Do the Crusades Discredit Christianity?

Jesus’ Words

Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World's Largest Religion “I Couldn’t Be a Christian because of the Crusades”

Rejection of violence dripped from Jesus’s lips. “If anyone slaps you on the right cheek,” he instructed his disciples, “turn to him the other also” (Matt. 5:39). And when those same disciples tried to resist his arrest with swords, Jesus rebuked them and healed their victim (Luke 22:50–51). His radical commandment “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt. 5:44) flipped the script that flows from human nature and has shaped most ethical systems in human history: morality applies to my in-group; outsiders can be virtuously destroyed. And Jesus’s words sprang to life as Roman soldiers nailed him to the cross and he prayed for their forgiveness (Luke 23:34). His first followers continued this path of love in the face of violence, and many went to their deaths for proclaiming Jesus as Lord. But how does all this square with the last two thousand years of Christian history? Were Jesus’s words just a muzzle on a dragon that could easily be shaken off?

The Language of Crusade

Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World's Largest Religion “I Couldn’t Be a Christian because of the Crusades”

The Crusades, depicted as the violent, unprovoked imposition of Western religion on peaceful Eastern Muslims, are typically the first example we reach for when invoking acts of Christian violence and when seeking paradigms for Muslim-Christian conflict. While the Crusades took place almost a thousand years ago, crusading language was deployed on both sides in the wake of 9/11. George W. Bush warned, “This crusade, this war on terrorism. It’s gonna take a while”; and Osama Bin Laden wrote, “We hope that these brothers will be the first martyrs in the battle of Islam in this era against the new Jewish and Christian crusader campaign that is led by the Chief Crusader Bush under the banner of the cross.”3 So, what, if anything, did the medieval Crusades have to do with present-day conflicts?

Myths & History

Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World's Largest Religion “I Couldn’t Be a Christian because of the Crusades”

To begin to answer this question, we must uncover some common misconceptions. Historian Thomas Madden calls the Crusades “one of the most misunderstood events in western history” and notes that recent popular histories of the Crusades have recycled “myths long ago dispelled by historians.” Central to this mythology is the aforementioned idea that the Crusades were an unprovoked attempt by Western Christians to force their faith on peace-loving Eastern Muslims. The truth is almost opposite. The Crusades were, in historian Robert Louis Wilken’s words, “a Christian counter offensive against the occupation of lands that had been Christian for centuries before the arrival of Islam.”

While the Christian movement began with emphatic nonviolence, Muhammad himself led the first Muslim armies. Madden describes the period between the foundation of Islam and the first Crusade like this:

With enormous energy, the warriors of Islam struck out against the Christians shortly after Mohammed’s death. They were extremely successful. Palestine, Syria, and Egypt—once the most heavily Christian areas in the world—quickly succumbed. By the eighth century, Muslim armies had conquered all of Christian North Africa and Spain. In the eleventh century, the Seljuk Turks conquered Asia Minor (modern Turkey), which had been Christian since the time of St. Paul.

Jerusalem was first taken by Muslim forces in 637, five years after Muhammad’s death. But their leader, Caliph Omar, continued to allow Christian pilgrims to visit their holy places, on payment of a fee. When the city was recaptured by Turkish Muslims in 1076, however, the atmosphere changed. Pilgrims were attacked. The city’s patriarch was kidnapped. Holy places were desecrated. Cries for help from Eastern Christians prompted Pope Urban II to call a conference of European leaders in France in 1095, and after eight days of deliberation, Western Christians resolved to intervene. This conference launched the first Crusade. Its aim was to retake Jerusalem.

A Failure of Christian Ethics

Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World's Largest Religion “I Couldn’t Be a Christian because of the Crusades”

The first Crusade achieved its goal: Jerusalem fell. But in many other ways it was disastrous. There was massive loss of life even before the Crusaders reached Jerusalem. When the remnant of the army finally arrived, they were exhausted and starving. Jerusalem itself was well stocked, so the siege did more harm to those outside the city walls than to those within. But when Jerusalem was taken, the brutality extended even beyond the norms of medieval warfare. Tens of thousands of Muslims were killed, including women and children.

While we must understand the desire to retake Jerusalem in its historical context and the centuries of conquest by Muslim armies that Eastern Christians had sustained, this needless slaughter of women and children represented a stunning failure of Christian ethics. Some attempted to parallel the fall of Jerusalem with Joshua’s defeat of Jericho in the Old Testament, when only Rahab the prostitute and her family were spared because she had helped Joshua’s spies. But although in the Old Testament God’s people were at times directed to exact God’s judgment on other nations (and vice versa), the New Testament shifts the paradigm. Jesus consistently taught nonviolence, and on the cross he took the full force of God’s judgment on the nations on himself. It is possible to make a Christian argument for military intervention to protect the vulnerable: defending a persecuted religious minority (whether Christians in eleventh-century Jerusalem or Jews in twentieth-century Germany) would certainly fall within this scope. But the repeated New Testament directives against violence make the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians unjustifiable from any recognizably Christian perspective.

The stain of cruelty is made more vivid by Crusader violence against Jews along the way. As Madden points out, these were “isolated incidents in direct violation of Church law and condemned by churchmen and secular leaders alike.” But the bouts of anti-Semitic violence nonetheless illustrate an appetite for murder. Furthermore, in a move shocking to contemporaries, the fourth Crusade involved the sacking of Constantinople, the largest Christian city in the world. This was partly a revenge attack against the Eastern Orthodox Christian majority for an earlier massacre of Latin Christians. But it exposes a tragic reality of Christian history: despite the biblical bonds of brotherhood across differences, despite Jesus’s command to his followers to love even their enemies, despite Jesus’s own repudiation of violence and the way the early Christians gladly faced martyrdom, the last two thousand years have seen Christians repeatedly embroiled in violence against each other.

This continued through the Reformation period and into our more recent past, from the conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland to the Rwandan genocide in 1994, when hundreds of thousands of Tutsis were slaughtered by the majority-Hutu government in a country with one of the highest rates of professed Christianity in Africa.

By What Standard Do We Still Judge?

Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World's Largest Religion “I Couldn’t Be a Christian because of the Crusades”

Without question, many acts of violence have been perpetrated by Christians through the centuries. In some cases—when committed in defense of the vulnerable—they may have been justifiable according to Christian ethics. In others, they have been utterly irreconcilable with the teachings of Jesus. But to this day, the ethical standards by which we judge episodes of violence like the Crusades (in all their complexity) are those given to us by Christianity, which breaks down the “them and us” of tribal ethics and insists on the humanity and worth of one’s enemies.

But in spite of this, can we not turn to a more peaceful religion than Christianity? For many of my friends who have abandoned monotheism but want to retain a spiritual identity, there is an obvious answer.

Critics mention the Crusades as evidence for the violence of Christianity. We can readily admit that the Crusades, the Inquisition, and Europe’s religious wars were a tragedy, a blot on the history of Christendom. But do these events reflect the essence of Christianity? All this talk of religion causing war raises questions of its own. What do we mean by religion? Every religion that has ever existed? Confucianism, Buddhism, Baha’i, Christian Science, Jehovah’s Witnesses? And the religion-war connection assumes that religion has little connection to truth. Any unique, authentic, honest-to-goodness divine revelation isn’t even on the critics’ radar screen. Nor is the question asked, Is violence imbedded in this particular religious tradition, or is it utterly inconsistent with that particular religion?

Those who (rightly) critique the Crusades as morally misguided will go further to lump the Crusades with Islamic jihad. Doing so is a mistake, and I can only sketch out the generalities here. The Arabic term jihad means “struggle,” which can encompass inner, intellectual, or moral struggle as well as militant, violent struggle. However, the more traditional Islamic understanding of jihad is the violent kind that has characterized the sweep of Islam’s history; there’s little support for jihad as mere spiritual/internal struggle.

Even if we compare the Crusades with militant, aggressive Islamic jihad, the Crusades come out looking considerably better:

The Crusades (1095–1291)

Jihad in Islam

The Crusades lasted about two hundred years.

Jihad has been ongoing for more than thirteen hundred years.

The Crusades have been criticized as the beginning of imperialism.

Muhammad’s imperialistic jihad expeditions began more than five hundred years prior to the Crusades.

The Crusades began as an effort to recapture from Muslims land once occupied by Christians.

Jihad began with the intent to take Christianized territory never occupied by Muslims, to establish the umma (Islamic community).

Jesus, in whose name the Crusades were fought, did not teach or exemplify violence against those who refused his message.

Muhammad not only preached violence against nonbelievers but also engaged in it himself in over sixty aggressive military campaigns.

The earliest followers of Jesus and those who wrote the New Testament didn’t advocate violence. In its earliest centuries, the politically powerless Christian faith expanded through deeds of love and communicating the life-changing news of Christ.

The Qur’an includes many militant, aggressive texts. After Muhammad’s death, Islam was extended far and wide through violence. It overran previously Christianized areas and regularly posed a threat to established Christendom (e.g., Spain, France, Vienna).

Consider the comments of Bernard Lewis, the leading Western scholar on Islam. He nicely summarizes the significant differences between Islamic jihad and the Crusades—despite both being waged as holy wars against infidel enemies for the true religion:

The Crusade is a late development in Christian history and, in a sense, marks a radical departure from basic Christian values as expressed in the Gospels. Christendom had been under attack since the seventh century, and had lost vast territories to Muslim rule; the concept of holy war, more commonly a just war, was familiar since antiquity. Yet in the long struggle between Islam and Christendom, the Crusade was late, limited, and of relatively brief duration. Jihad is present from the beginning of Islamic history—in scripture, in the life of the Prophet, and in the actions of his companions and immediate successors. It has continued throughout Islamic history and retains its appeal to the present day. The word crusade derives of course from the cross [Latin, crux] and originally denoted a holy war for Christianity. But in the Christian world it has long since lost that meaning.… Jihad too is used in a variety of senses, but unlike crusade it has retained its original, primary meaning.

Critics of the Crusades or the Inquisition are certainly correct that the Christian shouldn’t advocate atrocities or execution for heresy in the name of Jesus. And we should ask the critics, “Why select these anti-Christian events as exhibits A and B for the Christian faith rather than looking to the example and teachings of Jesus himself, not to mention Francis of Assisi, Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa, William Wilberforce, and other Christian peacemakers?” Indeed, atrocity and theological reigns of terror carried out in Jesus’s name oppose all that Jesus stood for in his ministry.[1]

What about Buddhism?

Many of us see Buddhism as the outlier on the global religious scene. If Islam and Christianity conjure up visions of jihads and Crusades, Buddhism evokes peaceful meditation. No dragon here. But if we are shocked by the tactics of ISIS, we must also be appalled by the violence against Rohingya Muslims in Buddhist-majority Myanmar.

When the soldiers reached Hasina’s village, they held her and the other women at gunpoint while they executed the men and boys. Then they led the women and girls, five at a time, toward a hut. “I was trying to hide my baby under my scarf, but they saw her leg,” Hasina recalled. “They grabbed my baby by the leg and threw her onto the fire.” After beating and raping the women, the soldiers shut the door and set fire to the hut. Doctors Without Borders estimated that nine thousand Rohingya, including a thousand children, died after attacks like this. The genocide continues as I write.

A 2018 New York Times op-ed entitled “Why Are We Surprised When Buddhists Are Violent?” reminded us that there is “no shortage of historical examples of violence in Buddhist societies.” The article cites Sri Lanka’s civil war from 1983 to 2009, which was fueled by “specifically Buddhist nationalism”; violence in modern Thailand; violence within the Dalai Lama’s own sect; and “a growing body of scholarly literature on the martial complicity of Buddhist institutions in World War II-era Japanese nationalism.” The point is not that Buddhism is particularly violence inducing. Millions of Buddhists lead peaceful lives. But if we think of Buddhism as a religion free of blood, we deceive ourselves, and we will overlook Buddhist-perpetrated violence—particularly when targeted against Muslims. The mindful dragon can breathe fire too.

The 2016 Martin Scorsese film Silence drew our attention to another counterintuitive rearing of the dragon’s head. We tend to romanticize traditional Eastern religions. But Silence gave voice to the persecution of Christians (European-origin and Japanese) at the hands of the Shinto-Buddhist government in seventeenth-century Japan. Tens of thousands of Christians were executed in ways so atrocious that martyr accounts struggled to describe them. Violence of this scale and brutality should be branded on our consciousness. And yet we have forgotten. Indeed, our collective amnesia regarding the massacre of Christians in seventeenth-century Japan contrasts sharply with our vivid memory of the Crusades, five hundred years earlier. The persecution of Christians in Japan is another square peg in the round hole of our stereotypes.

The rest of this book could excavate the mound of violence by religious people and barely scratch its surface. To be sure, some dragons would breath more fire per capita than others: violence perpetrated in the name of Islam is hard to miss, both in the fourteen hundred years since its founding and in the contemporary world. But in an analysis of violent history, no major world religion emerges without blood on its hands. While Jews have lived for centuries as a persecuted Diaspora, enduing oppression and violence at the hands of majorities, the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict will give most of us pause before we declare the Jewish record violence-free.

McLaughlin, R. (2019). Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World’s Largest Religion (pp. 79–81). Crossway.[1]Copan, P. (2011). Is God a Moral Monster? Making Sense of the Old Testament God (pp. 202–204). Baker Books.