Article published in the Christian Post:

Once again, the Nobel Peace Prize has gone to a religious person: the Ethiopian Prime Minister and Pentecostal Christian Abiy Ahmed. I write “once again” because if you exclude the occasions when the Peace Prize has gone to organizations, only about four percent of recipients have been atheists. Monks like the Dalai Lama, archbishops like Desmond Tutu, pastors like Martin Luther King Jr., and religiously driven activists such as Malala Yousafzai and Denis Mukwege dominate the list of Nobel peacemakers. 80 percent of them are Christians.

This is in sharp contrast to the idea that religion only brings war and misery. Such thinking was popularized after 9/11 by atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. They believed that “religion poisons everything” and that a world without religious beliefs would have been much better.

And sure, many horrors have happened in the name of religion. One of last year’s Nobel laurates, Nadia Murad, has testified to the horrific repression that the islamic extremism of ISIS brings. Still, Murad herself is motivated by her Yazidic faith.

When Alan Axelson’s and Charles Philipp’s ambitious work “Encyclopedia of Wars” gathered information on 1,763 historical wars, only seven percent of them could be categorized as religiously motivated. Few, if any, of the most destructive conflicts that we have seen in modern times (such as the First and Second World Wars, the Vietnam War and the Second Congo War) have been caused by religion.

How, then, can people claim that religion “poisons everything” with war and oppression?

For my answer to this last question, as well as some thought on atheisticly motivated violence, read the rest of the article in the Christian Post.

Micael Grenholm is editor-in-chief for PCPJ.

Pentecostals & Charismatics for Peace & Justice is a multicultural, gender inclusive, and ecumenical organization that promotes peace, justice, and reconciliation work among Pentecostal and Charismatic Christians around the world. If you like what we do, please become a member!