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Christians marching off to holy war—how can we understand that? And did any good come of it? To answer these questions, Christian History editors Kevin Miller and Mark Galli talked with Jonathan Riley-Smith, professor of history at Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, University of London. Professor Riley-Smith is author of The Crusades: A Short History (Yale, 1987) and numerous other books on the crusading era.

Christian History: In the first three centuries, Christians were pacifists. By 1096, they embarked on a holy war. What caused such a huge change?

Jonathan Riley-Smith: First, the early church was not entirely pacifist. In Romans 13, for example, Paul justifies the violence of the pagan emperor, for the emperor is yet a minister of God. And Christians served in the Roman army from the second century on.

Following the conversion of the emperors, in the fourth century, the church became more open to using violence. Church leaders, after an initial shock, began supporting the use of force against heretics.

Then Augustine formulated his theory of “just war,” but his terms effectively mean “holy war.” Augustine and the medieval world concluded that violence is not evil. Instead, violence is morally neutral. That makes a crusade possible.

How did medieval Christians support their idea that violence was morally neutral?

Augustine gave this example: Suppose a man has gangrene in the leg and is going to die. The surgeon believes the only way to save him is by amputating the leg. Against the man’s will, the surgeon straps him to a table and saws off the leg. That is an act of extreme violence.

But was that violence evil? Augustine said no. And if you find one exception to the idea that violence is evil, he concluded, then violence cannot be intrinsically evil.

Thus, for medieval theologians, violence may or may not be evil; it depends largely on the intention of the perpetrator. Until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this was the normative Christian view. In fact, the majority of Christians over 2,000 years have believed that violence may be justified under certain circumstances.

It’s one thing to say violence is morally neutral, but how did the crusaders justify an offensive strike against Islam?

If you had asked a canon lawyer (theologian), he would have said the crusades were defensive: Christians were defending their brothers and sisters in the East from Muslim aggression and oppression, or they were regaining land that had been taken by Muslims. Senior churchmen maintained that when Christianity goes to war, it can only be in defense or for the recovery of property.

But if you had mingled with a crowd of knights in the late eleventh century, they would have said they were fighting for “the liberation of Jerusalem”. That’s not so hard to understand when you consider that Christians reach the same conclusions today.

Christians crusade today?

Think about the more militant advocates of Christian liberation. Although liberationists argue for rebellion rather than war, they put forward arguments that were made in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: Violence is morally neutral; Christ intends people to live in just political structures; Christ is present in the process of liberation; we must show solidarity with our oppressed brothers and sisters; dying in this cause is martyrdom.

Every Christian reformation is accompanied by violence.
—Jonathan Riley-Smith

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