No nostalgia for the Crusades

America's religious freedom does not square with calls from the right for holy wars

The day after the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, as imagined in 1880 by Édouard Debat-Ponsan.

It is legend in Paris that the river Seine ran red on the morning of Aug. 25, 1572, its banks awash in the blood of tens of thousands of Protestants who had been murdered the day before upon the order of King Charles IX, a Catholic. The Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day was the most brutal incident in the half century that France was torn apart by the Wars of Religion, conflicts that led to the slaughter of peasants and nobles alike. Not until the French Revolution two centuries later did non-Catholics gain the full promise of the religious freedom that the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment guaranteed at just about the same time.

It's rather hard today to imagine why slightly differing views among adherants of a single religious faith could provoke such conflict. But resolving wars is difficult when each side claims the authority of ultimate truth. A fight over land might be settled by redrawing a border; a war in which the will of God is invoked by either side leaves little room for compromise and plenty of incentive for martyrdom.

In my early school years, religious wars were the stuff of history books. We learned about the Crusades, those bloody wars of the Middle Ages when huge armies of Christians fought Muslims for control of the Holy Land. Later came the Reformation, leading to battles that were waged, we were told, over the right to worship as people wished. Kids often get a distilled version of history, of course; only much later did we come to understand that the millions of lives lost in those supposedly religious wars really involved conflict over who would govern nations, and that the Church of England had emerged less from theological principles than personal passion.

But none of that was much that a modern American would need to worry about, anyway, we inferred. Since our national charter had promised to keep matters of faith free from meddling by civil authorities, how could Americans be involved in a conflict over religion? Even today, the two-thirds of Americans who say they are Christian mostly live and work alongside millions who are Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist and Hindu, as well as more who aren’t religious at all. If we’re all equally American, we can’t invoke the government’s authority on any one side to fight among ourselves, and it stands to reason that religion likewise couldn’t lead us to war with another country.

Or so it seemed until recently. The rhetoric of Islamist extremists who sought conflict with the West — which most of us didn’t much notice until the World Trade Center fell — was seen as something that a modern pluralistic society would meet with political and military force, not a corresponding religious invocation. A nation that counted millions of peace-loving Muslims as citizens could hardly engage in a war based on the fervor of another faith. Our presidents, Republican and Democrat, asserted that our wars to counter terrorism were not wars with Islam. And then Donald Trump came to power, eagerly asserting that America was a Christian nation at war with the un-American teachings of Islam.

Even so, most Americans haven’t recorded that we are on the verge of a holy war. As we have witnessed the growing political clout of evangelical Christianity as a force in the Republican Party, the effect has seemed more one of domestic rights than national security. Conservative Christianity had a big role in the reversal of the constitutional right to an abortion, and it is increasingly challenging the equal rights of gay Americans and people who are transgender. The Christian right, now more a political movement than a religious one, has seemed in the Trump era mostly eager to press forward with a cultural war against its fellow Americans.

Yet now a more ominous threat has gained urgency, notably with the emergence of Fox News commentator Pete Hegseth as Trump’s astounding choice to be Secretary of Defense. Hegseth has offered unequivocal messages indicating that he would be willing to use the most lethal fighting force in world history — that is, the military that would go to war in our name — on behalf of a particular religious faith: a strain of Christianity that is both more nationalistic and less tolerant of other religious traditions than anything America has known in modern time.

This presents a profound risk to world peace. For the moment, let’s lay aside the serious questions raised about Hegseth’s personal behavior — that is, allegations of alcohol abuse, sexual assault and financial mismanagement. Those are serious and deserve full airing, of course. But there’s ample reason to insist that the U.S. Senate ought not to confirm Hegseth to this sensitive role because of signals he has sent that he is inclined to risk war to support his own religious beliefs.

The notion of holy wars, it turns out, isn’t something considered only by rulers four centuries ago. Maybe humans haven’t progressed as much over these generations as we had imagined.

In the sanctuary of the Midwestern church where I was baptized, two flags stood to the left of the pulpit. One was an American flag, with its familiar red-and-white stripes and, in the upper left canton, 48 white stars on a blue field. The other was the Christian flag, with pure white in place of the stripes and a red cross inside the blue corner. The message of the congregation’s shared allegiance was clear. After all, Jesus himself had urged respect for civil authorities, saying, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.”¹

Religion was a powerful force in America in the years after World War II: Church membership grew at a faster rate than the population, and almost half of adults showed up for worship every Sunday morning. But the religious beliefs of the nation of my childhood were less diverse than today: 90 percent of adults identified as Christian in Gallup surveys.² Religious tolerance clears a low bar if it is defined by, say, the preferred translation of the Lord’s Prayer. A friend of mine who is a comic always gets a laugh when she describes the hurdle of mixed religion that greeted her parents’ marriage: “They were members of two different Presbyterian churches,” she says, eyes wide with horror.

In such a monochromatic view, the nation’s faithful citizenry was accustomed to the invocation of God in civil matters. On a frigid January day in 1961, when John F. Kennedy took the oath of office — the first Catholic president of a nation that had inherited from its English antecedents a suspicion of the Rome-based religion — he used the final words of his Inaugural Address to pluck the emotional chord of religion: “With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on Earth, God’s work must truly be our own.”

An important distinction is often lost in such political rhetoric. Kennedy was pleading for the nation to take on the good work that the faith of its citizens should require; he was not suggesting that God had ordained the nation’s secular political objectives. In calling the nation to promote peace and justice, as the scriptures known to most citizens would demand, he was not demanding allegiance to the religion of his choice or saying that God was on America’s side. He was urging us to be on the side of what is right.

The difference between Americans trying to do God’s work and Americans assuming that the work they are doing must be what God wants might seem to be a matter for religious instruction, not political decision-making. But the Hegseth nomination and the aims of the constituency it represents now place religion squarely on the agenda of senators and the voters who elected them.

Much has been made of Hegseth’s tattoo of a Jerusalem cross, which has been identified with white supremacists. It prompted a fellow National Guard member in 2020 to flag him as a possible “insider threat,” which got Hegseth removed from the security detail at the Biden inauguration. He also sports body art reading “Deus Vult,” or “God wills it,” a motto from the Crusades that likewise has been adopted by white supremacists. His bicep is wrapped in a tattoo of an AR-15.³

Hegseth has said that we need “an American crusade,” and he has written approvingly of the Crusades of the Middle Ages. The freedom of the West is a direct result of the Crusades, Hegseth claimed in his 2020 book, American Crusade, ignoring the historic fact that the Crusaders’ victories were short-lived and their actual impact limited. For such values as equal justice under law, Hegseth wrote, “Thank a Crusader.”⁴

If only there were fewer Muslims in America, Hegseth has said, wishfully. Last week, the New Yorker reported a 2015 incident when Hegseth, drunk at a bar in Ohio, allegedly chanted “Kill all Muslims!” His book claimed that Islam “is not a religion of peace” — which is belied by an actual reading of the Quran — and added, “Our present moment is much like the 11th Century. We don’t want to fight, but, like our fellow Christians one thousand years ago, we must.”

Really, Mr. Secretary-designate? Must we?

Religious intolerance and hatred have often been used by people holding or seeking power as tools to advance their cause. Antisemitism existed in Europe for centuries before the Holocaust, but Adolf Hitler centralized his power by blaming Jewish people for every ill in German society; along the way, he defined Jews as a demonic race, rather than Judaism as a set of religious beliefs and practices. The consequences were unimaginable – that is, until they became real.

Certainly, many conflicts throughout history that seem to be based on religious beliefs were actually political or cultural conflicts that also divided along religious lines.⁵ Many experts on the “troubles” that divided Ireland argue that they were more a reflection of a cultural power struggle than a theological dispute between Catholics and Protestants. In the 21st century, radical Islamist rulers draw on their religious texts more to win support for their wars against American imperialism than to squelch Christianity, the dominant religion of the West.

That particular religion, which still draws at least claimed support from a majority of Americans, teaches love; it does not urge repression of non-believers. Indeed, the First Epistle of John, likely written toward the end of the first century after Jesus’ birth, clarifies that true teachers are identified by their ethics and behavior: “Anyone who does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor the one who does not love his brother.”⁶

In that light, no true believer in a position of authority could use religion as a pretext for military action. It is easy, certainly, to cite religious teachings to incite the passions of believers, and tempting to find scapegoats in those of different beliefs, as we have seen throughout history. It ought to be clear by now, though, that no God deserving our worship has delegated the judgment of righteousness to a civil authority.

It's odd, really, that this sort of religious discussion is even necessary in a pluralistic society in the 21^st century. But the emergence of self-proclaimed religious zealots into positions of influence has put the antiquated notion of holy wars squarely before American citizens. How tragic it is that we haven’t advanced beyond such thinking now; how ominous that we must fear that a religious war that our own leaders wish to wage might again cause blood to flow into streets of the modern world.

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-REX SMITH

Message REX SMITH

1. Matthew 22:22

2. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-ca4-15-02597/pdf/USCOURTS-ca4-15-02597-3.pdf

3. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/12/06/pete-hegseth-defense-religion-christian-00192117

4. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/05/us/hegseth-church-crusades.html

5. https://blogs.uoregon.edu/dylanjtjohnson/2016/04/21/has-religion-been-a-chief-cause-of-wars-throughout-history/

6. 1 John 3:10