Are the Abrahamic religions violent? War and peace in scripture and history

It is often said that the Abrahamic religions are especially violent, even that religion has caused most of the wars in history. The claim deserves a serious answer, which means looking both at the historical record and at what the scriptures of each tradition actually command.

What the record shows

The figure most often quoted in reply comes from the Encyclopedia of Wars of Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod, which catalogues 1,763 wars across recorded history. Its index lists 121 of them under religious wars, about seven per cent.¹ The historian Andrew Holt has shown that the popular round figure of 123 comes from later commentators, and that the encyclopedia’s own index is a rough guide, since other wars in it had religious elements. A second reference work, the Encyclopedia of War edited by Gordon Martel, counts about six per cent of its wars as religious.² The theologian William Cavanaugh has argued further that the line between ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ violence is itself a modern Western invention, since wars called religious always had political and economic causes, and wars called secular have been fought for beliefs held with religious intensity.³ The deadliest wars of the twentieth century were fought for nation, race and class.

The Hebrew Bible and Judaism

The Hebrew Bible contains wars of conquest, and also some of the oldest laws of restraint in war: an army must offer peace to a city before attacking it, and must not cut down its fruit trees. Its prophets gave the world its most famous vision of peace, when nations ‘shall beat their swords into ploughshares’.⁴ The Mishnah teaches that whoever destroys a single life is regarded as though he had destroyed a whole world, and whoever saves a single life as though he had saved a whole world.⁵

Christianity

Jesus blessed the peacemakers, told his followers to love their enemies, and told Peter to put away his sword, ‘for all who take the sword will perish by the sword’.⁶ Some early Christian writers, Tertullian among them, held that a Christian could not serve as a soldier. Once the empire became Christian, Augustine developed the theory of the just war, and the church later preached the Crusades; the same tradition also produced the peace movements and the modern laws of war.

Islam

The Qur’an permitted fighting only after the Muslims of Makkah had suffered years of persecution, ‘because they were wronged’, and it binds the permission with limits: fight those who fight you, and do not transgress; if the enemy inclines to peace, incline to it too; there shall be no compulsion in religion.⁷ The first caliph, Abū Bakr, sending his armies into Syria, gave them ten commands: not to kill women, children or the old and infirm, not to cut down fruit trees, not to destroy inhabited places, not to slaughter sheep or camels except for food, and to leave in peace those who had devoted themselves to worship in their cells.⁸ Islamic law built on these commands a detailed law of war centuries before the Geneva Conventions.

Mandaeism

Mandaeism teaches that all killing and all shedding of blood is sinful, so that even lawful slaughter for food is an act for which Mandaeans feel the need to apologise.⁹ Drower was told by several pious Mandaeans that a deeply religious man gives up meat and fish altogether.

As if he had saved mankind

The Qur’an sets the principle in words addressed first to the Children of Israel:

مِنْ أَجْلِ ذَٰلِكَ كَتَبْنَا عَلَىٰ بَنِىٓ إِسْرَٰٓءِيلَ أَنَّهُۥ مَن قَتَلَ نَفْسًۢا بِغَيْرِ نَفْسٍ أَوْ فَسَادٍ فِى ٱلْأَرْضِ فَكَأَنَّمَا قَتَلَ ٱلنَّاسَ جَمِيعًا وَمَنْ أَحْيَاهَا فَكَأَنَّمَآ أَحْيَا ٱلنَّاسَ جَمِيعًا ۚ وَلَقَدْ جَآءَتْهُمْ رُسُلُنَا بِٱلْبَيِّنَـٰتِ ثُمَّ إِنَّ كَثِيرًا مِّنْهُم بَعْدَ ذَٰلِكَ فِى ٱلْأَرْضِ لَمُسْرِفُونَ ٣٢

Because of that, We decreed upon the Children of Israel that whoever kills a soul unless for a soul or for corruption [done] in the land – it is as if he had slain mankind entirely. And whoever saves one – it is as if he had saved mankind entirely. And Our messengers had certainly come to them with clear proofs. Then indeed many of them, [even] after that, throughout the land, were transgressors.

Qur’an 5:32¹⁰

The verse restates for all humanity the teaching the Mishnah preserved: one life weighs as much as the whole of mankind. That shared principle is the best answer to the charge with which this article began. The Abrahamic scriptures do permit war, under conditions, as nearly every political order has; what they add is the insistence that every life belongs to God, that war must be limited and just, and that peace is to be accepted whenever it is offered. Wars fought in the name of these religions were fought against their own teaching whenever they broke those limits.

Further reading: The Amman Message and A Common Word, Interfaith dialogue in the modern era, Apostasy in the Abrahamic traditions.

Notes

1. Andrew Holt, “Counting ‘Religious Wars’ in the Encyclopedia of Wars,” 26 December 2018, citing Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod, Encyclopedia of Wars (New York: Facts on File, 2005), vol. 3, pp. 1484-1485. ↩
2. Gordon Martel (ed.), The Encyclopedia of War (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). ↩
3. William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). ↩
4. Deuteronomy 20:10, 19; Isaiah 2:4. ↩
5. Mishnah, Sanhedrin 4:5. ↩
6. Matthew 5:9, 44; 26:52. ↩
7. Qur’an 22:39; 2:190; 8:61; 2:256. ↩
8. Muwaṭṭaʾ of Mālik, Book 21 (Jihād), Hadith 10. ↩
9. Drower, The Mandaeans of Iraq and Iran, p. 48. ↩
10. Qur’an 5:32, trans. Saheeh International; Arabic text from Quran.com. ↩