Christianity's Violent History

Michael Streich

June 16, 2010

 

The two thousand year history of Christianity is repeatedly marked by violence and bloodshed, often on a large scale. Although the religion’s founder, Jesus of Nazareth, preached peace and told the Roman Governor Pilate, “My kingdom is not of this world…,” the later beliefs and actions of Christians often sought to destroy kingdoms and replace them with their own.

 

This was true when the first Crusaders captured Jerusalem in 1099, it was true during the European post-Reformation wars of religion, and it was true of men like Columbus, Cortes, and Pizarro. Killing in the name of Christ, at least on a grand scale, slowed with the coming of the Enlightenment and secular reasoning.

 

The Christian Crusades against the Muslims and Heretics

 

The capture of Jerusalem was recorded by Fulcher of Chartres [1]. After the Crusaders entered the city, a great bloodletting began: “On the top of Solomon’s Temple, to which they had climbed in fleeing, many were shot to death with arrows and cast down headlong from the roof. Within this Temple about ten thousand were beheaded.”

 

Another kind of Crusade was carried out under Pope Innocent III in 1209 in southern France against the Cathari. This “Albigensian Crusade” resulted in the extermination of thousands of men, women, and children. When the crusaders besieged Beziers, there was some concern that good Catholics should be spared. The papal legate, representing Rome, however, replied, “Kill all! Kill all, for God will know his own.” [2]

 

The Post-Reformation Wars of Religion

 

The century after Martin Luther’s death witnessed unprecedented violence between Catholics and Protestants, culminating in the devastating Thirty Years’ War. In Bohemia, Protestants were all but eliminated and those that survived went into hiding, later to form the Moravian Church. In the Netherland’s, Dutch Calvinists were slaughtered by the orders of Spain’s Philip II whose sincere desire was to root out all Protestantism.

 

The St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre in France in 1572 represented widescale slaughter. Writing about those events in Paris, Mack P. Holt [3] details the example of Francoise Lussault: “They then took her and dragged her by the hair…She was then impaled on a spit and dragged through the streets…before she was eventually dumped into the Seine.” Another Huguenot woman about to give birth “…was stabbed in the abdomen and then hurled into the street below, as her nearly-born infant, with its head already protruding from its mother’s corpse, eventually died in the gutter.”

 

Conquest of the Americas

 

From the very first contact with Europeans in what would be called New Spain, Native Americans were compelled to become Christians or face death. Historian Howard Zinn, in his People’s History of the United States, cites examples from Columbus to Cotton Mather in Puritan New England. Native beliefs were forced underground but were never entirely eradicated.

 

In New Mexico the 1680 Pueblo Revolt represented a violent dissatisfaction with a local government closely tied to the Catholic Church in its operations. Historian Alan Taylor [4] states that, “The Pueblo Revolt of 1680 was the greatest setback that natives ever inflicted on European expansion in North America.” Although Spanish reprisals ended the revolt and the Pueblo accepted the rites of Catholicism, they continued their own traditional practices in secret.

 

In New England, Puritan leaders had no moral qualms in exterminating neighboring Native Americans. Puritans believed that these native peoples were already damned to hell and that the Old Testament promises given to God’s chosen were their own. Thus, God blessed their actions in taking native land.

 

Other Historical Examples of Violent Christianity

 

The history of the Christian Church is full of bloody examples of violence. Historians still debate how many hundreds of thousands of women lost their lives during the witch hunts. Protestant violence against Irish Catholics persisted for centuries and in Northern Ireland violent clashes were still common in the last decade. On June 15, 2010, British Prime Minister David Cameron apologized for the shooting of 13 Catholics protesting in Londonderry, Northern Ireland in 1972.

 

Religions often breed the seed of violence when adherents depart from the original messages of peace, love, and brotherhood. Christianity, in this respect, is no different. Resurgent fanaticism and intolerance should never be equated with the ethical nature almost all world religions were founded upon. In this regard, reformation and renewal have, in the course of history, attempted to realign misguided interpretations with foundational truths.

 

[1] Brian Tierney, The Middle Ages: Volume I, Sources of Medieval History (McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1992)

[2] Brian Tierney and Sidney Painter, Western Europe in the Middle Ages 300-1475, 5^th Edition (McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1992)

[3] Mack P. Holt, The French Wars of Religion, 1562-1629 (Cambridge University Press, 1997)

[4] Alan Taylor, American Colonies (Viking, 2001)

[First published in Suite101. Copyright owned by Michael Streich. Written permission to republish required]