Religious Wars in America Today

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Throughout the history of civilization, many major conflicts have been framed as religious wars. Opponents identify with different religions and refer to them in explaining the conflict.

Beginning in the 7th century, Muslim warriors invaded lands between Morocco and India, north into the Iberian Peninsula and Sicily, and south into Africa, putting “infidel” warriors to the sword, enslaving some of the conquered, converting some, and imposing Islamic supremacy on the others. In post-Reformation Europe, including Britain, France, and Germany, beginning at the end of the 16th century, Catholics and Protestants engaged in sanguineous attacks and battles. Burning opponents at the stake was a favorite punishment and a useful public example.

For example, from 1562 to 1598, there was in France an ongoing religious war between Catholics and Huguenots (Calvinist Protestants) and a ruthless slaughter of untold tens of thousands of French civilians of both faiths. One phase of this war was the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of 1572, during which noble and royal Huguenot leaders, gathered in Paris for a controversial wedding between the Catholic King’s sister and the Protestant King of Navarre, were targeted for assassination. This was followed by a slaughter of Protestants by Catholic forces throughout Paris, which then spread into the countryside to other towns and villages. Estimates of deaths range from 5,000 to 30,000.

More recent religious wars include the conflict between Hindus and Muslims in India, and between India and Pakistan after independence. Catholics and Protestants fought a guerrilla war in Northern Ireland through the 20th century. Attacks on Hindus by Muslims in Bangladesh are current in 2024.

The hundred-year holy war, jihad, by Muslims against the Jews of Israel continues to this day. This is a holy war for Muslims because Israeli Jews have violated two basic principles of Islam. First, Islamic supremacism requires Muslims to be religiously and politically dominant, and those of other religions to be subservient. Second, land once conquered and controlled by Muslims may not be alienated from Muslim control. Thus Israel must be destroyed and Jews killed or made subservient once again, as in the past. (Speaking to Westerners, Muslims will tailor their statements to their audience, claiming the war is about rights to territory and human rights. Don’t be fooled.)

For Jewish Israelis, the conflict is not a religious war. It is a war of survival as a people, and a war to maintain autonomy. Israel, while a Jewish state with a Jewish majority, is in fact the most welcoming multi-religious state in the Middle East, with many Muslim, Druze, Christian, and Baha’i citizens. As well, many Israeli Jews are secular rather than religious. The conflict between Israel and Palestinians, the many Iranian terrorist proxies, and Iran itself is an example of a religious war on one side and a civic war on the other.

For the next example, I must raise the question: What counts as a religious war? The concept of “religion” itself is ambiguous and contested. It is a relatively recent conception, several centuries only, resulting probably from the growing secularization of society. There is nothing separate in ancient Judaism or foundational Islam that was called “religion.” G*d and Allah were part of life and behind the law. In pre-modern society, what we have abstracted out as “religion” was integrated into a unified conception of life and society.

To further complicate the matter, “religion,” as we have traditionally defined it, refers to superhuman, supernatural powers that have important relationships with people and society. But there is another way to look at “religion,” which has been called a “functional definition.” This would be “the ultimate cultural reference for reality and value,” and might not involve superhuman beings at all. Pantheism, the worship of nature, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, and Jainism have been cited as religions that focus on law and duty rather than supernatural beings.

A case has been made that communism is a non-supernatural religion. It has its official prophets, Marx, Engels, and Lenin, its saints in political and military leaders, and its holy books, “Das Kapital” among others. Not lacking is a rigid doctrine and various heretics who deviated from it, such as Leon Trotsky. The adherents of communism were willing to sacrifice themselves for this ultimate value. From the point of view of the Soviet Union and its allied regimes, their war against the West was a holy war. So too was their early war against the Kulaks and Cossacks. In China, the Communist Party under Mao did not shrink from sacrificing tens of millions of citizens to ideological purification measures during the “Cultural Revolution,” and Pol Pot in Cambodia followed that example to a fault.

In America, the Islamic holy war, the jihad, reached home in a spectacular and devastating fashion on September 11, 2001, with the crashing of hijacked passenger jets into the Twin Towers in New York City, as well as into the Pentagon, and another that crashed into a field in rural Pennsylvania. The jihad continued under the radar as the Muslim population of America increased through immigration and fertile reproduction, and infiltrated into American institutions. Some Islamists call this “immigration jihad.”

The Islamic jihad is most blatant in the American and Canadian educational sector, with universities being a vector for the hundred-year Muslim war against Israel. Muslim activist organizations have advocated for and tried to gain official university sanction for their “boycott, disinvest, and sanction” anti-Israel campaign. “Israel Apartheid Week,” held in and supported by many universities, is an annual focus on Islamic imaginative propaganda against Israel.

The barbaric October 7, 2023, Hamas pogrom in southern Israel involved atrocities including gang rape, dismemberment, burning families alive, and murdering babies, all gleefully recorded and broadcast by the perpetrators. The invasion was not limited to Hamas terrorists, but also joining in were Gaza civilians, who scavenged the property of the dead. In North America, students and professors went on the internet and in the streets to celebrate the “great victory” of the resistance against Israeli “oppression.”

But the Hamas uprising in America was just beginning. Advocates for Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah decided that disrupting civilian life was their best course for discrediting Israel and Jews who support Israel. They invaded university campuses, setting up tent encampments and blocking entrances, and harassing and exiling Jewish students as best they could. They demanded that Zionists be excluded from universities. While some claimed to be anti-Zionist and not anti-Jew, they sported swastikas, chanted “death to the Jews,” “Jews to the gas,” celebrated “the final solution,” and advised Jews to “go back to Poland.” Their most popular chant was, “From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free [of Jews],” a call for the genocide of Israeli Jews. They also took to the streets, especially in Jewish districts, blocking traffic, as well as demonstrating at Jewish-owned restaurants and bookstores. Big marches were held in downtown main streets of many cities. Long live the jihad!

But the Islamic jihad is not the only holy war going on in America. The much-discussed political and geographical polarization of the United States has evolved from partisan differences into a cultural holy war, with the polarization characterized as good versus evil, and with both sides believing that if the other side is not stopped or reformed, the end of the country is nigh. This has not reached violent civil war, only attempted assassinations of Supreme Court justices and a candidate for the presidency. The struggle has taken place in meetings of school boards, where the boards and school officials represent the extremes of ideology of one party, while the parents of pupils often represent the ideology of the other party. In elections, the candidates of the parties often represent contestants in the cultural dispute.

The party of “flyover country,” the America between the coasts and in the south, is committed to God, family, and country. They believe that America was founded on Judeo-Christian morality, and that this should continue to be a touchstone. Obama was not wrong to say that they cling to God. They also tend to provide most of the recruits of the U.S. military. This commitment is reflected on Fox News, where many of the news and discussion anchors are not shy about expressing their adherence to God, family, and country. Many have written religiously inspired books, while others have written or hosted video specials about the military. One of the Fox anchors has just been nominated Secretary of Defense.

The party of the coasts is committed to social justice, the mainstream media, and international institutions. They believe that American history personifies evil, that there was a genocide of the indigenous population, that America is structurally racist, that females are kept down by toxic males, that blacks and Hispanics are kept down by evil whites (and Jews and Asians), that sex is not binary and that men can become women by saying so, and that queer sexuality should be celebrated. Further, it is the job of all good people to correct the injustice by raising up women, blacks, Hispanics, indigenous, gays, and Muslims as unjustly marginalized and underserviced populations, and our institutions should be dedicated to that task.

Nationalism is seen by the coastal party as ethnocentric and outdated, and should be replaced by international organizations such as the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, the plethora of international institutions and agreements, and, above all, international law. The coastal party does not believe that America is a force for good in the world or in any way exceptional. As Obama said, every country thinks it is special. America should not be first among equals, but one among many. Consequently, the coastal party is not a strong supporter of the military or of an assertive foreign policy.

Both parties see the only chance of saving the country is the defeat of its opposition. For the flyover party, its commitment to God makes this a religious war, although so far not a lethal one. For the lapsed Christians and Jews that make up the coastal party, their ultimate commitments make this conflict a religious war. Both parties see this as a struggle of good versus evil, a baseline definition of a religious war. What might ideally be handled as a civic policy disagreement, has become more intense, bitter, and nasty. But the line should be drawn forbidding violence, if our corrupted security institutions were capable of such a constructive and non-partisan action.