Christian Right "Offended" by Its Own History

President Obama speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast on February 5

The Christian right is all in an uproar over a speech President Obama gave at the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday.

Jim Gilmore (R), former governor of Virginia: "The president's comments...are the most offensive I've ever heard a president make in my lifetime.  He has offended every believing Christian in the United States."  He went on to say the president's speech proved that "Mr. Obama does not believe in America or the values we all share."

what eye thynk:   Mr. Gilmore seems to have an inflated sense of the value of his opinion.  While there certainly are many who share his view, he is a far way off from speaking for "all" of us.

And what did the President say to offend Mr. Gilmore and conservative Christians?  Well, first President Obama condemned the violence being perpetrated around the world in the name of Islam, saying it is an example of the way religion can be "twisted and misused in the name of evil."

So far, so good. It would not surprise me if the Gilmore Club found itself firmly in agreement at this point in the president's address.

The president continued, saying the atrocities we witness on the news every day are not really the fault of all believers in Islam.  "From a school in Pakistan to the streets of Paris, we have seen violence and terror perpetrated by those who profess to stand up for faith--professed to stand up for Islam, but, in fact are betraying it." He described ISIS as "a brutal cult that, in the name of religion, carries out unspeakable acts of barbarism."

I have a feeling that it was at this point--when the president failed to condemn all Muslims as the spawn of Satan--that conservatives' indignity gene began to vibrate.

President Obama went on to point out that, as shocking as are the acts of jihadist groups like ISIS, their actions are "not unique to one group or one religion...There is a tendency in us, a sinful tendency, that can pervert and distort our faith...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."

And that's when the right abandoned any semblance of rationality.

But what did President Obama really do?  He reminded the attendees that the Crusades and the Inquisition were cruel, bloody, barbaric and perpetrated under the banner of Christianity.  

• The Crusades were undertaken in an attempt to regain land the Pope saw as holy and belonging to the church.  Muslim occupants who believed, (and  800 years later still believe) that the land is also holy to Islam were murdered in the name of Christ.    
• The Inquisition was perpetrated against the church's own in an attempt to make itself more pure, more holy, to weed out those who lived on the outside of fanaticism. It was an attempt to legislate faith. (Sound familiar?)

These are historical facts, and Christians, no matter how conservative, don't get to pick and choose the parts of their history they want to remember while forgetting the rest.  That's not how history works.  If it did, no one in Germany would ever mention the Holocaust.