Does Christianity Cause War? by David Martin Clarendon Press, Oxford 226pp, £30 in UK
David Martin has written an erudite, illuminating and geographically and historically wide-ranging book with a provocative title but a reassuring conclusion. No, Christianity does not cause war.
Indeed, after reading Professor Martin's book it is difficult to see how anyone could ever believe that it did outside the semi-literate class of television commentators who regularly pontificate on the conflicts of the Middle East, Ulster, the former Yugoslavia or South Asia in an anti-religious way. For the telepundits, religion means indoctrination and persecution and therefore must lead to war regardless of what the comparative empirical evidence tells us. They have received support, though, from the Oxford zoologist and geneticist Richard Dawkins who sees religion in general as a source of utter and inner "certainty" which can lead the members of a religious group to want to kill those who disagree with them.
David Martin shows by means of comparative analysis that religion is only associated with war when it becomes fused with other secular institutions such as the nation and the state, which are concerned with the use of force. Religion then becomes just one more facet of group identity to be mobilised in a conflict. Ironically, the bases of these conflicts are rooted in the cultural defence of one's history, land and cultural integrity, the very factors that are cherished by the intellectuals who are suspicious of religion.
By contrast, in societies where religion is differentiated from other institutions, such that Christian believers and clergy constitute a distinct segment of the population rather than a mere aspect of an integral society, then Christianity, now an independent force, is largely directed towards peaceful reconciliation internally and to peace in foreign affairs. By means of data from a diversity of sources relating to Latin America, Eastern Europe and Africa, Professor Martin is able through a rigorous comparative analysis utterly to refute Dawkins and his supporters.
It is unlikely that "differentiated" religion in general is a cause of war, but David Martin also indicates that Christianity is more pacific than other religions such as Islam. Christianity is unique in offering the possibility of a renunciation of triumphalism, in having a God at times receiving rather than using violence, in the first being the last and the lord the servant. Such a religion can still be war-like and oppressive if, say, fused with Slovak or Serbian nationalism, but it has also given rise to sects dedicated to total pacifism such as the Waldensians or the Quakers, a phenomenon that does not exist in Islam.
Ironically, it is the excessive certainties of Christian pacifism that tend to cause war, a conclusion that will gall Dawkins and no doubt wormwood him as well. It was the hyper-moralism of the Protestant Christian pacifists of the Peace Pledge Union in the 1930s that led to an unwillingness to use force against Hitler when it would have succeeded, and thus to the second World War. A similar indictment can be brought against CND and its allies who nearly lost the Cold War for the West. Christian pacifism has much to answer for because of its lack of what David Martin terms "Aristotelian practical wisdom".
I hope Professor Martin will not feel it impertinent of me if, as a postscript to his brilliant analytical demolition of the critics of allegedly belligerent Christianity, I conclude that Dawkins was right about the dangers of certainty. It is not, though, the certainties of religion that are the cause of war but the certainties of pseudo-science. The worst wars and persecutions of the 20th century were caused by German National Socialism and Marxist Communism, ideologies that both claimed scientific certainty, a certainty rooted in the genetics of race and in historical sociology respectively. Unlike the cautious, falsifiable, provisional sciences of genetics and historical sociology adhered to by Dawkins and Martin respectively, the certainties of Hitler and Marx were rubbish. Unlike religion which, as David Martin shows, can and should stand alone, these secular ideologies of certainty were necessarily part of state power and bound to lead to war.
Christie Davies is a writer and critic