By Francis X. Maier
Americans don't suffer from amnesia. We prefer it. Memory shapes who we are as individuals, a nation, and a culture. But we define ourselves as a "new order of ages." Those words are stamped directly on America's Great Seal. Thus, Americans dislike the past. And since the 1960s, Europeans have followed suit. The reason is simple. History as it really happened is inconvenient baggage. We ignore or reinvent it, the better to reinvent ourselves. And this is exactly how the modern spirit (see here and here) treats our civilization's Christian roots.
The term "Middle Ages," for example, is a creature of Renaissance humanists. The Enlightenment added a bitter flavor to the mix. For men like Voltaire, the Christian past was little more than a blend of cruelty, ignorance, and superstition. And that caricature – that perversion of real history – persists today. Robert Eggers' upcoming film Werwulf, releasing on Christmas Day 2026, features a predictably wicked priest in a ferociously bleak 13th century. Ridley Scott's 2005 film Kingdom of Heaven showcases 12th-century corrupt Christian clergy and psychotic crusaders quacking "God wills it!" in pursuit of mayhem.
The trouble with caricatures is that they're false. They're a cocktail of fact and self-serving modern revisionism. The "Middle" Ages had plenty of disease, poverty, violence, and disorder. But they were also marked by extraordinary art, architecture, and scholarship. They also saw a profound religious renewal; a flowering of civil, canon, and common law; and a striking economic revival. As for the Crusades – that favorite target of modern critics – consider the following.
Jonathan Riley-Smith (d. 2016) is revered as one of the great historians of the last 100 years. He's also widely seen as the premier scholar of the crusading era, a reputation built on a massive body of work. A convert to the Catholic faith in his Cambridge undergraduate years, he never diminished or romanticized the violence of the Crusades. Quite the opposite. He noted that they were often undermined by "indiscipline and atrocities" – including fierce outbursts of hatred against Jews – with immense suffering as a result. But he explained their context and content with exceptional accuracy. And he insisted on seeking to understand the Crusades through the eyes of their participants.
Riley-Smith's book The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam, based on his 2007 Bampton Lectures at Columbia University, captures in barely 80 pages the realities of crusader motives, life, and times. He has special disgust for modern distortions like Kingdom of Heaven, in which:
a cruel, avaricious, and cowardly Christian clergy preaches unadulterated hatred against the Muslims. The priests' stupidity and fanaticism are echoed in the minds of the crusaders, the Templars, and most of the leaders of the Christian settlement around Jerusalem. . . . [Yet in] the midst of zealotry and bigotry a brotherhood of freethinkers has vowed to create an environment in which all religions can coexist in harmony. They are in touch with [the Muslim leader] Saladin, who shares their aims of toleration and peace, but zealots on the Christian side set out to wreck any chance of an accommodation with Islam.
For today's secular skeptic or the uninformed moviegoer, such a storyline might have value as entertainment. But as history, it's sheer counterfactual propaganda.
As incomprehensible they might seem to the present-day mind, the Crusades were "collective acts of penance," "penitential war pilgrimages" and — most importantly — fundamentally reactive to Muslim conquest of the Holy Land and interference with Christian pilgrims. They emerged from an organic medieval theology of penitential warfare and Augustinian just-war thinking, not a perversion of it. As Riley-Smith notes, they had the support of saints from Bernard of Clairvaux to Thomas Aquinas to Catherine of Siena. The Crusades were never colonialist or imperialist in a mod...
