The crusades: time for another?

National Review, August 9, 1985 by Harold O.J. Brown

Two of Christendom's favorite hymns, often used at services of Holy Communion, are "Jesus, Thou Joy of Loving Hearts" and "Jesus, King Most Wonderful." Both were written by the great medieval monk and theologian, Bernard of Clairvaux (1091-1153). Not many of those who sing Bernard's hymns know the name of their author, and even fewer know that he was the leading agitator behind the Second Crusade (1147-49). The thought might make them uncomfortable.

The Crusades do not enjoy a good press in the modern West--although the very existence of the modern West owes a great deal to them. Even among Christians the Crusades have a poor reputation. Of those bloody was fought between 1096 and 1270, chiefly but not solely in the Holy Land, Jerry Falwell, for instance, has said that they were "bloody aberrations . . . in no way representative of Biblical Christianity." He even goes so far as to classify them with some of the far-out cults and the "Jim Jones tragedy" as "aberrations of Christianity." Many Christians share Reverend Falwell's distaste.

Yet even if the Crusades were not "representative of Biblical Christianity," they were certainly representative of Christendom, of what we call Christian civilization. They inspired and enrolled many of the best men and minds of their day, including the saintly King Louis IX of France (who died of illness in 1270 during the Eighth Crusade, the last of the true medieval Crusades.)

In the long run, the Crusades were a disaster. The Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem, established in 1029, survived for barely a century. The Fourth Crusade, in 1202-04, captured not Jerusalem but constantinople, until then the first city of Christendom and the capital of the millennial Byzantine Empire. The fall of Constantinople to Western Christians so weakened the Christian Byzantine Empire that it rapidly fell prey to the Turks and finally expired in 1453, opening the door of Europe to the Moslems, whom Byzantium had held off for eight hundred years.

The fact that the Crusades ultimately ended in failure was a setback to the prestige of the medieval papacy and indeed to the Christian Church as a whole. This is one reason why many of us who are Protestants would like to blame them on Catholicism and to act as though they were no concern of ours. And of course crusading was not justified by Biblical doctrine and is not part of the program of any serious Biblical Christian today. Nevertheless, the Crusades were a primary preoccupation of Christendom for two centuries, and Christians should not dismiss them out of hand or brush them off with blanket condemnation. It is just possible that the medieval Crusaders knew something about the region adn culture they were invading that we have forgotten.

Dar al Islam

MANY MODERN Christians reject the Crusades with horror, believing they were an attempt to make converts by force. In fact, they were an attempt to conquer the Holy Land--an attempt that was, for about a century, a complete and surprising success. The Crusades were provoked not by missionary zeal, but by religious repression of Christians in the Holy Land--residents and pilgrims--by their Moslem rulers. Should the Moslem Arabs once again take control of Israel and begin to persecute the Jews living there, would we be surprised to see world Jewry organize militarily to rescue them? In that light, the First Crusade, if not justified, is at least as defensible as many other wars waged by the nations of the world, Christian and non-Christian alike.

A second fundamental misunderstanding is the idea that the Crusades are responsible for current Moslem hostility to Christianity. Missionaries in Moslem lands often explain their meager success in these terms, and indeed, after Mehmet Ali Agca tried to kill Pope John Paul II, some extremist Moslem media defended his action on the ground that the Pope is the "King of the Crusaders" and a menace to Islam. There is no doubt that the Crusades--now more than seven hundred years in the past--furnish a pretext for Moslem hostility. But to say they are the reason for Moslem hostility is to betray a fundamental ignorance of more than a thousand years of Moslem history.

The Crusades were not the cause of Moslem aggressiveness, but a reaction to it. From the very first years of its existence, Islam has been a militaristic, aggressive religion. According to Moslem doctrine, the Moslem belongs to the dar al Islam, the house of Islam, while all infidels--including Christians and Jews--belong to the dar al harb, the house of war. It is the Moslem's duty to expand the house of Islam and to pare down the house of war. Islam conquered the richest and most populous parts of the Christian Roman Empire within a century of its founding by Mohammed in 622. The conquering Moslems were finally stopped at the gates of Constantinople in 678, but they penetrated in the West as far as northern France, where they were defeated by Charles Martel, the grandfather of Charlemagne, at Tours in 732.