On Tuesday, the so-called Islamic
State released a slickly produced video showing a Jordanian pilot being burned
alive in a steel cage. On Wednesday, the United Nations issued a report
detailing various “mass executions of boys, as well as reports of beheadings,
crucifixions of children, and burying children alive” at the hands of the
Islamic State.
And on Thursday, President Obama
seized the opportunity of the National Prayer Breakfast to forthrightly
criticize the “terrible deeds” . . . committed “in the name of Christ.”
“Humanity has been grappling with
these questions throughout human history,” Obama said, referring to the
ennobling aspects of religion as well as the tendency of people to “hijack”
religions for murderous ends.
"And lest we get on our high
horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the
Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of
Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified
in the name of Christ."
Obama’s right. Terrible things have
been done in the name of Christianity. I have yet to meet a Christian who
denies this.
But, as odd as it may sound for a
guy named Goldberg to point it out, the Inquisition and the Crusades aren’t the
indictments Obama thinks they are. For starters, the Crusades — despite their
terrible organized cruelties — were a defensive war.
“The Crusades could more accurately
be described as a limited, belated and, in the last analysis, ineffectual
response to the jihad — a failed attempt to recover by a Christian holy war
what had been lost to a Muslim holy war,” writes Bernard Lewis, the greatest
living English-language historian of Islam.
As for the Inquisition, it needs to
be clarified that there was no single “Inquisition,” but many. And most were
not particularly nefarious. For centuries, whenever the Catholic Church launched
an inquiry or investigation, it mounted an “inquisition,” which means pretty
much the same thing.
Historian Thomas Madden, director of
the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Saint Louis University,
writes that the “Inquisition was not born out of desire to crush diversity or
oppress people; it was rather an attempt to stop unjust executions.”
In medieval Europe, heresy was a
crime against the state, Madden explains. Local nobles, often greedy,
illiterate, and eager to placate the mob, gleefully agreed to execute people
accused of witchcraft or some other forms of heresy. By the 1100s, such
accusations were causing grave injustices (in much the same way that
apparatchiks in Communist countries would level charges of disloyalty in order
to have rivals “disappeared”).
“The Catholic Church’s response to
this problem was the Inquisition,” Madden explains, “first instituted by Pope
Lucius III in 1184.”
I cannot defend everything done
under the various Inquisitions — especially in Spain — because some of it was
indefensible. But there’s a very important point to make here that transcends
the scoring of easy, albeit deserved, points against Obama’s approach to
Islamic extremism (which he will not call Islamic): Christianity, even in its
most terrible days, even under the most corrupt popes, even during the most
unjustifiable wars, was indisputably a force for the improvement of man.
Christianity ended greater
barbarisms under pagan Rome. The church often fell short of its ideals — which
all human things do — but its ideals were indisputably a great advance for
humanity. Similarly, while some rationalized slavery and Jim Crow in the U.S.
by invoking Christianity, it was ultimately the ideals of Christianity itself
that dealt the fatal blow to those institutions. Just read any biography of
Martin Luther King Jr. if you don’t believe me.
When Obama alludes to the evils of
medieval Christianity, he fails to acknowledge the key word: “medieval.” What
made medieval Christianity backward wasn’t Christianity but medievalism.
It is perverse that Obama feels
compelled to lecture the West about not getting too judgmental on our “high
horse” over radical Islam’s medieval barbarism in 2015 because of
Christianity’s medieval barbarism in 1215.
It’s also insipidly hypocritical.
President Obama can’t bring himself to call the Islamic State “Islamic,” but
he’s happy to offer a sermon about Christianity’s alleged crimes at the
beginning of the last millennium.
We are all descended from cavemen
who broke the skulls of their enemies with rocks for fun or profit. But that
hardly mitigates the crimes of a man who does the same thing today. I see no
problem judging the behavior of the Islamic State and its apologists from the
vantage point of the West’s high horse, because we’ve earned the right to sit
in that saddle.
© 2015 Tribune Content Agency,
LLC
