RELIGIOUS SMOKE (part one): The Crusades

When I ask my friend Jay for Vietnam stories his countenance changes. Jay always smiles (except for when he is laughing), but mention Vietnam and his face drops, his eyes lose focus. This man who is always ready to tell a story avoids the subject.

Vietnam was a grueling 25-year ideological war that undid men, demoralized a nation, changed the American psyche and altered political views concerning future international intervention.

"I love the smell of napalm in the morning," exclaims Lt. Col. Kilgore
(Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now)

In a sense, the Crusades (1095-1291 A.D.) were a European “Vietnam” lasting not 25-years, but 196 years! These religious wars set the stage for the current European allergic reaction to religion.
As you saw in my previous blog (and possibly on Jan. 13, 2006 when I originally posted this entry), three factors—religious carnage, atheistic philosophy, high civilization—form a triple-thick, all-but-impervious, full-body armor worn by a vast majority of Europeans. This armor forms a plausibility structure—the unquestioned set of preconceived “givens”—in the European culture that act as an irrational, unconscious filter through which all ideas about God and religion pass.

For example, years ago I was helping my son prepare for a 4th grade history test. He faithfully copied down the teacher’s notes about the Crusades which stated,

“INFIDELS: for the Christians the infidels were the Muslims.
INFIDELS: for the Muslims the infidels were the Christians.”

The valid conclusion is that religious war is absurd and bloody.
A second invalid conclusion that most Europeans adopt, however, is that one is best off keeping one’s distance both from religion (since both Islam and Christendom* committed atrocities) and from the Christian God who, in their imagination, somewhat resembles Mars, the god of war, capricious and gory.

*(Here I use "Christendom" as the Church wedded with political power and as a doppelganger of Christianity—the community of believers who have entered into a loving, obedient relationship with Christ through faith.)

But what were the Crusades all about?
Was it sort of like Indiana Jones’ quest for the Holy Grail?!

Europe was Christendom and Christendom was Europe. So when the Muslims seized the Church of the Holy Sepulcher it was up to the Europeans to retaliate because, well, Deus volt (“God wills it”); it was unequivocally assumed that God was on Europe’s side. The nine Crusades, therefore, were led by French, English, Austro-Hungarian kings and Holy Roman Emperors to retake Jerusalem from Muslims (see the film Kingdom of Heaven).

In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, do you remember the bit about the “Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch”? It goes like this:

King Arthur: How does it... um... how does it work?
Sir Lancelot: I know not, my liege.
King Arthur: Consult the Book of Armaments.
Brother Maynard: Armaments, chapter two, verses nine through twenty-one.
Cleric: [reading] And Saint Attila raised the hand grenade up on high, saying, "O [god], bless this thy hand grenade, that with it thou mayst blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy." And the [god] did grin. And the people did feast upon the lambs and sloths, and carp and anchovies, and orangutans and breakfast cereals, and fruit-bats and large chu...
Brother Maynard: Amen.
All: Amen.

"Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who, being naughty in my sight, shall snuff it." (from The Holy Grail)

We chuckle and even belly laugh at Monty Python’s Holy Grail because we take it as a fictitious comedy. But Europeans know that this is parody based on the historical Crusades, the cynicism having deep roots in the European mind.

For example, St. Bernard who initiated the Second Crusade, supported by the theological inference of the day, stated, "The Christian glories in the death of a pagan, because thereby Christ himself is glorified." And thus under the banner of “God wills it” coffers were emptied, multitudes were slaughtered and in the end Jerusalem was lost to the Muslims anyway. As I said, a 196-year European Vietnam.

St. Bernard of Clairvaux was, by the way, born in Dijon (where I live)

Today there is a resurgence of interest in spirituality especially among European youth. And though I believe many Europeans would like to believe in the Christian God, the triple whammy of the futility of religious war, carnage in the name of the Christian God, and a fear of once again being duped by religion, hinders these Europeans from knowing Jesus in the present, Jesus who preached, “Love the Lord your God…. Love your neighbor….” And “by this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one for another.”

The smoke of the Crusades obscures the spiritual sight of many Europeans; Christendom’s bloodshed hinders them from seeing the true light of Christ who warned of atrocities like the Crusades. Jesus predicted that there would be killing done in his name and that the perpetrators would claim to be “offering a service to God. They will do such thing because they have not known the Father or me. I have told you this, so that when the time comes you will remember that I warned you” (John 16:2-4).

But Europeans having been deprived of Jesus’ words by the Roman Church for centuries and do not remember his warning.

Unfortunately next time things will grow bleaker for the cause of the Christian religion. So stay tuned for: RELIGIOUS SMOKE (part two) — the Inquisition.