Ross Douthat, whom I’ve more or less left alone for some time, has a considered pushback against President Obama’s recent prayer breakfast talk during which he alleged that Christians could, at times, be as bad as Muslims, citing the Crusades and the Inquisition as examples. Douthat wisely leaves the Inquisition alone1 but is not completely off-base when asking for some nuance before denouncing the Crusades out of hand.
Douthat acknowledges rather awkwardly that what President Obama actually said at the prayer breakfast—“During the Crusades, people committed terrible crimes in the name of Christ”—was, um, totally accurate, but that’s not good enough for Ross, who feels that the “context” of the president’s statement regarding the Crusades matters. Because the president referred to said “terrible crimes” as part of a list of other bad things Christians had done, including slavery and segregation, which they had at least on occasion justified on religious grounds, the president was implying that the Crusades were just as bad as “institutions [i.e., slavery and segregation] that are regarded as comprehensively evil in our culture,” even though what Ross probably meant was “could have been inferred to have implied by a wide variety of right-wing cranks who embarrass respectable folk like me yet whom I cannot allow to be depicted by the liberal media as entirely ludicrous and contemptible.”2
Ross is particularly miffed at the amusement that Slate’s Will Saletan takes in pointing out the logical discrepancies in the explosions of outrage emerging from such right-wing volcanos as Bill Donohue and Erick Erickson. In response to Will’s sneers, Ross points out that, well, things were complicated back then, and you can’t really decide who started it, the Muslims or the Christians, which he presents as the question at hand.
Well, you can’t, and, really, so what? Conquest, back then, was regarded as basically the coolest thing you could do, whether you were a Muslim or a Christian. The conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 by the Crusaders was no more wicked than the conquest by the Muslim armies centuries earlier. But the president didn’t say that the Crusades were wicked. His right-wing critics said he said that and “refuted” the president’s non-statement by insisting that the the Crusades were in fact virtuous and above criticism. Since Ross clearly finds such arguments embarrassing, his quarrel is with those who make them, not those who laugh at them.
- Jonah Goldberg is not so timid, standing up for at least some of the “inquiries”, as likes to call them. Because inquiring minds want to know, even it hurts! ↩︎
- Whether Ross would acknowledge this without the application of enhanced inquisitional techniques is problematic. ↩︎
