Stark's Book on Crusades is Not P-C

Ecumenical News International
Author expects flak for work asking: Did Crusades get a bad press?

By Tiffany Stanley
(ENI/RNS)--The Crusades, when Christians tried for two centuries to oust Muslims from the Holy Land, left over a million dead, with territory lost and gained and lost again - all in the name of Jesus.

These days, Christians are not so quick to call the Crusades the golden age of Christendom, but a millennium later, their memory still reverberates.

Even so, Rodney Stark, 75, a professor of social sciences at Baylor University, a Baptist-affiliated college in Waco, Texas, says the crusaders were not all that bad, and certainly not barbaric, greedy warmongers, Religion News Service reports.

In his new book "God's Battalions: The Case for the Crusades," the 1996 nominee for the Pulitzer Prize depicts soldiers who truly believed their military service under God would cover over a multitude of sins - namely all that murdering and marauding required of them in the tumultuous Middle Ages.

"I get tired of people apologising for the Crusades, like Christians were a bunch of dirty looters that went over there and killed everybody," Stark said. "It just wasn't true."

Of course, apologies on the subject have been many. Pope John Paul II expressed regret for the medieval violence in 2000, the same year Wheaton College, alma mater of preacher Billy Graham - who made evangelistic "crusades" famous - changed its mascot from the Crusaders to the Thunder.

Stark argues that Muslims asked for it, that the Crusades were the first military response to Muslim terrorists and their looming, advancing Islamic empire. "It wasn't like they were harmless, little people minding their own business and tending their sheep," Stark said.

Indeed, Islamic powers were mighty before the Crusades, and bounced back after Christian attempts at conquest ultimately failed.

"I suspect that Muslims will hate the book, and I'm sorry about that," Stark said. "That's just the way the world is. I make no apologies or real accusations."

Stark, a sociologist of religion, admits he is no historian of the brutal battles waged between 1095 and 1291. The one-time journalist enjoys making academic writing accessible for popular audiences, and he said his book is merely synthesising current research by others.

Stark balks at the theory, in vogue 30 years ago, that the Crusades were spurred on by the promise of wealth and land. The Crusades were bloody and expensive, he argues, and far from being a profitable, colonial enterprise, they made paupers of princes.

Thomas Madden, professor of medieval history at Saint Louis University, agrees that recent analysis reveals the "crusades were a big money pit." He said it is important to understand the crusaders on their own terms, and like Stark, he sees faith as their primary motivator.

"These were men who lived by the sword," Madden said. "...They were keenly aware of their own sinfulness and their crusade was a way to get around damnation or at least a very long time in purgatory."

Despite noble intentions, the crusading onslaught recalls atrocities like the Holocaust for Jews, said Talal Eid, founder of the Islamic Institute of Boston and commissioner on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.

"The term crusade marks a painful time in the history of my kind, a painful era," Eid said.

Despite that legacy, the word "crusade" resurfaced after both the 11 September 2001 attacks and the intense European colonisation of Muslim lands in previous centuries.

In 2001, former President George W. Bush called his nascent "war on terror" a crusade, alarming critics. Osama Bin Laden, too, has made use of the politically charged term.

"If you look at the fatwas of Osama Bin Laden or al-Qaida against the U.S. or the Western world, these fatwas are always called against crusaders and the Jews," Madden said. "They see the United States and Western Europe as crusaders always."

Stark knows his book will have its critics, including his own academic colleagues. He usually chooses the outsider role, preferring his home office to faculty meetings or campus politics any day.

In Christian circles, it's more of the same. Though he has defended the Lutheran faith of his North Dakota childhood, he is a reluctant Christian apologist.

"Answers of faith are always very complicated for me," Stark said. "I have always been culturally a Christian, committed to Western civilization, but I have to admit in parts of my life, I was only culturally Christian. Slowly, I wrote my way to a more faithful position."

Stark does not worry about how his sympathetic portrayal of crusaders will be handled.

"If you sit there and worry about people misusing your stuff, you're never going to have anything to say," he said. [Copyright ENI Reprinted with permission]

Comments

[Hunter Baker]

I'm a big Rodney Stark fan. I agree that the degree of shame attached to Christians for the Crusades is seriously overstated. When I hear about young evangelicals apologizing for the Crusades, I wonder whether they have any idea what they are really talking about or if they have just heard that the Crusades were a shameful episode.

[bonobo]

Somewhat like Oprah's friend claiming in his book that the RCC burned a continent's population worth of witches at the stake in the Middle Ages?

Here's a question to set the cat among the pigeons: how many witches did the Spanish Inquisition burn?

[Michael]

Here's a question to set the cat among the pigeons: how many witches did the Spanish Inquisition burn?

Contemporary estimates put the figure between 40,000 and 80,000--and not all of those were "witches." Besides, most were tried by secular community courts, not the Inquisition--i.e., not by the Church's authority. And that over the course of 5 centuries: 10,000 every 100 years. A drop in the bucket next to the Holocaust, modern jihad (or even ancient jihad)...or even the Crusades.

But to the point of the Crusades: I always get a kick out of people saying the Crusades were imperialist ventures justified in the name of God. It's one of the frustrations that I've heard so many times that it becomes funny, which is sad. Even Madden is ridiculous: "...their crusade was a way to get around damnation or at least a very long time in purgatory." As compared to the sociopolitical factors of confronting an imperialist Caliphate and securing the Holy Land for pilgrims?

[bonobo]

Not a chance, Michael, did the Spanish Inquisition ever execute that number of people, let alone witches! And five centuries? 1492-1992, for example? Surely the Socialist government that succeeded Franco would have stopped the Autos-da-Fe :)

No offence intended, but...come on, someone with a better answer?

[James the lesser]

I don't have the references with me: I think it may have been from one of Stark's books. I gather that for the Spanish Inquisition, the number of witches killed is probably countable on one hand. IIRC, they had several in prison when an official came from Rome to put things in order--he reviewed the cases and released the suspects. There were more important things to investigate than bogus witches, it seems. Pity they didn't apply similar standards to the rest.

[bonobo]

Now, Jacobus Minor, we're getting closer to the truth! Far more poor unfortunate "witches" were lynched in Reformation Germany than under the two-generation Inquisitorial tyranny that Ferdinand and Isabella unleashed. (By the mid-1500s, the S.I. was a spent force. 500 yrs forsooth!) It's amazing how much of La Legenda Negra persists.

[Ken O'Shaughnessy]

The Spanish Inquisition was not an official RCC body - it was completely under the control of the Spanish crown. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition

[Michael]

Bonobo--

My 40-80,000 number was admittedly a mistake. That was number of trials. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa. But the number of executions? Oh, 1500, max, and not all of them witches. And for what it's worth, the Spanish Inquisition lasted officially from 1478 to 1834, or a total of 356 years. I often read "Inquisition" as a general term, and overlooked the "Spanish" part. Because then we throw in the Medieval Inquisiton, the Portuguese Inquisition and the Roman Inquisition...suddenly, it gets worse, doesn't it?

To be fair, you're right, I just ran with the 40-80,000 number instead of looking specifically for executions.

Ken:

"King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile set up the Spanish Inquisition in 1478 with the approval of Pope Sixtus IV. In contrast to the previous inquisitions, it operated completely under royal authority, though staffed by secular clergy and orders, and independently of the Holy See."

Sorry, but the fact that they had papal approval as well as being staffed by the clergy...the Church had a hand in it. What if Sixtus had said "no"? What if the clergy had washed their hands and shaken the dust off their sandals? Qui tacet consentit; the church was party to the game.

[Margaret]

Wondering where you got those numbers...

[bonobo]

That was number of trials. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa. But the number of executions? Oh, 1500, max, and not all of them witches

Sure, Michael, I don't dispute the complicity. But I selected out the "witches" carefully. The S.I. in its first, most virulent, form targeted Their Catholic Majesties' enemies of state: the Muslims and Jews who had been told accept Baptism or leave. Of witches they executed a handful. F & I were hardly cold in their graves when the execution rate dropped below the rates of execution any where in Europe for regular criminal offenses (like stealing an apple, for which a child was apparently hung in England in the 1700s).

The whole point about this excursion was to illustrate the wild exaggerations that abound, especially if you don't look where the devils hang out: the details!