Mark Silk on the Revival of the Crusades as 2012 Election Cycle Begins

As a follow-up to what I posted yesterday about Rick Santorum and his recent remarks about the crusades, I'd like to point to a very valuable posting on the same topic at Mark Silk's Spiritual Politics blog.  Mark kindly provided the link in a comment on my Santorum posting yesterday.

Mark notes he happened to be teaching the history of the First Crusade right when Santorum opined that the crusades were not in any way an act of Christian aggression, and that "the left" has revised the history of that bloody period due to an animus against Christendom.  He provided students with a copy of Santorum's remarks, and then let them comment.

And they found Santorum's take on the crusades ridiculous.  They did so because they had just been studying Fulcher of Chartres' account of the crusaders' actions in Jerusalem in 1099.  For those who want to read this account, which is regarded by historians as an exceptionally accurate depiction of what happened when the crusaders took Jerusalem, Paul Halsall of Fordham University has made the text available online at his Medieval Sourcebook site, using the text provided by August. C. Krey in his The First Crusade: The Accounts of Eyewitnesses and Participants (Princeton: 1921).

As Mark Silk notes, it appears that the call to crusade is back as the 2012 election cycle approaches.  And as Karen Armstrong, whose work on the crusades is now a classic source for the history of that period, noted several years ago, "We simply cannot afford this type of bigotry."  

Not any longer.  The price is too high--for Americans, for the global community.  The shameless pandering of politicians like Gingrich, Huckabee, and Santorum to the religious right feeds on our ignorance, counts on our remaining ignorant.  One of the key educational challenges we face in the U.S. is expanding our knowledge of other cultures and other religions.  

As the Pew Forum's study of religious knowledge in the U.S. last fall revealed, knowledge of religion in general--including Christianity--is abysmally low precisely in those areas of the nation dominated by the religious right.  In those areas of the nation on whose votes Messrs. Gingrich, Huckabee, and Santorum are counting.

In order to do better as a people, we need to know better.  The onus is on us to inform ourselves.  And for people of faith who continue to be duped by the empty, self-serving showmanship of the family values crowd, that means, I would propose, taking the kind of close critical look at politicians like Rev. Huckabee that David Corn and John Brummett take per Max Brantley's summary today at the Arkansas Times blog.

Rick Santorum on Crusades: The Left Hates Christendom

 

Yesterday, as I wrote about the presidential aspirations of Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee, and how both gentlemen are now doing everything in their power to position themselves as the candidate of choice of the religious right, I said,

The 2012 election cycle is going to be interesting to watch.  I predict it will be one of the slimiest, most unabashedly mendacious eruptions of religious and moral hypocrisy by so-called defenders of religion that we've seen in a long time on the American political scene. 

In a separate posting on the ongoing and astonishing attempt of the leaders of the Catholic church to redefine the term "religious freedom" to mean that they have the right to block the freedom of other religious groups to solemnize gay unions, I wrote,

Interesting, isn't it, to see people twist words like "freedom" and "non-discrimination" (not to mention "love," if they ever get around to talking about it) into something that means the very opposite of what the words actually mean, even while claiming that they are the ones whose freedom is being curtailed, and they are the ones being discriminated against?

And here's a story that combines aspects of both of those previous postings: another right-wing Catholic who is making noises these days about a 2012 presidential run, and who, like his fellow Catholic Mr. Gingrich, is also seeking to woo the religious right, is Rick Santorum.  And recently, in the heartland of the American religious right, at a private Christian school in Spartanburg, South Carolina, Santorum made the baffling claim that the medieval crusades were not about aggression at all, but that the "left" has revised the history of that shameful moment of Christian history in order to score points against Christendom.

Santorum stated,

The idea that the Crusades and the fight of Christendom against Islam is somehow an aggression on our part is absolutely anti-historical.  And that is what the perception is by the American left who hates Christendom.

And he went on to say,

What I'm talking about is onward American soldiers.  What we're talking about are core American values. "All men are created equal" — that's a Christian value, but it's an American value.  It's become part of our national religion, if you will.  The point I was trying to make was that the national faith, the national ideal, is rooted in the Christian ideal — in the Judeo-Christian concept of the person.

Islamic violence = evil aggression.  Christian violence against Islam = good and holy non-aggression.  American values = Christian values.  American aggression = God at work in the world defending the world against evil.

As I've been saying about Mr. Gingrich, it will be interesting to watch this election and see just how willing American Catholics are to be duped by these folks intent on selling out core Catholic values as they pander to a religious right whose values have little in common with Catholic values.  The U.S. Catholic bishops have worked long and hard to fuse the American Catholic church and the Republican party by getting into bed with the religious right.

Messrs. Gingrich and Santorum are the result.  As an indicator of how willing some American Catholics are to give Newt a free pass to engage in shameless pandering, since these Catholics are comfortable with equating the Catholic position on political matters with that of the Republican party and the religious right, watch the responses to Michael O'Loughlin's latest posting at the America blog.  O'Loughlin focuses on how Mr. Gingrich "is pontificating on various moral issues of the day even as he battles questions about his own moral failings."

And some of his brother Catholics are already logging in to indicate that said pontificating (on an exceedingly shaky moral foundation) doesn't matter in the least to them: Gingrich is an outstanding leader with a viable moral vision for American society.  Watch the blather about admirable Newtian moral leadership pile higher and higher at this site as O'Loughlin's posting reaches the ears of the right-wing Catholic talk networks.

The graphic is Tea Party Jesus's send-up of Santorum's recent remarks in South Carolina.