#STRask - Are the Crusades Proof That Christians Are Evil?

Episode Date: May 16, 2024

Questions about how to respond to someone who says the Crusades are proof Christians are evil, the facts around the church burning people at the stake for saying the world is not the center of the universe, and whether that history damages the witness of the church. How do you answer someone who says the Crusades are proof that Christians are evil? What are the facts around the church burning people at the stake for saying the world is round and not the center of the universe? Does this prove the unreliability of biblical authority and damage the historic witness of the church?

This is Amy Hall and Greg Kokel, and thank you for joining us on another episode of the Hashtag STR Ask podcast from Stand to Reason. Hi there. Hi, Greg. Well, in our last episode, we talked about ways that people misunderstand who Christians are and think the worst of them. Distortions of justice, according to critical theory. So we're going to continue along this path a little bit. Here's a question from Rebecca. How do you answer someone that says the Crusades are proof that Christians are evil?

How do you answer someone that says the Crusades are proof that Christians are evil? Well, I'm curious. A whole bunch of things come to mind when that is raised. What's interesting is somebody has to go back a thousand years to find a significant example of what they consider to be corporate Christian evil. Now, of course, during the Reformation, there were other problems, too. And you have Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition. The numbers there were quite a bit smaller. But there are a number of things going on here. That's one observation, all right? If you look nowadays at the way churches are dealing with human need, I'm in different churches almost every week. And there is the information in the bulletin and announcements.

information in the bulletin and announcements. There are all kinds of things that Christians are doing in communities to help other people who are not Christians meet pressing needs in their lives. There's all kinds of things virtually every church is doing. They're community-minded. It's characteristic. And by the way, this has historically been the case. The world is literate principally because of Christian missionaries. They went to bizarre climes—I'm talking 14th, 15th, 16th century, where a lot of them died on the way getting there— to take the gospel and God's Word to people who did not have a language that was written down, and God's Word to people who did not have a language that was written down, and so they had to write the language down and then teach people how to read and write so they could read the Bible that they translated then in their language. And that's how people became literate. Now, I'm not just making this up. This is the flow of history. This is how literacy spread, and all of the major

universities that popped up around Europe, and certainly in this country, the first 100 in this country, virtually every single one of them was established with religious purpose. Now, people may not appreciate the religious purpose because that's not their view, but the point I'm making is, look at the salutary effect on the culture that Christianity has had. The entire world practiced slavery, but it was only in the West, Europe, and then America, that slavery was abolished. And so, I'm just hitting highlights. There's a book that I have. I have a couple of them. One is called Under the Influence. Don't know the authors there. Then I have another one that's like it.

And then who is it? The historian Douglas Murray. Maybe he's written or who's written a lot is the other fellow. He's dead now. He wrote about the Crusades. He wrote about Christianity. Oh, I know who you're thinking of. Rodney Stark. Rodney Stark. And when you look at the—if you look at history, it turns out that whatever evil people thought

the Crusades represented, and in some measure it did, it pales by comparison to the massive good that Christianity practiced by Christians who were practicing real Christianity brought to the world. And that's a distinction that needs to be made, by the way. When people bring up some things like this, I have a question I want to ask them or a statement I want to make. You know, I was really interested in atheism for a while, I'd say to them, and I was really quite taken with it, and I thought I would adopt it, and then I discovered all these murderers who are atheists. Now, of course, I'm trying to get a response, and the response properly would be, just because there were murderers that were atheists doesn't mean atheism promotes murder. Okay? And in the same way, just because there are Christians who

are acting in an unchristian way doesn't mean Christianity teaches what they were doing. That's what it means to act in an unchristian way. Now, I've just offered a bunch of general stuff regarding this issue. Let's get specific with the Crusades. Why did the Crusades start? And Rodney Stark has written a book about this. There's more than one, obviously. What was the incentive to the Crusades? This is an example of people hearing things and not understanding what they're talking about and just repeating them. Well, look at the Crusades. Yeah, the Crusades, what about them? Well what they're talking about and just repeating them. Well, look at the Crusades. Yeah, the Crusades. What about them? Well, they're awful. You mean the Muslims were awful? No, I mean the Christians. Well, wait a minute. The Crusades started because Muslims had

forcibly taken over the Middle East, including the Holy Land, and were massacring Christians. the Middle East, including the Holy Land, and were massacring Christians. That's how they started. Now, there were multiple crusades, and there was a lot of gruesome things that happened to and fro as people were moving back and forth, and persecution of Jews and all kinds of stuff that were not justified by Christianity. But the reason the Crusades started was a response to the horrific atrocities that Muslim hordes were guilty of in the Middle East. So, are you equally condemning of Islam, which their behavior was characteristic of Islam, where crusades and profligate battle and spreading the faith through bloodshed was not part of Christianity. The Muslims took over the entire Mediterranean region within 100 years after the death of Muhammad in 632. By 732, 100 years later, they were stopped at the Battle of Tours in their expansion,

and that was in the middle of France. Okay, that was all warfare. It took Christians three centuries to do the same thing, and the only blood they shed was their own. That's the difference between the two. Okay, so I'm just trying to put these things in perspective. When the Crusades started, it was an attempt to stop this massacre of Christians in the Holy Land. Now, there are multiple Crusades, and some

were ill-advised. One of the last ones was the Children's Crusade. That was stupid. Nevertheless, notice what initiated the Crusades is a response to Muslim violence. Secondly, no crusade was ever justified by any teaching of the Scripture. Okay, so you can't lay the disaster of some of the Crusades, the moral disaster, on Christianity, but rather on misled Christians. However, you can lay the destruction of the Muslims on Islam because that was part, jihad was part of their theology. And for the first hundred years after Muhammad died, Muslims carried out the same practices that Muhammad carried out and encouraged his people to pursue. And that's why we have a hundred years like that, and they

took over the whole Mediterranean region. So, in this particular case, this is a largely adjust-the-facts-ma'am kind of tactic. Let's look at exactly what took place here. And the other half of it is, there's a difference between what Christianity teaches and what Christians do. And we ask people to judge Christianity and Christ and the teachings of Christ and the New Testament, not on what errant Christians do, maybe with good intentions or even proper intentions, which I think is true about the first crusade and maybe subsequent ones soon after. It did get out

of control, no question, but that's not a reflection on Christianity. That's a reflection on human beings. Human beings get out of control. And by the way, if you look at the 20th century, it was the bloodiest century in the history of the world. And Christians had nothing to do with causing that. de facto atheistic leadership, totalitarian governments that was responsible for the massacre of millions, hundreds of millions of people. And in that case, when it comes to a materialistic worldview, there is nobody above you. If let's say you have, you're a leader of a country, there's nobody above you. There's no standard of morality above you. There's no judgment above you. And vast numbers of people to obtain his own idea of utopia or whatever it is. Like Lenin or Mao or Stalin or Pol Pot or even Hitler in his own way.

Right. So in that case, there's nothing in their worldview to prevent them. That doesn't mean everyone will do it. That's right. Because many people are trained very well by their parents to treat people well. Or deeply influenced by a Christian ethic in Western civilization. That's another part of it. But there's nothing in their worldview that's constraining them. That's right. Whereas in the Christian worldview, there is something constraining you if you take it seriously. Now, one thing I think people misunderstand about the Crusades is they think that Christians were going there to convert people by the sword. Like they were going there to force people to convert, and that never happened there. There were certainly certain things where people were murdered and places were sacked and all sorts of things that were terrible.

But the purpose was never to go there to convert people to Christianity. So that might be something you'd want to clarify. And then finally, I would say, Greg, you noted that this isn't a problem with Christians. This is a problem with human beings. I would just say, yeah, we are evil. Christianity acknowledges that. That's the whole point. This is why we need Jesus, because we sin and we fall into all sorts of sins and we're deceived by things. And obviously we are being sanctified as we go, but we're fallen people and we sin. So I'm glad you brought up the idea that we're evil because this is why we need Jesus. And here's what Jesus did for that.

So that's actually a great opening for you to talk about the gospel because if it weren't for the fact that we were evil, we wouldn't need the gospel. Okay, Greg, let's go into a question from Amy. What are the facts around the church burning people at the stake for saying the world was round and not the center of the universe because the church thought that contradicted the Bible. Someone is using this to justify the unreliability of biblical authority and the historic witness of the church. Well, I'm not sure what they're speaking of. I don't know that. I mean, this little piece of information is news to me. I'm not saying it didn't happen, but I have never heard of anybody being burned at the stake for that reason. People were burned at the stake for getting the Bible translated into the vernacular. That happened during and just before the Reformation period. There was one case where

they executed a Christian. I'm trying to remember who it was. And then later, they took his bones out and they burned his bones, you know, and take that, you know. So there were executions, even among Reformers, there were executions. But I've never heard of people being burned at the stake for that reason. Copernicus is the one who popularized that idea. Galileo follows. The center of the universe. But I don't know of anyone ever for saying that the world was round. Oh, is that the question?

Well, the first part was that for saying the world was round and not the center of the universe. Those are two different things. I've never heard of anyone being hurt for saying the world is round. Yeah. And by the way, the planet Earth being the center of the universe is not a biblical teaching. That's Aristotle. That is not the biblical authors. And when you—and by the way, even the Egyptians knew that the Earth was not flat but round because of eclipses. You could see the shadow of the Earth on the sun or on the moon, you know, and so it was just obvious. They even calculated the size of the Earth that had to do with, you know, angles of shadows and stuff like that and looking down in wells. And I don't know how they did that, but it was pretty clever. And they had a close approximation. So this isn't something

that's new. What's interesting in the case of Galileo, and people bring him up a lot, is that he got in trouble not for being a heliocentrist, which Copernicus was before him. He got in trouble because he wrote a piece about it that publicly humiliated the pope, and that was stupid. And so he was placed under house arrest, you know, and it was not good for him. But it wasn't like he's going against science. He was going against the academy. Who ran the academy? The Catholic Church. And who was teaching in the academy?

The Jesuits. And who was principal in the teaching of the Jesuits? It was Aristotle. And so it was an Aristotelian universe that put the earth at the center of everything and everything else moving around it that the Jesuits in the academy, the university were teaching, sponsored by the Roman Catholic Church, which Galileo took exception with. So it's, yeah, the church is, you know, a problem here, but it was the Catholic church, principally, because those were the ones in power. And the chief offense wasn't the scientific view, but it was the public humiliation of the pope that Galileo was responsible for.

So, there's a lot of details in here that people are not characteristically made aware of. I think Rodney Stark actually wrote about this as well. But I have probably three books on Galileo, and this is one of those canards that comes up a lot. And the Pope apologized, some recent Pope apologized for Galileo, what happened to him. And okay, good for him. But it wasn't like science against religion in the sense that it was science against Aristotle, against the academy, the university. And there was this humiliating piece that was written by Galileo that got him into trouble. Right. That's the biggest point here. It was against the actual

scholarly reigning philosophy more than it was against the Bible. Now, I have a quote from Galileo here. He said, the laws of nature are written by the hand of God in the language of mathematics. Now, that doesn't sound like somebody who's fighting against Christianity. He just thought he'd figured out a better scientific explanation, and he was very loud about it. There were other people that agreed with him. But it's similar to what would happen today if you challenge naturalism. It actually is.

Like, look at all the people who are doing intelligent design and they get fired from their jobs and they, this is nothing new. This is the way human beings act. You have your reigning philosophy and your understanding of science. And when someone comes in and they challenge it, they get in trouble. So it's not just Christians. Again, this is a human thing. It's not just a Christian thing. And it was only because the Christians were in charge of the academy that it was coming from Christians. The Roman Catholic Church was in charge of the academy. By the way, that's an important distinction because not all the other Christians felt the same way about this. It was a mixed bag of concern.

And the last part of this question, someone is using this to justify the unreliability of biblical authority. Well, like you said, it doesn't teach the Bible is the center of the universe and the historic witness of the church. But here's where you have to also recognize that it was Christianity that created science. It was because the Christians believed that there was a rational God who created an orderly universe that could be understood that they started doing repeatable experiments to determine certain laws about nature. This arose in a Christian worldview for a reason. Now, I don't think this would have arisen in a naturalistic worldview because there would be no reason to think there was order in a world where everything is created by randomness.

But as it turns out, the Christians were right. There is order. And, you know, which is interesting to think about, if only a worldview with a rational creator would create science, and yet it turns out science is an accurate way of understanding reality, well, that's an interesting thing to think about here. But anyway, I just think the historic witness of the church is what we talked about in the previous question, Greg, and who are going to help people build wells or whatever. These were missionaries who actually were trying to convince people to become Christians. And in those places, that's where you saw the literacy, the universities, the hospitals, the charities, all these different things. These countries are so much better off now because of that. You know, everyone assumes there's some sort of, you know, colonialism that destroyed these wonderful places. But the truth is people are so much better off. There's less poverty. There's more literacy. All these different

markers that they looked at are much better off because of the Christian missionaries. And that is the true historic witness of the church. The people are flourishing more. Look at India under British influence. Whatever excesses people identify associated with that, or all of these African countries that were under imperial influence, all the good that resulted in them. And when in the mid-60s many of these got their independence, they went downhill because they went back to tribalism. And it still exists today where you cannot get these countries up and moving economically and culturally because of the tribalism that's there and the despotism. And the corruption. And the corruption, all these things, right.

Corruption destroys so much in countries. There's a book by Vishal Mangowadi, I think his name is Vishal Mangowadi. I'm not sure if I'm saying his name right. But he wrote, he was from India, and he wrote about this time he was in the Netherlands, I think, and he went to buy milk. And they just had it sitting there and you would drop the money off and you would get the milk. And he was saying, because there is this lack of corruption and people can trust each other, they don't have to hire someone to work there, to watch it, to protect it. All these things, the country just worked better in certain ways because of the lack of corruption.

And the corruption destroys so much. So does this mean that Christians never do anything wrong? Of course not. And we've talked about that many times. But you have to look at the big picture of what Christians have done in light of the fact that we are a fallen world. And Christians don't deny that. This is a fallen world. And we acknowledge that, and that's just a fact. So it's never going to be the case that Christians are perfect, but I don't know why anyone would expect that to be the case. You just have to look at

what is the worldview saying and what is it creating in the world? Anything else to add to that, Greg, or is that it? Probably, but I'll wait for another occasion. Thank you, Rebecca and Amy. Please send us your question on X with the hashtag STRask, or you can go to our website. All you have to do is go to str.org and look for our hashtag STRask podcast page. And then right at the top of the page, you'll see a link. Click on that link and you can send us your question and just keep it to two sentences. Just keep it short, about the

size of a tweet. Not many people are tweeting anymore or X-ing anymore. I don't even know what they call it now. But we would love to hear your question. Thank you for listening. This is Amy Hall and Greg Kokel for Stand to Reason.