I agree, but a few examples off the top of my head are Crusades any of them,
Given the diversity of wars to which that label was applied at various times, discussing that would take us a long time.
I would agree that the Middle Eastern Crusades of the High Middle Ages were (among other things) a mistaken attempt by the papacy to channel the military energies of Western Europe into the cause of defending Christendom. I also think that they were a failure, though not everyone agrees with me. (I don’t think that in the absence of the Crusades the Muslims would have taken Constantinople and threatened the West any sooner–but I could be wrong on that one.)
However, people have a lot of silly ideas about the Crusades–I’m not saying that you do, but I can’t assume that when people say “the Crusades” they are speaking from an accurate historical understanding. For instance, there are people who think that the purpose of the Crusades was to convert or exterminate Muslims, and that the Crusaders engaged in a “convert or die” policy toward the Muslims they ruled. Both of these things are clearly false. The Crusades were a response to Seljuk Turkish aggression against the Byzantine Empire (which was unquestionably real) and reported atrocities against Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land as well as against the Byzantines (the atrocities were no doubt greatly exaggerated). Had the Crusaders cooperated with the Byzantines, the Crusades would in my opinion have been about as close to a just war as it’s possible to come.
A good example. The last (and probably most destructive) phase of the Thirty Years’ War had lost much of its religious character, inasmuch as the French were involved in the “Protestant” side for pretty much purely political reasons. But certainly religion played an important role in starting the war.
I do understand that obviously there were some internal national politics involved with any of these conflicts, but it always seemed to be a religious bent as the primary focus and then the other struggles just kept adding fuel.
It’s hard to say what was “primary”–my advisor used to say, “Human behavior is always overdetermined.” But certainly these are two good examples of wars motivated to a very large extent (at least initially) by religious zeal.
I’d like to hear a little more on what it means for these not to have “worked out.” I think it’s fair to say that neither of them did. But would they have “worked out” better if they had been successful (on either side, in the case of the Thirty Years’ War)? I don’t think that’s what you’re after–I think you’re making a moral critique. But that’s where your criticism risks becoming circular. If you are saying, “church-state alliances are bad because they cause wars,” then you are assuming either that war is always wrong (which you may believe) or that religious war is wrong while other wars may not be. (Or to put the latter possibility a different way, you could be assuming that war is wrong when it’s unnecessary, and that religion is not the sort of thing over which people should fight.) This latter assumption (with or without the nuance I provided in the parenthesis) is precisely the point that needs to be debated if we are to make an argument against state churches. The concept of a state church is generally rooted in the idea that religion *is *the sort of thing that should be the basis of a society and should be protected by the machinery of civil government (which would include, for most folks, warfare, at least as a last resort). So to make the case that this position is wrong, you need something more than “religion has sometimes started wars.”
If you want to make the case that religious wars are particularly destructive, or particularly likely to be futile, then the examples you gave (especially the Thirty Years’ War) are a good place to start–but then you need to do some kind of comparison with other kinds of wars. In my opinion war in general is generally futile, at least for any genuinely good purpose, though there are some wars of which this is not obviously true. (That is to say, there are particular aims, either arguably or unquestionably good, which have been reached by wars. A critic of war in general might argue that even these wars invariably have caused evils as great as those they succeeded in preventing or eliminating–WWII would be the textbook case here. But that’s a point on which reasonable people can and do differ.)
We’re already off topic, and so we probably shouldn’t launch into a debate about war in general. My point is only that a discussion of religious violence needs to take place in the context of a discussion of violence in general. Too often modern Westerners simply assume that whatever kinds of violence might be OK, religious violence obviously isn’t. This strikes me as an irrational assumption, unless of course one has previously proven that all religions are false or at least trivial (which would amount to the same thing, since pretty much anything anyone has called a religion has claimed to be of immense importance). Sure, there’s a bitter irony in the idea of people fighting for the “Prince of Peace”–but there’s also bitter irony in the idea of fighting “the war to end wars” or fighting “to make the world safe for democracy.” If war is ever just, it’s just because it is fought in the service of peace. (Indeed, Augustine would say that all wars are fought in the service of some kind of peace, so the irony is built into war itself.) If Christianity isn’t worth fighting for, then what about the various secular goals for which people fight?
Edwin
