The Crusades once again become a rhetorical battle in American politics. Sigh. The cause this time was President Obama's speech at the National Prayer Breakfast. From The New York Times’ “Obama, Trying to Add Context to Speech, Faces Backlash Over Crusades’”:
President Obama personally added a reference to the Crusades in his speech this week at the National Prayer Breakfast, aides said, hoping to add context and nuance to his condemnation of Islamic terrorists by noting that people also “committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.”
But by purposely drawing the fraught historical comparison on Thursday, Mr. Obama ignited a firestorm on television and social media about the validity of his observations and the roots of religious conflicts that raged more than 800 years ago.
On Twitter, amateur historians angrily accused Mr. Obama of refusing to acknowledge Muslim aggression that preceded the Crusades. Others criticized him for drawing simplistic analogies across centuries. Many suggested that the president was reaching for ways to excuse or minimize the recent atrocities committed by Islamic extremists.
Mr. Obama’s remarks were certainly silly. The Crusades were a historical phenomena that were spread out over centuries and which involved the interaction of many distinct power centers in Europe and beyond. Even talking about the Crusades as THE Crusades doesn’t do them historical judgment. They are multifaceted and complex. For that reason, comparing them to ISIL is a silly rhetorical ploy.
ISIL is a relatively recent event. ISIL can be just a flash in the pan once everything is said and done. Furthermore, as compared to the heterogenous factions within (almost) any single Christian crusade, it is as close to a single entity as one can get, being unified by a militant Islamist ideology, and under the command of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. ISIL, indeed, is fighting as a single entity to establish an Islamic Caliphate. Overall, we really should really wait until events play themselves out before comparing ISIL to any previous historical phenomena, let alone the Crusades.
Is Mr. Obama therefore wrong in what he said? No. Christians should be impartial enough to recognize that people have done great evil in the name of Christ, just as people have done evil in the name of anything else that is good in the world. What is evil if not the corruption of the good? Christians have done great evil, but that’s something that Christians should learn from each and every day.
What Christians shouldn’t be doing in response to Mr. Obama’s remarks is to respond to them with a siege-mentality, which takes a turtled stance on the issue based on the pig-headed notion that the rest of society is out to get them. At Catholic Memes's "ISIS versus Crusades," one can see such a siege-mentality in the knee-jerk reaction that the Crusades were everywhere and anywhere a glorious endeavor meant to defend Christendom. It’s a laughable response, really, and betrays a sensitivity to inevitable criticism that no impartial persons should have. Unfortunately, the world isn’t black and white, nor is it Crusades versus ISIS.
In the long run, the siege-mentality does most harm to the people entertaining it because it reveals that they are sensitive about their beliefs, and why would anyone who is confident in their beliefs be sensitive to criticism?
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