Religion and Conflict: A Quantitative Approach

This chapter surveys the literature on the economics of religion, with a particular emphasis on its association with conflict. There is a long tradition of work on the relationship between conflict and ethnic diversity culminating with Horowitz’s seminal Ethnic Groups in Conflict. The effect of religion on conflict has generated less attention. Recently there have been several reviews of the topic. See, for instance, Iyer (2016), Finke (2013), or Silvestri and Mayall (2015). However, prior to 2000, few attempts tried to include religion and culture into the larger body of research and theory on social conflict. Samuel P. Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” (1996) thesis is the basic reference of this literature, the same way as Weber’s classic The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) is the focal point of the empirical study of the relationship between religion and economic development. Borrowing partly from an idea put forward by British-American historian, Bernard Lewis (1990), Huntington became the most prominent voice claiming that religious and cultural identities would be the main driver of international conflict in the new world order following the end of the Cold War. At the core of Huntington’s clashing civilizations lay religion. He argued that the civilization of Western Christianity is different from that of Eastern Orthodox Christianity; Eastern Christianity is distinct from Islam; Islam represents a fundamentally distinct civilization from Hindu; and so forth. The “clash of civilizations” occurs at two levels. One level points to the civilization divides across countries and regions, the other refers to the “fault lines between civilizations” within countries or territories. Thus, the civilizational fault line(s) within countries leads to conflicts just as they do across countries. Huntington recognizes that the argument is over-simplified, yet he concludes that “countries with similar cultures are coming together” while “countries with different cultures are coming apart.” He argues that civilizations compete on the international scene and that this competition can turn into violent conflict, most importantly because of the different religions that have formed these civilizations. In other words, civilization fault lines are a source of conflict; civilization homogeneity is a source of unity and peace (Huntington 1996).