So right now lots of conservatives are flipping out that Obama compared ISIS to the Crusaders.
(Per my earlier post, he’s being interpreted as if he said that there’s a moral equivalence between the two, so the West had better shut up, but the way I read it is just that Crusaders and ISIS fighters alike perverted their religion.)
The internet is brimming with defenses of the Crusaders, as pure of heart, sacrificing their lives to rescue the Holy Land from the Turks, with maybe a misstep or an exaggeration in their massacre of the inhabitants of Jerusalem. (And, as far as it goes, a distant, distant relation of my by marriage, did indeed die there, widowing his wife, Saint Elizabeth of Hungary. No, I didn’t research this myself, but we found a family tree of a somewhat less-distant relative, who had done this research.) But that’s not really helpful.
What is helpful is to look at what those same Crusaders did on their way there: massacre Jews.
Not all Crusaders, not even most Crusaders. But there was no single organized army travelling through Europe to the Holy Land, but a number of different armies. Those led by nobles departed first, and caused no trouble. But others, led by rabble-rousers like Peter the Hermit or Count Emicho of Leiningen, saw things differently, and said, according to a Jewish chronicler,
“Behold we journey a long way to seek the idolatrous shrine and to take vengeance upon the Muslims. But here are the Jews dwelling among us, whose ancestors killed him and crucified him groundlessly. Let us wipe them out as a nation; Israel’s name will be mentioned no more.”
(European Jewry and the First Crusade, by Robert Chazan, p. 66)
And these bands of crusaders, in multiple German towns, attacked and massacred the Jewish communities. Of the violence in Cologne, the chronicler Albert of Aix says,
I know not whether by a judgment of the Lord, or by some error of mind, they rose in a spirit of cruelty against the Jewish people scattered throughout these cities and slaughtered them without mercy, especially in the Kingdom of Lorraine, asserting it to be the beginning of their expedition and their duty against the enemies of the Christian faith. This slaughter of Jews was done first by citizens of Cologne. These suddenly fell upon a small band of Jews and severely wounded and killed many; they destroyed the houses and synagogues of the Jews and divided among themselves a very large amount of money. When the Jews saw this cruelty, about two hundred in the silence of the night began flight by boat to Neuss. The pilgrims and crusaders discovered them, and after taking away all their possessions, inflicted on them similar slaughter, leaving not even one alive.
(The First Crusade: The Chronicle of Fulcher of Chatres and Other Source Materials, edited by Edward Peters, p. 102.)
Now, if you read further in either of these books, but particularly in the former, you’ll learn that it was actually the bishops of these German cities who valiantly attempted to protect the Jews. That was part of how it worked in the Middle Ages; the bishops, in general, had a special role as Protectors of the Jews, whenever the populace got riled up over accusations of Blood Libel, for instance.
But still: of course, it’s easy to say, from the perspective of 2015, “these were Bad Christians, who failed to follow the teachings of their own religion in acting as they did.”
But that begs the question.
Is it possible to say that the “version” of Christianity these men followed included the belief that the murder of Jews was sanctioned by God? Or were they nothing but sinners who misunderstood their own religion?
Likewise, is it possible to say that the “version” of Islam that ISIS fighters follow includes the belief that the goal of spreading the Caliphate warrants all manner of cruelties? Or are Obama, and the Islam imams who say, “this isn’t a part of Islam” right?
When it comes down to it, the idea that either Christianity or Islam is primarily about peace and love and the Golden Rule, warm-and-fuzzy quotes notwithstanding, is a modern one. Each religion is primarily about specific beliefs about God — in the case of Christianity, to put it crudely, belief in the deity of Jesus Christ and the fact that his death and resurrection are our “admission ticket” to heaven; in the case of Islam, the belief that God requires submission via prescribed prayers and other actions.
Which means that I think we should neither accede to some kind of “moral equivalence” that says that misdeeds of Christians in the past mean that Muslims in the present get a free pass, nor should we flip out if someone mentions the Crusades — because neither massacres in the past, nor massacres in the present time, are “acceptable” regardless of the religion of the perpetrators. Do we, as Christians, need to “apologize” for their actions? No, of course not. But at the same time, these Crusaders, too, and not just the penitent ones, are a part of Christianity’s past.
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