The Myth of the Wars of Religion

Yet Another Cheap Trick

Voltaire once famously said, "History is after all only a pack of tricks we play on the dead".  Voltaire had in view some "dishonest" historians.  Doubtless he was excluding himself and his fellow Philosophes from the sarcasm.  Yet, arguably the Enlightenment intelligentsia was guilty of playing more tricks upon the dead than most.

One of the staunch prejudices of the Philosophes of the Enlightenment was against religion and religious belief.  These were characterised as riddled with myth, superstition, purblind prejudice, and ignorance.  In contrast were the cool headed, evidence based intellectuals of the Age of Reason.  Or so the story ran.

One of the slurs against religious belief was that it was responsible for fomenting war.  People believed in things that were no more than ignorant prejudices.  Ignorance (rather than rational debate, analysis, and discussion) readily led to the use of force.  With no evidence, the only persuader in the face of disagreement was compulsion.  Hence, religion was responsible for much of the violence and bloodshed of the early modern period.  Terms like the Wars of Religion have been coined to characterise Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  These wars, we are told, only came to an end with the emergence of the secular Nation State.  When the map of Europe was redrawn into nation states, wars passed away.  Enlightenment flourished.  Convinced?

This "pack of tricks" began to wear a bit thin during the Napoleonic Wars.  None could reliably claim that Emperor Napoleon was motivated by religious ferour.  "Vive la France" was hardly part of a Christian catechism.  Yet the myth--the cheap trick--has persisted right into our day.

France Fukuyama, a modern scholar, for example, takes up this wars-of-religion narrative with emphatic vehemence:

There was a time when religion played an all-powerful role in European politics, with Protestants and Catholics organizing themselves into political factions and squandering the wealth of Europe in sectarian wars. English liberalism, as we saw, emerged in direct reaction to the religious fanaticism of the English Civil War.  Contrary to those who at the time believed that religion  was a necessary and permanent feature of the political landscape, liberalism vanquished religion in Europe.  [Cited in William Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 137.  Emphasis, ours.]

So religion led to sectarian wars in Europe (the wars-of-religion narrative); but liberalism vanquished religion in Europe.  Therefore, under liberalism Europe broke out into a peaceful paradise.  One wonders what kind of beetle juice Professor Fukuyama has been chewing.  He really has been caught up in a cheap trick.

Cavanaugh goes on to discredit thoroughly the wars-of-religion narrative.  He proceeds to cite from the actual historical record and the work of actual historians of the period to demonstrate beyond doubt that religion played very little role at all in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe.  Nation states, however, did.   So much so that he uses the phrase "the myth of the wars of religion".  He commences a ten page survey of the period demonstrating that the "historical records of these wars, however, show many examples of members of the same church killing each other and members of different churches collaborating."  [Ibid., p. 142.]

In other words, to claim religious causation is as meaningful as the assertion that the wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth century were caused by people breathing.  The myth of the wars of religion is nothing less than a cheap trick which attempts to remove religion in general and Christianity in particular from the public square, so that it can be left to secularists and atheists, who, as we know, are utterly pacific, never warlike, and oozing with magnanimity and public virtue.