People differ from each other. Their values also differ. Without a value foundation, neither a community nor an individual is possible. The denial of the right to have one's own values, the disavowal of these values and their desecration - this, in fact, is an anthropological verdict.
This is exactly how the question was raised in the anti-Islamic "Manifesto of the Twelve" signed by a group of Western intellectuals, also known as "Together Against New Totalitarianism." “After fascism, Nazism and Stalinism have been overcome,” wrote Salman Rushdie and his associates in the Manifesto, “the world is facing a new totalitarian global threat: Islamism. We, writers, journalists, intellectuals, call for resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equality of opportunity and secular values for all... This battle will not be won by weapons, but in the realm of ideas. This is not a clash of civilizations or East-West antagonism, but a global struggle between democrats and theocrats… We reject the “cultural relativism” of the recognition that men and women of Muslim culture should be denied the right to equality, freedom and secularism in the name of respect for cultures and traditions… We stand for the universalization of freedom of expression, so that the critical spirit can be exercised on all continents, free from all abuse and all dogma. We appeal to democracy and the free spirit of all countries, our age is the age of light, not obscurantism.”
This text, in fact, was a declaration of war. It is characteristic that at the time of its appearance, then in 2006, it was first published in Charlie Hebdo. This is how xenophobia is fomented, this is how wars are provoked. And this is a war - not a war of religions, but a war, as the manifesto proclaims, against all religions. Liberal ideology, as you know, is based not on group, but on individual identity. The main value is a person, his rights and freedoms. Individual representatives of liberal thought could well be religious people. But essentially liberalism, which puts the freedom of the individual at the center of the value system, came into conflict with the theocentric religious approach consolidating the community of believers.
The theory of civilizations, it would seem, has a fundamentally different, in comparison with liberalism, axiological basis. Religions are recognized by both Toynbee and Huntington - the leading figures in the popularization of the civilizational approach, as the fundamental basis of civilization genesis.
However, within the framework of Huntington's concept of "civilizational wars" this literally means the following:
1. Civilizations are in conflict with each other;
2. At the base of every civilization lies one religion or another;
3. Religious wars are inevitable. Religions are said to be inherently confrontational.
The assessment of the supporters of the theory of civilizational wars and the supporters of liberal social science models, thus, at the level of conclusions, paradoxically coincides.
Otherwise, in the Huntingtonian version, modern Western civilization is being formed. For the first time in history, not a religious, but a secular foundation was laid at its foundation. And since civilizations are allegedly programmed for conflict by religious differences, the non-religious civilization of the West overcomes the paradigm of conflict. In the presented model of the world order, it turns out to be outside the world inter-civilizational struggle. Secularism thus turns out to be a suggested practice for mankind to get out of the impasse of confrontation.
The famous work of Samuel Huntington was first published in 1993. The topic of religious wars was not then in wide discourse. More was said about the end of the story. Almost a quarter of a century has passed and religious wars are at the core of the problems discussed by mankind. We have to admit that Huntington's book was ingeniously visionary, or design. And there are more and more empirical grounds for the assertion that a great sectarian war is projectable.
The principle of "divide and conquer" has been known for a long time. The classic of its application is considered to be, in particular, the policy of the British Empire in India. One of the main factors in the division of the Indian population was the division of religion. Hindus clashed with Muslims, exterminated each other. And for a long time after the departure of the British, the India-Pakistan conflict was one of the most acute "hot spots" on the map of the post-war world. The experience of fomenting inter-religious wars has thus been accumulated sufficiently large, and it would be strange for it to be abandoned in modern political design.
The clash of two parties, as a result of which all the dividends are taken by a third party, is also a well-known political practice. The world wars of the twentieth century unfolded precisely in this scenario matrix. Islamic and Christian communities may turn out to be parties to the new projected conflict. Christians - 33% of the world population and Muslims - 23% noticeably outnumber all other confessional groups. At the same time, the proportion of Muslims is rapidly increasing. In the future, it is predicted that they will reach the first position in terms of their share among the religions of the world. And this, accordingly, raises the question of changing the zones of territorial settlement.
Pictures of a new religious war - terrorist attacks, broadcast executions of heretics, destroyed cultural monuments are already shaking the consciousness of mankind. Mankind is prompted by a seemingly natural way out - the prohibition of "religious fundamentalism". But where does religion end and religious fundamentalism begin? Under the banner of the fight against religious fundamentalism, real de-Christianization and de-Islamization will take place. The result will be the establishment of real secular totalitarianism instead of imaginary religious totalitarianism. The history of pan-European solidarity with the militant secular magazine Charlie Hebdo confirms this scenario trend.
It is well known who created Al-Qaeda and other extremist organizations under the guise of belonging to Islam. And this creation was not a systemic error, a manifestation of the unprofessionalism of the American intelligence services. Soon to be two years old military operation US in the fight against ISIS. The concept of “strange war”, which is usually used to characterize the policy of Western states that imitated the fight against Hitler, but in reality channeled fascist aggression against the USSR, can be applied, with even greater grounds, in this case. The military operations of the US and NATO forces in Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya have been counting for days, and with the ISIS quasi-state for years. There is no doubt that if the United States had a desire to defeat ISIS, it would have been destroyed long ago. So there is no such desire. It follows from this that the United States needs ISIS for some reason.
The fact that the context of Islamic culture was chosen for the formation of groups of war provocateurs is quite understandable. On the one hand, there is no Church in Islam in its institutional Christian understanding, and hence there are much more opportunities for the emergence of various interpretations. Jihadist groups are positioned as such rumors. In order to separate them from Islam, there is no single institution that could implement this solution.
But the main thing that prompts the use of the Muslim factor to provoke a big war is the unique geographical position countries of Islam. This position can be characterized as the middle one among the civilizations of the old world. The traditional Islamic distribution area is bordered by the zones of Western Christianity, Orthodoxy, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, and traditional tribal cults of Africa. In the funnel of war, if it takes place, virtually the entire Old World will be drawn into it. The American continent is again withdrawn from the field of development of the main conflict. This war, unlike the wars of the twentieth century, is projected not only as an intercountry clash. Today there is not a single mono-confessional country in the world. This means that the war will also receive an intra-national refraction. And then it will be impossible to hide from it behind the might of the armed forces and state borders.
A sharp increase in tension in interfaith relations is a global trend recorded by sociologists. And this escalation of tension is not limited to Europe and the Middle East. It is not limited only to the attitude towards Islam.
Let's take a look at this year's LifeWay Research survey of Christians in the United States. The United States is positioned, as you know, on the one hand, as a more religious country than the countries of Europe. On the other hand, the value of freedom of religious choice for American society has always been emphasized. Today, 63% of Americans agree with the statement that Christians in the US are facing increasing intolerance. For three years, the share of solidarity with this assessment increased by 13%. The share of those who believe that Christians complain too much about the wrong attitude towards themselves and their beliefs has increased to 43%. And who can discriminate against Christians? Muslims make up about 1% of the American population and cannot be a significant discriminating force for 2/3 of Christian Americans. Only secularists can discriminate against Christians. This means that the point is not in Christian-Muslim contradictions, but in contradictions between religious traditions and militant secularism.
Technologies for provoking inter-religious conflict lie on the surface. The high-profile terrorist attacks in Europe were preceded by a large-scale anti-Islamic campaign in Western media. It is a chain of successively carried out speeches, which in religious vocabulary could be defined as "blasphemy" and "blasphemy". The incident with the Charlie Hebdo cartoons was not an isolated incident, but was one of the links in a single chain. This sequence convinces of the design basis for the development of an intercivilizational conflict. Blasphemy breeds blasphemy. In response to the publication of Muhammad's cartoons by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, the Iranian newspaper Hamshahri organized an international Holocaust cartoon competition.
But the Charlie Hebdo cartoons are not only anti-Islamic. They are equally anti-Christian and anti-Jewish. By and large, any system of values based on a religious worldview turned out to be the focus of desecration. And if neither the law nor the attitude of the public protects a person from insulting his values, then war and terror turn out to be a programmed result.
Another example of provoking conflict. After the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 2003, the Americans decriminalize homosexual relations as one of the first measures. And this is in an Islamic country! The Muslim reaction was predictable. And is it any wonder that gays are being massacred in Iraq today. What did the decriminalization mean - ignorance of local specifics or a deliberate provocation? The non-singularity of such actions makes us lean towards the second answer.
The extrapolation of Western experience as a universal experience for mankind produced a number of cognitive traps.
One of these traps is the idea of the inevitability of religious wars in the dominance of religion in public life. A specific phenomenon in the history of Europe began to be presented as a universal practice. Europe has found a way out of the mutual extermination of religious wars in secularism. This reduced the degree of confrontation for some time. But then a series of wars followed, already on a secular platform. The bloodiest wars in the history of mankind were unleashed on the European continent and had no religious basis. This means that the cause of wars is not religious differences. The initial message in favor of secularization turned out to be wrong. But the essentially unsuccessful experience of Europe is offered as a high road for all mankind. Today, the world is being brought back to the transformation that the West went through in its transition to a new Western civilization in the 16th and 17th centuries. Then, following the mutual extermination of Catholics and Protestants, there was a transition to a way of life that was breaking with religious value foundations.
The wars of fanatics, acting under Christian banners, turned into the de-Christianization of Western Europe. Isn't it proposed today to repeat the past scenario - the religious war and the subsequent de-Christianization and de-Islamization?
Meanwhile, the experience of religious wars is not the only model of civilization genesis. There is also a positive experience of religious coexistence. And it is not a precedent, but rather a general rule of civilizational development.
Contrary to Huntington's classification, none of the civilizations historically developed as a religiously homogeneous system. Traditionally, a multi-confessional model existed in India. Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism - all these religions have developed on Indian cultural soil. The Confucian tradition of China coexisted with the Taoist and Buddhist. Shinto and Buddhism coexisted in Japan. In Iran, Muslims coexisted with Zoroastrians. The Middle East was the cradle of the three Abrahamic religions - Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
The civilizational experience of Russia is especially indicative for illustrating inter-religious complementarity. All three religions, defined by religious scholars as world religions - Christianity in the version of Orthodoxy, Islam and Lamaist Buddhism are traditional Russian confessions. Russia, unlike Europe, despite its polyconfessionality, did not know religious wars. Therefore, the cause of the conflict is not in religious differences, but in the system within which the respective religions are placed.
Every day there are disturbing messages from Syria, embedded in the matrix of religious war. But Syria, even before the expansion of ISIS, was an extremely variegated region in terms of confession. The ruling group was mainly co-opted from the Alawites. With regard to them, there is still no consensus on the legitimacy of referring to Islam. Yezidis and Druzes profess special beliefs. Assyrians - Nestorians and Maronites - represent specific trends within Christianity. All these exclusive forms of religiosity date back historically to the early Middle Ages. They could not survive without the factor of interreligious peace. ISIS breaks with this tradition of coexistence, declaring the goal - the destruction of everything religiously different. This attitude distinguishes the pseudo-religious provocative doctrine and traditional religions proper.
So what is modern religious extremism if it cannot be attributed to traditional religions? Let's try to determine its place in the system of worldview coordinates. The polar opposite of religion is secularism.
Classical ideologies - liberalism, communism, fascism - do not coincide in their semantic core with either a religious or secular view. But they can use forms, ideological packaging, and both. Thus, the Christian Democrats are, in essence, a liberal social trend, although they appeal to religious tradition. Liberation theology is a communist current. There are, accordingly, religious packages of fascist ideology. An increasingly obvious trend in the development of the modern world is its new fascisization. Fascism can take many forms. And it is unlikely that these will be exact copies of fascism of the 30s of the XX century. Fascism can also put on a religious mask. This is what we are seeing today. Religious cover is especially effective, in view of the historical connection with the religions of the broad masses of the population. In connection with this understanding, it is necessary to carry out the labeling of information that fits under the concept of "religious war". Terrorist acts are organized not by Muslims, but by fascists.
ISIS is not an Islamic state, but a fascist state. Execution of people is not a Muslim practice, but a fascist practice. The ideological sources of modern extremism are not Mohammed and not the Koran, but Hitler and Mein Kampf.
The differences between traditional religions and religious fascism are paradigmatic. The list of these differences can be addressed to the general world community.
If traditional religions are built on the idea of philanthropy, then fascism is based on misanthropy, expressed in attitudes towards genocide. Traditional religions condemn violence, command "thou shalt not kill." For fascism, violence is the main method, and the killing of the enemy is presented as the highest manifestation of heroism. Traditional religions proceed from the priority of God, his commandments and revelations. For fascists, the interests of their own group, which is in a struggle with all other group identities, are priority.
In traditional religions central theme is neighborly love. God in Christianity is himself positioned as Love. For fascists, love for one's neighbor does not exist. The driving motivator is not love, but various phobias. Humanity is one for traditional religions. “There is no Greek, no Jew, no circumcision, no uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free, but all and in all Christ,” says the Apostle Paul in the Epistle to the Colossians. For fascism, there is no unity of mankind, people are anthropologically unequal, the higher and righteous exterminate the lower and unrighteous. Traditional religions aim at the salvation of mankind. The target setting of religious fascism is the extermination of the infidels.
But what about religious differences? How right Huntington is in asserting the determinism of the religious and, accordingly, the civilizational conflict.
The proposed concept is to distinguish between different levels of religious traditions. At the civilization-forming level, religions contradict each other. Differences at the level of localities are even more obvious. In the local dimension, even a single religion is often structured into rumors, diverging in local specifications. If one focuses solely on these differences, conflict may seem inevitable. But there is an even higher level of consideration - the level of the highest values of humanity, the level of understanding of good and evil. With regard to this level, traditional religions are united. Consequently, the solidarity of traditional religions is fundamentally possible. Solidarization, not as the ecumenical eclecticism of a single religion, but the unity of adherence to traditional values in their diversity.
The challenge of attacking each of the religious traditions of militant secularism can also be considered as a solidarity factor.
The “I am Charlie” actions of 2015 showed that it is not Christianity and Islam that oppose each other, but, on the one hand, extremist secularism, on the other hand, equally extremized jihadism - secular fascism and pseudo-religious fascism. Global anti-civilization threatens each of the traditional religions, and the awareness of this common threat makes it possible to overcome internal historical conflicts. In theology, in understanding the principles of life, religions diverge from each other. And this is understandable, bearing in mind that each of the traditional religions was formed in specific environmental conditions and dealt with the specific mentality of the population. But the identification of global Evil in traditional religions is close enough. And what is happening in the world today falls under this understanding in many aspects.
In "Three Conversations" by Vladimir Solovyov there is a story about the coming of the Antichrist, who established power over the world. Three people exposed him - the Orthodox elder John, the Roman Catholic Pope Peter II and the Protestant theologian Professor Pauli. The surviving righteous forces in all Christian denominations united in the face of a common threat. Theological and historical contradictions, which seemed insoluble, were removed, put aside, for the sake of a joint struggle against the Antichrist. Antichrist is for Christians, Dajjal is for Islam - the union here is even wider than just the union of Christians.
The above parable gives a fundamental understanding that the conflict does not consist in the contradictions of religions, but in the contradiction of good and evil. Each religion has contributed to the spiritual development of mankind, and competition between religions (if such a concept is at all appropriate) is competition in doing good deeds. The provocation of religious wars is identified as not just an anti-religious project, but as an anti-human project, opposing the perspective of “deification” to the prospect of dehumanizing a person.
We can feel the correctness of our faith, but we cannot always explain it or prove it to a non-believer, especially to someone who for some reason irritates our worldview. The reasonable questions of an atheist can confound even the most sincerely believing Christian. Sergey Khudiev tells how and what to answer to the common arguments of atheists.
Isn't religion the cause of all wars?
Part of the wars (although, of course, not all) were fought under religious slogans and between groups professing different religions. We can see this even now - they especially like to commemorate extremist groups like DAISH (aka ISIS - banned on the territory Russian Federation terrorist organization) and the protracted conflict between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland. Other examples are given - the extremely bitter and devastating Thirty Years' War in Europe in the 17th century, the terrible massacre between Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims that occurred after the British left India, one language, but different cultures associated with religions - respectively, Orthodoxy, Catholicism and Islam. The examples go on, and Dawkins (and other atheist writers) exclaim that if it weren't for religion, none of this would have happened.
Why is this conclusion grossly wrong? It is a fairly typical task-to-response fit - militant atheists are sure in advance that religion is the source of wars, and wherever they find war and religion, they postulate that the latter is the cause of the former. And one and the other can be found everywhere - alas, people have been at war throughout their history, and the vast majority of cultures in history are religious. Religiosity is a common property of the human race, like, for example, bipedality. We might as well point out that all wars are fought by two-legged people - and declare bipedality as the cause of wars.
It should be noted that, for example, the classic example of a "religious war" - the Thirty Years' War, if we consider it in more detail, does not look so religious. For example, the Catholic Cardinal Richelieu fought against Catholic Spain - obviously, for the sake of the state interests of France, and not for the sake of religion. Acute national conflicts - such as in Northern Ireland or Yugoslavia - are precisely national, not religious. Their participants are not at all interested in theology, traditional religion is, at most, one of the markers that separates “friends” from “enemies”.
Moreover, the 20th century is a century of wars, unheard of in terms of the scale of losses and destruction, which had nothing to do with religion, but were fought between purely secular regimes under the slogans of purely secular ideologies. So the cause of wars is clearly not religion.
But weren't wars fought - and aren't being fought now - under religious slogans?
This is undoubted, and there are many examples of military propaganda actively appealing to religion. But "the slogans under which the war is waged" and "the causes of the war" are completely different things. From the fact that absolutely any military propaganda since the advent of writing declares the cause of its side to be good and fair, it does not follow that the cause of all wars is kindness and justice. Of course, officially, wars are unleashed for the sake of restoring violated justice, protecting the oppressed, punishing the villains, establishing peace and order, helping the victims - that is, for the most noble and lofty motives. (You will laugh, but from the point of view of the ancient Romans, they never unleashed a single aggressive war in history; they always had good reasons) It would be somewhat naive to believe that these noble motives are the cause of wars.
In any society, military propaganda appeals to the values accepted in it - and if the society is religious, then it will appeal to religion. And if not especially, then to human rights, democracy, justice, dignity, freedom and other values that are important for the people they address. This does not make these values in themselves a source of wars.
But, for example, suicide bombers - would they blow themselves up along with innocent people if their religion did not promise them paradise after death?
Alas, they would. There are more than enough examples in history of people sacrificing themselves for a cause they think is right. Kamikaze, Japanese WWII suicide pilots who rammed enemy ships with their disposable planes, were not promised heaven after death. Judging by the surviving evidence, the hope of some kind of afterlife played absolutely no role in their motivation. They longed for a beautiful, in their eyes, death, for the Emperor and Japan, and became deeply depressed if the last flight for some reason failed.
Suicide attacks were widely used by the Chinese during the Sino-Japanese Wars, and by the German Nazis just before their end.
Even the practice of suicide bombers did not originate in a religious milieu. The first bomber of this kind was Narodnaya Volya member Ignaty Grinevetsky, who on March 1, 1881 exploded a bomb that mortally wounded Tsar Alexander II and himself. In the 1970-80s, explosive belts were actively used by the Tamil Liberation Tigers, a group that professed a purely secular nationalist ideology.
But what about the Nazi soldiers, on whose belt buckles was written "God with us"?
This slogan had nothing to do with Nazism and had been on the buckles of German soldiers since 1847 - about the same as the inscription "God with us" was on the coat of arms of the Russian Empire. The Nazis simply inherited this traditional element of uniform from their predecessors in the German army.
As a doctrine, National Socialism itself was irreconcilably hostile to Christianity. As Roland Freisler, Chairman of the Nazi People's Tribunal, said at the trial of the Christian and anti-fascist Helmut von Moltke: “The mask has been dropped. Only in one respect are we and Christianity alike: we demand the whole person.”
So, the cause of wars, at a deep level, is human sin, at a more superficial level, a conflict of political or economic interests, and religious slogans are involved later.
"Big soviet encyclopedia” and “Electronic Encyclopedia of Cyril and Methodius” give only a religious war in France between Catholics and Huguenots. It says nothing about the Crusades and the religious of the twentieth century. It turns out a clear definition, "war of religions" does not exist.
However, conflicts on religious grounds occur all the time in the world. In many countries of the Muslim world, even today there is a "holy jihad", which implies the widespread spread and establishment of Islam, up to a "holy war" against the infidels.
There are signs by which a "war of religions" can be defined. These include: religious rituals by military personnel, participation in hostilities by clergy, and the direct involvement of spiritual images. But the main sign is that the opposing forces belong to different religions.
Unfortunately, it is often used as a tool to settle scores and unleash a bloodbath. In order to raise a wave of indignation in society, and get many supporters on your side, it is enough to publicly burn the Bible or the Koran.
Often billions in profits are behind the "war of religions". This has been the case since the time of the Crusades, when those who did not even have the moral right to wear a Christian cross joined the Crusaders.
What factors can serve as an impetus for the start of the "war of religions"
The desire of the people to gain autonomy, based on the difference of religions. In this case, it is a kind of generator that fuels the desire to form a new national state.
A unifying religious war, which is based on the desire of the people scattered across the territory of different countries to reunite. At the same time, the divided people profess a religion that differs from the generally accepted one in the state where they live.
Communal or internal religious conflicts that occur within the same state between different sects within the same religion. Today, the confrontation between Sunnis and Shiites is happening throughout the Middle East.
Religious-absolutist conflicts arise in countries where, on the basis of the propaganda of one religion, intolerance towards representatives of another religion is manifested.
It is indicative of how one thoughtless provocative act on religious grounds can lead to the death of people. American pastor Terry Jones staged an action with the burning of the Koran, which caused massive attacks on employees of international organizations in Afghanistan. The pastor himself got off with a small fine, and the result of his act was the death of innocent people.
Dynastic and trade contradictions of European states in the XVI-XVII centuries. bizarrely intertwined with confessional ones. It was on the basis of religious contradictions at the beginning of the XVI century. Another acute international conflict arose, which determined the course of European politics for many decades to come.
The Reformation, which was initiated in 1517 by the famous speech Martin Luther(Luther Martin (1483-1546), leader of the Reformation in Germany, founder of German Protestantism. Translated into German Bible, came up with 95 theses against indulgences, containing the main provisions of the new religious teaching, which denied the basic tenets and the entire structure of the Catholic Church, proclaimed the idea of independence of a secular state from the Catholic Church. Luther's theses were perceived by the opposition strata of the population as a signal to speak out against the Catholic Church and the social order consecrated by it) with criticism of the Roman Catholic Church, divided the Christians of Western Europe into two camps: Protestant, as supporters of the Church Reform eventually began to be called, and Catholic. By the middle of the XVI century. The Reformation spread to Northern Germany, the Northern Netherlands, the British Isles, the Scandinavian Peninsula, partly in France and Switzerland. But Southern Europe - Italy, Spain, Portugal, the southern lands of Germany, the Southern Netherlands, the Habsburg monarchy, partly France, Poland - remained faithful to Catholicism.
The Church Reform again brought to the fore the confessional principle in relations between states. It would seem that trade and state interests made Europeans forget about religious differences. The flourishing of secular culture in the Renaissance, the achievements of painting, sculpture, architecture, the development of a humanistic worldview left no room for religious fanaticism. However, in connection with attempts to reform the Catholic Church, religious passions flared up with new force. Europe in the 16th - first half of the 17th century. is experiencing such an attack of religious fanaticism and religious intolerance, which are rarely seen in history. And all this had a direct impact on relations between states.
Middle and second half of the 16th century, as well as the first half of the 17th century. - This is the era of religious wars in the history of Europe. But although these wars were fought under religious slogans, they were of a dual nature. Often, under the cover of abstract religious slogans and contradictions, specific dynastic goals and trading interests were hidden. The European wars of that era were ambivalent in the sense that they were closely intertwined with internal, essentially civil, conflicts with external, interstate and international contradictions. In many countries, such as France, Germany, the Netherlands, one part of the population rose up in arms against another part of it, subjects of the same sovereign, Catholics and Protestants, tried to resolve the religious dispute between themselves by force. But in this civil war, they willingly resorted to outside help, from their like-minded people from other states, whether they were separate religious communities or independent sovereigns. Thus, both Catholics and Protestants who spoke different languages and being subjects of different monarchs, sought to act together. In essence, there were two pan-European camps - Catholic and Protestant. At the head of the Catholic camp were the Pope of Rome, as well as the secular sovereigns of Europe, who remained faithful to Catholicism, primarily the Habsburgs, who ruled in the German lands and in Spain. In the face of the united sovereigns of Catholic Europe, the Protestants also began to create their own international unions, assisting each other in protecting their rights, despite the well-known difference in beliefs, for example, between Lutherans and Calvinists. Great help to the Protestants on the continent was provided by England, protected from the intrigues of the Catholic sovereigns of Europe by the seas and oceans. Almost all international coalitions that were created in Europe in the second half of the 16th - first half of the 17th centuries were built along confessional lines.
In 1546, the Schmalkaldic War broke out in the German lands. It got its name from the Schmalkalden Union of Protestant States in Germany, which arose in the early 30s (Schmalkalden is a city in West Germany). This union was opposed by a coalition of Catholic states led by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. At first, the Protestants in this war were defeated largely because they refused to support the major military leader Moritz of Saxony, a Protestant to whom the emperor promised the title of elector. But then luck returned to them. Having defeated the Schmalkaldic League, Charles V began to clearly show a tendency to establish a strong imperial power in Germany. At the same time, he began to seek that the imperial crown passed to his son Philip. This was opposed not only by all German sovereigns without distinction of religion, but also by other European monarchs, including the Pope himself. This prompted Moritz of Saxony to go over to the side of the enemies of the emperor. In the autumn of 1551, the German Protestants concluded an agreement with France, promising her the fortresses of Toul, Metz, Verdun and Cambrai in return for their support. Charles V was taken by surprise by these events. He was forced to admit defeat, and in 1555, at the Reichstag in Augsburg, he signed a peace treaty with the Protestants, which went down in history as the Augsburg Religious Peace. He consolidated a certain balance of power, which had developed by the middle of the 16th century. between Protestants and Catholics in Germany. The princes received the right to independently determine the faith of their subjects. Subsequently, this provision of the treaty was formulated in the form of the principle: "Whose power, that is faith."
Charles V took the conclusion of the religious peace as a collapse of his plans. He renounced the Spanish crown (transferred the Spanish throne and the Netherlands to his son Philip II) and the imperial throne (in favor of his brother Ferdinand I), after which he settled in the monastery of St. Yusta in Western Spain. Here he spent the rest of his life in prayer and pious pursuits. As a result of the Peace of Augsburg, Germany was divided religiously into two parts. The south, including Bavaria, Austria, remained faithful to Catholicism. And the North - Brandenburg, Saxony, Hanover - supported Protestantism. The Duchy of Prussia also supported the reform. It was formed instead of the spiritual and knightly Teutonic Order, which had existed since the time of the Crusades. Grand Master of the Teutonic Order from the dynasty Hohenzollern(Hohenzollern (Hohenzollern), German monarchical dynasty; Electors of Brandenburg in 1415-1701, Prussian kings in 1701-1918, German emperors in 1871-1918. The origin is from the Franconian branch of the Swabian count family. In 1415, Burgrave Frederick VI of Nuremberg Hohenzollern received Brandenburg in the county and under the name of Frederick I became the ancestor of the Hohenzollern dynasty in the Brandenburg-Prussian state) in 1525 he himself renounced the priesthood and transformed the orderly theocratic state into the secular duchy of Prussia, which was in vassal dependence on the Polish kings.
Since the Peace of Augsburg, King Philip II of Spain has become the informal head of the camp of the Catholic Church. He decisively intervened in the religious struggle that was taking place in England. In the reign of King Henry VIII, this country also joined the Reformation, and at the initiative of the English monarch himself. Henry VIII was married to Catherine of Aragon, daughter of the "Catholic kings" Ferdinand and Isabella. But having fallen in love with the court lady Anne Boleyn, he wanted to dissolve the marriage with Catherine and marry Anna. With this request, he turned to the Pope, but received a firm and adamant refusal: the pope did not want to once again aggravate relations with Catherine's powerful nephew, Emperor Charles V. Then Henry VIII brought the English Church out of subordination to the Roman throne. Thus began the Reformation in England. However, shortly after the death of Henry VIII, Mary, his daughter from her marriage to Catherine of Aragon, became Queen of England, who restored Catholicism and persecuted Protestants. Mary was married to the Spanish King Philip II. Consequently, a dynastic union arose between the two largest states of the West - Spain and England, which could radically change the balance of power in Europe. The united Anglo-Spanish monarchy could ensure the decisive superiority of the forces of the Catholic camp over the Protestants.
But Mary did not reign for long - from 1553 to 1558. She was replaced by Elizabeth, the daughter of Henry VIII from marriage to Anne Boleyn, illegal, from the point of view of the Catholic Church. Neither the Roman See nor the Catholic Monarchs of Europe recognized Elizabeth's rights to the English royal throne. However, they expressed their readiness to recognize her as a legitimate monarch if she restored Catholicism in England. Philip II even offered her a hand and a heart. However, the English parliament, which elected Elizabeth queen, was by no means sympathetic to this idea. Majority English nobility did not want the restoration of Catholicism and considered Spain, which stood in the way of the commercial and colonial expansion of England, as a sworn enemy of their country. Therefore, Elizabeth rejected the proposal of Philip II and, in order to keep the throne, embarked on the path of deepening the Reformation begun by her father.
In the second half of the XVI century. A bitter conflict broke out between Protestant England and Catholic Spain. It had at least three important aspects - dynastic, confessional and commercial. The dispute between the English Tudors and the Spanish Habsburgs was complicated, and to a large extent - and caused religious and trade-colonial contradictions between the two states. The culmination of the Anglo-Spanish conflict was an attempt by Philip II to bring England to its knees with the help of military force. In 1588, the "Invincible Armada" was equipped - a fleet of one and a half hundred warships, which was sent with 20 thousand soldiers to the shores of England. However, the Spaniards lost this military campaign. Their defeat was a symptom of the beginning of the decline of the colonial naval power of Spain and, accordingly, the emergence of the power of England on the seas.
Simultaneously with attempts to subordinate England to Catholicism, Philip II intervened in the internal affairs of France, where in the middle of the 16th century. Calvinism became widespread. The founder of this Protestant creed was John Calvin, a Genevan preacher, a Frenchman by birth. In 1560, religious wars broke out in France, which continued until the end of the 16th century. One of the most tragic events of these wars was Bartholomew's Night on August 24, 1572, when Catholics staged a massacre of the Huguenots, as the Calvinist Protestants were called in France. After in 1589 the head of the House of Bourbon, Henry of Navarre, a Protestant by religion, inherited the royal crown of France, Spain sent its troops to prevent him from taking the throne. The Spanish garrison was even stationed in Paris, since the French capital supported the Catholic camp and refused to accept the Protestants. But if the French Catholics relied on the help of Spain, then the French Protestants received the support of their co-religionists from other countries, in particular from Germany. The religious war in France thus acquired an international character.
The war could not be stopped even by the fact that in 1593, as a sign of reconciliation with the Catholics, Henry VIII adopted the Catholic faith, allegedly declaring: "Paris is worth a mass!" Only when he issued an edict on religious tolerance in 1598 (the so-called Edict of Nantes) did the war stop. This edict granted the Huguenots not only freedom of religion, but also broad administrative and political autonomy. Inside the French kingdom, a kind of Protestant autonomy was created, which had its own administrative administration, provincial class assemblies, armed forces (army and navy), and controlled two hundred military fortresses.
Defeated by the English and French Protestants, Catholic Spain attacked the Netherlands with all its still significant power. This vast country, lying in the lower reaches (hence its name - lowlands) of the rivers Rhine, Scheldt and Meuse, in the XIV-XV centuries. were part of a powerful state - the Duchy of Burgundy. However, at the end of the XV century. The Duchy of Burgundy was divided between the German emperor and the French king. The western part of Burgundy was annexed to the French kingdom, the Habsburgs annexed it to their hereditary possessions. eastern part as well as the Netherlands. After the abdication of Charles V from the imperial crown in 1556 and the division of his power, Philip II received the Netherlands along with Spain and its overseas colonies.
As a result of the persecution to which the Dutch Protestants were subjected by the Spanish authorities, in 1566 an iconoclastic uprising broke out in the Netherlands. It was called that because during this uprising, the Protestants ravaged Catholic churches and burned icons. Protestants believed that the worship of icons, holy relics and other objects of worship is a sign of paganism. The religious war in the Netherlands gradually developed into a liberation revolution. The northern provinces of the Netherlands in 1579 formed the Union of Utrecht (a union of 7 Protestant provinces). And the southern Netherlands remained faithful to Catholicism and the Spanish king. In the same year they formed the Union of Arras.
In 1581, the northern provinces announced the deposition of Philip and formed an independent state - the Republic of the United Provinces, or Holland - by the name of one of the 7 provinces that became part of the independent state. Despite this, the war continued, because Philip flatly refused to recognize the independence of Holland. For several more decades, Spain waged war against the rebellious provinces, until in 1609 a truce was concluded between them and the mother country for a period of 12 years. After this period, the war resumed, and only after another almost thirty years, in 1648, Spain agreed to the withdrawal of the rebellious provinces from under its rule.
Religious wars gave rise to the adoption of Christianity in the orthodox form. So the founder of the Frankish kingdom, Clovis, having been baptized in 496, promised from now on to fight idols in the name of the cross - "worship what he burned, and burn what he worshiped." Under this slogan, Clovis launched a campaign against the Germanic tribes in 507 and captured almost all of Roman Gaul.
Starting from the XI century. The Crusades began in the world.
The initiative of the first crusade belonged to the Catholic Church, which was the largest feudal lord. In 1095, at the Clermont Church Council in France, the pope issued an appeal to go on a crusade to “liberate the Holy Sepulcher” (Christian shrine) and mentioned the rich booty that awaits the crusaders in the East. Thus, the organizers of the conquests masked their true goals with a "liberating" religious form.
First Crusade(1096-1099) ended with the capture of Jerusalem by the Crusaders from the Seljuks and the formation of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. The second (1147-1149) and the third (1189-1192) were inconclusive. The Fourth Crusade (1202-1204), organized on the initiative of Pope Innocent III, was directed against Byzantium, on part of whose territory the Latin Empire (1204-1261) was created after the capture of Constantinople by the Crusaders. The last campaigns - the fifth (1217-1221), the sixth (1228-1229), the seventh (1248-1254), the eighth (1270) - did not play a significant role. With the transition to the Muslims of Acre (1291), the crusaders completely lost their possessions in the East.
France in the second half of the 16th century. Huguenots (Protestants) and Catholics fought. For the period from 1562 to 1593 there are ten religious wars. In terms of its political content, it was a thirty-year war, which included ten campaigns that differed in strategic goals, time and theaters of action.
The Thirty Years' War, which began in 1618 in Germany, developed into a struggle for supremacy in Europe between the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II, supported by Spain and Bavaria, and France, supported by various Protestant states, as well as Pope 1.
The religion was used during the English Civil War (1642-1646, 1648-1649) between the parliamentary and royal armies.
In 1644, the "Soldier's Catechism" was given to the British troops, explaining the goals of the war and indicating the means to achieve victory. The English soldiers of the parliamentary army were inspired that their profession was noble. The war is religious, it is a war against enemies who persecuted religion, destroyed the world of justice and freedom. Therefore, soldiers before posterity and themselves must stand up for the defense of honor and a just cause; whoever does not share the enthusiasm of "honest and pious" soldiers is a cowardly coward and a secret enemy of God, and therefore God himself will deal with him. “Honest and pious” soldiers will win because their cause is just and good, and the cause of the enemies is hopelessly bad, and God cannot support an insidious enemy, God is always on the side of justice. Therefore, a good soldier must be religious, pious and moral, God bless such a soldier. One of the means of educating parliamentary soldiers was the study of the Holy Scriptures. At the same time, Cromwell (commander of the parliamentary army - Note. V.M.) pointed out that the divine power is related to the physical, as infinity is to one.
As a result of religious reasons, in the 7th century Muslim Arabs conquered the Greco-Roman territories from Syria to Spain; in the XIV-XV centuries, Muslims captured India, the states of Western European civilization fought with Orthodox Russia; Catholics fought Protestants, Shiites fought Sunnis.
Empress Catherine II in 1769 decided to invade Greece in order to free Christians from the "impious Turk". She urged the Greeks to join the fight against the "infidels". The Ottomans, adherents of the “ghazavat” (“holy war”), waged wars not only to seize new lands, but also to “fulfill their religious duty.” In the Balkan war of 1912-1913. King Ferdinand of Bulgaria sought to free Christians from Turkish oppression. Iran in the war with Iraq set the task of bringing the Shiite majority to power, creating an Islamic republic. Under the influence of the ideas of the samurai Yamazaki Ansai (1618-1682), his students sought to spread the “Japanese spirit” in wars not only in Asia, but throughout the world. The Spanish king Charles V set himself the following goals: to unite the entire Christian world, lead it to fight against the infidels (Turks and Moors), defeat them, spread Christianity throughout the earth
