Crusader Babbits
by digby
Oh boy.
I thought we at least could agree that the Inquisition was bad and burning witches was no darned good. 500 years of violent European history was a lesson learned. Defending slavery as a Christian institution was not something to be proud of. But apparently not. These things never happened. Christianity has never been used as an excuse for violence and war.
Ed Kilgore took this on, as well as a lot of others (including me) over the week-end. Kilgore highlighted a brilliant post by Ta-Nehisi Coates on one aspect of our allegedly non-violent Christian history that wasn't all that long ago:
If anything, Coates says, Obama understated the extent to which Christianity served as a rationale for racist policies and all their brutal corollaries. After quoting Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens’ explicit claim of divine sanction for slavery, Coates notes how common this sacralization of racism was and continued to be right up to the 1960s:
Stephens went on to argue that the “Christianization of the barbarous tribes of Africa” could only be accomplished through enslavement. And enslavement was not made possible through Robert’s Rules of Order, but through a 250-year reign of mass torture, industrialized murder, and normalized rape—tactics which ISIS would find familiar. Its moral justification was not “because I said so,” it was “Providence,” “the curse against Canaan,” “the Creator,” “and Christianization.” In just five years, 750,000 Americans died because of this peculiar mission of “Christianization.” Many more died before, and many more died after. In his “Segregation Now” speech, George Wallace invokes God 27 times and calls the federal government opposing him “a system that is the very opposite of Christ.”
This reminder is especially powerful to me because I recall a sweet church-going elderly aunt of mine in 1968 asserting that “George Wallace is the best Christian running for president,” not long after I heard her say she wished she could give sanctuary to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassin.
As it happens I already posted the "Segregation Now" speech this morning.
But it shouldn't take a brilliant historical essay to make this point. This image says everything you need to know doesn't it?
The crosses are by accident, I guess.
Now, I think it's fine to say that the KKK (and the Inquisition) were Christian institutions that were at odds with the true teachings of their faith. It's a big faith with a lot of different permutations. Just like Islam. But I don't think people commonly attributed the atrocities committed by the KKK to the Christian faith in general. Certainly African Americans didn't. They are among the most fervent followers of the religion themselves. Their most revered leader was a preacher. One might even compare them to the thousands of Muslims in Iraq and Syria who are being slaughtered by ISIS. (Guess who the American "ISIS" was in this scenario?)
It is just categorically false that this is an "Islam" problem. It's a species problem.
.
