Pausing to recognize the unremarkable should help remind us that even when we do routine things, we are still privileged to participate in the long history of human life. Many of us get up in the morning, pour a cup of coffee or orange juice, pull out a chair, and sit down at a simple table for breakfast. We do homework, we pay bills, we write emails, we laugh, and we hurt. As in the years long past, we are doing the same things today. Sure, we have different technology, but we are still people being people. And we still sit at tables.

Many of our mundane moments go unnoticed, but we should pause to appreciate them occasionally because they will soon come to an end. I am sure this will sound strange to some of you, but I take pleasure in pulling out a chair and sitting next to a table or desk. The simpler, the better.
We own an antique secretary’s desk we picked up at a yard sale for next to nothing. Someone built it either in the late 1800s or early 1900s. I like to pull up a chair and write there, usually with pen and paper. Occasionally, as I write, I wonder who else sat at this desk and what else had been written on this old wooden surface long before computers and mobile phones.
Did someone sit here and write a letter to a loved one who was away at war with a heart full of concern? Did tears fall on this surface while a couple tried to figure out how to pay bills larger than their income during the Depression? Was it used to write wedding invitations, baby announcements, or tell loved ones about a cancer diagnosis?
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Wednesday, October 27, 2021
Christianity tells the world what it does not wish to hear. We should not expect to be embraced by those whose thoughts and deeds contradict the truths of our faith. Nor should we seek to make our faith more palatable, lest the salt lose its savor.

There are times in history when Christianity feels its place in ­society coming under threat. As it finds itself pushed to the margins, two temptations emerge. The first is an angry sense of entitlement, an impulse to denounce the entire world and withdraw into cultural isolation. In the early twentieth century, American Fundamentalism offered a good example of this tendency, renouncing public engagement and defining itself against alcohol, evolution, the ­movies—characteristic productions of the society by which it felt attacked. Arguably, we see something of the same thing today in evangelical support for Donald Trump, though in this case populist Protestantism is contending for ­America’s future rather than retreating from its present. I dare say readers of The Christian Century wish that truculent evangelicals would take the Benedict ­Option.
The second tendency is more subtle and more seductive. While appearing to be valiant for truth, it conforms Christianity to the spirit of the age. If fundamentalist fist-shaking is the temptation of the ragamuffin masses, accommodation appeals to those who seek a seat at the table among ­society’s elite. And these elite aspirants often blame the masses when their invitation to high table fails to materialize.
Over the last few years, America has witnessed plenty of both tendencies. We’ve seen the anger of the evangelicals who think the country is being stolen from them, and we’ve detected the condescension of those who blame their less urbane coreligionists for the woes of the Church and the nation. Ecclesiastes reminds us that there is nothing new under the sun. As often as Christianity has had its cultured despisers, it has had adherents who respond by warring against the age or by making entreaties to the despisers—often reinterpreting the anti-Christian sentiments of the moment as fulfillments of the true faith.
Today, countless apologists insist that a rejection of Christian sexual morality is actually a fulfillment of the Christian imperative of love, which they gloss as the imperative to “include.” But one of the first of these apologists, and arguably the most sophisticated, was Friedrich Schleiermacher. He is credibly called the father of modern theology, which really means modern liberal Protestant theology. Liberal Protestants pioneered the tactic of labeling critics “anti-modern” rather than engaging their arguments. Only in the last few decades, as liberal Protestantism has declined as a cultural force, have historians recognized that theologies framed to reject modern individualism, subjectivism, and historicism are themselves uniquely modern.
When Schleiermacher was a young man, an older, confessional Protestantism still had ownership of institutional culture in his native Germany. But even then society was in transition, and ­Christianity was losing ground among elites. The first generation of historical critics was shaking old Reformation certainties. Theology, once queen of the sciences and the crown of university education, was subject to fundamental challenges from Enlightenment thinking. The empiricism of thinkers such as David Hume called into question the traditional proofs for God’s existence and the credibility of miracles. Influenced by Hume, Immanuel Kant ruled out-of-bounds any possibility of knowing transcendent realities. In effect, Kantian philosophy, which rapidly came to dominate German intellectual life, made it impossible to sustain classical Christian theism. In the world of Kant and his successors, God was perhaps useful as a presupposition by which to anchor moral duty—what Kant called a “postulate” of practical reason—but theological notions served no substantive purpose. At the same time, Romanticism was placing sentiment or feeling at the heart of what it means to be human. This, too, ran counter to inherited forms of Christianity, with their dogmas and systematic theologies full of close arguments and fine ­distinctions. Christianity was being cordoned off from the influential modes of inquiry that inspired excitement and enjoyed the prestige of the new.
It was in this context that Schleiermacher produced his brilliant work On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers. He did not dispute Kant’s strictures against metaphysics, which entailed that we cannot know God’s revelation and thereby denied that Christian doctrine has authority. Instead, he attacked Kant’s reliance on argument and analysis. God, Schleiermacher insisted, is not a postulate. He is rather the object of our most intense emotions. Religion is thus a matter of feelings, not of reason. The purpose of doctrine, therefore, is not to convey knowledge but to evoke intense ­feelings that move our souls. We do not “know” God; rather, we commune with God in an “­immediate feeling.”
One rightly marvels at Schleiermacher’s ability to concede all of Kant’s philosophical points while advancing a passionate case for the enduring relevance of pious emotions. At one point, ­Schleiermacher notes that Christianity is heatedly rejected by those influenced by Enlightenment thought—and the passion of unbelief indicates that religion has great power and significance. Yet it is not so much Schleiermacher’s argument as his strategy that is instructive. Rather than defend Christian orthodoxy, he concedes the ground claimed by religion’s cultured despisers. He redefines Christianity to make it accord with the assumptions of its critics. He argues that ­Christianity is not characterized by irrational credulity, because it is not concerned with beliefs at all, but rather with feelings. By Schleiermacher’s way of thinking, Christian beliefs are symbols, cherished because they evoke the “immediate feeling” that links us to the divine.
With this approach, Schleiermacher was free to partake of the rising criticism of theological systems. He need not defend the authority of doctrine or of those who believed that Christian doctrine made objective claims about reality. By turning the dogmatic faith of previous generations into a religion of feelings and intuitions, he construed Christian doctrines as expressions of religious sentiment rather than as statements of objective truth. For example, predestination was not for him a matter of divine action effecting the eternal decision or decree of God, which divided the human race into elect and reprobate. Rather, it was a conceptual-­poetic expression of the feeling of absolute dependence upon God, which Christianity evokes and Christians experience.
Schleiermacher is long dead, as is the Enlightenment audience he sought to address. But the problem of Christianity and its cultured despisers has not disappeared. It has become increasingly evident in recent decades. Powerful forces of secularism, metaphysical materialism, and scientism, among other factors, have driven religion from its former places of influence. One need only note that very nearly all private universities in the United States were founded by religious groups and were for a long time anchored in a religious tradition, only to become secular in the last two generations. In response to this pressure, Christianity has once again put forward those who seek to persuade its despisers that the faith is not inimical to polite society.
In the mid-1990s, a sustained effort was made to rehabilitate and defend the intellectual and academic integrity of orthodox Christians. The leaders of this movement, the historians Mark Noll and George Marsden, made valiant cases for the Christian mind. In The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, Noll argued that American evangelicalism was hamstrung by its commitment to indefensible positions that lacked intellectual credibility. It consequently attracted the scorn of educated people outside the Church. Worse still, the lack of intellectual standards made life hard for thoughtful individuals within the Church. Noll focused on dispensationalism and literal six-day creation, arguing that these commitments were not defensible by the canons of reason, nor were they necessary for a rigorously orthodox Christian faith.
The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind was a bestseller and named Book of the Year by Christianity Today, the flagship evangelical magazine whose purpose was, in part, to articulate a Christianity that avoided the excesses of fundamentalism while defending orthodox Christianity. Shortly afterward, Marsden argued for what he dubbed “the outrageous idea of Christian scholarship” in a monograph of the same name. The historical portion of his case was based on research he had earlier published on the Christian origins of many of America’s most significant institutions of higher education. Marsden concluded that Christianity’s cultured despisers were simply wrong when they claimed that faith set a person at odds with the life of the mind. In the constructive portion of his case, Marsden argued that Christian scholars could cultivate careful respect for the canons of academic discourse and thoughtful, honest engagement with other academics within the guild without compromising their faith.
Unlike Schleiermacher, Noll and Marsden are careful to sustain full-blooded affirmations of orthodox Christian faith. And unlike ­Schleiermacher’s, I find their arguments convincing. There is nothing about belief in the saving death and bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ that undermines intellectual rigor or compromises academic standards—­unless, of course, those standards are deemed above criticism from the get-go. But there can be no doubt that the extraordinarily positive reception of Noll’s and Marsden’s ideas came about because university-­educated Evangelicals in the 1990s were anxious to be reassured. The universities they attended increasingly told them that their faith was disqualifying. Noll and ­Marsden argued otherwise, showing that a person of faith who ­engaged in self-criticism and discarded ­untenable beliefs could participate fully in modern ­intellectual life.
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If ‘Defenders of the West’ is our new, Christian ‘Plutarch’s Lives’, then let us recognize the truth of our ancestors’ greatness, and piety and let us validate their sacrifices and imitate them. The Crusades were good and right. The myths have been rewritten with our people as the villains because the powers of the air fear a Christendom with muscle. At some point, we must all decide if we will believe the stories about our ancestors from people who hate us and our King, Jesus, or if we will believe what our ancestors said about themselves.

Western Christians have forgotten the meaning of the word persecution. They have also forgotten that once upon a time Christians, when they had the power, prestige and wealth to put a stop to persecution, resisted persecution with violent, military force. Raymond Ibrahim is on a quest to remind us of both of these forgotten truths. 
In his book Defenders of the West, Ibrahim continues the work he started in his previous book, Sword and Scimitar. In Sword and Scimitar, Ibrahim chose to focus on events, specifically on battles that shaped the Crusades and the conflict that he believes must be continuous between Muslims and Christians. In Defenders of the West, he has chosen to go a different route by focusing on the men themselves. Each chapter is a succinct biography of one of the heroes of the Crusades.
After a very good forward by Victor Davis Hanson (whom Ibrahim studied under), Ibrahim gets into his introduction to set the stage for his work. His introduction takes a militant stance right away and sets out to right the wrong of intentionally misrepresenting the Crusades, Crusaders and their Islamic counterparts. Ibrahim has already established himself as a historical and contemporary expert on Islam. In Defenders, he lays out the true historical account of the misdeeds of the Muslims of the era in order to clarify the stakes and motivations of the Crusaders. He also has a secondary goal of clarifying actual Islamic beliefs about how non-Muslims are to be treated according to their writings. The misunderstandings of the modern media regarding Islamic doctrine are so ubiquitous that even some self-professing Muslims believe they are a “religion of peace,” clearly in opposition to their history and teachings.
Ibrahim has a strong desire to get a complete picture of each man he is highlighting in his book and so he considers sources both friendly to and opposed to each subject. This pays dividends later on when seemingly outlandish historical claims are made about the appearance, piety or fighting prowess of one of the Crusaders, only to then have those hyperbolic claims be confirmed begrudgingly by their enemies in private communiques or official records. 
The Great Men
Ibrahim’s work is like a medieval, Christian version of Plutarch’s Lives. A book in which Plutarch set out to strengthen the Roman ethos by linking the heroes of Rome to a heroic Greek counterpart. Americans understand this in a way because of the hackneyed trope in politics of appealing to the founders. Sometimes this is warranted and accurate and sometimes it is absolutely false. A reversal of this is to accuse enemies of being “nazis” or “literally hitlooor.” These things are nearly universal in the way they are regarded. Most Americans give at least lip service to agreeing with the Founders or regarding Hitler as a villain. To connect a cause with them is to have instant ethos. This is the way many of the Romans viewed their Greek predecessors. Plutarch set out to write the definitive biographies of these men and show why Romans were equal to and surpassed their exploits.
Ibrahim doesn’t seek to pair each Crusader to another or to a predecessor in such a direct way. But many comparisons are easy to make within the book among the men he has chosen to write about and in some cases their Islamic adversaries. They are able to be grouped by region and temporal proximity for the useful purpose of comparing and contrasting and offering a wide range of personalities and physical types. If Ibrahim set out to present the men in the book as figures worthy of imitation, he has succeeded brilliantly. If he did not set out with that goal in mind, then these larger-than-life figures have overshadowed whatever other goals he had. Unlike the Romans who appealed to the greatness of their civilizational forebears the Hellenists, when the Crusaders walked the Earth, they considered all the great men of their day to have already bowed the knee to the Cross of Christ. They were of one Kingdom. They sought to imitate biblical warrior kings, pious ancestors, and Christ Himself. 
After telling my 5-year-old son a few anecdotes about Richard the Lionheart, he laid siege to our sofa and started ordering his stuffed animals to convert to Christianity. (Ongoing discussions of Soteriology are clearly necessary.) It is very difficult for a man to read this book and not find himself inspired by the men within. He wants to have a Crusader birthday party. He found a snapping turtle shell near the creek and was hoping I could make him a shield out of it with a lion on it.
Ibrahim knows that the study of the lives of great men is recalling a former way of studying history that has been neglected. Classically trained and educated people are generally more aware of the historiography of the individual because of exposure to older historical works (like Plutarch) which are focused on people’s lives, not merely a series of events. A dry history of mere events can be interesting enough if you find the period compelling, but there is a reason why our best stories have characters in them. To enter history, you must do so through the life of a character who lived it. In that way, even boring periods of history have proved quite captivating to readers.
Surveying the Field
Each chapter, except the introduction and the conclusion, covers a specific Crusader. Ibrahim chooses to highlight Crusaders from each of the major fronts of war with Islam in the Middle Ages and they are presented in chronological order, some overlap each other. The Holy Land in the war with the Saracens and Egyptians, Spain and the war with the Moroccan Moors, and the Balkans in the war with the Ottoman Empire. The crusaders featured are Godfrey of Boullion (French/Frankish), Rodrigo “El Cid” de Vivar (Spanish), Richard the Lionheart (English), Ferdinand III (Spanish), Louis IX (French), John Hunyadi (Hungarian), George “Skanderbeg” Castrioti (Albanian), and Vlad Dracula (Yes, that one. Romanian).
The chapters have a formula that does not get old even though it is routine. First, the situation is explained. In virtually all cases, Muslims have achieved the upper hand politically and are using their power to extort Christians, enslave them, steal their children and murder them. This is a dark part of each chapter. The atrocities committed by the Muslims against their Christian subjects are nearly too heinous to mention. Mass murder, enslavement, brainwashing, forced conversion and forced circumcision, mass pedophilic rape, routine covenant breaking, destruction of churches and holy sites, and forcing captives to fight against their own people. This is an important chronology to understand. The Christian Crusaders always set out to recapture Christian lands and put a stop to the abuse and persecution of other Christians, or to actively defend lands under threat of Muslim invasion. The Crusaders did not invade Muslim lands unprovoked.
As an aside here, this realization is probably a revolution to some people on its own. All of us, even friends of mine who were homeschooled by based parents and myself (private Christian school educated), believe that, at best, the Crusades were a conventional land war meant to expand the control of Islam or the Roman Church. They believe that the Pope dispatched troops to the Holy Lands to expand his personal influence and if the Christians didn’t go then they got excommunicated or deposed. While there is no doubt some questionable doctrines being bandied about at this time in history, such as indulgences for Crusaders, that is not the reality. The Pope requested Christian kings to help in response to outrages beyond count.
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