War & Peace Quote by Midge Ure

The sting in Midge Ure's line is the snap from private comfort to public carnage. He starts inside the soft-focus story many people inherit about faith: religion as a personal coping technology, a hand on the shoulder, a way to get through the week. Then comes the rude, almost cinematic cut: "you wake up one morning" and the world has turned religion into a tribal badge and a permission slip for violence. The phrasing is deliberately ordinary, like a friend recounting a gut-punch realization, which makes the political horror feel closer, not like a distant history lesson.

The context is Ireland and Northern Ireland, where sectarian identity often stood in for politics, class, and national allegiance, and where the language of belief could be mobilized as a sorting mechanism: us/them, safe/target, loyalist/republican. Ure isn't parsing theology; he's pointing at how religion gets drafted into conflict and then pretends it was always the cause. "Based on religion" lands with skepticism baked in, implying that what looks like faith-driven war is also about power, territory, and grievance laundering itself through sacred vocabulary.

As a musician who came of age in an era of televised unrest and activist pop responses, Ure's intent reads as witness testimony rather than sermon. The subtext is a warning to listeners who keep religion quarantined as "personal": history doesn't honor that boundary. Faith can comfort you, sure, but in the wrong hands it can also organize a battlefield and still claim the moral high ground.