What About the Church's History of Violence and Oppression?
When I was teaching Sunday school, I did a series of classes using Lee Strobel's works. The following is from The Case for Faith. While there may be the stray original item from me, I deserve no credit for what is written in this particular article. It is properly attributed to Lee Strobel in its entirety.
There needs to be a clear line of demarcation between people who are part of ‘the church’ - that is, people who are the sheep who hear the Shepherd’s voice (true Christians) - and the institutional churches.
Some people are cultural Christians but not authentic Christians
This is not some new convenient escape hatch that lets us look back and say all those atrocities were committed by people who called themselves Christians but really weren’t. It goes back to Jesus Himself. In Matthew 7:21-23 Jesus says, “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father who is in heaven will enter. Many will say to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness.’ Jesus talked about this distinction two thousand years ago, and certainly much has been done in the centuries since that does not reflect His teachings.
However, the Bible makes it clear that because of our sinful nature, we continue to do things Christians shouldn’t. Unfortunately, some of the evil deeds committed through history may have indeed been committed by Christians. But, and this is very important to understand, if so, they’ve acted contrary to the teachings of Jesus.
At the same time, we should recognize that there has often been a minority voice that has spoken out against abuses that some institutional churches have perpetuated. For example, during Spain’s colonization of Latin America native peoples were exploited for economic gain in the name of Christ. Christians were willing to speak out against abuses by the representatives of the state or church and say, “No, you can’t do that!”
Unfortunately, for some people, certain incidents in history have created cynicism toward Christianity. But, there are a number of misleading stereotypes about what Christians have and haven’t done. Some critics have attacked a cultural Christianity, failing to understand it is not an authentic Christianity.
The Crusades
Atrocities of the Crusades are often used against belief. Did it happen? Yes. Is it heartbreaking to contemplate? Yes. We can-not try to excuse it or rationalize it away. But as to whether the Crusades were just or not, we need to consider the broader context.
Beginning in the seventh century, Muslims actually made violent attempts to colonize the West by invading what was heretofore Christian territory in the Middle East, Egypt and all of North Africa, Spain and southern Italy, and major Mediterranean islands including Sicily, Corsica, Cyprus, Rhodes, Crete, Malta and Sardinia. In the eighth century, Christian counterattacks liberated many of the occupied areas and foreshadowed what was to come in the Holy Land.[1] Then, early in the eleventh century Seljuk Turks conquered Armenia, Syria and Palestine, and “they destroyed some churches, murdered clergy and seized pilgrims…[making] pilgrimage to the Holy Land a difficult and often deadly task.”[2] To this we add that the Turks had also swept through Asia Minor and had almost reached Constantinople, prompting the Byzantine emperor Alexius I Comnenus to appeal most urgently to Pope Urban II “to encourage Westerners to help defend the Eastern Church against [them].”[3]
While pilgrimages to Jerusalem had been allowed since Muslim occupation in the seventh century, pilgrims still had to pay a great deal to enter the Holy Land. And what they did not pay in taxes, they paid in constant harassment and raids against their caravans on their journeys. Regularly throughout the centuries before the arrival of the Turks, “mass murders of Christian monks and pilgrims were common.”[4] On one occasion, pilgrims who refused to convert to Islam were killed; on another, they were crucified. Churches were destroyed and their monks slaughtered. Rape was not uncommon.
Augustine’s Just War Theory, developed around the turn of the fifth century, provided the basis upon which the popes called for the reclamation of the Holy Land for Christendom. Simplified, it contained three propositions: First, the war must have a just cause, usually aggression of or injury by another. Second, it must rest on the authority of the prince. In other words, it had to be proclaimed by a legitimate authority. And finally, it had to have right intention. Participants were to have a pure motive and war had to be the only means remaining of achieving the justifiable objective.[5]
“Christian writers were generally in agreement that the just cause for a war must be reactive. It was just to defend one’s country, laws and traditional way of life, just to try to recover property unlawfully taken by another, perhaps even just to enforce by physical means a properly delivered judicial sentence. It was not legitimate to wage a war of aggrandizement or conversion… The justification for the crusade, therefore, was the reconquest of Christian territory, and especially Christ’s own patrimony, which had been usurped by the Muslims, and the pope’s appeal was presented in such a way that it conformed to the criterion of a just cause.”[6]
Crusading professor Thomas F. Madden sums up the historical case this way: “The crusades were in every way a defensive war. They were the West’s belated response to the Muslim conquest of fully two-thirds of the Christian world. While the Arabs were busy in the seventh through the tenth centuries winning an opulent and sophisticated empire, Europe was defending itself against outside invaders and then digging out from the mess they left behind. Only in the eleventh century were Europeans able to take much notice of the East. The event that led to the crusades was the Turkish conquest of most of Christian Asia Minor (modern Turkey). The Christian emperor in Constantinople, faced with the loss of half of his empire, appealed for help to the rude but energetic Europeans. He got it.”[7]
The actions of the Crusaders, or of anyone really, are an indictment of no one but the actors themselves; they are not an indictment of Christ or of Christianity. People have done things in the name of Christ they never should have done. We should point out to the accuser that not everything done on the name of Christ should, in point of fact, be attributed to Christianity. At the very least, those who commit acts such as rape and murder do so contrary to God’s will, not because of it. The Bible is clear that these are wrong and certainly not “Christian.”
The critic should not be surprised to find hypocrites among professing Christians. The Bible is replete with examples of Christ Himself denouncing hypocrisy (Matt. 6:2, 5, 16; 7:5, 22:18; 23:13 and so on). Jesus’ parable of the Wheat and the Tares in Matthew 13 makes it clear that Satan sows false believers among the true believers. The Lord makes clear that we are not to try to uproot the “tares” among us but are to leave the sifting for Him in the afterlife. Thus we can expect there to be Christians in name only among us.
Jesus’ admonition that “the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter it are many, [but] the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to eternal life, and those who find it are few” (Matthew 7:13-14) supports the Christian belief that there has never been a majority of Christians in any age of the church.
The Inquisition
In 1163 Pope Alexander III instructed bishops to discover evidence of heresy and take action against the heretics. What developed was a campaign of terror, with secret proceedings, supreme authority vested in the inquisitor, and a complete lack of due process, where the accused didn’t know the names of their accusers, there was no defense attorney, and torture was used to extract confessions. Those who refused to repent were turned over to the government to be burned at the stake. A second wave came in 1472 in which Isabella and Ferdinand helped establish the Spanish Inquisition. And a third wave followed in 1542 when Pope Paul III was determined to hunt down Protestants, especially Calvinists.
Christians were also the victims of the inquisitions, not just the perpetrators. We don’t know the identities of all who died, but it is very likely many were the ones upholding the true faith. There’s certainly evidence that the Catholic church had lost its way in launching these inquisitions. But Protestants, too, sometimes used inappropriate tactics to suppress heresy as well.
The Inquisition is a tragedy Christians cannot run away from, but it’s not representative of the history of the Christian churches. It’s reaching too far to say that this kind of hateful activity is part of a pattern. For much of their existence, many Christian churches have been in a minority situation and therefore not even in a position to persecute anyone. In fact, it’s often the other way around - apparently, more Christians have been martyred in the 20th century than in any other. As a matter of fact, according to journalist David Neff, “the typical Christian lives in a developing country, speaks a non-European language, and exists under the constant threat of persecution - of murder, imprisonment, torture, or rape.” So the Inquisition is by far an exception in church history, not the norm.
The Salem Witch Trials
The Salem witch trials at the end of the 1600s are frequently cited as a kind of Christian hysteria. In all, nineteen people were hanged and one pressed to death for refusing to testify.
Again, can we even say true Christianity was involved here? When you unpack the events leading to the trials, you see there are many factors that precipitated them - issues related to people scheming to get land from other people; issues related to hysteria; issues of believing in astral appearances, whereby people testify that somebody did something even when they were in another place.
When you study the legal context for the trials, there are variables that take you into issues unrelated to Christianity. Does this mean the churches were innocent? Historians who work with matters of this sort know that you can’t attribute such events to a singular cause. Life is more complex and nuanced than just saying “Christianity” was responsible. The Salem witch trials were terrible; we can’t downplay their seriousness. But historians recognize that the story line is considerably more complicated than merely blaming the churches. They can’t be written off merely as an example of Christianity having run amok.
Ironically, a Christian played the key role in ending the trials. A Puritan leader named Increase Mather spoke out forcefully against what was happening and that was the beginning of the end of the Salem witch trials.
Exploitation by Missionaries
History tells us that the missionary movement was often associated with an economic policy of the colonial powers known as mercantilism (the belief that the country with the most gold would be the most powerful). Unfortunately, as a result, mercantilist motivations became mixed with missionary enterprises. Many of the horrible things done were instigated by adventurers and mercantilist types while many missionaries did praiseworthy things.
The Catholic Church has an impressive record of taking care of the poor during the Middle Ages. When you read the journals of Protestant missionaries who went to other countries, it’s very difficult to come to the conclusion that they were self-consciously determined to oppress or destroy all aspects of native cultures.
Many critics become lost in their notion of the “noble savage.” They paint a picture Native people as always happy, living perfect lives with no demonic or negative spiritism going on in their lives. But when you read the accounts of the people going into certain regions, you see that some of these native people were in dire physical and spiritual circumstances and the missionaries greatly helped them.
When native people become Christians, they experience the love and joy of Christ; that’s a wonderful thing. It’s when other motivations creep in, like a quest for economic gain or a twisted sense of racial superiority, that very bad things result.
And quite frankly, many critics of missionaries see no value in the Christian message and therefore no benefit to the people who become followers of Jesus. So it’s easy to see how they view Christianity as a western imperialist ideology bent on destroying other cultures and religions
Anti-Semitism
What more can I say than that Christians simply cannot be anti-Semitic. It should be unthinkable to any follower of Jesus.
For a more detailed treatment of the Crusades, check out my four-part series (extracts of which are contained herein):
[1] Stark, God’s Battalions, 8-9.
[2] Thomas F. Madden, The New Concise History of the Crusades (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 5.
[3] Riley-Smith, What Were the Crusades, 13.
[4] Ibid., 84.
[5] Riley-Smith, What Were the Crusades, 6.
[6] Ibid., 9,14, emphasis mine.
[7] Thomas F Madden, “Crusade Propaganda” Available at: <http://www.nationalreview.com/article/ 220747/crusade-propaganda-thomas-f-madden?target=author&tid=901578> [Accessed 4/23/16]