History Ain't Simple

In all of my years of reading the title of this post represents one of only a very few solid conclusions that I have been led to believe without qualm. Nothing is as easy as we would like it to be: no one, with very few exceptions, is either as noble or as villainous as we have either been conditioned to believe or just sort of implicitly feel. John Calvin was a great man—one of my heroes—and he ordered that a heretic be executed in his city of Geneva for advancing anti-Trinitarian views. Does this mean that nothing Calvin wrote is of any value? Of course not. But it is something you have to deal with when praising (justly) Calvin. Did the Founding Fathers of this nation establish our country on largely Christian principles, having in mind the structure of our nation to be contingent upon Christian believers? Yep. Did a lot of them believe heterodox things about Christianity or God or merely utilize Christian morality as a convenient rallying point? Yep. Which is merely to say that they were not twenty-first century evangelicals.

I was thinking about this one solid historical dogma—nothing is simple—as I read the introduction to Thomas Asbridge’s single volume history of the Crusades, The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land (on whose authority, sir?). Asbridge is very careful in refusing to attribute pat motives to either the Christian or Muslim factions that fought the two century war for control of the Levant.

In other words, there is no one explanation for Christian aggression at the end of the eleventh century. Today we seem to ascribe to the Crusades the worst possible motivations, making the Church out to be greedy, land-hungry, manipulative and bent on destroying the cultured Muslims of the Near East, even when there is little evidence for this claim. We choose to take Saladin, the genuinely noble Muslim commander, as representative of all the Muslim commanders, ignoring the hellacious warlord Zangi, who would kill any Muslim, Byzantine, or Frank in brutal fashion for the slightest offense.

But there are charitable possibilities: Muslim armies did, after all, conquer Jerusalem from the Byzantines in the seventh century, and it is not crazy to imagine that Christians genuinely wanted to recover control of their holiest sites. There is also some evidence that Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land were being attacked, robbed, and even murdered by Muslim groups before being able to reach Jerusalem. St. Augustine had theorized the possible circumstances justifying a war—proclamation by a legitimate authority, a just cause, and right intention—paving the way for popes and other leaders of the Christian world to advance a military cause in good faith.

Another charitable option is just really bad theology. Medieval preoccupation and concern for avoiding hell was ubiquitous. The power of the pope, never a secure hold at this time, enlisted their belief that they were spiritually responsible for the fate of every soul under their care. Promoting a holy war that functionally cleanses one of the guilt of sin could then be seen as an altruistic act, opening up the door to salvation for more and more members of the flock. While someone like me reads this and scoffs and mutters under my breath a quick prayer of thanks for Martin Luther, granting the intense fear at the time of the fires of hell and the uncertainty of salvation, it only makes sense to advance surefire ways to guarantee one’s spot in the celestial realm (believers of various stripes believe the same thing to today).

In any event, whether one subscribes to a charitable explanation or merely chooses to believe that all Christians of the time were bloodthirsty murderers bent on conquest, less subjective elements, sometimes referred to as facts, throw a bit of cold water on the Church=bad equation. For one, the goal of the sanctioned Crusades was limited: reclamation of the Holy Land. The project, as Asbridge notes, was not “to eradicate Islam, or even convert Muslims to the Christian faith. Rather, it was a consequence of Islam’s dominion over the Holy Land and the sacred city of Jerusalem” (17).

Whether or not this goal is noble, and I really don’t have much of a dog in this fight, we have to be careful, self-righteous as we tend to become at a distant historical remove, to not always assume the worst either because that is what we have been taught or that is what is most easy to believe. Every Christian at one point or another has been asked to defend their fidelity to a faith that propagated the Crusades. This is fair enough as it goes, but the next time someone asks me for my defense I am going to simply ask them just what it is they know about the Crusades. If their answer is something other than Church=bad than I will engage them on the subject. If not, they are not really looking to be convinced anyway. It can be snug, after all, to have one’s head in the sand.