The answer to this question is "no"

"Should Religion Be Blamed for the World's Bloodiest Wars?", is the title of this book review in The New Republic.  The review is John Gray's, of Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence, by Karen Armstrong.   Here's a taste:

Consistently surprising and illuminating, Fields of Blood should be read by anyone interested in understanding the interaction of religion with violence in the modern world. Relying on detailed historical analysis, Armstrong argues convincingly against the prevailing idea that religion is uniquely prone to acting violently. She is less sure-footed in her account of secular faith and the violence that has been committed on its behalf. When she refers to the “secularist bias” of modern thinking, she seems to endorse the conventional perception of the modern world as having moved away from religion. Yet the logic of her argument pushes in another direction.

Few movements have been as single-minded in their commitment to modernization as Lenin’s Bolsheviks, and few have been so virulently hostile to mainstream faiths. Yet as Bertrand Russell observed in his forgotten 1920 classic The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism, written after he travelled to Russia and talked with Lenin, Soviet communism was from the beginning as much a religion as a political project. Oddly, though it was a rerun on a vaster scale of the French revolutionary terror that she analyzes so penetratingly, Armstrong says practically nothing about the Soviet experience, or about Maoism. Yet, together with Nazism, these 20th-century state cults plant a question mark over the very idea of secularization. Certainly there has been a decline in the old authority of churches, but that does not mean religion is becoming weaker. Simultaneous with the retreat of the mainstream faiths, there has been a rise of a plethora of political religions and an explosion of fundamentalism, sometimes fused in a single movement. . . .