The Case Against the Case Against the Crusades

From Ross Douthat, at the New York Times:

The Crusades as an epoch-spanning phenomenon aren’t in and of themselves a great stain on Christian history: They’re a phenomenon in Christian history that includes many stains and sins and great crimes, but also involves many admirable figures and heroic moments, many great tragedies, and many individuals and incidents that simply resist any kind of manichaean reading. Contemporary Christians should reject and disavow the great crimes that some Crusaders committed as they should reject and disavow the un-Christian hatreds that motivated them. But we are under no obligation to reject and disavow the entire multi-century struggle with an armed and equally-militant foe as merely the manifestation of some irrational religious “phobia,” let alone accede to analogies that cast an entire civilization’s worth of kings and theologians and soldiers as the moral equivalent of Osama Bin Laden.

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Hat Tip: Instapundit, "Obama is a historical illiterate."