Is Religion Dangerous?

Keith Ward

Issue 388, vol.97, Winter 2008

Of course, the Christian churches do not confine their membership to good people. They invite in people who know that they fail as human beings. So we should not be surprised if religious people often do bad things – The real question is : Do they do these bad things because of their religion, or in spite of it ?

And even whole groupings of religious people will sometimes be found putting themselves forward as markers-of-identity in opposition to other religions or ethnic bodies; or trying to suppress opposing views; or making people feel guilty. Such tendencies, however, surface in every political, moral, and social grouping : the crucial factor is that, where required, religion should be able to draw on its own resources to suppress them…A world with religion may be bad. But a world without religion, without hope in a God of justice and self-sacrificial love, would be inconceivably worse.

The charge recurs that, over the course of history, religion has been the precipitant of violence. However, turning to the modern era – when, it has been estimated, more people were probably killed (the millions of victims of World War I and II) than in the whole of preceding history – we note that religion was not the conflicted issue. And, surveying the three hundred wars being fought today across the globe, we notice that none of them is religious…All this, of course, is in no way to deny that the religious element can sometimes become embroiled in an existing conflict. Basically, however, governments and empires initiate wars not because they want to promote religion, but because they want territory…The final irony is that the other indubitable cataclysmic outbreak of violence in living memory – the killing of 20,000,000 people in the USSR and the killing of 65,000,000 in China in the cause of atheistic communism – was precipitated by ideologues bent on nothing less than religion’s violent extirpation.

Some critics assert that Christians, themselves assured of an after-life, can afford to be careless regarding the right to life of others. But Christian teaching (and traditional Muslim teaching too) unequivocally condemns the killing of the innocent. Other critics, by contrast, ascribe to the doctrine of Hell the danger of causing psychological fear in adherents of Christianity. For the Christian, however, this doctrine functions as simply one of the two arms of the choice – without which human freedom would not be preserved – which s/he is faced with : to miss human fulfilment, or to find it finally in accepting the invitation of a loving God.

It is sometimes claimed that religious belief is a type of personality disorder. However, the 2001 Handbook of Religion and Mental Health [Harold G. Koenig], having reviewed thousands of published experiments, comes to the general conclusion that (compared with those of no religious affiliation) believers tend to be happier, healthier, more altruistic and socially concerned.

Rev. Keith Ward is Emeritus Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford