{"id":177,"date":"2011-02-24T16:13:45","date_gmt":"2011-02-24T16:13:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/02\/onward-gop-crusaders.html"},"modified":"2011-02-24T16:13:45","modified_gmt":"2011-02-24T16:13:45","slug":"onward-gop-crusaders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/02\/onward-gop-crusaders.html","title":{"rendered":"Onward GOP Crusaders!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Crusaders.jpg\" <\/p>\n

\n

Visiting<\/a>
\na private Christian school in South Carolina two days ago, former PA
\nsenator and would-be GOP presidential nominee Rick Santorum opined, “The
\nidea that the Crusades and the fight of Christendom against Islam is
\nsomehow an aggression on our part is absolutely anti-historical. And
\nthat is what the perception is by the American left
\nwho hates Christendom. They hate Christendom. They hate Western
\ncivilization at the core. That’s the problem.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Since I
\nhappened to be teaching the history of the First Crusade today, I
\nthought I’d try this out on the students, who’d had the opportunity to
\nread various contemporary accounts of that notable historical event.
\nAfter a minute or so of stunned silence gazing at the words I’d
\nprojected on the screen, one of them blurted out, “That’s ridiculous.
\nThat’s just completely ridiculous.”<\/p>\n

I doubt the students’
\npalpable sense of outrage had anything to do with a deeply ingrained
\nhatred of Western civilization. More likely, it had to do with having
\nread Fulcher of Chartres’ report on the crusaders’ capture of the Temple
\nMount in 1099:<\/p>\n

Many of the Saracens who had climbed
\nto the top of the Temple of Solomon (Al Aqsa Mosque) in their flight
\nwhere shot to death with arrows and fell headlong from the roof. Nearly
\nten thousand were beheaded in this Temple. If you had been there your
\nfeet would have been stained to the ankles in the blood of the slain.
\nWhat shall I say? None of them were left alive. Neither women nor
\nchildren were spared.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n


\nSantorum’s way of disclaiming an “Onward Christian Soldiers” ideology of war-making in the Middle East didn’t exactly help:<\/p>\n

What I’m talking about is onward American soldiers. What we’re talking
\nabout are core American values. ‘All men are created equal’–that’s a
\nChristian value, but it’s an American value. It’s become part of our
\nnational religion, if you will. The point I was trying to make was that
\nthe national faith, the national ideal, is rooted in the Christian ideal–in the Judeo-Christian concept of the person.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Santorum
\nis hardly the only Republican presidential aspirant rallying
\nChristendom against Islam these days. Appearing recently on Fox and
\nFriends, front-runner<\/a> Mike Huckabee denounced<\/a> a couple of Protestant churches for permitting Muslim congregations to worship in their sanctuaries with the words:<\/p>\n

If the purpose of a
\nchurch is to push forward the gospel of Jesus Christ, and then you have a
\nMuslim group that says that Jesus Christ and all the people that follow
\nhim are a bunch of infidels who should be essentially obliterated, I
\nhave a hard time understanding that. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That kind of harks back to the rhetoric of Pope Urban II, who, responding to a request from the Byzantine emperor, urged<\/a> the flower of European knighthood to have at the Seljuk Turks:<\/p>\n

Oh
\nwhat a disgrace if a race so despicable, degenerate, and enslaved by
\ndemons should thus overcome a people endowed with faith in Almighty God
\nand resplendent int he name of Christ!\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Not so long ago, a Republican president was insisting that
\nIslam was a religion of peace and inviting imams to sup at the White
\nHouse. Last summer, the 9\/11 mosque controversy made clear that his ban
\non using Islam in partisan politics had come to an end. Now that the
\n2012 election cycle is off and spinning, the call to crusade is back,
\nwith a vengeance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Visiting a private Christian school in South Carolina two days ago, former PA senator and would-be GOP presidential nominee Rick Santorum opined, “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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nOnward GOP Crusaders! - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/02\/onward-gop-crusaders.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Onward GOP Crusaders! - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Visiting a private Christian school in South Carolina two days ago, former PA senator and would-be GOP presidential nominee Rick Santorum opined, “The idea that the Crusades and the fight of Christendom against Islam is somehow an aggression on our part is absolutely anti-historical. 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}