A MILITARY HISTORY OF GOD
Or how belief shaped the world and slaughtered millions
If the written records and the oral accounts are to be believed, then the Judeo Christian God is the greatest military commander the world has ever seen. The Bible tells us that he (for he is usually depicted as being male) stopped the sun in the sky to allow Joshua to defeat the five kings of the Amorites, although Joshua’s subsequent conduct in hanging all five of the surrendered kings from handy trees would presumably have got him similarly disposed of at Nuremberg. God demolished the walls of Jericho to allow the Israelite besiegers in; God gave King Henry V a great victory at Agincourt being firmly on the side of Harry, England and Saint George, although he later changed sides and allowed Jean d’Arc to drive the English out of France; the fires of Smithfield burned for God; God blew and the Spanish Armada was scattered; the defeat and execution of the despotic King Charles I was God’s work; Napoleon sneered at how many battalions the Pope had, and went down in defeat; Field Marshal Haig was convinced that God was on his side on the Western Front, although inconveniently the Germans thought he was on theirs and had it written on their belt buckles; and the Lord Mighty in Battle gave Montgomery the victory at el Alamein.
Religion, belief in gods, conviction that there is something greater than ourselves is as old as recorded history, and has probably been with us since Homo Sapiens started to walk upright and began to develop the mental processes that we call reasoning. It is not difficult to speculate as to why primitive man should have believed in something greater than himself: the sun, the moon the stars, lightning, floods, earthquakes, landslides were all inexplicable, sometimes frightening, and often dangerous. As man the observer had not created them, then somebody or something else must have, and as realisation grew that the world was an unfriendly and dangerous place, and that nature was capricious, so there must have been some sort of intent behind it all. If man could think and plan, then whatever made the rain and the lightning, and took away and then returned the light, and sent or did not send the woolly mammoth into the man’s laboriously dug trap, must also think and plan and do those things with deliberation, and if there was intent or conscious purpose behind all this then it could be persuaded, propitiated and perhaps controlled. Primitive religion was very largely sympathetic magic: everything had a consciousness – a spirit – that, if approached the right way, might be inclined to cooperate. If certain things were done then it would rain; if certain things were not done then the crops would fail; if the right gifts were given then a battle would be won; prayers said and sacrifices made allowed wanderers to complete their journeys in safety.
As man grew up, and as societies became more sophisticated, so religions developed with them. The Greeks had a highly complex belief system predicated around a whole pantheon of gods, all with some human characteristics, but able to transform themselves into all manner of creatures at will. These gods were not ill disposed towards humans, but they were largely uncaring, regarding their disposal of human affairs as not much more than a game, and whom man could only keep on side either by keeping a very low profile indeed and hoping to be ignored, or if that was not possible – and for anyone wanting to move up in the world it was not – then by performing all sorts of tasks and making sacrifices. Classical Greek society was a mixture of opposites: on the one hand it was democratic – at least for citizens – it had highly developed schools of philosophy, schools that are still instrumental and inspirational in the study of philosophy to this day, and it delved into mathematics, physics, astronomy, drama and poetry. At the same time it was a slave owning society that could be brutal and belligerent, with savage wars between the city states and with institutional and personal extremes of cruelty and vengeance. Life was the throw of the dice, and so was the behaviour of the Gods.
Once religion became more than just superstition; once it advanced from the mere killing of a virgin and burying her body by a newly constructed bridge in order to keep the water spirits happy; once it began to develop a structure, so it attempted to explain what life was about and what it was for. As man began to question why he was here at all, so the interpreters of the gods provided reasons. Along with this came the idea of a life after death, something at the core of all ancient religions and all modern ones too. Whether it was reincarnation, or Valhalla, or the bridge of swords, or Lyonesse, or the underworld, or paradise, or heaven, man did not want to believe that all there was for him was a nasty, brutish and short life here on earth followed by death and oblivion. Surely there must be something more? And sure enough, religion provided it. Life after death was a marvellous comfort. However unpleasant life here might appear, however far down the pecking order one’s station might be, with the right form of behaviour, with the prescribed forms of sacrifice, with prayer or works, a man might return in the next life a step farther up the food chain, or he might be translated to a world where he would be forever young, and would never die.
While in very early religions every man was his own intermediary with the Gods, fairly quickly individuals emerged who seemed to have a knack for communicating with the spirit world, and who seemed to be able to talk to the Gods and receive their thoughts rather more efficiently than anyone else. Oracles, buddhas, prophets, shamans, lamas, witch doctors, prophets, druids, priests, maulvis all became respected, feared, influential and (often) very rich. The importance, and the influence, of religion was not, of course, lost on secular rulers. Religion was, and in many cases still is, an instrument of social control. An order emanating from the king which is also the word of the gods carries considerable persuasion. The oldest of the major religions still practised, Hinduism, is rooted in a caste system which says that everyone is born into a particular station according to what he has done in previous incarnations. There is therefore no point in protesting against one’s station for it is fixed by the Gods. Good behaviour, however, will mean that at the next turn of the eternal wheel, the lowly sweeper may come back as a Brahmin (with bad behaviour, of course, providing the reverse). Mass uprisings against rulers in India were very, very rare.
Ancient religions were, in many ways, remarkably tolerant. No Greek claimed that only the gods of Greece mattered; every country, every race, had its own gods, and while they might not be as powerful as one’s own, they were still there and had to be respected. The Romans had a front rank line up of gods that were largely functional: there was a god of war, one of the sea, one of fertility and so on. In the second rank every Roman father was his own priest and communicated with his family gods directly. Rome never denied the existence of other gods; it simply absorbed them into the all embracing state religion. While in the imperial period the emperor was the state chief priest, before that it was an elected office. Rome persecuted Christians not because of their god, which the Romans were perfectly happy to recognise, but because Christians would not reciprocate by recognising the divinity of the emperor.
A major change in attitude came with an intellectual breakthrough: the idea that there was only one God. This was not something that was arrived at spontaneously, but only through thought and argument. The oldest surviving monotheistic religion – Judaism – did not always claim that there was only one god and that it was theirs. In the Old Testament the Book of Kings tells us of a competition between the priests of Baal and those of Jehovah to see which could set a sacrificial pyre alight first. The Jehovah team won, but the point is that they were not saying that Baal did not exist, only that their god was stronger.
Once the idea of a single god takes hold, then scientific thought becomes possible. If there are many gods, each with its own fiefdom and each with its own way of doing things, then there cannot be a universal physical system. The idea that water flows downhill at the same rate in Sparta as it does in Persia can only convince if the same set of rules applies in both countries, and the same set of rules can only apply if there is one universal god in charge of both areas. The Romans had a rich, educated, powerful and stable society (give or take an assassination or three and the occasional usurpation) and yet in the eight hundred years from the founding of the city to the collapse of the Empire technology hardly advanced at all. There were advances in architecture and in military engineering, but Romulus or King Tarquin would have had no difficulty in understanding and fitting into the empire of Constantine the Great. Polytheism inhibited scientific thought.
If monotheism stimulated scientific thought then so it also bred intolerance. Belief that there is only one God automatically supposes disbelief in any other. There is only one God, and anyone who says otherwise is wrong. Even someone who agrees that there is only one God but insists that it is theirs, not that of the previous speaker, is also wrong. It is but a short step from saying that someone is wrong to saying that he is evil, and then to putting him on trial or, in the case of a nation, going to war. Monotheism, and specifically the Judeo Christian monotheistic god, has been responsible for more deaths in recorded history than all the gods before him, and for more destruction than plague, drought, earthquake and fire combined. How can belief in something whose existence cannot be proved and who allows bad things to happen to good people, be a motivator for war, conquest and slaughter? It matters not whether God defeated the Armada or whether that feat was due to better English ships, faster English gunnery and statistically perfectly normal weather: what matters is that people genuinely believed that God had a hand in it. While plunder and loot may have been powerful incentives to go and conquer Jerusalem and Acre, the crusaders nevertheless honestly believed they were doing it for Jesus Christ. Burning people alive because of how they interpreted the words of the same god may have been – undoubtedly was – barbaric, but those who lit the flame did so for honestly and genuinely held motives. The latter stages of the Hundred Years War, the wars of religion, the English Civil Wars all had a strong element of religious faith, and the people who held to that faith were not all superstitious peasants, but educated and learned men perfectly capable of logical reasoning.
Even today God is still very much in the death and destruction business. The state of Israel justifies its existence by the land on which it sits having been granted to the Jewish people by their god in the distant past. British and American soldiers attend field services on Sundays, conducted by regimental chaplains, provided and paid for by the state, and although not many private soldiers would admit to any strong religious beliefs, a surprising number of officers do. Although early Islam was a tolerant religion, that did not last long, and the Muslim conquests of North Africa, Spain, Persia, Southern Russia, the Balkans, Afghanistan and India were carried out in the name of the faith.
So in reality, far from being a peaceful, tolerant belief system, turning the other cheek and walking the extra mile, monotheism, and particularly the Judeo Christian version of monotheism is in fact bloodthirsty, aggressive, savage and destructive. God makes Moloch look like a mere amateur arsonist. Religion has had a major influence on military commanders and nations from the earliest times to the present day, and one has to ask whether God, rather than being a harbinger of goodwill and morality, is not rather an instigator of death and oppression.