At the laundromat today, I finished reading Thomas Asbridge’s The First Crusade: A New History. It’s an excellent and readable history, which I highly recommend. Reading this history spurred me to think about parallels between the spirituality of the First Crusade and today’s “culture wars.”
The First Crusade was spurred, in part, by Pope Urban II, whose fiery sermon delivered in 1095 promised “eternal rewards” to all who participated in a holy war to defend eastern Christians against Islam and recapture Jerusalem. Asbridge is unique among modern historians in that he does not paint the first crusaders as merely a rapacious mob of disenchanted nobles seeking plunder. Although they were indeed often rapacious and greedy, Asbridge argues that the first crusaders persevered mainly because of their “[i]ntense spiritual conviction.” But this conviction was not so much in the justice of their cause as in their belief that crusading valor would lead to salvation. Thus, Asbridge concludes, the crusaders “suffered the horrors of the crusade to fulfil and intimate and ultimately self-serving need: to overcome their desperate fear of damnation and to emerge, purified, at the gates of heaven.”
This mixture of violence and piety is illustrated starkly in Asbridge’s discussion of the sack of Jerusalem. On July 15, 1099, after years of bloody campaigning, the crusaders had reached and captured Jerusalem. Once the city was taken, the crusading armies engaged in mass pillage and slaughter of combatants and civilians alike. Yet, even as they butchered Jersualem’s inhabitants and stole their possessions, the crusaders marched to the Holy Sepluchre of Jerusalem (which marks the spot where Christ is supposed to have been crucified) in tears of praise. As Asbrige describes it, quoting a contemporary source, “[I]n a moment that is perhaps the most vivid distillation of the crusading experience, they came, still covered in their enemies’ blood, weighed down with booty, ‘rejoicing and weeping from excessive gladness to worship at the Sepluchre of our Saviour Jesus.'”
The incongruity of this scene is beyond comprehension for most of us who claim to follow Jesus today. And that incongruity is disturbing. Are there times when we rejoice though we are at least figuratively covered in our enemies’ blood? Are our deeper motives in fighting the culture wars sometimes largely self-serving? Do the ghosts of the first crusaders haunt even the phrase “culture wars?”
Thankfully most Christians today abhor crusading violence. But it seems to me that some of the crusading spirit still survive in the angry rhetoric and aggressive tactics we often bring to the so-called “culture wars.” Even the unfortunate imagery of a culture “war” hearkens back to the crusading ideal. I do believe we as Christians are called to be “salt and light” in society, and that we must take our place in the public square. Our warfare, however, is “not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” (Eph. 6:12). We must always remember that our interactions with others, even over the values we hold dear, are rooted in love, not war.