The issue of religion and violence has returned to the agenda. This time because of the Muslim world’s reaction to the Quran burnings and - not least - the capital of violence represented by Islamist groups within this community.

Linked to this, it is natural to discuss the role of religion in armed conflicts. And compared to the general picture, it is a research area that offers several surprises.

 

War and religion in the past

The Swedish historian of religion, Mattias Gardell, for example, has been able to show that more than 90 per cent of all armed conflicts in the world between 1945 and 2001 had something other than religion as their primary driver. 66 per cent of the conflicts were also between parties who nominally had the same religious affiliation (Christians fought Christians, Muslims fought Muslims, and so on). And not least remarkable, given the prevailing Western narrative: the religion that was most over-represented among the armed conflicts of the period was Buddhism.

This is not a defence of religious violence. And especially when it becomes a state religion, Christianity also has blood on its hands. The most common reference is to the Medieval crusades, but the Thirty Years’ War deserves a special mention in terms of the number of deaths.

 

Old Testament wars

And doesn’t the Old Testament talk about both war and killing in the name of God? Let me here clarify the concepts of the Old Testament war texts, and then compare them with the Quran’s message on the subject.

Any reader of the Old Testament will notice the presence of war. Certainly, this is not unique to Jewish historiography. War means that the welfare of the nation is at stake, which makes it natural for historians to dwell on these events. What possibly stands out in the biblical texts is God’s active presence in what happens. However, this too is not unique to the Old Testament - claims of divine presence and protection in the context of battle are a standard feature of war stories of this period.

A type of war that arouses greater moral indignation, however, is that fought in connection with the entry of the Hebrews into the land of Canaan. Here we can read about the judgment of rejection, cherem, which, at least on the surface, seems to have involved the total extermination of the local population: “However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them – the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites – as the Lord your God has commanded you” (Deuteronomy 20:16-17, NIV).

Research in recent decades has shown that these wars were probably not as brutal as they seem. Here again, the contemporary traditions of war writing come into play, where ‘spare no one’ can in some cases be compared to a football coach telling his team ‘let’s crush the opposition’. This is what is sometimes called hyperbole - rhetorically motivated exaggeration. Three times as often as there is talk of “exterminating” the Canaanites, there is also talk of “expelling” them. But no matter how the cherem texts are interpreted, it is clear that we are dealing with a form of war that is difficult for a modern reader to digest.

This may not make things easier for a contemporary reader of the Bible. But it has major implications for the contemporary Judeo-Christian view of violence. Put simply, the religious wars of the Old Testament were geographically limited to the land of Canaan and essentially took place under the leadership of Israel’s rulers Moses and Joshua. In other words, the biblical texts describing the Cherem wars can be characterised as descriptive, since there is no expectation that this warfare will be repeated by later generations.

I am not claiming that moderate Muslims support this attitude. However, it is an explanation for why we today feel a well-founded fear of Islamist attacks, while very few Swedes have any expectation of similar behaviour from Christians.

The past is proving to hold crucial keys to understanding contemporary events

In fact, even the Crusades were not motivated by the Old Testament war texts, but rather by the New Testament discourses of love, self-sacrifice and taking up one’s cross and following Christ. The background to the first Crusades was several hundred years of wars of conquest by the Muslim world, where previously Christian areas in the Middle East, North Africa and Spain had been Islamised. The campaigns were launched when the Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Comnenos appealed to Pope Urban II for military assistance at a time when the Christian presence in Asia Minor was in danger of being completely wiped out.

The relationship between religion and violence is complex and, like most areas of research, deserves in-depth study. But it is also an area where the past is proving to hold crucial keys to understanding contemporary events.

Olof Edsinger, Secretary General of the Swedish Evangelical Alliance. Author of the book 'The Wars in the Old Testament: An attempt to understand' .