Is Christianity a Pacifistic Religion?

[Angrboda]

My point to Vulcan was that while he implied that Christians have this long history of connection to war, that is really not the case. Religions might be a factor, but hardly any war EVER, especially in Europe was about religion in any primary way. It is always about way more than that. There are very good pragmatic reasons to put a religious face on a war that the leaders know is about something else (popular support, whipping up the troops, financing etc.). It's not hard to figure out the real reasons. See my original post with the links.  I think my post said like 7% had religion as a primary reason and half of them were Islamic wars. Seems to me it is only echo chamber atheist propaganda that Christianity is responsible for so many wars.

A friend shared the image above from a Facebook page called WHY?Outreach. I thought the statistic was interesting, so I followed the links they cited for their claim in the caption text.

In one of them, an article at CARM, which I despise and link under protest, Robin Schumacher makes the following claim, which is cited verbatim in the meme:

An interesting source of truth on the matter is Philip and Axelrod’s three-volume Encyclopedia of Wars, which chronicles some 1,763 wars that have been waged over the course of human history. Of those wars, the authors categorize 123 as being religious in nature,2 which is an astonishingly low 6.98% of all wars. However, when one subtracts out those waged in the name of Islam (66), the percentage is cut by more than half to 3.23%.

Footnote 2 is a broken link, but it’s supposed to take readers to a Google Books preview of a book called The Irrational Atheist in which author Vox Day adds up “all the wars that the authors of the Encyclopedia of Wars saw fit to categorize as religious wars for one reason or another.” Day includes several caveats, like some wars being lumped together, but is generally satisfied with his work. At the risk of another dead link like the one suffered by CARM, I include a link to the book preview here.

The claims that (1) there have been 1,763 wars in human history, and (2) only 123 of them are a result of religious causes, appear explicitly nowhere in Encyclopedia of Wars. Those numbers were tallied up by Vox Day using data from Encyclopedia of Wars. Sort of.

Wikipedia’s article on religious war previously included the number as well, citing 3 sources: a Huffington Post article which made the claim but failed to support it, a book called An Atheist Defends Religion which also made the claim but failed to support it or even footnote Vox Day’s work, and finally, Vox Day’s book, pages 104-106. Vox Day’s book, as best I can tell, appears to be the original source of the number (allegedly derived from Encyclopedia of Wars).

While I was tracking down the original source, I learned something about the Encyclopedia of Wars: It’s freakishly expensive. Like $400 expensive. So how the heck did Vox Day get hold of a copy?

Answer: He probably didn’t.

PDF copies of everything seem to live on the internet, however, and an expensive reference book like Encyclopedia of Wars is apparently a prime target. I found a PDF. (The link may have stopped working by the time you get to it; there’s another one on Scribd. If those don’t work, Google is amazing and there may still be a copy floating around.)

In case there isn’t, I have a few observations:

1. The Encyclopedia of Wars doesn’t categorize wars as religious or non-religious. I searched the PDF for “religion.” It appeared 201 times. “Religious” appeared 216 times. There is no section of the book where Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod explicitly “categorize” wars as religious or non-religious.

I suspect Vox Day did a word search of a PDF copy of Encyclopedia of Wars, noting which of the entries mentioned religion, and counting up all the other wars. In any event, Robin Schumacher’s claim that “the authors categorize 123 as being religious in nature” and Vox Day’s claim that “the authors of the Encyclopedia of Wars saw fit to categorize as religious” any wars at all are both false. Some entries mention religion, some don’t. The catch here is that to make this claim, Vox Day ignores something critically important:

2. In the introduction to Encyclopedia of Wars on page xxii, the authors note the following:

Wars have always arisen, and arise today, from territorial disputes, military rivalries, conflicts of ethnicity, and strivings for commercial and economic advantage, and they have always depended on, and depend on today, pride, prejudice, coercion, envy, cupidity, competitiveness, and a sense of injustice. But for much of the world before the 17th century, these “reasons” for war were explained and justified, at least for the participants, by religion. Then, around the middle of the 17th century, Europeans began to conceive of war as a legitimate means of furthering the interests of individual sovereigns. (Emphasis mine).

So. Have most of our wars been about religion? According to the authors of Encyclopedia of Religion, for the people who started them, mostly not. For the people fighting them, they mostly have been.

My friend, who was researching with me, un-shared the image when we realized most of the sources… weren’t.

Fact Check: Religious Wars: Only 123 of 1763?

In case you are wondering, as I was, who the Richard Deem that is referenced in the footnote to this Wikipedia claim is, he appears to be associated with the web site http://www.godandscience.org. It's unclear where he got the claim from as he cites both the encyclopedia as well as the work by Vox Day, here. I'm not calling Mr. Deem a liar, but the facts surrounding the matter seem rather suspicious. This would hardly be the first time a Christian source has passed off a secondary source's claim as original to the primary source. Particularly among creationists.