The late novelist Gore Vidal spoke of America once as \u201cthe United States of Amnesia.\u201d This condition was highlighted all too painfully by the response of many conservative Christians to a remark made by President Obama during the National Prayer Breakfast on February 5, 2015.<\/p>\n
Specifically, President Obama\u2019s address noted that while decent men and women everywhere must deplore the horrific cruelties committed by Islamic militants such as ISIS, Americans and other Westerners shouldn\u2019t mount a \u201chigh horse\u201d of piety and forget that \u201cduring the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.\u201d1 He went on to note similar misdeeds committed by professed Christians in defense of American slavery and the later Jim Crow segregation laws.2<\/p>\n
Christian conservatives and their political allies pounced at once. \u201c\u2018The president\u2019s comments this morning at the prayer breakfast are the most offensive I\u2019ve ever heard a president make in my lifetime,\u2019 said former Virginia governor Jim Gilmore (R). \u2018He has offended every believing Christian in the United States. This goes further to the point that Mr. Obama does not believe in America or the values we all share.\u2019\u201d3<\/p>\n
Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, called Obama\u2019s comments \u201can unfortunate attempt at a wrongheaded moral comparison.\u201d4 Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal was reported on the February 8, 2015, broadcast of ABC\u2019s This Week With George Stephanopoulos as saying to President Obama, \u201cThe medieval Christian threat is under control. It\u2019s radical Islam that requires our attention.\u201d<\/p>\n
The extent to which past Christian intolerance may be \u201cunder control\u201d or not may be arguable, but the record of history—recent as well as distant—remains beyond dispute. As a lifelong student of both religious and secular history, and a lifelong devout Protestant who still holds the Reformation to have been the right idea, I find myself deeply appalled by these conservative Christians\u2019 reactions to President Obama\u2019s statement. What they reveal is a shocking
\nignorance of church history, especially when one considers the frequent, often mass burnings at the stake of persons condemned as heretics by the Roman Catholic Church during the medieval and early modern centuries. These public burnings came immediately to my mind when it was reported that ISIS, likely in early January 2015, had burned alive a captured Jordanian pilot.<\/p>\n
Is it truly a \u201cwrongheaded moral comparison\u201d to draw a parallel between the burning of heretics in past centuries by the state churches of Europe, and what was done to the Jordanian pilot, along with the other atrocities committed by ISIS and other Islamic militants? Could it be too many Americans aren\u2019t even familiar with such names as John Huss,5 Girolamo Savanorola,6 Louis de Berquin,7 and a host of others whose conscientious resistance to church teachings and corruption resulted in martyrdom every bit as cruel as anything done by ISIS?<\/p>\n
President Obama\u2019s mention of the Crusades caused some journalists to write as if these initiatives were directed exclusively against Muslims.8 Yet why do so few remember the crusade against the Christian Albigenses in 1208, initiated by the most powerful of the medieval popes, Innocent III?9 And how many remember the crusades of Roman Catholic monarchs against the followers of John Huss in Bohemia, which began in 1419 and lasted approximately 15 years?10 Or the bloody Saint Bartholomew\u2019s Day Massacre of August 24, 1572, in which tens of thousands of French Protestants were slaughtered in the streets and in their homes throughout the country?11 It is estimated by historians that as many as 2 to 4 million were killed during the French Wars of Religion, in which
\n Catholics and Protestants struggled for national control.12 The crimes committed by modern Islamic terror groups can\u2019t come anywhere near these numbers. And when one surveys the events of medieval and early modern European history these are only the beginning.<\/p>\n
One critic of President Obama\u2019s statement insisted that \u201cthe Inquisition was benign compared to Boko Haram, al-Qaida, Islamic State, the Taliban, Hamas, and the other Islamic terror organizations,\u201d13 and denounced the president\u2019s moral comparison as \u201cidiocy.\u201d14 Only someone pathetically unaware of the historical record could utter such statements.<\/p>\n
Historian Will Durant writes, regarding the medieval persecution of Christian dissidents by the established church of that time: \u201cCompared with the persecution of heresy in Europe from 1227 to 1492, the persecution of Christians by Romans in the first three centuries after Christ was a mild and humane procedure. Making every allowance required by an historian and permitted to a Christian, we must rank the Inquisition, along with the wars and persecutions of our time, as among the darkest blots on the record of mankind, revealing a ferocity unknown in any beast.\u201d15<\/p>\n
Describing the persecution of French Protestants (Huguenots) during the reign of King Louis XIV, the same author writes: \u201cThis holy terror of 1685 . . .was far worse than the Revolutionary terror of 1793,\u201d16 I daresay far fewer Americans remember this \u201choly\u201d terror perpetrated by professed Christians than remember the atheistic terror of a century later, despite the historian\u2019s observation that the former was \u201cfar worse\u201d than the latter.<\/p>\n
Turning to the history of our own land, it is astounding how anyone could escape the moral equivalency between contemporary Islamic terror and the torture, rape, mutilation, and murder of antebellum slavery and post-Civil War segregation—all of which was defended by certain ones on the basis of allegedly \u201cChristian\u201d principles. Though, speaking as a biblical theologian, one must blanch at the exegetical absurdities needed to support such statements as that of Confederate president Jefferson Davis, who insisted Negro slavery was \u201cordained by God,\u201d17 it remains incontrovertible that these American crimes against humanity were justified by purportedly Christian beliefs.<\/p>\n
Some will immediately remind us that the late Pope John Paul II apologized for the atrocities committed by his church through the Inquisition and similar means during its years of European supremacy.18 But unfortunately, the theological and philosophical rationale that undergirded these brutalities remains little changed.<\/p>\n
In a recent Catechism of the Catholic Church, published in 1994, it is stated that \u201cthe right to religious liberty is neither a moral license to adhere to error, nor a supposed right to error.\u201d19 Some years later, when the same pope issued his encyclical promoting the sacredness of Sunday and civil legislation as one means of establishing it, he declared that one who violates the sanctity of Sunday should be \u201cpunished as a heretic.\u201d20 The late Malachi Martin, in his expansive defense of John Paul\u2019s agenda, contrasted the late pope\u2019s vision of humanity\u2019s future with that of the \u201cMinimalists\u201d—those Martin describes as standing for liberty of conscience as opposed to the teachings of the church: \u201cEvery person [according to the Minimalists] must literally be assured the right to choose Hell over Heaven. That obligation carried to that extreme not only sets the Minimalists apart from John Paul; it sets them against him, as well.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt sets them apart from the Holy Father, because democratic principles cannot take precedence over divine revelation. . . . It is axiomatic for John Paul that no one has the right—democratic or otherwise—to a moral wrong.\u201d21<\/p>\n
Quite clearly this is not simply referring to the church\u2019s right to uphold and maintain its convictions for those choosing to be part of its fellowship—a right every religious organization should be permitted. Rather, the above statement denies the right to what is defined as \u201cwrong\u201d by the church even in the setting of civil democracy, beyond the borders of the Catholic community. The Dignitatus Humanae document, which came out of Vatican 2, does take a more open view of individual spirituality; but it has come under question by many Catholics who have noted that the two previous popes were in an increasing rush to roll back the reforms of that council.<\/p>\n
This rationale for civil intolerance on the part of the Roman Catholic Church helps explain a number of recent incidents in the United States involving political variance from church teachings on the part of Catholic politicians. The late New York governor Mario Cuomo, for example, was threatened with excommunication by the late Cardinal John O\u2019Connor because of Cuomo\u2019s belief that the church\u2019s opposition to abortion shouldn\u2019t be enforced by civil law.22 Similar threats were issued during the 2004 U.S. presidential campaign regarding Roman Catholic John Kerry, when a prominent bishop declared that there was \u201conly one way for a faithful Catholic to vote\u201d in that election, and that was for the incumbent president, George W. Bush, and against Senator (now secretary of state) Kerry.23<\/p>\n
Once again, it is important to consider what the issue in these recent clashes was, and was not. This was not about churches enforcing discipline on members regarding their adherence to their official teachings, as both Cuomo and Kerry were clear that they supported the church\u2019s opposition to the practice of abortion. What they did not support, however, was the church\u2019s quest to enforce this and other teachings through the coercive power of the state. It was for this cause that these public servants braved ecclesiastical condemnation.<\/p>\n
The words of George Santayana remain as relevant now as ever: \u201cThose who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.\u201d President Obama\u2019s reference to past Christian atrocities—American and otherwise—after he had decried present acts of Islamic terror offered a most instructive, and embarrassing, moment for a culture whose ignorance of history is often chronic. The basic premises justifying theocratic intolerance administered through civil government remain a part of official Roman Catholic teachings, and professed Protestants exhibit either abysmal ignorance or moral bankruptcy—perhaps both—when historical and moral analogies of indisputable truthfulness are laid before them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The late novelist Gore Vidal spoke of America once as \u201cthe United States of Amnesia.\u201d This condition was highlighted all too painfully by the response of many conservative Christians to a remark made by President Obama during the National Prayer Breakfast on February 5, 2015. Evoking Christian Atrocities Specifically, President Obama\u2019s address noted that while decent<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[306],"tags":[138],"class_list":["post-6303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-may-june-2015","tag-may-june-2015"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6303"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6303\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}