Religious Wars

Under War’s Bloody Banner [Excerpts]

Has religion really inflicted "more suffering" than any other manmade cause? Is this assumption, one shared by a large segment of society, an accurate notion? Certainly it's a position that's well ingrained. Demonstrating the imbedded nature of this popular impression, history professor Pat Johnson writes, "I challenge my classes to comment on the following statement: Organized religion has caused more suffering, wars and violence than any other cause. Almost all the students raise their hands in agreement."

Logically, if religion has been the major cause of the world's wars and death, then religion should shoulder the burden of responsibility towards making peace. Today, this rationale underscores much of the global interfaith movement, including the recent United Nations Conference on Interfaith Cooperation for Peace.

But can the finger of guilt really point to religion as the primary cause of war and strife?

The Killing Century

In analysing this hypothesis of religion's global war guilt, let's examine the role of religion as the primary killing factor in the bloodiest century of all time -- the last one hundred years. As Winston Churchill explained during the MIT Mid-Century Convocation,

"Little did we guess that what has been called the Century of the Common Man would witness as its outstanding feature more common men killing each other with greater facilities than any other five centuries together in the history of the world."

So was religion the prime death factor, the "single greatest source" of war and suffering, for this very cruel and brutal century?

In order to understand the answer to this question, we need to chart the major wars and human-caused genocides that occurred during this time frame. And in order to do this in the space allotted for this short article, we need a lower stop-limit number -- let's say 1.5 million as a minimum death total.

Please bear in mind that this chart will not be able to list or separate-out all examples. Some, such as the death figure for World War II, could be broken down into holocaust tabulations, single battle totals, etc. -- but we'll try to keep it simple.

Furthermore, it's important to note that many historical conflicts and killings lack accurate death tabulations, and in some instances – such as killings done under Stalin and Mao – the numbers given in our chart may actually be too low.

Other problems arise from the lack of concrete death totals. For example: the Mexican uprisings of 1910-1920 variably runs between 750,000 and 2 million dead, likewise the decades-old Rwanda/Burundi conflict falls into this statistically difficult range. Because of the variance in accounting up to the 1.5 million mark, I will leave out these two examples, along with many others that display complex numerical discrepancies up to the 1.5 million figure.

However, the following death-inventory will suffice for our brief review.[10] Notice how many of these mass-killing events had classical religion as its central cause.

[The following list is arranged by event (war), date, number of deaths, and lastly, cause.

Congo Free State

1886-1908

8,000,000

Control of colonial profit and power base.

Feudal Russia

1900-1917

3,500,000

(figures vary)

Political control

Turkish purges

(cross-over with the Russian struggle and World War I)

1900-1923

5,000,000

Ottoman Empire collapse. Political control struggle. Islamic/ethnic factors play an important role

First World War

1914-1918

15,000,000

Balance of power

Russian Civil War

1917-1922

9,000,000

Political control

Soviet Union, Stalin Regime

1924-1953

20,000,000

Political control

China Nationalist Era

1928-1937

3,000,000

Political control

Second World War

1937/38-1945

55,000,000

Balance of power. Expansionism

Sino-Japanese War

1937-1945

21,000,000

Expansion

Yugoslavia

(includes WWII)

1941-1987

2-2,500,000

Political control. Ethnic and religious issues

Post-WWII German Expulsions from Eastern Europe

1945-1948

1.8-5,000,000

(figures vary)

Post-war policies. Retributions/Soviet and Eastern European control

Chinese Civil War

1945-1949

2,500,000

Political control

People’s Republic of China (Mao Zedong)

1949-1975

40,000,000

Political control

North Korean Regime

1948-

1.7-3,000,000

(figures vary)

Political control

Korean War

1950-1953

2,800,000 (figures vary)

Political control

Second Indochina War

1960-1975

3-4,000,000

Political control

Ethiopia

(includes famine)

1962-1992

1,500,000

Political control. Ethnic issues came into play

Pakistan-Bangladesh Genocide

1971

1.7-3,000,000

(figures vary)

Political/economic, and social control over East Pakistan. Islam and Hindu ethnic/religious issues

Khmer Rouge

1975-1978

2,500,000

Political control

Afghanistan

1979-2001

1,800,000

Political control. Soviet expansion. Islamic issues

Second Sudanese War

1983-

2,000,000

Historical ethnic struggles. Islamic religious issues play a key role. Resource control and usage

Kinshasa Congo

1998-

3,800,000

Political control and debasement. Ethnic strife. Resource control

The sheer horror and brutality of mankind throughout the twentieth century cannot be properly demonstrated in a simplistic chart. However, it's more than apparent that the principal causations of the majority of these awful events -- especially those with death numbers more than five million high -- cannot be laid at the feet of classical religion.

(http://www.crossroad.to/articles2/006/teichrib/war.htm#_edn10)