The current “war on terror” has focused attention on the issue of sacred violence.  Images of wild-eyed Muslim fanatics on suicide terror missions in the name of God pervade Western media—just as images of wild-eyed American imperialists greedy for Muslim oil pervade Middle Eastern media.  But war and violence in the name of God is hardly unique to Islam.  A new book by Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven, has just been released.  Using the story of the Lafferty murders in Utah as a launching pad for his wider thesis, Krakauer links Mormonism in particular and religious belief in general with violence, claiming that “[violent] extremism seems to be especially prevalent among those inclined by temperament or upbringing toward religious pursuits.”  Sadly, although his attempt to blame the Laffertys on Latter-day Saint theology and to tie them to Joseph Smith strains his meager evidence to the breaking point, there is a degree of plausibility, at least on the surface, to Krakauer’s wider general thesis.  Throughout history there has almost always been an intimate connection between religion and war. “O how we hate one another for the love of God,” lamented the great John Henry Cardinal Newman.

The Pyramid Texts, arguably the oldest book in the world (25^th century BC), focus on obtaining eternal life for the king, but include passages where the king is described as arming himself for battle (#57-71), and slaughtering and cannibalizing his enemies (#273-4).  Hammurabi of Babylon (1792-1750 BC) is most famous for his law-code, which bears remarkable resemblances to the Law of Moses.  The same text, however, emphasizes that the sacred order embodied in the law code given by the Sun-god Shamash could only be established by force of arms: “With the mighty weapons which the gods Zababa and Ishtar bestowed upon me … I [Hammurabi] annihilated enemies everywhere.” 

Another great lawgiver of the ancient Near East, Moses, was also a holy warrior, who in the name of God ordered genocide against the enemies of the Israelites (Num 31.13-18; Deut 13.12-18, 20.16-17; the biblical herem, usually translated in the KJV as “utter destruction.”)  Jewish holy wars continued throughout biblical history, culminating in the two bloody rebellions against Rome (AD 66-70 and 132-135) that left their country desolate and depopulated, their temple destroyed, and their people scattered and politically impotent.  While all this slaughter in the name of God seems hypocritical and repulsive to many modern people, to the ancients it made perfect sense; after all, who would possibly want to worship a god who did not promise victory in battle?

Cyrus the Great of Persia (r. 557-530 BC) was ordered by the gods to conquer the world; according to the Cyrus Cylinder: the god Marduk “pronounced the name of Cyrus, king of Persia, to become ruler of all the world.”  Isaiah seemingly agreed, calling Cyrus the Lord’s “anointed” (or messiah), whom God had ordered “to subdue nations before him.” (Isa 45.1).  Alexander the Great (r. 336-323 BC) believed he was the son of Zeus, on a divine mission to conquer the world and, as a devoted convert to Greek culture and a onetime student of Aristotle, to establish universal Hellenistic civilization.  Likewise, Augustus (r. 45 BC – 14 AD), the first Roman emperor, believed he was chosen by the gods to establish universal Roman imperial rule, the Pax Romana (“Roman Peace”).  Such, however, was not the general view of Roman imperialism; Tacitus ironically described the perspective of the conquered:  The Romans “create a wasteland and call it peace.”

Unfortunately, the history of Christianity too is filled with the practice of sacred violence.  The first overtly political act by a Christian state was a holy war, constituted as such by Constantine’s (r. 306-337) vision affirming that God would grant him victory at the battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312.  No Christians at the time found this paradoxical or even slightly dubious.  Thereafter, sacred violence formed an integral part of Christian history, from Heraclius’ holy war against the Sasanid Persians in the 620s through the Crusades (with their military monastic orders, such as the Templars).  At the siege of Beziers, during a war against Cathar heretics in southern France in 1209, the soldiers complained that they could not tell the difference between the heretics and good Catholics, and thus didn’t know who was their enemy.  With no apparent intended irony, Arnald Amalaricus, the Bishop of Citeaux who was participating in the siege, commanded his men: “ all; God will recognize his own,” meaning that God would welcome the slaughtered Catholics into heaven.  The rise of Protestantism was accompanied by a veritable orgy of bloodshed, with the wars of religion in the sixteenth century culminating in the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), during which a third of the population of Germany perished. 

The Pre-Columbian Maya engaged in a cosmological cycle of holy war, while the Aztecs fought “Flower Wars,” the major purpose of which was to capture enemies to be sacrificed to the gods.  The Mongol conquests were also ordered by the gods; according to Genghis Khan’s court shaman Teb-Tengri, “God has spoken with me and has said: ‘I have given all the face of the earth to Temujin [the khan’s personal name] and his children and named him Genghis Khan [‘World King’].”  The Vikings craved admittance to their warrior paradise, Valhalla, to which only those who died in battle with sword in hand had access.  Nothing was more detestable to a Viking than a “straw death” in bed.  And Hindus of the kshatriya warrior caste would have agreed.  The Rig-Veda, the oldest book of Hindu scripture, contains numerous hymns to the war-god Indra, “destroyer of cities.”  The two great Hindu epics, the Mahabharata and Ramayana, are martial tales in which the gods themselves become incarnate to fight holy wars against evil on earth.  The Bhagavad-Gita, the most important Hindu scripture, teaches that, for warriors, the gate to heaven is opened in battle (2.32).

Some today claim that Buddhism is a uniquely pacifistic religion, but this claim is plausible only to those unfamiliar with the history of holy war in Buddhism.  Japan offers the most obvious example, with its notorious Buddhist sohei (warrior-monks) and the Buddhist-based war-code of Bushido.  What we today know in the West as the “martial arts” derive from Japanese systems of combat steeped in Zen Buddhism.  Their ultimate source, however, was India, from whence the legendary Indian Buddhist monk Bodhidharma (died 527) introduced Indo-Buddhist martial arts to the Shao-lin temple in China.  The rebellion against Mongol domination of China in 1367 was led by the “White Lotus” sect of Buddhism, whose followers believed themselves to be engaged in an apocalyptic war preparing the way for the imminent advent of Maitreya, the future Buddha who would usher in an era of peace and justice. 

Millenarian religious movements occasionally engaged in sacred rebellion in China up through the early twentieth century, most notably during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 and in the utopian Taiping rebellion (1850-1864), which in some ways was a precursor to the politico-millenarian Marxist movement of Mao Tsetung.  Today, the fourteenth Dalai Lama is rightly renowned as an activist for compassion and non-violence, for which he won the Nobel Peace prize in 1989.  What is less well-known is that his early predecessor, the fifth Dalai Lama, Nag-dban-rgya-mtsho (1617-1682), became ruler of Tibet not through offering an example of compassion, but by leading a holy war against his rivals, with the aid of the recently converted Buddhist Mongols led by Gushri Khan.  Buddhism provided the ideology of sacred war throughout much of Southeast Asia as well. 

People who take religion seriously are thus faced with the paradox of believers who seem to engage in violence, warfare, and even genocide as sacred obligations.  This is a conundrum with no easy solution.  The history of sacred warfare in the world’s religions has even led some to claim that the influence of religion on mankind has been largely pernicious.  If, they say, we could only abandon our silly tribal superstitions and add a healthy dose of “tolerance for diversity” for different religions we would somehow resolve these problems.  This view, however, seems quite myopic.  It ignores the vast quantity of evidence on the other side, for the positive aspects of religious faith. The paradox rests in part on the fact that, while religious faith moves one person to acts of violence, in another it inspires to acts of compassion.  As the eminent scholar of comparative religions Huston Smith observes, in his 2001 book Why Religion Matters, “If a pro-life advocate shoots an abortionist doctor, it is certain to hit the front page of every newspaper in the country.  Meanwhile, millions of ordinary citizens will on that day have given some thought to their souls through prayer, meditation, Bible-reading, and the like—activities that reach into the depths of the soul where the switches are thrown between kindness and cruelty, hope and despair.  This passes without mention.”

Unfortunately, too, the tolerance for religious differences advocated by many modern secularized Westerners is not necessarily a morally superior stance.  Often, such tolerance is merely a camouflage for indifference—since all religions are equally true (or false), it doesn’t much matter which one you select.  For many today, choosing one’s religion has all the moral gravity of making a fashion statement or picking an ice cream flavor.  (Indeed, for some in Hollywood, choosing the wrong wardrobe may present more of a cause for holy war than choosing the wrong religion.)  True tolerance for religious diversity—as opposed to mere indifference masquerading as tolerance—is only possible for one who holds sincere religious belief.

The view that religion is a primary cause of warfare is further belied by the fact that, as war has become increasingly desacralized in the West during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it has become increasingly—not decreasingly—deadly and vicious.  More people have died in the wars of the twentieth century than in all the wars of the rest of human history combined.  Centuries from now, many historians may view the twentieth century as, uniquely, the age of total war and genocide.  This is in part due to the rapid rise in killing-technology and to mass mobilization of larger armies from burgeoning populations.  But there is obviously more to it than that; replacing war in the name of God with war in the name of “national interest” still leaves us with war. 

Religion can certainly be used as a tool for oppression, power, greed, or glory.  (The Book of Mormon calls this priestcraft.)  It represents an extraordinarily potent source of symbols and potential motivators, particularly in periods of extreme intensity such as war—one for which ambitious (or, like the Laffertys, merely mad) people naturally reach, either instinctively or by cynical design.  But is it, in most cases, really a primary or even a secondary factor?  One suspects that, if religion were not ready to hand, something else would probably be pressed into service.  Greed, anxiety, lust, anger, hatred, fear, and xenophobia surely don’t require theological nurturing to germinate in the human soul.  It would be extremely naďve to imagine that the Crusades, or the raids of the Vikings, or the seventh-century Arab conquests, or the Mongol expansion, can be explained solely or, in many cases, even largely on the basis of religion, whatever their ostensible pro da justification. 

The fact that many people, in every denomination and every culture, have used religion as a means to obtain power and wealth by means of oppression and violence does not demonstrate that religion is inherently oppressive, any more than the fact that money can be used as a tool for oppression demonstrates that economic activity is inherently oppressive.  (If the Laffertys had been obsessed with Star Trek instead of religion, would Krakauer claim that “extremism seems to be especially prevalent among those inclined by temperament or upbringing toward watching television”?  Yet there are plentiful examples of murders in some way or another inspired by Hollywood films.)  It should, however, lead us to be very dubious of “those who kill [and] think that by doing so they are offering worship to God” (John 16.2).

Further Reading

Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred (1977), examines the paradox of sacred violence and offers an interesting Christian interpretation of its meaning.

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Daniel C. Peterson teaches in the Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages and is co-director of research for BYU's Institute for the Study and Preservation of Ancient Religious Texts.

Photo of William J. Hamblin atop the ruins of the huge eighth century Buddhist stupa at Balgas, near Karakorum, Mongolia.

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