Our dark record of Christian cruelty

President Obama elicited a firestorm of reaction to his National Prayer Breakfast speech on Thursday, where he compared ISIS atrocities like the recent cage-immolation of the Jordanian fighter pilot to atrocities committed by Christians in the name of Christ across the centuries.

“So how do we, as people of faith, reconcile these realities—the profound good, the strength, the tenacity, the compassion and love that can flow from all of our faiths, operating alongside those who seek to hijack religion for their own murderous ends? Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history. And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”

Conservatives and white evangelicals blew up over what they saw as an unjustified moral equivalency: There he goes again, minimizing Islamic extremism and running down America.

The president’s “high horse” remark, intended to dampen our moral furor, was counterproductive for our struggle against this global menace. And his claim that ISIS has hijacked an otherwise beautiful religion fits his history of distancing jihadist terrorism from its self-professed Islamic inspiration. For example, Obama insisted in a speech to the nation that “ISIL is not Islamic.” He seems keener on preventing anti-Muslim prejudice than naming and defeating this international Islamofascist scourge. Given the president’s understanding of religiously sanctioned inhumanity here at home, one would think he would be more aggressive in destroying the threat of it abroad.

Like many people, he is wrong on the Crusades, which responded to Muslim attacks on Christian communities and holy places. But American Christians justified black slavery as well as lynchings and burnings, and even burning churches, to terrorize the black population and keep them “in their place.” In some cases, people attended lynchings as family events as though they were church picnics. They did this in Jesus’ name. It was not long ago and it was right here.

Americans have expressed impatience with the unwillingness of Muslims worldwide to denounce ISIS and al-Qaeda for their crimes against humanity. So they should. But while Obama weakened his case by reaching back a thousand years for an example of Christian cruelty, he was right to direct our attention to our own recent history of appalling inhumanity from church-attending Christian people. As a nation, we need to repent more clearly of what our Christian brothers did with conviction and joy to their black neighbors, even to brothers and sisters in Christ. We need to articulate in biblical terms how it was wrong, and thoughtfully pledge ourselves to a renewed study and practice of Christian charity.

It is sad that Barack Obama has been such an ideologically extreme and polarizing president to the extent that he has politically incapacitated himself from leading us across that moral bridge together.