BY ROSS DOUTHAT, THE NEW YORK TIMES
FEBRUARY 10, 2015

In my Sunday column on the controversy surrounding President Obama’s National Prayer Breakfast speech, I tried to explain what I saw as the problems with the president’s “high horse” references to Western Christian sins without letting the column get sucked down too deep into the quicksand of historical-moral controversy. But now (because what else are blogs for?) let’s step a little deeper into that quicksand, and talk a little bit about the Crusades, the most contested of the various examples — the others were Jim Crow, slavery, and the Inquisition — that the president cited as Islamic State-like case studies in which Christianity was used as a license for cruelty and persecution. The references to slavery and segregation inspired debates about how deeply religion was implicated in those institutions (the short answer: a lot more deeply than many Christian conservatives care to admit today, though not in exactly the same way that religion is implicated in the crimes of ISIS; the South was many things, including a home to terrorism, but it was not a utopian theocracy); the reference to the Inquisition inspired some discussion of just how bad the institution really was (the answer: not as bad as Black Legend-style history would have it, but at its worst quite, quite bad enough). But only the Crusades inspired a debate about whether they deserve to be condemned at all.

The existence of this debate is clearly very strange to many liberal and secular writers, and no doubt seems strange to the president himself; I suspect he thought that a Crusades reference would have been the most uncontroversial of his historical analogies. And in fairness to Obama, stripped of context his specific words should be uncontroversial: “During the Crusades,” he said, “people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ,” and there is no question that such terrible deeds were committed, in many places and with many innocent victims (Jewish especially as well as Muslim and Orthodox Christian), across the four or five or six centuries (depending on whether you include the later Holy Leagues) in which crusades were officially undertaken or attempted.

But the context matters, and his juxtaposition of the Crusades with institutions that are regarded as comprehensively evil in our culture prompted a wave of writing from Christians justifying those campaigns as essentially “defensive” in intent and therefore justified conflicts. And that, in turn, prompted a lot “you must be joking” responses from liberal journalists — like this one from Will Saletan, which I’ll quote:

“All the Crusades met the criteria of just wars,” says a quote circulated by the Catholic League, conservative news sites, and Tea Party forums. Bill Donohue, the league’s president, asserts: “The Crusades were a defensive Christian reaction against Muslim madmen.” Giuliani, Jonah Goldberg, and Joe Scarborough agree. E.W. Jackson, the 2013 Republican nominee for lieutenant governor of Virginia, defends the Crusades as “a response to Islamic aggression.” Erick Erickson, the editor-in-chief of RedState.com, says they were merely “a response to Islamic invasion.”

As for the awkward gap between the Muslim aggression and the so-called defensive reaction—about four centuries—today’s apologists plead that the Crusades were a “delayed response.” Donohue blames the whole thing on Muslims: “They’re the ones who created the war.” In fact, according to the apologists, the Crusaders were liberators. They were trying “to free the holy places of Christendom.”

Clearly lot of the people Saletan is quoting are being apologists, sometimes with a side of bigotry, rather than historians. But the reality is that many of their apologias are still closer to the historical reality than his snideness about the alleged “awkward gap” between Islamic aggression and Christian crusading. Like all complicated historical events, the Crusades were hardly monocausal, and historians will be arguing about the whys and wherefores in the same way that they’ll always argue about the causes of the last century’s global conflicts. But the first Crusade was not summoned, as Saletan implies, in a world where the Islamic empires and Christian Europe had been enjoying a comfortable four-hundred year peace after the original fall of Jerusalem to Muslim armies. Instead the actual context included 1) the gradual rolling back of prior Muslim conquests in Spain and Southern Italy (Saracen raiders had threatened Rome in the 10th century, and the Emirate of Sicily only fell to the Normans five years before Pope Urban II called the First Crusade), 2) the disastrous Byzantine defeat at Manzikert in 1071, at the hands of the Seljuk Turks, which ended with the emperor in chains and prompted Constantinople to call for military assistance from the West, and 3) the Seljuk occupation of Palestine (displacing the Fatimid Caliphate), which visited persecution and pillage on the Holy Land’s remaining Christians and made pilgrimage much more difficult than it had been under some (though not all) of the Fatimid rulers.

The context also included many other factors internal to Western Christendom, which is why historians have wrangled endlessly over the motivations of Urban and others, and over how much explanatory weight to give to geopolitical issues related to Islam versus other goals (increasing papal power, channeling intra-Christian violence elsewhere, forcing a reunion with Orthodoxy, etc.). But the broad story of the era and the movement can’t be explained without a recognition that the context of the crusades, from the 11th century beginning to the echoes at Lepanto and Vienna centuries later, always included 1) ongoing conflict between Islamic and Christian forces in territory that had been Christian before an earlier wave of Muslim conquest and 2) the emergence of new Islamic powers, first Seljuk and then Ottoman, whose advances threatened first Byzantium and then, after its fall, the Balkans, the Christian Mediterranean and eventually Central Europe. One can argue back and forth over whether this or that crusade met “just war” criteria, but none of them sprang de novo from a world of stable borders and religious peace, and all of them were part of a longer story of attack and counterattack in which both sides were playing for potentially-existential stakes.

Which makes a comparison between the Crusades as a historical phenomenon and various specific institutions — the sort of comparison in which “Crusaders” get casually likened to “slave owners”, for instance — seem, well, not even wrong: It’s just a category error, like putting “Franco-British conflict from the 14th through the 19th century” on the same list of great historical wrongs as South African apartheid, and then when challenged invoking Henry V at Rouen and the Vendee to “prove” your point. And it’s a category error that Christians, and especially Catholics and other Christians who aren’t pacifists and don’t think the true faith died with Constantine, can’t reasonably just acquiesce to and accept, any more than a patriotic Frenchman should accept some blanket historical condemnation of “French aggression” that casts Charles Martel, Joan of Arc and the Marquis de Montcalm alike as great historical villains. The Crusades as an epoch-spanning phenomenon aren’t in and of themselves a great stain on Christian history: They’re a phenomenon in Christian history that includes many stains and sins and great crimes, but also involves many admirable figures and heroic moments, many great tragedies, and many individuals and incidents that simply resist any kind of manichaean reading. Contemporary Christians should reject and disavow the great crimes that some Crusaders committed as they should reject and disavow the un-Christian hatreds that motivated them. But we are under no obligation to reject and disavow the entire multi-century struggle with an armed and equally-militant foe as merely the manifestation of some irrational religious “phobia,” let alone accede to analogies that cast an entire civilization’s worth of kings and theologians and soldiers as the moral equivalent of Osama Bin Laden.

The problem, in this in as many other debates, is that there seems to be little ground between being “for” and “against” a phenomenon too historically complex to meaningfully “favor” and “oppose” — which is why the religious-conservative rush to answer Obama has produced a lot of arguments (including some of those quoted by Saletan) that effectively whitewash Christian history, romanticize the bloody muddle that was medieval warfare, minimize the harsh reality of pogroms and persecutions, and otherwise present fat targets for secular eye-rolling. That kind of romanticization can be sinfully stupid: To the extent that it devolves into “feverish dreaming about a mythological Christian military history,” I’m with Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig in rejecting it; to the extent that it leads to consequentialist defenses of particular aggressions and holy-innocent defenses of particular strategic stupidities, I’m with Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry in calling it indefensible. Wars fought on behalf of Christianity can only be justified as unfortunate necessities, and save in rare exceptions the faith’s warriors cannot — must not — be confused with its martyrs and its saints.

But I’m also not interested in an exercise in historical amnesia where the actual necessities of medieval geopolitics get wiped out of Western memory in favor of blanket condemnation of anyone who took the cross. If you want me to condemn pogroms in the Rhineland or the bloody aftermath of Jerusalem’s fall or the entirety of the Fourth Crusade, I will, and readily. But ask me if I’m sorry that Spain is Spain and not Al-Andalus, or if I regret Lepanto or Jan Sobieski’s gallop to Vienna, or if I wish that Saint Louis had somehow rescued Outremer or that aid had come to Constantinople in the 15th century — I’m not, I don’t, I do. There are parts of Christian civilization’s past that have to be simply judged, rejected, and disowned; that the list is depressingly long, too long for a presidential speech. But the Crusades are nowhere near that simple, and to disown them requires a kind of amputation, a schism with the past, a triumph of forgetfulness over the more complicated obligations of actually remembering.

SOURCE: http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/02/10/the-case-against-the-case-against-the-crusades/?_r=0