War, Religion, and Fallenness

Talks over how to end the Israel-Hamas War and the war in Ukraine have been sputtering of late, with hopes for ceasefires being hampered by kickback or hesitations on every side of the table. Add to it the US’s recent airstrikes on Yemen in response to the Houthis’ bombing of American ships – as well as the promise of retaliation on the part of the Houthis – and violent global conflict seems as intractable a problem as ever, with world leaders fumbling over often-opaque issues and negotiating, with varying levels of force, complicated demands to try to find some way to secure peace.

It's our tendency to approach these things as though they’re spurred by primarily secular issues. We hear religious language being used on all sides of the problem, but our habit is to dismiss even the voicing of explicitly religious motivations as hiding the “actual issue,” which we imagine to be power, wealth, or rights of some kind. We dismiss the religious dimension as a façade, providing cover for what’s “really” going on, which must be a struggle to upset a power dynamic, or to grab after more money or autonomy.

But in fact religion is what’s “really going on.” The Houthis response to US airstrikes, for instance, wasn’t something like, “We hate those Americans because they’re so powerful.” It was a refusal to be deterred from fulfilling their “religious” and “moral” duties toward the Palestinian people, as they put it; their response was to announce that they’ll continue to escalate military operations “against the Zionist enemy” until victory is won. Submission to Allah, winning back what belongs to Allah, is the principal reason for the obduracy of their campaign.

Our minds tend to screen these proclamations out, or to reconfigure them. But without a grasp of the religious dimension of these conflicts, taken at face value, we’re without the tools to understand them – or to resolve them.

At the same time, it’s also worth noting that it’s not as though eliminating religion as a pretext for war (even if that were possible) would solve all the world’s problems. A handful of years ago, Richard Dawkins and similarly-minded thinkers noted that religion did tend to be the most prolific source of conflict in history … using the point as yet another reason for why our societies should be rid of it.

But this is to misunderstand human behavior, too. Religion is indeed at the heart of conflicts like those in the Middle East, but one could say even more truly that the fall, really, is at their heart, and at the heart of every conflict in history. Human beings will always find reasons to fight, no matter what: sometimes religion is the pretext for battle, but sometimes it is land acquisition; sometimes it is something like water rights. But we don’t get rid of property rights or water because people are fighting over it. Nor should we try to rid societies of religion because people are fighting over that.

All of this points back to the reality that a holistic awareness of human anthropology is necessary for getting any kind of good social or political thinking off the ground. Human beings simply are religious animals – whether their religion is Islam or Judaism or secularism. And human beings simply are fallen. Each of our hearts is marred by a wound that makes evil and violence a fact of human life this side of heaven. So we pray and work for peace, of course, with vigor and hope. But we also remember the words of Jesus, which refuse us any sort of faulty optimism and call us, instead, to see reality with clear and trusting minds, and an openness to be more and more deeply purified in the midst of it: “Woe to the world because of things that cause sin! Such things must come, but woe to the one through whom they come” (Mt 18:7).

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