Onward Christian Soldiers

      Apparently,  Mike  Huckabee, the  entire Fox News staff and a significant number of Republican talking heads in and out of congress either failed history, or more correctly are trying to rewrite it. The recent reaction to the President remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast (WHY? Why not a national ping pong breakfast?)  reminding the attendees, correctly, I might add that Christians need to be mindful of their own history as a religious movement before rolling all Muslims into one group and associating all Islam with ISIS.  

        This seems to me to be a reasonable statement of the situation, but heads exploded,  Huckabee  said "  “Everything he does is against what Christians stand for, and he’s against the Jews in Israel. The one group of people that can know they have his undying, unfailing support would be the Muslim community. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the radical Muslim community or the more moderate Muslim community.”  If that seems a bit extreme, it is. I have seen this president do nothing "against the Christians, except express his concern that some religious groups were intent on forcing their doctrinal belief on the body politic, co-religionists and dissenters alike. Of course this is constitutional, but I fear Huckabee can't read much of that document, except perhaps the second Amendment, which he misinterprets, in my opinion.

        Faux news was worse, several statements on their propaganda broadcasts actually stating that Christians might have killed in the name of God ("might have?"  they painted friggin' crosses on their shields) during the Crusades, but that was a long time ago and it was really a war to "liberate" the "Holy land," apparently from the Muslims who had lived there for about the previous 600 years. But other than that..... nada, zip, zero, all Christians had been blameless in the following 800 or so years, and no more deaths in the name of God had occurred. Really?  

        As  a history teacher, it makes me want to puke for two reasons. First, these are the assholes who would "sanitize" history texts so that our kids would grow up being exposed to a sort of  "Lake Woebegone" history where  " all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average" and,  by the way, everything America has ever done at home and in the world has been perfect and Christianity is the reason because all the founding fathers were really ministers.  

        To these ravings that Christians haven't killed in the name of  their religion consider the following:

Bosnia: During the Bosnian War, at least 97,207 people were killed. The vast majority were Bosnian Muslims, the victims of religiously motivated "ethnic cleansing" at the hands of both Croatian Catholics and Yugoslav  Orthodox.

Crusades: Christian military excursions against the Muslim Conquests killed at a lower estimate,  1.7 million. Although styled as holy war , and preached as one by the Pope, it was even worse, as it rapidly degenerated into empire building in the name of "Christian kingdoms" in the eastern Mediterranean.  

French Wars of Religion: In France, during the last half of the 16th century wars between French Catholics and (Protestant) Huguenots  caused the death of  2.8  million souls, again in the name of the same god (different uniform)Holocaust 8.1 million

The Thirty Years' War:  Fought between parts of Germany and other outside forces pitted Protestant against Catholic again, both convinced God was on their side, as Protestant princes rebelled against the Holy Roman Empire . During the first half of the 17th century at least  5.9 million died in the name of one or the other version of Christianity.

Spanish Inquisition:  Once again, Roman Catholics killed those who did not believe as they did. between 1493 and about 1530, burnings killed at least 1,000, but the real tragedy was the belief that God had , via the Pope, granted all of the Americas to Spain, ergo, if native persons did not follow God's will (give up the gold and be slaves) they could be killed, all in the Caribbean basin eventually would be.

Irish Civil War:   at least 2,000 died over God's word in the Irish Civil War

Worthy of special mention is the fact that Germany considered itself a Christian nation as it pursued the "final solution".  Of course this was not the first time Jews in Germany had been persecuted, since Teutonic Knights on their way to the holy land burned synagogues with the congregations locked inside. This , then is just a partial listing of the real story about the clean hands of Christianity. The Huckabees and Faux news shills don't want you to know this, of course because then you could contextualize  the president's remarks.