Religious Peace, Then and Now

By Wayne P. Te Brake

Religious Peace, Then and Now presents a radically new perspective on one of the critical challenges of our time: making religious peace in a world afflicted by religious conflict, violence, and war. In a text that is passionate and accessible, Wayne Te Brake demonstrates how concerned citizens and political and religious leaders, who have learned to recognize religious peace when they see religious diversity, can envision and promote a more peaceful world through constructive engagement and nonviolent activism. Religious Peace builds on the author's personal experience as well as his academic research on religious war and religious peace during Europe's Age of Religious Wars and applies what we can learn from that history to our understanding of the prevalence and prospect of religious peace today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Jun 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9781666725940

Wayne P. Te Brake

Wayne P. Te Brake is Professor Emeritus of History at Purchase College, State University of New York. He has published broadly comparative work on the themes of revolution, contentious politics, and religious coexistence in early modern Europe, including Shaping History: Ordinary People in European Politics, 1500-1700 (1998) and Religious War and Religious Peace in Early Modern Europe (2017).

Book preview

1

Religious Peace, Really?

I offer these historical reflections on religious peace because I think we have an urgent problem. I began thinking seriously about this problem in 1992, when I first learned about ethnic cleansing in southeastern Europe. Ethnic cleansing was a euphemism for a violent project by Serbian Orthodox Christians to eliminate Bosnian Muslims from a religiously diverse piece of the former Yugoslavia. My thought, as a European historian, was that we have seen this kind of religious violence in Europe before and that it would be useful to see how stories like this ended.

In 2001, two years after I undertook a major historical research project on this problem, my thinking was utterly shaken by the devastating September 11 attacks on New York City and Washington DC, after which the President of the United States called for a Crusade against the Muslim radicals who had perpetrated the attacks. Clearly, we had never seen anything quite like that kind of violence, but it was nevertheless only part of a rising global tide of religious violence at the end of the twentieth century. Suddenly, my European historical curiosity had acquired an unanticipated currency and relevance.

Twenty years later, it is clear that our current cycle of religious violence has not yet ended. In fact, it has taken on new dimensions in recent years as Christians and Muslims have engaged in episodic attacks and counterattacks in Sub-Saharan Africa, sectarian conflicts between Sunni and Shi’a Muslims have enveloped ongoing wars in Syria and Yemen, and Buddhists in Myanmar and Sri Lanka have undertaken ethnic cleansing campaigns against Muslims and Tamils, respectively. So, is this our new normal in the twenty-first century? Are we condemned to live in an unending cycle of religious violence and war?

Amid deeply disturbing reports of military carnage and forced migration, it is, sadly, much more difficult to imagine how these conflicts might end and what a more peaceful future might look like. This is not merely a problem of scarce evidence, however; it is also, very clearly, a problem of perception and imagination. We simply cannot imagine a more peaceful future because we do not know what we are looking for; neither can we recognize the things that make for peace (to borrow the language of the Gospel of Luke) if we attend only to the things that make for war.

So, this is the problem that this book addresses. What might religious peace look like in the twenty-first century? And how can we recognize the things that make for peace in a world where religious conflict and violence recurrently demand and hold our attention? In order to answer these questions, we will need to explore religious peace, not only in relation to religious war, but on its own terms—as something recognizable that we too easily take for granted. At the same time, we will need to investigate the recurrent mechanisms and historical processes that make religious peace possible. Both challenges require us to think historically.

While concentrated clusters of religious violence and war like we see today are highly unusual, they are not unprecedented. Between 1529 and 1651, six major clusters of increasingly destructive religious wars in Europe eventually gave way to a durable religious peace. This European precedent is particularly important because it is well-documented, and it provides modular examples of durable religious coexistence that have served as the foundation of religious pluralism in the modern era. Using this history as my guide, I will advance several postulates regarding religious peace, more generally. But before we begin that historical exploration, we will need to develop a usable vocabulary to frame the analysis.

Thinking Historically

As trained professionals, historians are especially concerned with telling the stories of the past, correctly and dispassionately. We frame questions designed to illuminate what actually happened in a particular time and place, and since we are trained to pay close attention to the details, we focus on events and processes that are well-documented and places where archives and libraries preserve ample documentation. Meanwhile, careful reviews of previous historical research sharpen the focus on what still needs to be illuminated, what needs to be corrected, and how our detailed stories fit into larger narratives that aim to tell us how we got to be the way we are. Consequently, much historical research is framed modestly and historiographically—that is, in relation to what we think we already know and what others have argued about—and we lose sight of the larger picture or even our original goal of simply and freshly getting the story right.

The history of religious peace is a subject that requires us, I believe, to do something more fundamental, to start all over with the basic questions: What actually happened? Why did it happen the way it did? And why should we care? Answering these questions, simply and freshly, is of course not easy, and regarding a big subject like religious peace, it is beyond the ken of a solitary historian. Still, asking the basic questions is important if we don’t simply want to get variations on the same old answers. The first question is deceptively simple because it requires skillful detective work to find and critique appropriate sources of information. The second question may seem overwhelming to historians who are often allergic to causal argumentation, but a good rule of thumb is this: to show how something happened is to say why it happened. The last question is perhaps the most important because it requires us always to reassess the relevance of what we do to those who do not share our expertise.

With the generous support of several institutions and the collaboration, both witting and unwitting, of a multitude of scholars, I have tried to answer these basic questions regarding the history of religious peace prior to, during, and after Europe’s long and difficult Age of Religious Wars. To focus on religious peace, as such, is difficult because the wars loom so large, but at the very beginning of this new century, a very diverse and talented group of scholars accepted my invitation to give it a try collectively: first, as a small group, at a preparatory conference in New York in the summer of 2000, and then as a much larger group in the summer of 2001 in Wassenaar, The Netherlands, just two months before the 9/11 attacks.¹ The question we, a diverse assembly of regional and national specialists, posed and tried to answer was simple: How and how well did Europeans learn to accommodate the obvious religious differences that emerged in the course and in the wake of what we traditionally call the Reformation? The answer that we gave to that question was surprisingly simple as well: the peaceful accommodation of religious differences was the rule, rather than the exception, throughout Europe, within as well as among the many diverse polities of early modern Europe.

This conclusion ran counter to many threads of historiography that underscored the competition and mutual intolerance of various confessional groups. But since then, my collaborators and I have participated in and contributed to an international conversation regarding the successful accommodation of religious differences and the genesis and preservation of religious diversity during and after the Reformation. While others produced important studies of particular themes, places, and problems,² my task, as I saw it, was to produce a broadly comparative study of the Reformation and post-Reformation eras that described and accounted for the outcome that we had found collectively, working from very different perspectives: a widespread pattern of religious diversity that constituted the foundation of modern religious pluralism.³ Only recently have I been able to conclude that enormous task, and reconsider my answer to the third of my basic historical questions: Why should we care about the particulars of European history when the most urgent problems today seem to have emerged from very different histories in other parts of the world with very different religious traditions?

This book is my answer. We should take seriously the particulars of Europe’s history of religious war and religious peace because it can inform our imagination of what religious peace might look like in our own time and what it might take to transition from a cycle of religious violence and war to a new era of religious peace. But religious peace, really? Surely that is not a realistic expectation for the near future! To be sure, a definitive end to our current cycle of religious violence seems like a utopian dream. But a realistic, which is to say, a historically grounded vision of what religious peace looks like and an account of how it came into being can and should embolden us to be peacemakers, rather the warmakers. To make that transition, we need first to think historically about a problem that is too often obscured by violence and a prospect that is too often dismissed as impossible.

War and Peace

War and peace are, to say the least, complex and closely related terms. Though most of us think we know armed conflict when we see it, specialists typically offer very precise definitions of war—the Upsala Conflict Data Study Program, for example, defines active war as causing at least a thousand battle deaths per year, while minor conflicts entail at least twenty-five battle deaths per year.⁴ But peace is much more difficult to pin down. In The Peace Continuum, Christian Davenport, Erik Melander, and Patrick M. Regan offer a compendium of twenty-three definitions of peace that have been proposed by various peace-studies specialists since the 1970s.⁵ Almost all these definitions explicitly mention the absence of armed violence as a necessary condition for peace. Most of these definitions also go on to mention some other defining characteristic; these range from trust or confidence and nonviolent methods for conflict resolution to social justice and the rule of law or respect for human rights.

These variant definitions of peace point to a larger challenge that is evident in the history of Peace Studies, as this field has developed since World War II. A recent review of the literature in the Journal of Peace Research asks pointedly whether peace research is Just the study of war? The authors, all affiliates of the venerable Peace Research Institute Oslo, conclude, Negative peace, in the sense of reducing war, was the focus in peace research from the inception. But positive peace, in the sense of cooperation or integration, has also always been on the peace research agenda.⁶ From the beginning, studies that discuss war, conflict, and violence have dominated in the professional journals, though recently there has been a shift from interstate war to civil war and other forms of intrastate violence, like one-sided violence (genocide) and non-state violence (terrorism). Meanwhile, there has never been a ‘golden age’ of peace research, which focused more clearly on peace as a normative concept.⁷ The problem, as Davenport and his colleagues see it, is that normative views of positive peace are much harder to study systematically than the more easily measurable attributes of negative peace, or the absence of war.

These challenges of identification, definition, and measurement are especially clear if we focus more specifically on religious war and religious peace. Though there is no large body of research focused specifically on religious war and religious peace, it is conventional, perhaps, to identify the armed conflict of religious war in terms of the motives or intentions of the combatants. But there are real difficulties in determining the real or essential motives of those who command armies and have ready access to violent means. Whose motives count, and do stated intentions represent real motives?⁸ Likewise, it is perhaps conventional to set a high standard for religious peace: real peace, we are often told, is much more than the absence of war (negative peace); it can only be predicated on reconciliation and/or justice (positive peace). But using these criteria, which set a very high standard that is difficult or even impossible to achieve, we would be hard pressed to find clear evidence of religious peace in European history or in any time or place.⁹

At bottom, however, religious war and religious peace are not simply cognitive or normative problems, which resist easy observation or measurement. They are also clearly relational problems, which are more susceptible to observation and measurement. Thus, in my research on early modern Europe, I settled on relational criteria to identify both religious war and religious peace. I regard as religious any armed conflict in which: 1) the combatants identify their enemies in terms of their religious ideas, practices, or affiliations; and 2) mobilization for the conflict invokes networks of support and solidarity based on religious identities. These simple criteria underscore the ways in which the actors in the drama invoke religious identities and affiliations to mark their political differences—their alignments as well as their oppositions—and they are particularly useful for historical comparison because they do not assume that religious violence and wars are fundamentally different from other forms of lethal conflict or coordinated destruction.¹⁰

Similarly, I identify religious peace with two relational conditions: 1) the durable absence of the coordinated destruction of armed conflict (negative peace); and 2) the durable presence of some form of peaceful religious coexistence (positive peace). Using these much less-exacting criteria, we will not expect to see the absence of religious competition or even episodic conflict, as long as it does not escalate to the level of armed conflict; rather, these relational criteria shift our attention toward the routine interactions among religiously different individuals and groups. Thus, the challenge for the analyst of religious peace is to describe and account for the ways in which the relevant actors learned to manage and ultimately to live with the kind of religious differences that served as the principal markers of their political enmity when they were engaged in armed conflict or coordinated destruction.

The premise of this book, then, is that these relational definitions will serve well to identify the closely linked problems of religious war and religious peace, not only in European history, but in any time or place. It is especially important to distinguish between negative religious peace (the absence of war) and positive religious peace (the durable presence of religious coexistence or diversity) to observe and understand religious peace in the real world. Indeed, if we resist the temptation to reify religious peace as an impossible ideal, we will be able to identify the practical and often subversive ways that ordinary people have helped to make positive religious peace a pervasive phenomenon, even amid the violence and war their rulers might be engaged in, both historically and in the world today.

Though I wish it were otherwise, and two decades ago I even thought it was so, we cannot fully understand religious peace without a reasonable understanding of its more sensational counterpoint: religious war. But understanding the dynamics of religious war and religious peace is not only for academic experts. On the contrary, it is one of the great moral imperatives of the twenty-first century, I believe, that engaged citizens become knowledgeable, even astute, observers of the patterns of religious war and religious peace that surround us in the same way that it is imperative that we become astute observers of the environmental and climate changes that shape our lives today. To that end, we will use the record of European history to become better observers of our current challenges.

What Comes Next

This book consists of two parts: Learning from History and Thinking with History. The first part explores what history can teach us about the prevalence and prospect of religious peace in a turbulent world. To do this, however, we must first acknowledge and interrogate the elephant in the room: the episodic history of religious war. Thus, the second chapter situates Europe’s religious wars, roughly 1500–1700, in a broader global historical context, looking at the chronology and geography of religious war, especially from the early Middle Ages to the present. Exploring this largely unfamiliar historical terrain will allow me both to identify more precisely what is problematic in the global history of religious war—it is less common than we might think—and to underscore the singularity of Europe’s experience of religious war—it was unprecedented in global history—and, by extension, religious peace—it has been more common, durable, and replicable than we might think.

Against that background, the third chapter analyzes Europe’s religious wars in the context of the religious changes that we associate with the Protestant Reformation. A broad array of new religious ideas and identities were recurrently politicized when a variety of rulers and their often-contentious subjects chose sides in otherwise arcane theological controversies, resulting in dramatic changes to the religious and political landscape of Europe, especially north of the Alps and the Pyrenees. Not all these conflicts and changes issued into armed conflict, but between 1529 and 1651, they produced an increasingly violent, widespread, and interconnected pattern of religious war that culminated in the Thirty Years War on the Continent and the civil wars in England, Scotland, and Ireland.

The fourth chapter explores both the negative and positive dimensions of Europe’s religious peace, before, during, and after the religious wars. Most of Europe’s religious wars were ended by political and religious compromises that were expressed in an edict, a truce, or a formal treaty. Such compromises recurrently failed, if they did not entail the demobilization of the forces in conflict or otherwise disrupt the political coalitions or international alliances that sustained the warfare. But even in the absence of a formal settlement, decisive military victories could bring negative peace if they effectively ended the coordinated destruction of war. Over time, then, a pattern of durable negative peace emerged from the fog of war.

Positive peace—that is, the durable presence of some form of religious coexistence—was, in European history, the work of many hands, both rulers and their frequently contentious subjects. By choosing sides in the religious debates of the Reformation era, these very diverse political actors politicized the issue of religious change, drove the process of religious pluralization, and fundamentally reshaped the religious landscape of Europe, prior to, during, and in the wake of the religious wars. Over time, then, a complex and often messy pattern of religious diversity replaced the universal Latin Christendom of the Middle Ages. The forms of religious coexistence that emerged were varied, imperfect, and subject to both local and national renegotiation, but over time they constituted the durable foundations of modern pluralism.

In these historical chapters, I will, as a historian, narrate a series of illustrative stories to describe the most significant forms of religious war and religious peace and to show how they came into being. At the same time, as a social scientist, I will identify a limited number of mechanisms that I think are key to understanding how religious war and religious peace are made. I use the term mechanisms to denote a limited class of events or interactions that alter the relations among historical actors in identical or closely similar ways across a variety of situations; think of them as the verbs that connect the subjects and predicates of historical processes. Processes, by extension, are clusters or concatenations of mechanisms that recurrently alter the relations of historical actors over longer periods of time and in a variety of situations with a limited range of variant outcomes.¹¹

Now, many of my historian colleagues will think that, in switching out my academic hats, I am proposing social scientific models to explain historical phenomena and to predict the future. In fact, what I will be doing is demonstrating a rhetorical and analytic strategy for understanding recurrent historical phenomena that makes broader historical comparisons possible and, by extension, makes it possible for us, as citizens of the world, to recognize more clearly the things that make for both religious war and religious peace.

The second part—Thinking with History—demonstrates how Europe’s experience of religious war and religious peace can help us to envision and promote a more peaceful future in the twenty-first century. The first challenge is to recognize religious peace when we see it. The fifth and sixth chapters explore the religious peace that is evident in four very different communities in both the cultural West and beyond: Ossining, New York; Mainz, Germany; Istanbul, Turkey; and Hong Kong, China. These case studies describe the positive religious peace that is evident all around us, in all its variant forms, and they show briefly how it came into being. Recognizing