Learn from History: Deus Vult!
The crusades have never really stopped
There is an axiom bandied about among the pundit class: if there is anything more dangerous than religion or politics, it’s religion and politics. As with most such pithy sayings, it’s funny because it’s true, even if the humor is blacker than black. John Adams certainly thought so, and he had good reason. We still have good reason to think so today.
In 1095, Pope Urban II opened human history to a new frontier of bloodshed at the Council of Clermont, when he called upon the kings of Europe to turn their swords on the Muslims of the holy land, and guaranteed their salvation for doing so:
Wherefore, I exhort you with earnest prayer—not I, but God—that, as heralds of Christ, you urge men … to hasten to exterminate this vile race from the lands of your brethren. … And if those who set out thither shall lose their lives on the way … or in fighting … their sins shall be remitted. This I grant to all who go, by the power vested in me by God.
Thus began three centuries of warfare. At some point during this period (the etymological timeline is unclear) these wars came to be called “crusades.” The battle cry of the crusaders was Deus vult, or “God wills it.” Once a person has embraced such a sentiment, all manner of atrocities become palatable.
The history of Europe from Clermont (if not before) all the way to John Adams’ present was a vast tapestry of astonishing violence. Adams laid the blame for this squarely at the feet of both Rome and Kings, calling their interaction a “wicked conspiracy” and extolling the virtues of the Reformation and Enlightenment as finally kindling a light at the end of this dark tunnel of human history.
The framers of the Constitution clearly agreed with Adams (or at least were convinced to go along with his opinions). It is not difficult to see Adams’ distrust of political and religious interaction at work in the first amendment, specifically protecting religion, but doing so in such a way as to also ensure that no religious body would be able to form another wicked conspiracy with the government. This was part and parcel with the entire apparent goal of the framers: how to enshrine equality before the law in a practical system, and how to ensure that system would not be obviously vulnerable to hijack by religionists or other demagogues.
Unfortunately, in their zeal to make sure organized religion could not compromise the republic, the framers left a god-sized hole in the heart of the American social fabric. They were very educated men who filled that hole for themselves with learning, dispassionate philosophizing, and in many cases their own personal religious beliefs. But broadly, as years went by and generations served in government, something else happened. The result can be described differently depending on your point of view (an anthropologist will use different jargon than a theologian) but the result was the unconscious development of a new “civil religion.” American society came to view government as a church unto itself, complete with an executive inquisitor, legislative cardinals, and judicial popes to keep the faith pure. Nobody actually called this new state-worship a religion, but the trappings were all there for those with the perspective and courage to name them. And with those trappings in place, the danger of new crusades (the ultimate expression of the wicked conspiracy Adams railed so hard against) grew anew.
So let’s talk about Abraham Lincoln.
Abraham Lincoln had the perspective and courage to see American civil religion as existing, but he could not stay uninfected by it and it took him to a dark place indeed. His story is inextricable from the story of the Republican party at large, as both came to embrace this civil religion. Towards the end of his Cooper Union Address, Lincoln makes a prophetic point: “An enthusiast broods over the oppression of a people till he fancies himself commissioned by Heaven to liberate them. He ventures the attempt, which ends in little else than his own execution.”
Lincoln is referring specifically to John Brown and Guy Fawkes, and other would-be assassins or usurpers who struck at established power structures thinking they would be liberating an oppressed people, but whose efforts both failed to accomplish the goal and brought on their own destruction. And it is spookily accurate for Lincoln himself, the Republican party of his day, and American political conflict writ large.
Republicans unquestionably believed (in theory at least) that all should be equal under the law, and that American slavery was a moral wrong. Politically, though, Lincoln also recognized that the federal government needed to exercise care in pursuing the eradication of slavery inherent in this tenet of civil religion. There is a recognition of political reality in Lincoln’s early speechwriting that speaks to an admirable view of restraint, respect for constitutional limits, and very careful consideration over how and when to test those limits. The Republicans might have included zealots ready to shout Deus vult and go crusading, but Lincoln may not have been so sure.
The historical record displays the realpolitik course the Republicans first chose. Ban the import of new slaves, ban slavery in new territories, and let slavery wither and die over time. It would not be fast, but it would theoretically be peaceful. Most Republicans, Lincoln included, would surely have liked to just ban it entirely. It was, after all, the single biggest reason the party even formed. The largest article of their civil religious faith.
But then the southern states themselves embraced their own civil religion, jamming their foot firmly into Lincoln’s Cooper Union beartrap. Convinced they were being oppressed, the new Confederates viewed themselves as commissioned by Heaven to seek liberation. And the crusade was on. Secession had always been totally off the table for the Republicans. The House Divided speech, delivered at the beginning of Lincoln’s rise to power, refuses to countenance even the possibility. The civil religion of the Republicans could tolerate no confederate Luther nailing the theses of secession to the door of the capital-cathedral. Deus vult.
The butcher’s bill of the Civil War is staggering: over 600,000 dead, countless women and children left widows and orphans, deep and still unhealed rips in the fabric of American society, nearly a century of Jim Crow and lynching, and other poisonous threads woven into the tapestry of history. One is given to wonder how Adams would have viewed this process. Everything about the Civil War had religious overtones. The Battle Hymn of the Republic is still sung by church choirs every July. Dixie is played with equally religious fervor in its own quarters. The Civil War did not change minds, it forced compliance. So it always is with crusades.
There is an ugly clutching of centralized government lurking in civil religion, no matter how justified we might think it was (or is) from our modern perspective. Many people today call Lincoln the great emancipator. Objectively, it is hard not to also call him the first fascist. Adams may well have done so. And Lincoln’s own Cooper Union warning caught up to him, too. He would pay for his views on federal power (and his perceived duty to Heaven to wield it) with his life. Deus vult was followed by sic semper tyrannis and a bullet.
And like the crusaders of old, once the Republicans had attained the goal that was their sole and holy mission, they grew aimless, fat, and corrupt, soiling whatever legacy they thought they had built. The Grant administration was an embarrassing pile of steaming graft and incompetence. The Republicans turned their attention to “liberating” consenting women from Mormon polygamy. And beyond, future generations have continued to pay the price for the Civil War Republicans’ religious embrace of federal government. It had been empowered to take ever increasing control over ever more aspects of life. New popes and antipopes called crusade after crusade to do just that. Just call it “liberation” for a select group, invoke the beloved Lincoln and his emancipations, and Deus vult; the public body civil religious can be sold any new tyranny.
Just as Steven of Croyes shouted Deus vult as he led the first Children’s Crusade to destruction in 1212, so too did Abraham Lincoln shout Deus vult as he brought the Confederacy to heel. So too does Greta Thunberg shout Deus vult when she demands of the world “how dare you?” as she rails at the UN over climate change. So too have the high priests of America’s civil religion shouted Deus vult as they declared “wars” on poverty, drugs, terror, racism, COVID, and more, with all their destructions of civil liberties—every ounce new crusades. Yes, I said COVID; if you don’t think the clarion call of lockdown hysteria (“trust the science!”) was flavored with suicide-bomber-level religious zealotry, take a step back and look again.
The wicked confederacy of Adams’ warnings was not defeated, though no outside religion hijacked the government as he feared. Instead, government became a religion, and continues to be so in multiple quarters today. Adams would be appalled. And probably unpack his musket.
Suggested Reading
Adams, John. “A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law.” Teaching American History, accessed March 10, 2022. teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/a-dissertation-on-the-canon-and-feudal-law/
Endy, Melvin B. “Abraham Lincoln and American Civil Religion: A Reinterpretation.” Church History 44 (2): 229–41.
Krey, August C. The First Crusade: The Accounts of Eye-Witnesses and Participants. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1921.
Lincoln, Abraham. “Cooper Union Address.” Abraham Lincoln Online, accessed March 10, 2022. www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/cooper.htm.
Lincoln, Abraham. “House Divided Speech.” Abraham Lincoln Online, accessed March 10, 2022. www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/cooper.htm.
Wineapple, Brenda. “The Rub; or, The Moral Debate over Slavery.” Raritan 33 (1): 16–32.