By Francis X. Maier
Americans do not suffer from amnesia. We prefer it. Memory shapes who we are as individuals, as a nation, and as a culture. Yet we define ourselves as a «new order of the ages.» Those words are printed directly on the Great Seal of the United States. Therefore, Americans dislike the past. And, since the 1960s, Europeans have followed the same path. The reason is simple. History as it actually happened is uncomfortable baggage. We ignore it or reinvent it, so that we can better reinvent ourselves. And that is exactly how the modern spirit treats the Christian roots of our civilization (see here and here).
The term «Middle Ages,» for example, is a creation of Renaissance humanists. The Enlightenment added a bitter flavor to the mix. For men like Voltaire, the Christian past was little more than a combination of cruelty, ignorance, and superstition. And that caricature—that distortion of real history—persists today. Robert Eggers’s upcoming film, Werwulf, set to premiere on Christmas Day 2026, features the predictable evil priest in a fiercely grim thirteenth century. Ridley Scott’s 2005 film, Kingdom of Heaven (Crusade / Kingdom of Heaven), portrays a corrupt twelfth-century Christian clergy and psychotic crusaders shouting «God wills it!» in pursuit of chaos and destruction.
The problem with caricatures is that they are false. They are a cocktail of facts and modern revisionism seeking its own advantage. The «Middle» Ages had a good dose of disease, poverty, violence, and disorder. But they were also marked by extraordinary art, architecture, and scholarship. Likewise, they witnessed a profound religious renewal, the flourishing of civil, canon, and customary law, and a remarkable economic revival. As for the Crusades—that favorite target of modern critics—consider the following.
Jonathan Riley-Smith (d. 2016) is revered as one of the great historians of the last 100 years. He is also unanimously regarded as the leading specialist on the era of the Crusades, a reputation built on a monumental body of work. A convert to the Catholic faith during his undergraduate years at Cambridge, he never diminished or romanticized the violence of the Crusades. Quite the opposite. He noted that they were often undermined by «indiscipline and atrocities»—including fierce outbreaks of hatred against Jews—which caused immense suffering. But he explained their context and content with exceptional precision. And he insisted on the need to try to understand the Crusades through the eyes of their participants.
Riley-Smith’s book The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam (The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam), based on his 2007 Bampton Lectures at Columbia University, summarizes in barely 80 pages the reality of the motives, life, and times of the crusaders. He holds special contempt for modern distortions such as Kingdom of Heaven, in which:
a cruel, greedy, and cowardly Christian clergy preaches pure hatred against Muslims. The stupidity and fanaticism of the priests are reflected in the minds of the crusaders, the Templars, and most of the leaders of the Christian settlement around Jerusalem. … [Yet, in] the midst of intolerance and fanaticism, a brotherhood of freethinkers vowed to create an environment in which all religions could coexist in harmony. They are in contact with [the Muslim leader] Saladin, who shares their goals of tolerance and peace, but the fanatics on the Christian side set out to destroy any possibility of understanding with Islam.
For today’s secular skeptic or the uninformed viewer, such a plot might have value as entertainment. But as history, it is pure propaganda contrary to the facts.
However incomprehensible they may seem to the modern mind, the Crusades were «collective acts of penance«, «penitential war pilgrimages» and—most importantly—fundamentally reactive to the Muslim conquest of the Holy Land and interference with Christian pilgrims. They arose from an organic medieval theology of penitential warfare and from Augustinian thought on just war, not from a perversion of these. As Riley-Smith notes, they were supported by saints ranging from Bernard of Clairvaux to Thomas Aquinas and Catherine of Siena. The Crusades were never colonialist or imperialist in the modern sense.
They also involved great risk: the mortality rate on the Crusades was around 35 percent among nobles and knights, with far higher casualties among the less fortunate. Nor did they produce great wealth. The Crusades proved financially ruinous for the vast majority of those who took part. And the claim that the Crusades offered a way to move the younger sons of the European nobility to the Levant—sons who could not inherit their families’ lands and titles—is also false. Among the nobility, the crusade was often a family affair. Fathers and sons set out and fought together. And most surviving crusaders returned to Europe once the crusade had succeeded or failed, often in debt and broken in health.
In short, despite the many grave sins of the crusaders, the primary motives of the Crusades were genuine piety and religious zeal, something modern elites neither understand nor respect. Christians of the crusading era saw Islam as a persecutor of the faithful, a desecrator of holy places, and a brutal aggressor that had seized Jerusalem, Spain, and much of the (Christian) Byzantine Empire by force in the name of jihad; that had strangled Christianity throughout North Africa; and that had penetrated deep into France before being repelled. Today we may criticize and lament the concept of «holy» wars. But we do so from a very convenient distance.
So what is the point of dredging all this up?
In George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984, the regime’s Ministry of Truth works tirelessly to secure its infallible control over reality. Uncomfortable news, photos, and facts from the past are simply revised or vaporized into «memory holes» that erase them. Here, in our own time and country, we do nothing so direct or so crude. Instead, we simply forget. We make the past and its obligations irrelevant: floating, forgettable debris in a river of noise and comforts; distractions and addictions to the new. As FanDuel Casino reminds us ad nauseam, we are all potential «trillionaires» in search of adrenaline.
Here’s the problem: someone important once said, «Do this in memory of me.» (Luke 22:19) To remember the Son of God, who we are as his people, our pilgrimage through history, and our missionary vocation—that is our mandate and our glory. We are part of something greater and more beautiful than ourselves, our sins, and our age. And the task of remembering that is sacred.
About the Author
Francis X. Maier is a senior fellow in Catholic studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is the author of True Confessions: Voices of Faith from a Life in the Church.