While researching my paternal ancestry, I made an astonishing discovery. Our family’s 400-year-long generation-to-generation Christian heritage had emerged from Jewish roots. I learned that I am a tenth-generation descendant of a marriage between a Jewish man and a Lutheran woman. Wanting to learn more about my freshly unearthed Jewish family origins, I began paging back through German Jewish history. I was not prepared for the appalling horror story I uncovered: a gruesome, bloody, medieval version of “Christian cultural warfare.” 

Over the course of several centuries, Christian peasant mobs had erupted in terrorizing, plundering, murderous outbursts against Jewish communities. These began during the time of the First Crusade in 1096. When Pope Urban II called for an assembling of princes and knights to liberate Jerusalem from its Muslim captors, an excessively zealous French priest known as Peter the Hermit immediately amassed an unofficial “Peoples Crusade.” Thousands of French peasants and low-ranking knights sewed crosses on their clothing and prepared to “rescue” the Holy Land. Heading eastward along the great trade routes through the Rhine River region, they were, to their astonishment, soon passing through the heart of Germany’s Jewish colonies.

Taken aback by this unexpected encounter, the mob was momentarily sidetracked. Here were the very people responsible for murdering their Jesus. Pent up with anti-Muslim venom, and eager to unleash a ravaging rampage, they exploded. Entering one Jewish community after the next, they offered a choice: be baptized or be executed. Many Jews selected what they considered a more honorable option: suicide. All told, nearly half of the Rhineland Jewish community – about 12,000 men, women, and children – lost their lives. 

Two hundred years later, another wave of anti-Jewish atrocities cascaded across German territory. In 1298, a Bavarian knight named Rindfleisch led his followers on a bloodthirsty six-month spree, murdering every man, woman, and child in 140 Jewish communities. In the 1330s, villagers in the Franconia area formed gangs of Judenschlagers (“Jew-beaters”). In Alsace, an innkeeper named Zimberlin and his entourage armed themselves for battle with axes, rakes, and spears – and bearing the sign of the cross, went on a two-year beating and plundering tear, massacring Jews in almost 100 communities.

When the frightening Black Death pandemic swept across Europe in the mid-1300s, it was immediately assumed that the Jews were somehow to blame. Jewish “suspects” were rounded up and tortured into making incriminating “confessions.” Their fallacious professions of guilt spread widely, feeding vicious rumors that the Jews had poisoned Europe’s water supplies in an attempt to kill off the Christians. A systematic execution of Jews ensued. Angry mobs rounded up entire Jewish communities, one after another, and set them on fire. Nearly 600 such communities in Germany were attacked, pillaged, and inflicted with loss of life. In more than 200 of them, “Jewish bonfires” utterly annihilated every person. All told, between 1348 and 1351, likely more than half of the German Jewish population was exterminated – all in the name of Christ. By the mysterious grace of God, my own Jewish ancestors were miraculously spared.

Moving past my initial revulsion, I endeavored to understand what triggered this murderous frenzy. Its perpetrators had become viscerally agitated by what they saw happening in society. The conviction that Christians were, by God’s design, to exercise supremacy over Jews was firmly ingrained within their minds. For centuries this had been the Church’s official stance. It was supported by the oft-repeated argument articulated by Pope Innocent III in his 1205 Esti Judaeos papal bull. Jews, he bluntly declared, “are consigned to perpetual servitude because they crucified the Lord.”

The non-literate medieval masses were incapable of reading anything handed down from Roman Church officials. Nonetheless, they got the message. It was vividly conveyed to them via the church’s widespread visual arts display known as Ecclesia and Synagoga. These were two female figures appearing side by side, one representing Christianity, and the other Judaism. Ecclesia was presented as a crowned triumphant queen, holding a chalice or scepter, looking confidently forward. Synagoga, by contrast, looked disheveled, her head drooping in humiliation and defeat. She was often blindfolded, and typically held a broken scepter. They could be seen paired together as large sculpted figures inside churches, at entrances to cathedrals, on church altars, in devotional church paintings, and in public places as well. The message was unmistakable: Christianity has triumphed over Judaism. 

But this did not square with the Christian peasantry’s real-life experience. To them, the tables appeared to have been turned against them. While they were shackled by an oppressive feudal socio-economic system, their Jewish neighbors had been exempted from it. To make matters worse, the Jewish community had been handed the ability to engage in a profitable economic activity that Christians were forbidden from: the ability to charge interest. Because of ecclesial law, the lucrative economic service of moneylending fell by default to the Jewish community. Because Jews were barred from most other avenues of generating income, moneylending and pawn-broking became mainstays of the German Jewish economy. Some within the Jewish communities became affluent, and a predominate image of the stereotypical “rich Jew” emerged. 

Resentments fed feelings of fear that Christian society would be overtaken by this minority immigrant people with strange Jesus-denying religious and cultural practices. Wild-eyed, far-fetched conspiratorial theories sprang to life. Rumor had it, for example, that the blood spilled by Jews during Passover was really that of Christian children. Another rumor claimed Jewish people were so hateful of Jesus they re-crucified him by stealing consecrated communion wafers – the transformed body of Jesus – so they could curse them and stab them until they bled.

Fear of the imagined approaching demise of Christianity propelled medieval Christians into brazen lethal action on behalf of Jesus. However, what they deemed the noble cause of Jesus turned out to have been nothing more than a thinly-veiled manifestation of tribal impulses. Charlemagne’s “Christianizing” of Europe in the 700s may have quelled a long history of European intertribal conflict, but it failed to purge its inhabitants’ tribal mindset. His top-down imposition of Christendom did little to spiritually transform the hearts of his subjects. Yes, they had renounced their loyalties to their pagan gods, and became baptized and confirmed church members. But their knowledge of the teachings of Jesus was woefully limited. They knew the Lord’s Prayer and Apostles’ Creed, and that was about it. There were no Bibles, and they wouldn’t have been able to read them if there had been any. And almost everything they heard spoken at church services was in Latin, a language they did not understand.  

Their cultural identity and sense of loyalty shifted to a new tribe – one centered around Christendom’s mysterious heroic figure Jesus. Christendom’s rival was Judaism. Tribalist-oriented medieval Europeans could easily relate to the Roman Church’s “us against the Jews” mindset. They may have had a lamentably deficient understanding of the true person and mission of Jesus, but they proudly sported the sign of the cross when going to battle against their newly-adopted Jewish rivals.

Medieval Christian cultural warfare came at an immense cost. In addition to the loss of innocent human life, the toll inflicted upon Western Christianity’s integrity is incalculable. Generations of Western Christians have been forever saddled with an ugly stain on their legacy. On top of that, the mission of Jesus was severely distorted. I try to imagine what it might have been like for my Jewish ancestors to have lived through such travesty. What grotesque images of Christ formed in their minds? I am haunted by the thought that they likely went to their graves picturing Jesus as a hateful, brutal, bludgeoning, terrorizing arsonist. Who would want anything to do with such a Jesus?

The good news is those savage medieval days are long gone. The bad news, however, is that some of the same motivations that plagued those Christian mobs are still very much alive and well in America today. They lurk behind Christian nationalist agendas, feed obsessions with “Christian” culture wars, and provoke present-day versions of Christian tribalism. No wonder this tragic medieval-era story has such an eerily familiar ring to it.

The parallels are unmistakable, including an assumption that Christians are entitled to hold cultural supremacy over non-Christians, resentment from the perception that Christians are being dethroned from their God-endowed position, a panicked readiness to embrace conspiracy theories, and an impulsive desire to use what is imagined as the cause of Jesus as a cudgel for beating a godless secular culture into submission.

What makes Christians in America today so vulnerable to such a misguided mindset? Consider that since the time of Constantine seventeen centuries ago, Western Christianity has taken for granted its culturally dominant position. Now those days are over. Quietly and unsuspectingly, and seemingly overnight, we live in a post-Christian landscape. Forty million American Christians have dropped out of church over the past 25 years. We see church infrastructures unraveling, budgets shrinking, ministries closing, and pastors quitting. Modern culture, with its growing indifference to biblical truth, seems poised to drive American Christianity – as we’ve known it – completely to the sidelines.

How will we find our way through this confounding post-Christian labyrinth? Christian nationalist and culture-war ideologies offer what may sound like an appealing pathway forward. The call to “take back our country” and win the culture wars strikes a responsive emotional chord. At the same time, however, this entices Christians to chase after the same old useless idols of power, control, and score-settling that bedeviled our medieval predecessors. We would do well to choose an alternate path – the one blazed by Jesus himself.

If ever the people of God had a legitimate reason for engaging in cultural warfare and fighting to “take back their country,” it was when Jesus was conducting his ministry among Palestine’s first-century Jews. Palestine was a gift handed to their ancestors by God, whose intention had been for them to be an attractive light amid the pagan darkness hovering over the nations around them.

In the time between the Old and New Testament eras, Alexander the Great’s invading armies had infused pagan Hellenistic elements into Jewish culture. Statues of Greek gods populated the land, Jewish priests presided at Hellenistic religious ceremonies, and Jewish youth showed up at the Greek gymnasium in Jerusalem wearing the hat of Hermes, the Greek god of sports. 

Shortly before the birth of Jesus, the Maccabees had led a revolt attempting to reassert Jewish cultural, religious, and political control. Their success was short-lived and the Roman empire was soon garrisoning troops in Palestine and installed a maniacal, pagan-friendly Herod the Great as their puppet ruler. Jesus’ contemporaries were chafing under Roman and Herodian suppression. When Herod died, riots erupted throughout the land as people vented their pent-up revulsion. A resurgent, nationalist, Zealot element was gathering steam among Jesus’ fellow Galileans. While Jesus was a toddler in Nazareth, a rebel group led an insurrection merely four miles down the road in the town of Sepphoris. He and his family likely saw the smoke billowing as Rome burned Sepphoris to the ground and, according to Josephus, crucified 2,000 Jews outside its ruins. Some of Jesus’ own Nazareth townsfolk were likely among the executed rebels.

As a youth, Jesus likely walked among the ruins of Sepphoris with his father Joseph as part of the labor force employed in its reconstruction. He understood his countrymen’s hatred of Roman oppression and their longing for political freedom and socio-economic justice. He understood their desire for a restoration of Israel’s glory days under Kings David and Solomon. The temptation for Jesus to cater his ministry to these deeply-felt sentiments must have been strong. It’s no coincidence that when Satan tested Jesus in the wilderness, he offered to make him the world’s new supreme emperor. What a shortcut that would have been for remedying the Jews’ calamitous circumstances and for Making Israel Great Again.

Jesus would have nothing to do with this delusional scheme.  His mission was much broader than merely redressing the particular political and cultural affairs of the world’s various nations – he had come to announce and instate an astonishing new world-transforming reality: the Kingdom of God had touched down on Galilean soil. A superior, diametrically-opposed spiritual realm had suddenly been embedded behind enemy lines.  And it was here to stay – firmly entrenched inside the domain of the kingdom of darkness that had blanketed the planet since antiquity.

Through miraculous signs and wonders, Jesus demonstrated its supreme restorative power over the kingdom of evil. He challenged his followers to live out this new kingdom’s radical principles: love your enemies; pray for those who mistreat you; do good to those who hate you; turn the other cheek.  He then went willingly to his crucifixion – not merely to clear a pathway to heaven for sinners when they die but also so he could come back to life and drive the decisive final nail into the coffin of this present evil age. 

Christian nationalist and cultural warfare ideology appears to disregard the decisiveness of the victory Jesus has already achieved over the kingdom of evil. It seems to think the final outcome is still hanging in the balance, believing unless control is asserted through “Christianizing” political and legislative agendas, all will be lost. Thus, the urgency of strong-arming peoples’ outward behaviors into conformity.

But this approach seriously under-calculates the kingdom of evil’s true power. The powers and principalities of the present evil age has no fear of book bans. It is not intimidated by perfunctory displays of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms. It is not cowered by reactionary executive orders. It refuses to be merely window-dressed into compliance. Such superficial maneuverings are powerless to effect actual cultural change. Worse yet, they distract from the true message and mission of Jesus. And they distort the gospel message into something centered on electing the right people, passing the right laws, and banning the right immoral behaviors.

The kingdom Jesus inaugurated is all about cultural transformation. But his culture-transforming power operates from the inside out, not the top down. It’s a spiritual process, not a legislative or governmental one. It happens when followers of Jesus embody his living, loving, attracting presence among their indifferent neighbors; when they reflect his light and personify his truth amid the spiritual darkness and confusion of this age; when they live out the radically counter-American-cultural values of his kingdom. It ensues as individual hearts become transformed by the Spirit of Jesus working in concert with his followers’ expressions of love for those in their circles of influence.

What story will historians eventually write about the way early twenty-first-century American followers of Jesus forged their way in an increasingly post-Christian age? Will it be an account of how Christian nationalist and culture war ideologies won the day, but sabotaged the gospel in the process, ala the misguided medieval crusaders? Or will it instead be a story of how American Christians rallied around the Kingdom-of-God-centered gospel of Jesus by giving up their need to be in control, trusting Jesus to orchestrate the advancement of his own kingdom, and witnessing him spiritually transforming individual hearts and lives in fresh, new, unexpected ways that ripple across the broader American culture?