"Are you now or have you ever been a Lutheran?"

Mollie Ziegler Hemingway at Get Religion, who is a Lutheran, analyzes the silly hit piece on Michelle Bachman's former membership in the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS):

I don’t know what it is about conservative women that makes some reporters lose their everliving minds, but Bachmann’s candidacy is this year’s Sarah Palin media meltdown, apparently.


In any case, Joshua Green is one of the more partisan folks at The Atlantic, and that harms his piece when it comes to stuff like facts, nuance and context.

For one thing, the headline is not true. It’s about the church body to which Bachmann once belonged, but not her current church. And let’s actually start there. I’m a confessional Lutheran. Ostensibly, Michele Bachmann was a member of a more conservative but also confessional Lutheran church body. And for years, whenever I heard her speak, she never sounded even mildly Lutheran to me. The “the Lord put it on my heart” type language. The “the Lord anointed me” stuff. This is not how Lutherans speak, although I won’t bore you with all of the why. Her other affiliations have always been more evangelical than Lutheran, going back decades.

You might keep that in mind when you’re thinking about what news value a hit-piece on the doctrinal views of a church that a presidential candidate no longer belongs to has.

And:

The justification for the hyperbolic story about 500-year-old history is that, we’re to believe, Michele Bachmann will have trouble getting the Catholic vote in light of the fact that she was once a member of a Protestant church that had Protestant views on Catholicism.


Yeah, right.

There is no political significance to what the article reports. Instead it serves only to alarm the casual observer over a non-issue. I mean, seriously, go to Minnesota and you can see for yourself that there is no 30 Years War breaking out among the large Catholic and Lutheran populations. That state has had tons of Catholic and Lutheran governors — many of whom held opposing views on the papacy. They somehow managed to get through it.

Exactly.  As Rodney Stark points out, religious cooperation in America is a unique phenomenon.  Despite their oppositions, members of different religions - led by their clergy - have cooperated in emergency relief and prayer services - in ways that have no imitation throughout the way.

This cooperation is what true tolerance looks like.  Rather than a watering-down of difference, in American religious pluralism we see a respect for other human beings because we recognize their humanity and their likeness to God and their common membership in a community united in mutual respect.

So, why in the face of that singular success, does the leftist media want to stir up religious discord by focusing on Mitt Romney's Mormonism and Michelle Bachman's former church's roots in the 16th Century?

Let's stop apologizing for the 11th Century.

Rodney Stark on the Crusades:

The Crusades is a topic that generates a lot of books each year. Why did you want to write God’s Battalions: The Case for the Crusades and what makes this book different from others?


Since my teens I have read a great deal of military history, but until now I had not written any myself. Along the way I read many books about the Crusades and in the past few years I have been greatly impressed by the work of historians such as Jonathan Riley-Smith and others including Thomas Madden. Unfortunately, these wonderful new studies have not reached the intelligent reading public. Nonsense about Crusaders as greedy, colonizing, brutal barbarians still prevails in the public sphere. So, I wrote a chapter on the matter as part of a proposal for a book on anti-Catholic historiography. My publishers responded that they wanted that chapter expanded into a book. So I did it. What makes my book different is, first, that it pulls together the scholarly literature (all of it carefully acknowledged) in one volume written for the general reader in hopes of setting the record straight. Secondly, my book begins in the seventh not the eleventh century, since I regard the Crusades as part of many centuries of conflict between Christendom and Islam. Thus far there have been four major book club pre-publication adoptions, so maybe God’s Battalions can have some corrective effects.

If one starts one's study of the Crusades in 1098, it looks like Christian aggression, in the same way that starting with a freeze-frame of one guy hitting another makes that person look like the aggressor.  Roll the tape back and a different picture emerges.  With respect to the Crusades, that picture includes the fact that the Crusades were into formerly Christian territory with a majority Christian population after Islamic Turks had lopped off the largest and richest part of the Christian territory in Turkey.