@nprofile1q... @nprofile1q... @nprofile1q... that's true for macro-politics and elite theory, but it doesn't really speak to how common people viewed from an individual perspective are motivated and what they value. I'm not sure many northerners in the civil war were motivated by "we have to kneecap the south's economy" but a good chunk might've been by "slavery is a moral evil", and since we're talking about polling and approval, that would seem to be the prescient thing. Similarly the Hussite Wars may have been started for reasons which are not religious at all (I wouldn't know, I'm unfamiliar with the intricacies but conceding the point for the sake of argument), but the people on the ground, if you were to ask them, would probably say their religious motivations were primary.
the motivations of the elites who start wars are indeed divorced from the motivations of the commoners who fight them, and that means both that you can't necessarily believe the winners who write history, but also that many of the commoners probably would have