November 5, 2001

Holy war: When religion goes sour
___By David Gushee
___Union University
___JACKSON, Tenn. (RNS)-- "Some of our men cut off the heads of their enemies; others shot them with arrows, so that they fell from the towers; others tortured them longer by casting them into the flames. ... It was a just and splendid judgment of God, that this place should be filled with the blood of the unbelievers."
___ Boasts of Osama bin Laden?
___ No. The words are from Raymond of Aguilers, a Christian crusader and historian, describing the capture of Jerusalem from the Muslims in 1099.
___ Americans now realize we are at war and have been for some time. Our adversary is not a nation but a movement, an international consortium of terrorists. The ideology of the movement is a form of Muslim extremism bent on waging its version of jihad--holy war--against infidel enemies.
___ We recoil. We are tempted to describe this ideology, and its hatred, as incomprehensible. To the extent that all evil is incomprehensible, this is true.
___ But it is possible, sadly enough, to find points of contact between this ideology and a similar one that can be found in the Christian tradition.
___ For 200 years, European Christians were fired with the vision of retaking the Holy Land from the Muslims. From 1095 to 1270, crusaders undertook eight separate crusades. Spurred on by the preaching of popes and other leaders, Christian crusaders waged holy war against their own brand of infidel enemies.
___ Preaching the first crusade, Pope Urban II declared: "God wills it! It is Christ who comes from the tomb and presents you his cross. Wear it upon your shoulders and breasts, your arms and standards. Christ died for you. It is your duty to die for him."
___ Off they went--priests and farmers, emperors and monks, archbishops and knights, and children. They killed for Christ, in the full confidence that their cause was holy; that their enemy was God's enemy; that the Holy Land had been polluted by pagans and must be cleansed. They killed--and died--with a joyful religious zeal.
___ The more restrained Christian tradition of the just war was swept aside.
___Whereas the just war theory identified war as a necessary evil, the crusade was viewed as a positive good. Whereas just war theory refused to identify all goodness with one side and all evil with the other, the crusade located holiness with the crusader and evil with the Muslim. Whereas just war attempted to recognize the rights of the adversary in war, the crusade viewed the adversary as having no rights whatsoever. Whereas just war imposed restraints upon the conduct of war in order to minimize loss of life, the crusade viewed the death of infidels as a good in itself.
___ Today, virtually no responsible Christian moral thinker or church body embraces a crusade ethic. All embrace some form of just war, or pacifism, or a newer theory called just peacemaking. We thought we had put the crusade ethic safely behind us, back in the Middle Ages. Now we awaken to discover an Islamic variant alive and "well."
___ Holy war--killing in the name of God--is a toxic permutation of religious faith. It is religious zeal gone disastrously awry. Yet it seems a perennial temptation. Long ago, mainstream Christian leaders repudiated it; yet even now one finds occasional zealots who kill in Jesus' name.
___ If Christian experience is any guide, the world's Muslim leaders, both political and religious, bear the single greatest responsibility for repudiating and suppressing holy war thinking. U.S. soldiers can perhaps destroy a terrorist network, but the internal reform of a religious tradition can only be undertaken from within that tradition.

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