A Brief History of Christian Violence

Peace and Conflict Studies, 

By David P. Barash, Charles P. Webel, pp 390-91.

Christianity, too, has a complex relationship to war. Although many of its founding principles emphasize pacifism, turning the other cheek, and loving one’s neighbor, Christianity…constitutes one of the great warrior religions of history. The fundamental Christian ambiguity toward war is reflected in attitudes toward the cross. On the one hand, it is supposed to be the ultimate symbol of God’s peace and love, divine grace with which to replace violence and sin. But on the other hand, the cross has long been seen as a new and more effective sword with which to smite the forces of evil. Thus, Saint Paul warned [Rom 13.4].

Christendom was the eventual heir to the dying Roman Empire, and as such, many of its early wars were unsuccessful, although fought with increasing fervor. The “holy war” tradition in Christianity is a direct descendant of the commanded wars of the Old Testament and was especially influential during the Middle Ages, most dramatically during the Crusades. Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, in the 12^th century, delivered the following sermon in support of Christian efforts to drive Muslims from Palestine:

A new sort of army has appeared…It fights a double war; first, the war of the flesh and blood against enemies; second, the war of the spirit against Satan and vice…The soldier of Christ kills with safety; he dies with more safety still. He serves Christ when he kills. He serves himself when he is killed.

In 1215, the Catholic Church forbade participation of priests or bishops in trials by combat. Go, it was claimed, was not concerned with such demeaning matters; nonetheless, the tendency to see wars as divine judgment and retribution continued, in part as a carryover from the time when various Old Testament prophets warned that the sinning city of Babylon would be punished by God, via war. From the 16^th to the 18^th centuries, many Christians adhered to a similar perspective; war was widely seen as “God’s beadle”, chastising the ungodly, the sinners, those who were insufficiently devout and righteous. Not only did war represent God’s vengeance on the wicked; it also served as a hair shirt, a kind of penance for the war maker, a chastisement for people who had been backsliding, who needed its miseries to remind them of their wickedness and smallness and of God’s almighty power. At other times, religious zealotry served to legitimize the Christian conquest of nonbelievers.

Although “conversion by the sword” was a stimulus for the expansion to Islam from 700 to 1450 CE, it was also prominent among Christian war makers. Even as recently as 1914, the Bishop of London [Arthur Winnington-Ingram] urged his countrymen to “kill Germans—kill them, not for the sake of killing, but to save the world, to kill the good as well as the bad, to kill the young men as well as the old…As I have said a thousand times, I look upon it as a war for purity, I look upon everyone who dies in it as a martyr.” And of course, bellicose German priests and ministers were simultaneously reassuring their countrymen that Gott mit uns (God is with us).

War is bad enough; when religious zealousness adds the conviction of absolute certainly of one’s righteousness, it becomes even worse. “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully”, noted Blaise Pascal in his 17^th-century Pensees, “as when they do it from religious conviction.”