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A religious war, literally, is a war fought on the pretext of religion or religious differences. The European Wars of Religion, the Crusades, and the Reconquista are frequently cited examples. Opinions differ as to whether the leaders of such wars are in fact motivated by religion, or whether they are motivated by political power or conquest, and use religion simply to motivate the masses to fight.

The Islamic term jihad (literally "struggle") can refer to religious war, though it can also refer to an inward striving for perfect faith.

The remainder of this article addresses the metaphoric use of the term "religious war" in the computer hacker community.

"Religious war" aka "Holy war" is a term used in the computer programming community (mainly the Unix community). It refers to heated debates on some subject of interest to the community, discussed over a long time and without clear results.

One well-known religious war is the war over what text editor is the best: Emacs or vi (the Editor wars). This particular debate is sometimes humorously described as "the Church of Emacs" vs "the Church of Vi" where both participants refer to their preferred editor as "the One True Editor". Another religious war is the decades-long one concerning endianness (having to do with differing byte sequence schemes for multi-byte words stored in computer memory and/or transferred between computers).

Of course, not everyone will accept that a specific debate is a religious war, as the term in a sense denotes such debate as futile. These differing feelings on whether a particular debate is to be considered a religious war is, naturally, a significant factor of a debate's being (turned into) just such a "war"—people on both sides will tend to make dead-serious, emotionally laden, arguments, provoking each other to rising heights of disagreement. Some religious wars conducted over the Internet are considered flame warsThis article is about the Internet meaning of the word "flaming". For other meanings, and meanings of the word "flame", see Flame. Flaming is the performance of posting messages that are deliberately hostile and insulting in the social context of a discus. The "computer term" religious war is older than the Internet, though.