More than 60 per cent of Britons think the teachings of the world’s religions are essentially peaceful but 70 per cent think that most of the wars in history have been caused by religions, according to new research.
A poll looking at attitudes towards religion and violence among British adults also found that only 32 per cent agreed religions were “inherently violent” and that 40 per cent agree with the idea that, on balance, religions are much more peaceful today than violent, but that 47 per cent agreed the world would be a more peaceful place if no-one was religious.
The Theos report cover.
Conducted by ComRes, the poll was commissioned by the UK’s Theos thinktank and involved more than 2,000 adults who were surveyed online over 6th and 7th June.
Writing in the foreword of an accompanying essay on addressing religiously inspired violence, Nick Spencer, research director at Theos, wrote that the results of the survey were “as instructive as they were unclear”.
“If this is confusing, it may be because the public seems to be aware of the many complex and confusing factors within this whole debate,” he wrote. “Religions comprise of their teachers and their followers, their ethics and their contexts. Thus, the single clearest finding from our survey was that people believed overwhelmingly that ’It is religious extremists, not religions themselves, that are violent’.”
The survey showed 81 per cent of respondents agreed with this statement, with only 12 per cent disagreeing while 64 per cent of respondants agreed that ‘Most religious violence is really about other things, like politics, socio-economic issues, or Western foreign policy’ – a figure which rose to 73 per cent among respondents belonging to a religious minority.
“In other words ‘religion and violence’ is rarely, monochromatically, about religion…” Mr Spencer wrote. “It is about the people, some of them extremely nasty, who claim to follow a religion and use it for violent ends, and the economic, political and nationalist causes with which it is often inextricably linked.”
“This is emphatically not to say that religion in itself – its practices, loyalties, scriptures and even ethics – has nothing
to do with violence,” he added.
“Whatever else this survey tells us, it does not tell us that people think this whole religion and violence issue is really about something else. They don’t. Rather, the polling about ‘religion and violence’ is complex and unclear in part because people recognise that ‘religion and violence’ is invariably about ‘religion and violence and…’, when the ‘and’ is followed by issues of loyalty, ethics, ethnicity, politics, textual interpretation, geography, economics, or any other number of factors.”
In the essay, ethicist Robin Gill writes that while he can only provide an ambivalent answer to the question of whether or not religiously-inspired violence is on the rise, there is “clear evidence” of an increase in concern about religiously-inspired violence.
