A Faith as Weapon: war and religion in the cultural memory of the 20th – early 21st century

Abstract

The main differences in the perception of the problems of faith and war before and after the Second World War are examined. It is stressed that it became a turning point of the history of the 20th century, but did not eliminate the confessional factor in the field of armed conflict, and in many cases strengthened it. The role of religious views since the late 1940s has been traced to the wars in the Middle East, China and Tibet, India and Pakistan, the Yugoslav wars, and the post-Soviet conflicts of the 1990s. The problem of intensification of radical religious movements is considered. The attitude to the war in post-war Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Lamaism is studied and compared. The ways of evolution of religious doctrines from 1945 to the beginning of 2020 are outlined. The question of the genesis of new fundamentalist concepts is raised, in which armed conflicts and the violent spread of the faith, including the destruction of entire religious communities, are proclaimed as a means of spreading religious views. It is made an attempt to determine the role of religious ideas or motives as the basis of modern wars, and the impact of neo-religious wars on contemporary thinking. The general ways of evolution of religious thinking through the prism of the category of war are also traced. It is concluded that from archaic mythologies, from cultures of antiquity to postmodern neo-religions, faith and war are in “parallel” planes, which in fact intersect. It is emphasized that the doctrine of incompatibility of war with religious morality faced the problem of religious fundamentalism, bigotry and terrorism, which became challenges for Europe and the world in the late 20th ‒ early 21th century. It is established that the religious factor continues to play one of the key roles in the development of philosophy of peace, multiculturalism, tolerance, and in the development of militancy and of the intolerance of the opinion of others.
Keywords: war, religion, cultural memory, world history, regional history, Europe, Ukraine, 20th century, early 21st century