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What History Shows

But history shows that Christianity, when pressed, will murder and burn and torture countless people to enforce orthodoxy. We live in kinder, gentler times, and Christianity experienced a Reformation, a Counter-Reformation and even the Second Vatican Council in ways that Islam sadly has not. And so regular Muslims are far closer to Islamists than many […]

But history shows that Christianity, when pressed, will murder and burn and torture countless people to enforce orthodoxy. We live in kinder, gentler times, and Christianity experienced a Reformation, a Counter-Reformation and even the Second Vatican Council in ways that Islam sadly has not. And so regular Muslims are far closer to Islamists than many Christians are to Christianists. ~Andrew Sullivan

Has it come to this? Has basic historical knowledge fallen to such a pitiful state that these sorts of statements can be made in earnest by allegedly educated people? Someone who believes that any Christian authority killed “countless people” to enforce orthodoxy reveals himself as an ignoramus. That’s all there is to it. In the entire history of the Inquisition–the longest and bloodiest enforcement of any orthodoxy in Christian history–the number of those executed over six hundred years was on the order of 9,000 people. The American government has accidentally killed more Iraqis than that in the last three years for their own liberation (which Sullivan supported), so can we be spared the faux morality of whining about Christian fanatics killing the heterodox? I take St. Theodore Studites’ view that it is wrong to kill heretics for their heresy, as it deprives them of a chance to abandon heresy, but even so 9,000 is not “countless people.”

The Wars of Religion and the Thirty Years’ War were extremely bloody and devastating, particularly in the damage the latter did to agricultural production and food supply (famine, not direct casualties, caused much of the devastating loss of 1/3 of the population in Germany), which do tell us that wars are, well, very destructive and evil. That does not seem to stop Sullivan from endorsing every war that comes along. Had confessional differences not inspired some of the actors in the Thirty Years’ War, it might have been brought to a peaceful end more quickly, but what we see in that war is a Europe divided along confessional lines that then goes to war over principally dynastic and political questions. The war kept going as long as it did, and involved as many European powers as it did, because of semi-Realpolitik concerns about their equivalent to the “balance of power.” That is not to deny that religious convictions intensified the war and made it more “total” than anything Europe had seen previously, but it seems rather important to point out that this was not the result of the domestic enforcement of orthodoxy (on which all belligerents at that time agreed to be vital and rational) but the identification of particular rulers with different confessions. In a sense, the wars of the 16th and 17th centuries are good arguments against a plurality of Christian churches and in favour of one standard of orthodoxy, but I won’t push that line too far. The emperor’s war to establish his authority over the dissident princes was a classic example of early success breeding overreach; this was only partly a function of his stern Counter-Reformation Catholicism.

But as the modern, post-Enlightenment age has shown, men freed from the constraints of religious orthodoxy or even simply of religion will find even more absurd things to kill each other over without any sense of proportion or limit. The sack of Magdeburg was horrific (of course, who now remembers the sack of Magdeburg?), but it cannot even compare to the devastation of the March to the Sea or the suppression of the Vendee. These latter two cases of widespread destruction and death wrought for ephemeral, ridiculous ideas tell me that I would prefer the danger of religious wars. At least, as Chesterton said in The Napoleon of Notting Hill, “the only just wars were the religious wars.”

Someone who strings together Reformation, Counter-Reformation and Vatican II as if they represented any of the same impulses or changes in Christianity cannot be taken even the least bit seriously as an observer of Christianity (I know it’s Andrew Sullivan, but that doesn’t excuse shocking historical illiteracy). What, pray, does Mr. Sullivan think happened in the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, if not the intensification of violent religious dispute among Christians? In many respects the Reformation was intended to be a purifying, renewing movement of a fairly reactionary (and I don’t use that word pejoratively) type. That is inevitably an oversimplification, but whatever else it was neither it nor the Counter-Reformation could readily be associated with the kind of religious “reforms” undertaken at Vatican II.

The essential difference between the restorative rationales of early Protestantism and an Islamic movement like Wahhabism or the Northern Indian Islamic revival of the 17th century is the difference between the kinds of original religion they were trying to restore: on the one hand, the early Apostolic Church and its proper teachings, and on the other the followers and armed doctrine of Muhammad. But the restorative mentality is the same, and it is one that Mr. Sullivan would (and does) find regressive and offensive. For him to speak favourably of Reformation and Counter-Reformation in the same breath with Vatican II reveals him to be a breathtakingly ignorant person on the subject of Christian or, indeed, general European history.

He speaks of the Reformation as if it were some sort of moderating influence, and he seems to think that Reformation and Counter-Reformation helped to separate religion from politics. To put it bluntly, Sullivan could not pass a college early modern European history course with such a confused understanding of these fundamental transformations of Christianity. Islam has experienced reform and revival movements frequently; it is simply that the original form and original life of Islam do not improve with revisions and no number of “returns” to the original can possibly improve upon something so basically flawed.

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