That religion is uniquely prone to violence is a truism anti-theistic atheists assume almost without question. The cliché that more people have died in wars over religion than any other cause is a unassailable dictum among atheist activists, and religious violence is a driving motivation for their zealotry. But, on closer inspection, this idea becomes increasingly incoherent and actually leads several New Atheists into some ethically paradoxical positions. The idea that religion is essentially and particularly violent is a founding myth of the modern nation state, though one with highly dubious historical and philosophical foundations.

Many commentators have observed that the so-called New Atheism arose at a particular juncture in reaction to a specific event. As some who have objected to (and, actually, misunderstood) the label like to point out, there is nothing especially novel about New Atheism – it simply articulates ideas about religion that have been around for centuries. But “New Atheism” is “new” in the same sense as “New Wave” – not “uniquely original”, but rather “the latest in a sequence”. This particular wave of anti-theist polemics and activism arose in the early 2000s in direct reaction to the events of September 11, 2001. The first chapter of Christopher Hitchens’ 2007 book God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything is entitled “Religion Kills”, and it begins with an anecdote introduced with the words “A week before the events of September 11, 2001 …” (p. 7). The book refers to the terrorist attack on the US on that day four more times, each time using is as a touchstone of religious violence. In his The End of Faith (2004), Sam Harris does much the same thing in his 13 references to 9/11. Richard Dawkins, A.C Grayling, Peter Boghossian and other New Atheist luminaries all regularly refer to 9/11 as the epitome of a key element in their argument against religion: it shows that unfettered religion leads inevitably to violence and this is why religion needs to be at least restricted and, preferably, neutered or even eliminated.

While the motivating event is particular, the sentiment is general and has been a mainstay of arguments against religion for several hundred years; since the eighteenth century at least. It is such a well-worn and widely accepted idea that Hitchens and Harris give examples of religious violence not to substantiate their claim that religion is particularly and uniquely violent, but purely for rhetorical effect – to reinforce their arguments for atheism as the solution to this wholly unquestionable problem. Hitchens details his experiences in Belfast, Beirut, Belgrade and Baghdad to illustrate just how deadly religion inevitably is. Harris asks in exasperation why we do not acknowledge that religion is simply “the most prolific source of violence in our history” (p. 27). No piece of New Atheist polemic is complete without a catalogue of religious violence, both ancient and current. Invoking the John Lennon song, the opening pages of Dawkins’ The God Delusion (2006) invites us to “Imagine”:

Imagine no suicide bombers, no 9/11, no 7/7, no Crusades, no witch-hunts, no Gunpowder Plot, no Indian partition, no Israeli/Palestinian wars, no Serb/Croat/Muslim massacres, no persecution of Jews as ‘Christ-killers’, no Northern Ireland ‘troubles’, no ‘honour killings’…. no Taliban to blow up ancient statues, no public beheadings of blasphemers, no flogging of female skin for the crime of showing an inch of it

(Dawkins, pp. 1-2)

Again, these lists of religious atrocities have a long pedigree in anti-religious polemic. Voltaire employed them in his works, though perhaps with rather more wit and charm than his modern successors. In his 1763 plea for religious tolerance (but not, it should be noted, for “the end of faith”) old François-Marie Arouet noted just some of the sorrows religion had brought to his native France:

After the death of Francis I – a monarch better known for his amours and misfortunes than for his cruelties – the execution of a thousand heretics caused the persecuted sect to take to arms. …. They imitated the cruelties of their enemies: nine civil wars filled France with carnage; and a peace more deadly than war led to the massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day. …. The League assassinated Henry III through a Dominican monk and Henry IV through a monstrous former Cistercian monk. Some claim that humanity, indulgence, and liberty of conscience are horrible things; but could they have produced calamities such as these?

(“Voltaire, “Treatise on Tolerance” (trans. Jonathan Bennett 2017)

Voltaire invokes the Reformation, the French civil wars of the sixteenth century and the Wars of Religion of the seventeenth century as evidence that religious intolerance leads inevitably to violence. But his more recent successors take this much further. For Harris, Hitchens et. al. the problem is not simply religious intolerance but religion per se. And the solution is not merely rather more tolerance all round from everyone, but more substantial measures. Victor Stenger ends his The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Science and Reason (2009) with the declaration that religion “is absurd and dangerous and we look forward to the day, no matter how distant, when the human race finally abandons it” (p. 244). A.C. Grayling hopes this eschatology will be realised soon. He assures believers that secularisation is very much to their advantage, but he too is eager for religion’s demise:

In a truly secular world, one where religion has withered to the relative insignificance of astrology, tarot card divination, health-promotion based on crystals and magnets and other marginal superstition-involving outlooks, an ethical outlook which can serve everyone everywhere …. will at last be possible. That outlook is humanism.

(Grayling, The God Argument: The Case Against Religion and for Humanism, Bloomsbury, 2013, p. 138)

So Grayling’s secularism is essentially one where religion is given room to quietly die. Peter Boghossian believes this death needs to be helped along by atheistic “street epistemologists” – essentially atheist evangelists – who “intervene” with religious people they come across in day to day life to help them understand how wrong they are – see Boghossian’s helpful evangelical tips in his A Manual for Creating Atheists (Pitchtone, 2013, pp.57-9; 112-17).

But the spectre of religion’s inherent and particular tendency for violence means that some New Atheists go much further than relegating religion to the margins or evangelising it out of existence. Harris thinks sometimes things need to go much further still:

Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live. Certain beliefs place their adherents beyond the reach of every peaceful means of persuasion, while inspiring them to commit acts of extraordinary violence against others. There is, in fact, no talking to some people. If they cannot be captured, and they often cannot, otherwise tolerant people may be justified in killing them in self-defense. This is what the United States attempted in Afghanistan, and it is what we and other Western powers are bound to attempt, at an even greater cost to ourselves and to innocents abroad, elsewhere in the Muslim world. We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas.

(Harris, pp. 52-3)

At least Harris has the faintest glimmering of self-awareness that he acknowledges this “may seem an extraordinary claim”. He is stating that religion is, in at least some cases, so intolerant that tolerant people cannot tolerate it. And he declares that some religion has such an inherent tendency to spill blood that the only way to combat it is to spill blood. Harris has decided that the intolerance and violence of religion must be met with intolerance and violence. And he has little to no cognisance of the irony here.

He is not alone. Hitchens’ politics were left wing and progressive for most of his life, but his anti-religious zealotry, particularly after 9/11, led him to support the disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003. War, he argues, is justified when it is a just war. In one of many such premature declarations of victory in a war that dragged on for years and resulted in predicatable chaos and suffering long after, Hitchens lauded Bush’s invasion and hailed its “success” as a triumph of secularism over religion:

Secularism is not just a smug attitude. It is a possible way of democratic and pluralistic life that only became thinkable after several wars and revolutions had ruthlessly smashed the hold of the clergy on the state. 

(Hitchens, “Bush’s Secularist Triumph”, Slate, Nov. 9, 2004)

War is good when Hitchens says it is good. Harris spends many pages fulminating against the irrational torture of suspected witches (Harris, p. 88 ff), but gives what he considers perfectly rational justifications for the torture of suspected terrorists (pp. 192-99). Torture is good when Harris says it is good. Harris takes this “the ends justify the means” utilitarianism to a certain type of conclusion when he decides that the vast dangers posed by some religion’s intolerance and irrationality can perhaps be cured by the tolerant and rational application of thermonuclear warheads:

There is little possibility of our having a cold war with an Islamist regime armed with long-range nuclear weapons. …. In such a situation, the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own. Needless to say, this would be an unthinkable crime—as it would kill tens of millions of innocent civilians in a single day—but it may be the only course of action available to us, given what Islamists believe.

(Harris, pp. 128-9)

To paraphrase the apocryphal Vietnam Era justificiation for extreme violence, “we had to nuke the believers in order to save them.”

That New Atheist rhetoric could get to this level of bizarre hypocrisy is remarkable, but to an extent it is explicable. It is an outgrowth of a series of historical myths with their roots in the eighteenth century and the establishment of the European nation state as the primary institution of the modern world, at least until very recently. It is based on several ideas: (i) that there is a distinct social category called “religion”, (ii) that “religion” is inherently and distinctively inclined to intolerance and violence and (iii) that the nation state and its governmental institutions are the best way to hold this violence in check by reducing religion to the private sphere (or supressing it altogether). These claims are justified by reference to history, but the historical bases for them are both outdated and highly dubious.

Holy War

All discussions of religious violence have to mention the Crusades. The New Atheists usually gesture toward them rather than discuss them in any detail, seeing them as the epitome of religious violence and so needing no elucidation. Dawkins mentions them on the very first page of The God Delusion and then repeatedly throughout. Harris and Stenger mention them in passing in catalogues of religion’s violent ills (see, for example, Stenger, God and the Folly Of Faith, Prometheus, 2012, pp. 254-5). Hitchens gives a summary of his understanding of the subject in his chapter “Religion Kills”:

[T]he Crusades, when a papal army set out to recapture Bethlehem and Jerusalem from the Muslims, incidentally destroying many Jewish communities and sacking heretical Christian Byzantium along the way, and inflicted a massacre in the narrow streets of Jerusalem, where, according to the hysterical and gleeful chroniclers, the spilled blood reached up to the bridles of the horses.

(Hitchens, p. 9)

Like most of Hitchens forays into history, this one is heavy on rhetoric, light on details and slightly garbled. He seems to be giving an account of the First Crusade (1096-1099 AD), but works in the sack of Constantinople, which happened a century later in the Fourth Crusade (1202-1204 AD). This is a little like saying the D-Day Landings were a prelude to the Battle of Waterloo, but near enough is good enough when it comes to history for Hitchens. He also notes the tale of “spilled blood … up to the bridles of the horses”, though it is not clear if he actually thinks this should be taken as a literal event or just gleeful hysteria from the “hysterical and gleeful chroniclers”. Plenty of other modern commentators take this story and its variants very literally. No less than historians Karen Armstrong and Arthur Goldschmidt and former US President Bill Clinton have assured various audiences that the Crusaders waded up to their ankles or to their knees in blood after the massacre that followed the fall of Jerusalem in 1099. Thomas F. Madden traces the origins of this story and how it grew in the telling in the various sources in his paper “Rivers of Blood: An Analysis of One Aspect of the Crusader Conquest of Jerusalem in 1099” (Revista Chilena de Estudios Medievales, No.1, 2012, pp. 26-37). Madden also has some macabre tongue-in-cheek fun by calculating the amount of blood that would need to be spilled for even the less ludicrous versions of the story to be true and arriving at a figure of approximately three million exsanguinated corpses; which is about one hundred times the entire population of eleventh century Jerusalem.

Of course, the stories of Crusaders wading in blood are clearly not meant to be taken literally, but they do show the very religious nature of this war and its violence. The claim that the blood of massacred Muslims in their last stand at the Al-Aqsa Mosque was up to the bridles of the Crusaders’ horses (“usque ad frenos equorum“) comes from Raymond of Aguilers – the chaplain to Count Raymond of Saint Gilles and a priest who was present at the fall of Jerusalem. A version of this claim was also made in the letter the Crusade leaders sent to Pope Paschal II in September 1099, informing him of the Crusade’s (to them) miraculous success. But the Biblically-literate clerics of the eleventh century would all have understood the allusion – Revelation 14:20 reads “… And the wine press was trodden outside the city, and blood flowed from the wine press, as high as a horse’s bridle, for a distance of about two hundred miles”. In the Vulgate the Latin reads exactly as in Raymond’s account: “usque ad frenos equorum“. No-one was taking this literally.

But they were taking it religiously. The lurid imagery of the various versions of this “wading in blood” story is making a point about divine justice and the cleansing of the holy places with the blood of the unrighteous. Modern people would (I hope) find this fairly abhorrent, but medieval clerics and knights were not modern people. There has been a tendency in much modern analysis of the Crusades to the Holy Land to downplay or at least modify the idea that they were primarily religious in motivation; in part because the idea of a holy war is so alien to us. There was a tendency in twentieth century analysis to react against pious and romantic conceptions of the Crusades by explaining that they were “really” driven by base motives. This reappraisal was led and substantially shaped by Sir Steven Runciman’s three volume A History of the Crusades (1951-54), which debunked the earlier lofty views of the Crusades and depicted them as barbarian invasions of the superior Byzantine and Islamic cultures of the east. In this view, the Crusaders were motivated more by land and loot than faith and the Papacy was more interested in expanding its power and influence than any pious motives.

This view has been popularly accepted, largely because it plays into many modern prejudices, and can be seen reflected in popular culture, such as in the Ridley Scott movie Kingdom of Heaven (2005), where the Crusaders are mainly bloodthirsty oafs and the clergy mostly scheming weasels. More recent scholarship, however, has tempered these views considerably. Most historians now agree that the Papacy actually had no plan to expand eastward, let alone start a religious-military movement, so the idea that the Crusades were launched to increase its power is mostly baseless. Work by Christopher Tyerman and Jonathan Riley Smith has also largely debunked the idea that seizing land or profiting from loot was a primary or even a major motivation. In fact, going on crusade was more likely to bankrupt someone than make them rich and most Crusaders already had land back in Europe and, having fulfilled their Crusading vows, were eager to get back to it. The Crusader kingdoms of “Outremer” consistently suffered from a manpower shortage and ultimately collapsed precisely because most Crusaders actually did not want to settle down in the occupied lands of the east and generally went home as soon as they could.

A slightly different view of the “real” motives for the eastern Crusades comes from some Christian apologists and right wing commentators, particularly in the context of recent Islamic terrorism and post-9/11 military excursions. In this reading, the Crusades were not barbaric invasions of the Islamic world and proto-colonial occupations of the Middle East. Rather, they were entirely justified defensive wars in the face of Muslim encroachment on Europe. Christian convert, Rodney Stark, tries to make this case in his God’s Battalions: The Case for the Crusades (2009), where he projects a kind of “Bush Doctrine” onto the Crusades, whereby European Christendom was under assault by “Islam” and so decided to “fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here”. Stark’s case does not square at all with the evidence however, and is a classic case of bad history shaped by modern political and ideological biases.

The fact is that, no matter how odd it may seem to moderns or uncomfortable it may be for some Christians, the Crusades were, in fact, primarily a religious phenomenon. Jay Rubenstein’s excellent study Armies of Heaven: The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse (Basic Books, 2011) argues the origin of Crusades is best understood in the context of medieval popular apocalyptic thought. This goes a very long way toward explaining how a religion based on the distinctly unwarlike texts of the New Testament inspired a succession of holy wars and why Urban II’s sermon at Clermont in 1095, which aimed only at stirring some western knights to support the Byzantines against the Seljuk Turks, unleased an unprecedented popular mass movement which, at times, the Papacy and the aristocracy found difficult to control.

The key point here is, despite attempts at arguing otherwise, the Crusades were primarily and fundamentally religious. Similarly, there are plenty of other examples of wars, pogroms, persecutions, violent suppressions etc. which were and are also primarily and fundamentally religious. Few of these things are only religious in their inspiration or motivation – few to no historical events have simply one cause, except in the minds of the simple – but we should be clear that religion can, has and does, on occasion, inspire violence. But while this fact can furnish anti-theists with plenty of examples for their catalogues of religious atrocities, it is definitely not sufficient to sustain the argument that religion is somehow especially and uniquely violent, and more so than other motivating ideas and ideologies. As William T. Cavanaugh puts it in his provocative but carefully-argued book The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (Oxford, 2009):

There is plenty of important empirical work to be done on the violence of certain groups of self-identified Christians, Hindus, Muslims, etc., and there are no grounds for exempting their beliefs and practices from the causal factors that produce violence. …. Where [these arguments] fail is in trying to separate a category called religion with a peculiar tendency toward violence from a putative secular reality that is less prone to violence.

There is no reason to suppose so-called secular ideologies such as nationalism, patriotism, capitalism, Marxism and liberalism are any less prone to be absolutist, divisive and irrational than belief in, for example, the biblical God.

(Cavanaugh, pp. 54-5)

This is the “myth” of Cavanaugh’s title – not that religion can be violent, but that it is uniquely and particularly so. The New Atheists do not bother to even examine this latter claim, they simply assume it. But closer inspection shows it to be deeply dubious and ultimately impossible to sustain.

The Invention of Religion

Part of the problem for any argument that religion is fundamentally and especially prone to violence is the fact that “religion” is a remarkably slippery thing to define. For many people it is a little like good art – they do not know exactly how to describe it but they know it when they see it. Unfortunately, anyone who wants to make an argument about the inherent violence of religion needs to do better than that, and here is where things get tricky.

Definitions of “religion” generally fall into two broad categories – substantivist definitions and functionalist ones. Substantivist definitions of religion look at the focus of religious belief, defining religions as being oriented toward “the gods”, “the divine” or, more broadly, “the transcendent”. Unfortunately this fairly traditional approach usually takes a Western idea of religion – i.e. the sort of things Muslims, Christians and Jews believe and do – as its template and the further one gets from Western ideas and practices the less useful this measure becomes. This has led to more recent attempts at defining religion by what it does and how it works. But these functionalist definitions then become so broad or fuzzy that they can encompass almost any ideology or even any abstraction at all that people care enough about to motivate them to do anything. So the first set of definitions is too narrow, and struggles to find way to sensibly include many forms of Buddhism or traditions such as Shintoism, let alone multiple traditional indigenous traditions that do not fit into the Western template neatly or even at all. While the second is too broad, and finds ways to corral most things we would think of as “religion”, but in the process also rounds up everything from Marxism, to nationalism to a belief in the superior goodness of liberal democracy. So neither serve the purposes of anyone who tries to argue “religion” is particularly and especially violent very usefully.

Not that the anti-theist polemicists bother to actually define “religion” with any rigor, if at all. Harris provides no definition of the term and just claims that religion is the cause of most woes and violence in the world and that this can be substantiated by “a glance at history, or at the pages of any newspaper” (p. 12). His various examples include, of course, the usual religious suspects, but also include Stalinism and Maoism as “political religions”. As Cavanaugh observes:

[Harris] does not consider the possibility that Western political religions, such as American civil religion, might qualify as religion, for that would confound his neat dichotomy between liberal reason and religious irrationality.

(Cavanaugh, p. 212)

So it is only political ideologies that Harris does not like which he includes in his vague parameters, not things he is trying to fence off as being legitimate in ways “religion” is not. This gets particularly thorny for him when he turns to justifying torture, war and even nuclear first strikes in the name of his favoured ideologies.

Hitchens has much the same problem. He too does not bother to define religion, but when he turns to examples he also includes Stalinism and Maoism. Even more strangely, he includes the Baathist ideology of Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime, despite the Iraqi Baath Party being a secularist party with socialist leanings founded by a Christian and open to all people, religious or otherwise. Saddam had been tolerated by western powers for decades partially because he kept radical Islam and political clerics in check, often by the most brutal of methods. But Hitchens seems happy to include Iraqi Baathism because, like Stalin, Saddam adopted some religious trappings when it became politically expedient to do so. Though Hitchens’ main motivation is probably his own very vocal justifications for the 2003 toppling of Saddam’s regime.

Hitchens’ reasoning gets even more tangled when he turns to arguing that the totalitarian regimes of Hitler and Stalin were “religious” precisely because they were totalitarian. To demand total control of people’s lives and have them submit totally to a leader, state or ideal is what religions have done down the centuries, therefore, according to Hitchens, any ideology that does these things is religious. But this is a clumsy attempt at a functionalist definition of religion and far a better conclusion to his argument is that, actually, it is not only religions that do these things – other ideologies can do them as well. Like Harris, Hitchens is shaping his definitions to fit his ideological preferences and doing a bad job of it.

This gets Hitchens into some odd tangles. He does not like Saddam’s Baathism, so he tries to rope this secularist and socialist ideology into “religion”. On the other hand, he does rather like Martin Luther King’s moral teachings, so he has to wrangle this devout Baptist pastor away from Christianity on the flimsy grounds that his non-violence is contrary to Hitchens’ conception of the vengeful God of the Bible. Apparently King’s own conception of that God is not relevant here, and so Hitchens can thus boldly declare that he was “in no real as opposed to nominal sense … a Christian” (p. 61). Hitchens’ definition of “religion” is endlessly flexible.

The whole concept of something called “religion” that is distinct from secular ideas and ideologies is actually remarkably recent and distinctively western. This means that it is not only a difficult concept to define, but it is also very difficult to treat “religion” as a constant in all human cultures across time. The word derives from the Latin religio, but both that word and its later derivatives have changed markedly in meaning over the centuries before eventually arriving at its modern manifestation. There is no word in the cultures of ancient Greece, Egypt, India, China, Japan or Mesoamerica which fits the modern conception of “religion”. And the Latin word our term derives from does not actually fit it either. To the Romans, religio did not refer to a set of beliefs, ideas, teachings or dogmas. It referred to a powerful obligation to perform an action, particularly to renew a bond or confirm a link. This means it often was used to refer to the ancient obligation to worship the gods in particular ways, but it was not confined to this. It applied to a wide range of social and cultural obligations or actions that were venerable and so proper and fitting, many or even most of which a modern person would not regard as “religious” at all.

This means that when Augustine wrote his treatise De Vera Religione (usually translated as “Of True Religion” ) in the late fourth century, he was not maintaining that Christianity was the true “religion” and other “religions” were untrue. He was defining what he regarded as proper worship. He argued that any worship that focuses on created things – idols, animals, nature etc. – rather than the Creator was not proper worship or true religio. Naturally, as a Christian, he regarded the worship of the Trinity the only true religio, but while an earlier Roman like Cicero would have disagreed with this conclusion, he would have agreed with Augustine’s use of the key word. For both, religio in this context referred to the focus of practices, not beliefs.

In medieval Christian usage this Roman meaning became obscure and the word was rarely used at all. The exception was its use to refer to the various kinds of monastic rule or orders. This is its meaning in its earliest recorded usage in English (c. 1200), defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as meaning “a state of life bound by monastic vows”. This is why members of monastic orders are referred to even today as being “religious clergy” while non-monastic, diocesan clerics are “secular clergy” – terminology which is puzzling to many, given the modern meaning of those words. By the later Middle Ages the various orders – Benedictines, Dominicans, Franciscans etc. – were referred to as “religions”.

The process whereby religio became “religion” was a very gradual one, beginning with the Platonists Nicolas of Cusa (1401-1464) and Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), who both presented Muslim, Jewish and Christian worship (religio) as all inspired by the same universal divine impulse, though with the Christian form as the best and closest to God’s ideal. This is still not too far from the medieval conception found in, say, Aquinas, but it provided a stepping stone to conceptions of religio in the debates of the Reformation that not only made it a universal impulse but also very much a matter of doctrine and belief rather than practice. As the various Christian sects and churches of Europe defined themselves by increasingly codified lists of doctrines, “religion” began to emerge from religio as something with hard and clear edges and, increasingly, ones defined by what you thought rather than how you worshipped.

The Reformation saw some call for greater toleration of varied beliefs, which began to emphasise the idea that “religion” was a universal human instinct. In his 1624 book De Veritae, Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583-1648) presented an early form of Deism and defined five essential beliefs found in all religion: (i) Belief in a deity, (ii) Worship of the deity, (iii) That virtue and piety combined are the best form of worship, (iv) Rejection of our sins, (v) Punishment or reward after death. Like all later definitions of religion that try for universality, Herbert’s clearly falls well short. But his ideas were heavily influential on Descartes and John Locke (1632-1704). It is in Locke’s work that we start to see the – to us – commonly understood idea of a clear and hard division between the private, internal, belief-based “religion” and a public, external, political and non-religious secular sphere. For Locke, religious ideas cannot be settled by public authority and so are and have to remain matters of private conscience.

So here we finally arrive at an idea of “religion” which is recognisable to us. It is private and individual, but also universal and trans-temporal. And it is also quite distinct from civil, political, mercantile and worldly affairs – or at least, it should be. This conception would be very odd to anyone from a late medieval society and totally alien to Augustine or Cicero. It also arose in a specific European context in reaction to the upheavals of the Reformation, the threat of the Ottoman Empire and the wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which we still call “the Wars of Religion”. This is why this very modern and very European conception seems so “normal” to us, despite not actually fitting most of human history or most of the world beyond Europe.

The “Wars of Religion”

The wars that wracked Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – from the civil wars in France from 1562-98 through the Thirty Years War (16-18-48) and up to the English Civil War (1642-51) and its aftermaths – occupy a central place in the concept of religious war and violence. These have long been dubbed “the Wars of Religion” and held up as the quintessential example of what happens when religion’s unique tendency toward violence and oppression is unchecked. This idea has a long pedigree and actually began as early as Spinoza, but was shaped by Hobbes and Locke and given polemical expression by Gibbon and Voltaire.

As a result, it is a truism that the Reformation broke the domination of Catholicism but also unleashed the pent up violence of religious disputes and it was only the assertion of political control by the liberal nation state and the political marginalisation of religion that controlled this chaos caused by the clashing of doctrinal absolutism. This is what Hitchens is invoking when he talks about “several wars and revolutions [that] ruthlessly smashed the hold of the clergy on the state”. It is also the example that he, Harris and other anti-theist activists have most in mind when they not only warn against the dangers of religion, but also justify violence and military action against Islamic nations and groups, since they are the modern manifestation of “the hold of the clergy on the state”. So it is right and good that modern, liberal, secular states act to contain and curtail their inevitable barbarism.

The idea that modern secular liberal states have their origin in the eventual political solution to the problem exemplified by the Wars of Religion is so well accepted that it is repeated without question in most contemporary political theory, with Cavanagh providing multiple examples in his analysis (pp. 130-41). Quentin Skinner’s summary in his The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: 1978) is typical:

[T]he religious upheavals of the Reformation made a paradoxical yet vital contribution to the crystallizing of the modern, secularized concept of the State. For as soon as the protagonists of the rival religious creeds showed they were willing to fight each other to the death, it began to seem obvious to a number of politique theorists that, if there were to be any prospect of achieving civic peace, the powers of the State would have to be divorced from the duty to uphold any particular faith.

(p. 352)

In his Leviathan (1651), Hobbes had written of the inherent violence of humanity’s natural state and of “the war of all against all”, proposing the benign commonwealth of the nation state as the solution to this natural chaos. The inevitable sectarian violence of the Wars of Religion and the secular liberal nation state as their ultimate solution is an extension of this idea. This means the concept of the secular, liberal nation state has its roots deep in this conception of Early Modern History.

That conception is based on two widely-held ideas about the Wars of Religion. Firstly, that the combatants opposed each other primarily and fundamentally because of religious differences and intolerance, with any political, economic or social causes being at least secondary if not insignificant. Secondly, the modern nation state was the solution to the wars and the agent of their end, not their cause. But modern reappraisals of these conflicts have cast serious doubt on both of these assumptions, to the point where neither are able to be strongly sustained.

To begin with, if the Reformation was supposed to have unleashed the violent forces inherent in religious differences, it is very strange that it took about three decades to do so. The first war usually cited as one of the Wars of Religion is the Schmalkaldic War of 1546-47, between the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and the Lutheran Schmalkaldic League. Not only did it take Charles many years to decide to attack any Protestants, but he had spent most of those years at war not with any Protestant princes, but with the Pope. As Richard Dunn points out, “Charles V’s soldiers sacked Rome, not Wittenberg, in 1527” (The Age of Religious Wars 1559-1689, Norton, 1970, p. 6). Charles was far more interested in the long struggle with the Papacy for control of Italy and control over the Church in the German principalities than Protestantism. And even the Schmalkaldic War was hardly some neat Catholic versus Protestant “religious war”: several Protestant princes joined the emperor against the League, indicating that it was more about power and control than doctrine.

And this is the pattern we see across the so-called Wars of Religion. Catholic France allied with German Protestant princes against the Catholic Charles V in 1552, while Catholic German princes sat back and watched. France allied with the Muslim Turks against the Holy Roman Empire in 1525: which saw a Catholic ruler fighting another Catholic with Islamic assistance. The Pope withdrew forces from Germany in 1547, fearing that Charles V’s military successes against rebellious Protestants would make him too strong to deal with. In 1556 Pope Paul IV went to war against another Catholic monarch; Philip II of Spain.

The French civil wars of the sixteenth century are traditionally seen as conflicts between the Catholic majority and the Huguenot minority over religious differences. In reality, we see nobles happily switching sides as the fortunes of war shifted and plenty of examples of Catholic and Protestant nobles cooperating to maintain the rights of the nobility over the increasing centralising power of the monarchy. Such alliances were also found among the commoners, with Catholic and Protestant peasants uniting to resist abuses by both the nobility and the crown. In Agen in 1562, Catholic peasants joined their Huguenot compatriots in rebellion against the Catholic baron Francois de Fumel, seized the lord from his chateau and beheaded him. There were similar revolts where Catholic and Protestant commoners made a common cause in Pont-en-Roians (1578), Roissas (1579), the Vivarais (1580) and many other areas.

When we get to the piece de resistance of the Wars of Religion, the Thirty Years War, the image of one denomination battling another over doctrinal differences became even more endlessly muddled. The nominally Catholic Imperial army included several Protestant generals and many Protestant soldiers. The war was increasingly sustained by mercenary companies whose allegiance was to the highest bidder, regardless of confession. Ernst von Mansfield originally worked for the Catholic Spanish and then switched to Lutheran Fredrick V, before switching sides several more times. Sweden’s king Gustavus Adolphus is often depicted as the great champion of the Protestants, but was often seen as an invader by both Protestants and Catholics in Germany – he massacred Lutheran peasants who tried to drive out the Swedes in November 1632. Cardinal Richelieu made a treaty with the Swedes in 1631 and the latter half of the War was effectively a struggle between France and the German Empire – both Catholic. In 1635 Catholic Spanish troops attacked Trier and captured the Catholic archbishop-elector, with France subsequently declaring war on Spain – again, both Catholic. In 1635 the Protestant principalities of Brandenburg and Saxony signed the Peace of Prague with the emperor and their armies joined the Imperial forces to fight the Protestant Swedes. Meanwhile the Pope, far from backing the Imperial champions of Catholic Europe, gave his blessing to the French-Swedish alliance. And this is just a small selection of examples of how this war was clearly not some Catholic versus Protestant struggle over religious belief.

This is not to say that religion was not a factor, that doctrinal disputes were not often the inciting element that began these conflicts or that both sides did not use religious propaganda to inflame and motivate their troops and supporters. But the examples above cannot be dismissed as mere exceptions. The switching of sides, shifting alliances and multiple examples of armies of different confessional backgrounds uniting against a common enemy or kingdoms of the same faith turning on each other shows that, while religion was a factor in these conflicts, it was clearly not the factor. Anything more than the most cursory reading of the wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth century shows that they were driven by social, political, territorial and economic factors as much or more than anything religious.

This means the equally simplistic narrative that the rise of the secular, liberal nation state was a response to and therefore solution to the Wars of Religion is clearly a dubious one. These wars were primarily nation states jockeying for supremacy while also consolidating their new forms of authority and economic strength. The English Civil War was sparked, in part, by a Parliamentary party scandalised by a king who seemed overly “Popish”, but at its heart it was a struggle between a newly and increasingly absolutist monarchy seeking to centralise its power and a Parliament fighting for a much older form of distributed authority. This pattern can actually be seen across Europe, and it pre-dates both the Wars of Religion and the Reformation.

More centralised nation states had been rising across Europe since the later Middle Ages, driven by the economic boom of the later medieval period and by the influx of wealth from the New World and other long distance trade and colonisation. Long before the Reformation, these newly rich and powerful nations began a process of the transfer of much of the Church’s power to the state. Looked at this way, Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses are not so much the beginning of the Reformation but rather an incident within this already accelerating process. It is interesting to note that the Reformation only took hold where it was backed by the state and it did not take hold where it was resisted by the state. Closer examination of this shows that the states that backed the Reformers tended to be ones which had not managed to wrest political independence and economic benefit from its local Church (e.g. England, where the Church had remained rich and politically powerful), while the states that resisted the Reformation were ones where the Church had already increasingly been suborned to royal domination and economically weakened (e.g. France and particularly Spain, where the Church had in many respects become an instrument of royal policy).

This means both the Catholic and the Protestant spheres emerged from the seventeenth century with either a Protestant national church firmly in the hands of the king or the supposedly “universal” Catholic Church locally dependant on royal protection, with the reluctant acquiescence of popes not wanting to see more kingdoms turn Protestant. At the same time older, medieval systems of distributed authority and economic power had increasingly been reshaped or simply marginalised and replaced with more centralised state authority. The division of the realm into secular and religious spheres, the consignment of religion to a matter of personal conscience and the increasing removal or dilution of religious institutions’ political authority was all part of this process. It was not wise and noble kings and politicians realising that religion was uniquely dangerous and so had to be neutralised. It was a growing and increasingly powerful state authority reshaping how everything worked and doing so to its advantage.

This means the Wars of Religion were actually these states jostling for individual benefit and supremacy, thanks to an influx of wealth combined with a revolution in military technology and organisation. Their secularisation was a function of religious institutions being neutralised or marginalised. And any liberalism and democracy came much, much later and as a result of economic and social forces that had little to do with religion.

So the “Wars of Religion” were, actually, not wars of religion. They were certainly not the salutary lesson in unchecked religious impulse of common imagining. And the secular, liberal nation state did not arise as a solution to the problem of religious violence. Rather, the rise of the nation state was the primary cause not only of these wars, but also of the Reformation and its aftermath.

The Central Myths

The secular, liberal nation state, therefore, has its roots deep in the myth of religious violence. Again, it should be emphasised that this is not the idea that religions can be violent or that religion can inspire violence – they clearly can and obviously sometimes do. But the myth is that religion is particularly and uniquely violent, and so must be contained, curtailed, marginalised and, preferably, eliminated. This myth is a central assumption in most current anti-theistic argument. And it is no coincidence that the so-called New Atheism that still motivates most anti-theism today arose in the early 2000s; in a direct response to a religious movement by non-state actors striking the dominant nation state at the height of its post-Cold War supremacy.

It is also no coincidence that this myth arose in the eighteenth century and was reinforced into a certain dogmatic force in the nineteenth century as one of several “historical” founding myths of the Western nation state and its status as the best and, in fact, the “normal” way of ordering human affairs. Like the myth of “the Dark Ages” and the tangle of myths about the rise of science, it is a foundational story in the establishment of this model of social, political and economic organisation. So it is hardly surprising that it would be invoked so forcefully by the New Atheists when the 9/11 attacks seemed to threaten this model. Nor is it remarkable that people like Harris and Hitchens would use it to justify a response – military action, torture and even a nuclear option – wielded by Western nation states against the Islamic “other”.

This is why the arguments of these polemicists have to slip and slide around making any clear definition of “religion”, so they can include things they do not like (e.g. Baathism, communism) but exclude things they do like (liberal democracy, capitalism, some forms of nationalism). It is also why a tension quickly emerged between the progressive politics of many atheists and the rather politically staid and even conservative tendencies of the New Atheist agenda. This is why what was at one point called the “Atheist Movement” has increasingly descended into political bickering between a progressive wing (called “Woke” or “Social Justice Warriors” by their opponents) and a conservative opposition (called “Alt-Right” or just “Nazis” by the others). New Atheism was always a political enterprise.

This is not to say that secularism, liberalism or a separation of Church and State are therefore wrong or bad ideas – I happen to think all of them are very good things. But it does mean that the historical underpinnings of many arguments for them are, at best, distinctly wobbly. The trite claim that “more people have died in wars over religion than any other cause” is too simplistic and glib to be anything other than a weak cliché. No war has a single cause and not even overtly religious wars like the Crusades were only about religion. Even so, the Encyclopedia of Wars (Alan Axelrod, Charles Phillips ed.s, 2004) lists 1,763 historical conflicts and only classifies 123 of them (6.98%) with religion as their primary cause. Religion is not uniquely and especially prone to violence: no more so than any other motivating ideology or idea. Humans are eminently capable of finding reasons for violence and religion is not some special case that requires particular or particularly extreme counter-measures.

Grayling and Dawkins may fondly imagine a world where there is “no religion” and think it would be a better place. Personally, I think this is a naïve fantasy and that the sum total of happiness and misery, stability and turmoil and peace and war would be about the same as now and the same as it ever has been. History tells us this, at least.

Further Reading

William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (Oxford, 2009) – I would like to acknowledge my debt to Cavanaugh’s book in my writing of this article and cannot recommend it highly enough.

Borden W. Painter, The New Atheist Denial of History: Hijacking the Past in the Name of Reason (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)

Nathan Johnstone, The New Atheism, Myth, and History: The Black Legends of Contemporary Anti-Religion (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)