Academia Is More Afraid of Blaming Religion Than of Blaming Anything Else

You will often hear from historians that you cannot really say religion caused wars. Causation in history is complicated, motives are mixed, and the actors themselves may not have known what moved them.

All true. Caution is a virtue in historical writing, and I have no quarrel with it in general.

My quarrel is that the caution is applied unevenly, and the unevenness follows a pattern that has nothing to do with evidence.

The Asymmetry

Nobody in the field objects to the claim that economic factors were implicated in many wars. Nobody demands a special standard of proof for the assertion that dynastic ambition drove a conflict, or that resource competition did, or that a ruler's desire for personal glory did.

Say religion, and the standards tighten dramatically. Suddenly we need to disentangle motives with unusual care, note that the participants had material interests too, observe that religious language may have been mobilised rather than motivating.

Every one of those cautions is legitimate. That is what makes the asymmetry so revealing. They are legitimate for economic explanations as well, and they are not demanded there. The differential is not a standard of evidence; it is a reflex about which conclusions require extra work to publish.

Why It Happens

The mechanism is not conspiracy and I do not think it is even conscious.

Religion is more personal than economics. People identify with their religious commitments in a way they do not identify with the trade policy of the seventeenth century. So the claim generates more heat, more correspondence, more institutional discomfort — and the professional cost of making it is genuinely higher.

Academia is not immune to the special protection religion enjoys in the surrounding culture. It reproduces that protection while believing itself neutral, because neutrality is what unexamined defaults always feel like from inside.

The Case in Point

The clearest example is one that sits at the foundation of the discipline that should be most alert to it.

Read Plato on the trial of Socrates. The serious charges are introducing new gods and leading the youth to doubt the old ones. It was, to a substantial degree, a religious trial — impiety, sacrilege, the corruption of the young in specifically religious terms.

Philosophy departments teach this and quietly file the religious content away. What they present is Socrates the philosopher-rebel, martyred for free inquiry by a state that could not tolerate a questioning mind. That is a story philosophers find flattering, because it is a story about the importance and danger of philosophy, and it casts the philosopher as the hero of it.

The historical situation is less flattering. Religion tolerated Socrates' philosophising for decades — right up to the moment it touched religion. He was free to be tiresome about definitions, about virtue, about the nature of knowledge, for a very long career. The charge that killed him was impiety.

The lesson available is that religion killed Socrates and philosophy did not, which is precisely the lesson the discipline does not draw.

What Is Actually Wrong Here

I want to be careful, because there is a version of this complaint that is itself unscholarly.

I am not claiming religion is the hidden cause of everything, or that historians who cite economic factors are dishonest. Multi-causal explanation is correct, and religious motives genuinely are entangled with material ones.

The claim is narrower: the caution should be symmetric, and it is not. When a discipline demands more evidence for one class of conclusion than for another equally supported class, it has stopped reporting what it found and started reporting what is comfortable to have found.

And reinterpreting the past to suit the present needs of a department is exactly the failure historians are trained to detect in everyone else.