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President Obama speaks at the National Prayer Breakfast, 2/5/15.

In his 2/5/15 speech at the National Prayer Breakfast, Barak Obama made a statement that has outraged many Christians.  In his comments, Obama compared current atrocities committed by jihadists to the crusades, the inquisition and slavery.  Obama’s words were,

Unless we get on our high horse and think that this [the commission of atrocities] is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.  In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was (sic) justified in the name of Christ.

This remark was not the whole of his speech, but it’s the portion that has generated the most controversy among conservatives and Evangelicals.  For example, Robert Jeffress, a Southern Baptist pastor from Dallas, went on the Bill O’Reilly show on Friday, 2/6 to denounce Obama’s remarks.  Jeffress’ comments sought to refute the president by offering that the Inquisition killed only 2,200 people over a period of 450 years, whereas the radical Muslims who perpetrated 911 killed far more in a single morning.  Perhaps one could deem this the body count argument. Christians have racked up a lower one than the Muslims, therefore Christianity is the true religion.

Franklin Graham invoked the length-of-time defense, saying, “Today at the National Prayer Breakfast, the President implied that what ISIS is doing is equivalent to what happened over 1000 years ago during the Crusades and the Inquisition.” At least Jeffress had the wisdom to explicitly deny this weak argument during his interview on Bill O’Reilly.

In the National Review, Jonah Goldberg was a little more imaginative centering his argument against Obama around the absurd claim that the Crusades were a defensive war.   Citing Thomas Madden, a historian at Saint Louis University, Goldberg even attempts to whitewash the Inquisition, writing,

As for the Inquisition, it needs to be clarified that there was no single “Inquisition,” but many.  And most were not particularly nefarious.  For centuries, whenever the Catholic Church launched an inquiry or investigation, it mounted an “inquisition,” which means pretty much the same thing.

All that stuff about the rack and the stake and death sentences for denying the real presence of Christ in the mass, it’s all just overblown.  The Church was merely conducting an investigation that every great now and then became a little over enthusiastic.

A better argument

So, are Christians obligated to defend the Crusades and the Inquisition?  Simply put, Christians are under no obligation whatsoever to offer an apology for the Crusades or the Inquisition.  Quite the opposite.  The appalling sins committed by the Roman Catholic Church-State during those periods should never be defended by Christians.  Rather Christian apologists should use them to point out the Antichrist heart of Roman Catholicism. The problem is that most Christians have so hamstrung themselves with bad eschatology, eschatology that see Antichrist everywhere but the place he actually is, that they have rendered themselves incapable of seeing the works of Antichrist for what they are, enormities from the pit of hell.   As a result, at best they make arguments that make them appear ridiculous before an unbelieving world.  But what is far worse, they dishonor the name of Christ by linking his name to the grievous sins of Rome.

Goldberg was a little closer to the truth than either Jeffress or Graham when he wrote, “When Obama alludes to the evils of medieval Christianity, he fails to acknowledge the key word: ‘medieval.’ What made medieval Christianity backward wasn’t Christianity but medievalism.”  Of course, what made medievalism medievalism wasn’t the period of history.  It was Roman Catholicism, the devil’s masterpiece, showing its true colors in both thought and practice.

As to Obama’s comments that the name of Christ was used to justify slavery and Jim Crow, he is quite right about that.  Many people, among them some who apparently were Christians, attempted to defend slavery from the Bible.  But the defenders of slavery find no shelter in the Scriptures.  One of the implications of the Gospel, as is made especially clear in Paul’s epistle to Philemon, is that slavery is incompatible with Christina society.  Worth noting also is the little known fact that the Roman Catholic Church favored the South in the American Civil war.  In his commentary on Philemon, John Robbins made the point that,

During the American Civil War, the pope favored the Confederate government, for they both favored slavery; they both opposed capitalism; and they both favored feudalism; the is, they were both medieval.  The pope saw the war as a way to end the threat that America, a large, free, Protestant nation, posed to the political ambitions of Rome for world domination:  Divide and conquer (Slavery and Christianity, 11, n.4).

As Christians, we are under obligation before God to defend the Gospel of Jesus Christ before an unbelieving world.  But it would be hard to imagine a more inept apology than what has been offered by some Christians in response to Obama’s remarks.  May God grant his people the knowledge and wisdom to do better.