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War is the ultimate social conflict. As does conflict at other levels in the social order, war intersects with religion. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict, now over half a century in duration, is an example: two peoples, each self-identified as followers of an Abrahimic religion, engage in deadly pursuit of incompatible goals. Israel's goal in the struggle is to guarantee the security of its borders as a nation-state within the territory of the former League of Nations mandate for Palestine. By contrast, Palestinians seek precisely to eliminate not individual Israelis but Israel as a nation-state within traditional "Palastina."

Through the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, Israel united Jerusalem as its capital and increased the territory under its control by three and a half times its original size. Since then, various initiatives sought final resolution of the conflict in terms of a land-for-peace principle: assuming that both parties wanted peace, Israel would exchange territories captured in the war for guarantees from the neighboring Arab states that Israel would be secure within its borders. While Egypt and Jordan negotiated individual treaties of peace with Israel, the central conflict between Israel and the Palestinian people has remained without resolution. The land-for-peace principle does not permit resolution of their conflict because the combatants' goals are incompatible.

Internal politics make it untenable for Israel even to consider sharing Jerusalem, and the same politics require Israeli leaders to equivocate about surrendering the West Bank, the covenanted lands of Samaria and Judea, to a Palestinian state. Conversely Palestinians developed a sacralized political claim on the land as a driving force in their emergent solidarity as a nation. The targeted outcome for each side is political control over the entirety of the land. The mutual incompatibility of the two goals (reclamation of the Abrahimic covenant versus Palestinian sovereignty) makes unworkable a land-for-peace exchange and its implicit vision of two independent states, side by side, sharing ancient Palestine.

The concept of civilization refers to a complex social grouping that subsumes all other forms of structured social activity including nationality, kinship, ethnicity, and, in particular, politically organized societies. Today, obvious to all is a split between the umma--the totality of Muslims in the world--and historically non-Muslim populations. In another irony of history, what some in Islamic civilization see in modernity, Christianity, and the West as evil is itself the spawn of conflict within an earlier civilization, Christendom, a half-millennium ago.

The precursors and leaders of the Reformation acted to shift the locus of authority from a centralized papacy to local institutions responsible in varying degrees to individual believers. Martin Luther and England's King Henry VIII by their ecclesial defections fractured papal political sway over huge swatches of Europe's territory. Soon bourgeois revolutions in the political sphere followed revolutions in the religious sphere to realign the balance of power from feudal nobility and monarchy to new classes made influential and wealthy by economic changes. Economies, characterized through the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance by medieval guilds, mercantilism, and chartered corporations, were freed from these constraints by the rise of modern capitalism, first commercial, then industrial.

In parallel with these transformations, intellectual emancipation from ecclesiastical and political dominance was precipitated by Francis Bacon's Novum Organum, the economic thought of the Scottish Enlightenment, and the political thought of the French philosophes. Christendom's social cohesion, embodied in Pope Gregory VII's paradigm of the monarch's dominance in earthly matters and the church's dominance in heavenly matters, was forever lost to the secularized, contradiction-laden logics of modernity's autonomous value spheres.

Religion, then, does not obviate the likelihood of conflict but offers fertile soil in which the dichotomous dynamics of conflict--both division and cohesion--can take root and flourish. In many historical cases--seen especially among monotheistic traditions--religious groups, viewing themselves as the only legitimate religion, have erected both structural and cognitive frameworks to maintain an "ingroup/outgroup" dichotomy and to ensure internal purity. In other cases, although claiming commitment to a transcendent relationship with an ultimate reality and a constructive relationship with others in the world, religious people for religious reasons have and continue to turn violent and destructive.

Bibliography:

1) Ehrman, Bart D. 2006. Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew. New ed. New York: Oxford University Press.

2) Hall, John R. 2003. "Religion and Violence: Social Processes in Comparative Perspective." Pp. 359-81 in Handbook of the Sociology of Religion, edited by M. Dillon. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

3) Hobsbawm, Eric J. [1962] 1996. The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848. New York: Vintage Books.

4) Kimball, Charles. 2008. When Religion Becomes Evil. New York: HarperOne.

5) Lewy, Guenter. 1974. "Millenarian Revolts: Jewish Messianism: Eschatological Revolt and Divine Deliverance." Pp. 70-101 in Religion and Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press.

6) Miles, Jack. 2002. "Theology and the Clash of Civilizations." Cross Currents 51(4).

7) Moore, Barrington Jr. 2000. Moral Purity and Persecution in History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

8) Oren, Michael B. 2002. Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East. New York: Oxford University Press.

9) Sigmund, Paul E. 1990. Liberation Theology at the Crossroads: Democracy or Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press.

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