Religion was the main cause of surprisingly few of history's wars
A popular claim holds that religion has caused most wars. Tallies suggest otherwise. The 1997 Encyclopedia of Wars listed 1,763 notable conflicts and filed 121 of them, under 7 percent, as religious wars. Another reference work, using a stricter test of overt religious action, arrived at about 6 percent.
Historians reviewing such counts generally conclude that territory, ethnicity and money have driven far more wars than faith. Andrew Holt, surveying the estimates in 2022, noted that no quantitative study backs the idea that religion is a frequent cause. Even the numbers get garbled in retelling: Holt traced a widely quoted figure of 123 religious wars not to the encyclopedia itself but to a polemical book from 2008 that had nudged the total.
Part of the difficulty is deciding what counts. The German historian Konrad Repgen argued in 1987 that motives are often unknowable, so a war should be called religious only when at least one side publicly justified it on religious grounds. Others found that too narrow. David Onnekink separated religious wars from holy wars: a holy war needs religious authorisation and devout fighters, whereas a Lutheran prince hiring mercenaries could still wage a religious war. Many conflicts were several things at once, such as succession disputes in which rival claimants happened to hold opposing faiths, as in the French Wars of Religion.
Some scholars go further and question the word itself. The theologian William Cavanaugh argues that religion, as a label for a distinct package of beliefs, took its modern shape only in the seventeenth century, after the Reformation split Western Christianity and Europeans met unfamiliar cultures. The Latin religio originally meant a personal virtue of devotion. Translators rendered the Quranic word deen as law until the mid-1600s, the Sanskrit dharma also carries that sense, and Japanese had no word for the concept until American warships arrived in 1853 and pressed treaties demanding religious freedom.
The pattern also shifts over time. Kalevi Holsti sorted wars from 1648 to 1989 by the issues behind them. Protecting fellow believers ranked among the main causes in 14 percent of wars between 1648 and 1714, falling to 10 percent in the century before 1914 and to zero in the periods from 1918 to 1941 and 1945 to 1989.
Source: Religious war
