Distorting Christian History to Defend Islam

Distorting Christian History to Defend Islam

Secularism didn’t save the West from religious excesses, and it won’t save us from jihadists.

By Michael J. Ortiz in the Wall Street Journal

In an attempt to find a peaceful alternative for those in the Islamic world who advocate violence for political and religious goals, Christians in the West shouldn’t distort the history of Christianity, or stand idly by while others do so. Letting this version of events shape perceptions of Christian history invariably means a portrait of religion as a force of darkness, while science and technology will always be beacons of sanity and light.

The narrative portraying religious conviction as antithetical to reasoned comity among people and nations is easy enough to fall into. At the national prayer breakfast last week, for instance, President Obama compared the excesses of the Crusades and the Inquisition to the terrorism of today’s radical Islam. The president went on to condemn (rightly) those who advance their religious convictions with violence.

But what he and many others miss is the conviction that Western core values come from a faith in which God enters into human history precisely to save the world from the erring reason that fails, among other things, to recognize that terrorism is an affront to God and humanity.

The all-too-common narrative goes like this: Centuries ago, Catholics and Protestants gladly burned heretics up and down Europe by the thousands until, thank God—or All Powerful Goodness, as Ben Franklin would put it—the rise of Enlightenment thinkers banished the barbarity that is somehow native to religious fervor. Only with the liberalizing mandates of Vatican II (1962-65), we’re told, did Catholicism—usually the main boogeyman in this version of history—come to grips with the idea of democracy and religious freedom, and finally extinguish the last embers of the Inquisition.

This narrative is false according to the historical record and to the origins and abiding ethos of Christianity, Catholic and Protestant. Historians call this the la leyenda negra—the “Black Legend”—because it blackens the name of Catholicism in particular and religion in general. According to this legend, the Inquisition is on a continuum with the Holocaust and the terrors of Stalinism.

Yet objective historians realize that in the most infamous example, in Spain, several popes condemned the Inquisition’s excesses. Moreover, the 6,832 members of the clergy executed by the Spanish Republican Red Terror in 1936 is more than twice the number of those executed in 345 years of the Inquisition in Spain.

Far from being an enemy of reason and peace, Christianity’s overwhelming message through the centuries has been one of tolerance, a message that underpins many of the values that people of all faiths, and of no faith, can live by. Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI ’s work as a theologian has done great service in trying to correct the erroneous view that faith and civil tolerance must always be opposed.

He looks forthrightly at the negative aspects of the rise of democracies in the West, while not forgetting their positive legacies. As then- Pope Benedict pointed out in a 2005 address to the Roman Curia—the church’s governing body—popes of the 19th century condemned democracy because so many of its exponents were claiming “to embrace with their knowledge the whole of reality to its limit, stubbornly proposing to make” God completely “superfluous.” He thus reminds us that a Western culture beset by nihilism cannot provide a way out of the nihilism of the jihadist.

If we say to followers of Islam that the only way to rid the faith of extremists is to accept “modernity,” are we also asking them to accept a world view that embraces a growing agnosticism about the fundamentals of civilized living?

While we celebrate our freedoms, such freedoms also give us rampant abortion, commercialized eroticism and laws that make marriage anything one wishes it to mean. If we want the Muslim world to emulate our institutions of democracy, perhaps we should give them reasons for believing that democracy doesn’t automatically have to jettison publicly held moralities that actually ensure those freedoms in the first place.

Benedict XVI saw with his own eyes a Europe in flames after the Allies defeated Hitler ’s self-made religion of blood. Yet he rightly remembered in that 2005 address the hope of the mid-20th century for a state that was “not neutral regarding values but alive, drawing from the great ethical sources opened by Christianity.” If we betray this hope today, it will not only be the West that suffers.

Mr. Ortiz teaches at the Heights School, in Potomac, Md. He is the author of “Like the First Morning: The Morning Offering as Daily Renewal” (Ave Maria Press, 2015).