny of foreign policy and the sale of armaments, for the arbitration of international disputes, the enforcement of international law, and eventually the League of Nations and the United Nations. Alongside these ran mostly nonviolent agitations for civil rights and/or national liberation such as those led by Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and Archbishop Tutu.

Of course, given the schooling of populations in patriotic sentiment, dissenting attitudes and conscientiousness usually characterized only a minority in the churches and even more so among people at large. This was above all true in wartime, when dissent from all war or from the claimed objectives of a particular war, could be defined as cowardice or disobedience to lawful authority. Yet conscientious objection still made headway and, at least in the countries of the North Atlantic, Protestant world governments reluctantly accepted that national claims to loyalty were not absolute. This partial tolerance applied to the ‘historic peace churches,’ such as the Quakers and Mennonites, but also included sizeable groups within the larger Protestant denominations, and it just about extended to secular objections rooted in socialism or humanitarian ideals such as were promoted by Leo Tolstoy.

The social ecology of the ‘peace sentiment’ over the last quarter millennium is clear enough. It began in the transatlantic world through a combination of religious and rational liberal motifs—Manchester allied to Boston—above all among Protestants, and by degrees affected established churches and the Roman Catholic Church. Given that the Roman Catholic Church was rooted in more organic and communal forms of society, especially in Latin Europe, its defence of the rights of individual conscience was originally weaker. Yet its transnational character always included a sense of the law of nations as nourished by the traditional concept of a just war, such as due proportion of means to ends.

With the development of weapons of mass destruction most mainstream churches expressed reservations about the doctrine of deterrence as it related to the ‘just war.’ On the one hand there were religious groups allied to secular middle-class radicalism in campaigns against nuclear armament and colonial involvements such as Vietnam, and on the other hand there were specialist commissions into the contemporary nature of war and peacemaking. Thus the Church of England produced a report The Church and the Bomb (1982) and the Roman Catholic Church in the USA published an extended critique in 1983.

In summary one may say that there has always been a dialectic relation between the idea of an all-embracing empire (the Roman Pax, Chinese imperial civilization) and the vision of a transnational unity, such as the Islamic ‘Ummah’ or the Christian Oekumene. In times of religious establishment, whether imperial, monarchical, or national, the former will inevitably tend to colonize the latter, so that the wider vision is maintained underground in liturgy, iconography, and movements of protest. However, as religious groups became separate from the state the visionary repertoire gains more purchase, and is increasingly reinforced by the interdependence of global society. The resources on which the search for peace may draw become increasingly international, so that the message of the gospels, of Isaiah, and Micah mingles with Eastern and especially Gandhian, notions of nonviolent protest and moral suasion. Indeed, as Western protest has drawn on Eastern resources, so have Eastern movements been cross-fertilized by Western ones, not only Christianity but the works of Tolstoy and Thoreau.

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