There is a threat of war in the air, no small local war but a conflict that could involve several continents. The threat now comes from a fundamentalist notion that seeks to Islamize the known world as far, it is said, as Rome, though no one has as yet threatened to take their camels to drink from the holy water stoops of St. Peter’s.
All of this leads to the thought that the great transcontinental threats always come from monotheistic religions. Greeks and Romans didn’t seek to conquer Persia or Carthage in order to impose their own gods. They had territorial and economic concerns, but from the religious point of view, as soon as they came across new gods in exotic countries, they welcomed them into their pantheon. You’re Hermes? Fine, I’ll call you Mercury and you can become one of us. Did the Phoenicians worship Astarte? Well, the Egyptians translated her into Isis, and for the Greeks she became Aphrodite or Venus. No one ever invaded any land in order to stamp out the cult of Astarte.
The first Christians were martyred not because they recognized the god of Israel—that was their own business—but because they denied the legitimacy of other gods.
No polytheism has ever instigated a large-scale war to impose its own gods. That doesn’t mean that polytheistic peoples haven’t fought wars, but these were tribal conflicts that had nothing to do with religion. The barbarians of the north invaded Europe, and the Mongols invaded the lands of Islam, but not to impose their gods—in fact, they soon converted to the local religions. It’s curious that the barbarians of the north, having converted to Christianity, and having established a Christian empire, then set off on crusades to force their god on Islamic peoples, even if in the end, monotheism for monotheism, it amounted to the same god.
The two monotheisms that have fought wars to impose one sole god have been Islam and Christianity. Among the wars of conquest I would include colonialism, which, economic interests aside, has always justified its conquests through the virtuous plan of Christianizing the conquered peoples, beginning with the Aztecs and the Incas, up to Italy’s own “civilizing” of Ethiopia in the 1930s, conveniently forgetting that the Ethiopians were already Christians.
Jewish monotheism is a case in point. By its nature, it has never proselytized, and the wars described in the Bible were intended to secure a land for the chosen people, not to convert other populations to Judaism. Nor have the Jewish people ever incorporated other cults and beliefs.
With all this I don’t want to suggest that it’s more civilized to believe in the Great Spirit of the Prairie or the gods of the Yoruba than in the Holy Trinity or the Only God of whom Muhammad is the prophet. All I’m saying is that no one has ever tried to conquer the world in the name of the Great Spirit or of one of the gods in the Brazilian Candomblé ceremonies—nor has the voodoo Baron Samedi sought to urge his followers beyond the narrow bounds of the Caribbean.
One could say that only a monotheistic belief enables the formation of large territorial areas, which then tend to expand. The Indian subcontinent has never sought to export its own divinities. The Chinese empire covered a vast area yet had no belief in a single entity that had created the world, and so far it has never sought to expand into Europe or America. Perhaps China is doing that now, but through economic means, not religion. It is engaged in acquiring industries and stocks in the West, regardless of whether people there believe in Jesus, or in Allah, or in Yahweh.
Perhaps we can find an equivalent to the classic monotheisms in secular ideologies, such as Nazism, though its inspiration was pagan, and Soviet atheist Marxism. But with no military god to galvanize their followers, their war of conquest came to naught.
2014