Holy war definition

Etymology

In the computing sense, coined or popularized by Danny Cohen's paper “On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace”, Internet Experiment Note 137, published 1980 April 1, which compared the debate over serialization order to the holy war between "Little-endians" and "Big-endians" in Jonathan Swift's novel Gulliver's Travels.

Noun

A war that is entirely, primarily, or ostensibly religious in motivation; a war over religion.
A flame war that is considered to resemble a war over religion, in that the strength of emotion is not proportional to the magnitude of the disagreement.