launched in 1097 AD to wrest Jerusalem from the infidels. Along the way, at Nicea, in their first encounter with the enemy, Crusaders sought to terrorize the city into surrender by cutting off the heads of the Turkish dead and wounded, which knights then hung from their saddles, or stuck on the ends of spears and paraded before the city walls, or catapulted over the city walls. At Antioch, captured Muslims were lined up outside the walls and beheaded in plain sight of the city’s defenders. When the Crusaders finally gained entrance into the great city, the slaughter was indiscriminate; no Muslim was spared on the grounds of age or gender. And then came Jerusalem. When the crown jewel of the Crusader’s quest fell on July 15, 1099, beheadings, immolations, torture, the slaughter of women, infants seized by their feet and smashed against walls, and the intestines of Muslims cut open in a search for gold coins or precious stones that might have been swallowed were the rule, not the exception. And through it all, the Crusaders’ rallying cry was “God’s will, God’s will.”

Ruthless, murderous brutality carried out in the name of Christ. Is it any wonder that for a thousand years Muslims have typically despised anything associated with Christianity? The wars called the Crusades (the English equivalent of jihad) serve to remind us that

• Atrocities have been committed in the name of Christ. Give the devil his due: by

prompting in Christ’s name something utterly abhorrent to Christ (John 18:36; 2 Cor 10:4), he successfully disguised murder and brutality as a holy cause.

• Atrocities in the name of Christ encourage the rejection of Christ. Far from conquering unbelief, Christian atrocities promote it. Scripture contains numerous examples wherein the ungodliness of God’s people made Him a stench to outsiders (2 Sam 12:14; Is 52:5, Rom 2:17–24; cf. Gen 34:30).

• Any crusade that is not an offensive of love is not of Christ. Any act of hateful-ness, or arrogance, or prejudice, or close-fistedness, or bullying, or mercilessness, etc. perpetrated by a Christian should be recognized for what it is: an act from hell, not heaven (1John 3:8–10). To the extent that we veer from a course of love and service in our dealings with others, to that extent we have departed from Christ.

The skeptic Hume was right when he called the Crusades “the most signal and most durable monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation.” No one admires the bravery of a Bohemond of Taranto, the genius of a Richard the Lionhearted, or the sincerity of a Louis IX more than I. But we should never have the illusion that personal virtue can ever transform an ungodly venture into something glorious.