The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (38 page)

Lost in much of this discussion is that Christianity is not a Western faith imposed on the Middle East by the West. It was a faith born in the East that spread to the West. The Holy Lands were Christian for centuries before Muhammed was even born. The Crusades were launched not as a war of conquest but as a war to save Christians from Muslim persecution and conquest. Atrocities in the name of Christ were undoubtedly committed, as were atrocities in the name of Islam. One need not condone all of that. Indeed, one can single out Christianity for its hypocrisy, since the crusaders at times violated their ideals of love, forgiveness, and charity, while Islam was under no such restraint.

Regardless, to this day the Crusades myth saturates policy and academic debates as if everyone knows what they were really about. Leading textbooks continue to describe the Crusades as the dawn of Western colonialism and imperialism rather than an effort to beat back Eastern colonialism and imperialism. According to the authors of
Western Civilizations: Their History and Their Culture
: “the Crusades opened the first chapter in the history of western colonialism.… Western colonialism in the Holy Land was only the beginning of a long history of colonialism that has continued until modern times.”
⁹
The often in error but never in doubt
New York Times
columnist Maureen Dowd wrote in 2003 that Bush’s foreign policy had backfired because the “neocons… have created new terrorist-breeding swamps full of angry young Arabs who see America the same way Muslims saw Westerners in the Crusades: as Christian expansionist imperialists motivated by piety and greed.”
¹⁰

It’s a bizarre turn. Robert Frost defined a liberal as someone too broad-minded to take his own side in a fight. In their desperation not to take their own side, today’s anti-imperialists take at face value the flawed arguments of nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperialists just so they can condemn their own country for its imperialism. And, in their condescension,
liberal commentators assume the West was always in the position of the aggressor, the hegemon, the empire builder, and that we have nothing to offer to the rest of the world but apologies. They lecture the rest of us about the burning need to understand and empathize with the frustration of the Arab street, and for Westerners to see things through their eyes so we don’t breed even more terrorists (see
Chapter 23
, Understanding).

Meanwhile, the Muslim fanatics we are hectored to understand are recognizable to liberals precisely because they’ve been colonized by the same Western clichés.

Stopping the Witch Hunts

A similar dynamic can be found for the Church’s various “internal Crusades” against heretics, freethinkers, Jews, and other members of the coalition of the oppressed. These crusades go by the clichéd shorthand: The Inquisition. The word is so freighted with ominous implications that merely using it suggests someone is being unfairly railroaded. If a witness on the stand or before a congressional committee complains that he is being dragged before “an inquisition,” the implication is that something unfair or nefarious is going on. And suddenly the person trying to get the facts is forced to defend himself for even trying.

Communists loved to invoke the Inquisition during the Red Scare. See for example such subtly titled books as
Red Scare: Memories of the American Inquisition
,
The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition
, or
The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–60
. “Red Scare” itself is another such phrase that suggests an unfair ganging up on the accused. But scares can at least be based on facts. The avian flu scare, the anthrax scare after 9/11—these were driven by a real threat. The phrase “witch hunt” is even more loaded, because it assumes that there’s no good reason to have an inquisition in the first place. After all, there’s no such thing as a witch. That’s nonsense when it comes to the McCarthy period. Joseph McCarthy was a bully and an often irresponsible loudmouth. But he was right about a very important point: There were Communists in our midst working to undermine America. Maybe not as many as McCarthy insinuated. But certainly more than those on the Left who say it was all just a witch hunt, will admit.

Let’s turn to the original witch hunts of Europe. It is a fascinating, surprising field
of study. Unless you are very up to date on the research it is almost surely the case that nearly everything you know about the subject is almost wholly untrue. One has to say “almost” because nearly any contention about a phenomenon that spanned wildly diverse cultures and eras will find some anecdotal support. But what is clear beyond any doubt is that the fantasies of feminists, atheists, and Wiccan propagandists (which is not to say all Wiccans), anti-Catholic bigots, Hollywood screenwriters, and some leading theorists of the Third Reich are all staggeringly wrong.

There is a bizarre yearning to claim that in the name of fighting heresy, the Church oversaw wholesale slaughter in order to impose Christianity on reluctant populations. “The witch-hunting cost the German people hundreds of thousands of mothers and women, cruelly tortured and executed,” insisted Nazi SS chief Heinrich Himmler.
¹¹
Adolf Hitler was obsessed with the witch-hunting “atrocities” committed by the Catholic Church. He blamed the joylessness of vast swaths of the Germanic world on the witch burnings of the Inquisition. “Clearly,” he explained, “one must not forget that these areas are still feeling the weight of several centuries of religious oppression.”
¹²

Coming from a different perspective, in her
Revolution from Within
Gloria Steinem laments the “killing of nine million women healers and other pagan or nonconforming women during the centuries of change-over to Christianity.”
¹³
Or consider the more mainstream but scandalously slanderous novel,
The Da Vinci Code
:

The Catholic Inquisition published the book that arguably could be called the most blood-soaked publication in human history. “
Malleus Maleficarum
”
—
or
The Witches’ Hammer
—indoctrinated the world to “the dangers of freethinking women” and instructed the clergy how to locate, torture, and destroy them. Those deemed “witches” by the Church included all female scholars, priestesses, gypsies, mystics, nature lovers, herb gatherers, and any women “suspiciously attuned to the natural world.” Midwives were also killed for their heretical practice of using medical knowledge to ease the pain of childbirth—a suffering, the Church claimed, that was God’s rightful punishment for Eve’s partaking of the
Apple of Knowledge, thus giving birth to the idea of Original Sin. During three hundred years of witch hunts, the Church burned at the stake an astounding five million women.
¹⁴

Aside from the fact that there was indeed a book called
Malleus Maleficarum
—“the hammer of the witches”—everything in this passage is a hateful lie or ignorant nonsense. For the record, the best, most scholarly estimates are that somewhere around
forty-five thousand
people—not five million, and not just women (in Iceland, 90 percent of the witches were men)
¹⁵
—were killed as witches.
¹⁶
The
Malleus Maleficarum
, primarily written in 1486 by Heinrich Kraimer, a Dominican inquisitor, was purported to be the essential guidebook to identifying, trying, torturing, and killing witches. For generations it has been cited as the central evidence that the Catholic Church was a merciless persecutor of innocent women. The truth is that the Church rejected the book instantly and censured its authors. The more relevant fact is that the Catholic Church never much cared about witches, and for the most part intervened in the business of trying witches—and other alleged heretics—in order to halt bloodshed and hysteria by secular authorities and the laypeople of Europe.

In the last few decades scholars have stopped relying on the vast reservoir of propaganda about witches—and witch hunts—and started delving into the records of local towns and villages across Europe. It turns out that the most irresponsible parties in the persecution of alleged witches were not Catholic officials but neighbors of the accused, followed closely by ignorant secular authorities. Women were just as likely to turn in other women for witchcraft as men, and victims were not particularly likely to be folk healers, midwives, or keepers of some ancient tradition. Laura Miller, who surveyed the literature for
Salon
magazine in 2005, notes that accusations of witchcraft usually centered around pregnant women, births, miscarriages (only half of all babies survived to their first birthday), deformed children, and other maladies that could be ascribed to petty superstitions like the “evil eye.”
¹⁷

Most witch trials were conducted not by the Church but by the local lords and other nobles at the behest of the mob. In fact, one reason the word “inquisition” is associated with witch hunts as much as it is stems from mere terminological inexactitude. Witch trial documents often recorded
a sentence “by inquisition,” which simply meant “inquiry” or “investigation,” but subsequent historians assumed it meant a capital-I Inquisition sanctioned by the Church.

Local officials were sometimes reluctant, other times eager to appease the people with a good witch trial. The problem was that the nobles were often just as ignorant and backward as the mob yelling “burn her!” They were reliably ill equipped to handle such cases. Innocent women were tortured and executed on absurd evidence interpreted through even more absurd reasoning. In this, the witch trial in
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
is dismayingly accurate (“If she weighs the same as a duck… she’s made of wood!”).

It was against this backdrop that the Church felt it had to intercede, to bring order, reason, and an end to such spectacles. The Church saved thousands of innocent people from horrific sentences by secular authorities. As a rule, the Church did not burn witches or heretics, contrary to popular conception. That’s something the mobs or their lords did.

Also, while there were certainly witch trials throughout the Catholic Church’s history, witch hysteria was essentially a product of the Reformation. “[T]he onset of large-scale witch trials,” writes historian Joseph Klaits, “corresponds almost exactly with the uneven spread of reforming impulses across Christendom.”
¹⁸
“During the 16th century, when the witch craze swept Europe,” concurs Thomas Madden, “it was those areas with the best-developed [Catholic] inquisitions that stopped the hysteria in its tracks. In Spain and Italy, trained inquisitors investigated charges of witches’ sabbaths and baby roasting and found them to be baseless. Elsewhere, particularly in Germany, secular or religious courts burned witches by the thousands.”
¹⁹

Hence this basic rule of thumb: Where the Catholic Church’s authority was unquestioned, there were fewer—or no—witch trials. And when they did occur, they were saner and gentler. But where its authority was contested or nonexistent, there were more—and more barbaric—trials. Secular courts delivered death sentences. Catholic inquisitions rarely sentenced people to death, preferring dismissals or excommunication or penance.

The myth popularized by Dan Brown, Gloria Steinem, and Hitler that the Church was interested in beating back rival pagan faiths makes no
sense for numerous reasons, not least the fact that the areas in question had by that time been converted to Christianity for over a thousand years. Jenny Gibbons, an avowed neopagan scholar of the subject, notes in a devastating essay, “Recent Developments in the Study of the Great European Witch Hunt”: “Today, we know that there is absolutely no evidence to support this theory. When the Church was at the height of its power (11th–14th centuries) very few witches died. Persecutions did not reach epidemic levels until after the Reformation, when the Catholic Church had lost its position as Europe’s indisputable moral authority.”
²⁰

None of this erases the fact that the witch trials were an obvious barbarism. But the modern bias against institutional power and religious authority has caused us to get the causation horribly wrong. These crimes were not driven by the corrupting madness of absolute power and the Church’s institutional dogmatism. Rather they were fueled by the demands of popular mobs a weakened Church could no longer hold at bay.

The Inquisition: What a Show!

We’re not even close to done with the Inquisition yet. Historians specializing in the subject have all but given up trying to dispel popular misconceptions about the Inquisition (and I have no illusions that I will be any more successful than the professionals). The first misconception is that there was a single thing called the Inquisition. In fact, there were numerous individual inquisitions in countless countries over several centuries. There was an institution within the Church called the Inquisition, or the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition (Official title was
Suprema Congregatio sanctæ romanæ et universalis inquisitionis
²¹
now known as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. But there were also various Inquisition movements as historians call them—the Medieval Inquisition, the Portuguese Inquisition, the Roman Inquisition, etc. There was also the famous inquisition of Galileo mentioned earlier.

Let’s begin with the Medieval Inquisition. This too is a blanket term for a series of responses to heretical Christian movements in Europe in the twelfth century initially launched by Pope Lucius III in 1184. Here again the same general dynamic of the witch hunts applied. It was the secular authorities who
punished heresy with death, and it was the people themselves who did most of the rounding up of heretics. The image of the Church looking under beds for heretics—so useful for defenders of Communists and others—is simply a distortion (and yes, of course, there were anecdotal exceptions).