Too bad, so sad, for New Atheist types, but it seems that only a really small minority of wars have been caused by religion since the Treaty of Westphalia.
To establish a baseline for comparing religious conflicts with other reasons why countries fight, we gathered information on three additional issues where Holsti collects data: real estate (territorial disputes), riches (battles over resources), and regimes (where one country attempts to replace another country’s government with one it prefers). Like the religion analysis, this involved bundling several of Holsti’s issues under a broader category for each issue of conflict, since many if not most wars have multiple issues. The results are listed below:Well, obviously. Anyone who studies history knows this, but it is amazing how Hitchens et al. can get away with this bag of wind.
As you can see, in no time period since the Peace of Westphalia did religious wars ever constitute the dominant issue for why countries fight. In no case did religion ever consist of more than half the number of the next-lowest category of conflict.
But there’s still the matter of Huntington’s argument that we may be entering into some new age of religious wars. So far, the data doesn’t necessarily reflect that.
We also looked at the new Correlates of War dataset on conflicts since 1990. The Correlates of War project is perhaps the most respected scholarly endeavor to collect data on conflict and the factors associated with it. Some of these conflicts are territorial disputes (Ecuador-Peru over the Cenepa Valley, Ethiopia-Eritrea over the Badme border town, India-Pakistan over Kargil). Others involve conflict between Iraq and other countries, which are fought for a host of issues, none of which seems to have a religious component.
Even in the Balkan wars, the international component to these (NATO versus Bosnian Serbs or Serbia over Kosovo) did not directly involve religion, even if the groups on the ground battled under the banners of differing faiths. Here, the literature splits on whether religion was the genuine cause or merely an easily cited rationale hyped by Western media and armchair diplomats. The same might be said of the fight between Muslim Azerbaijan and Christian Armenia over the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. Only the Afghanistan conflict seems to have a clear religious element, but like the religious disputes of old, only Afghan Taliban ally Osama bin Laden claimed it as such.
Of course, while countries with different religions go to war, religion does not have to drive the dispute. Japan did not try to convert the United States to its religious beliefs by bombing Pearl Harbor, any more than the American response was an attempt to Christianize the Japanese islands.
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