Oil exporting People wrote:Bienenhalde wrote:Yeah, but the Catholic and Orthodox churches would both consider the clergy having higher spiritual status than laypeople, including the military. In Protestantism, there is more equality between clergy and laity, but the Protestants did not declare Crusades either. Indeed some Protestant denominations teach pacifism.
The image of the Crusader within Christianity is pretty distinct from classification of laypeople; I'd almost say there struggle directly in the cause of God elevates them to the Clergy, if distinct therein from it. As for Protestantism, they have not rejected most Christian theology to my awareness so they inherited this same streak. A very good example would be during the American Civil War or the early days of the War on Terror.
Well, yes, I suppose John Brown, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, and Oliver Otis Howard could be seen as Protestant crusaders, in a certain sense. But the United States is a secular state and the reasons for going to war were secular regardless of the motives and ideals of certain individuals in the military. A better example would probably be the Thirty Years War and other wars associated with the Reformation era, but that was more a response to Catholic aggression. Anyway, since Protestants generally reject the authority of the papacy and church tradition in favor of sola scriptura, many of the ideas associated with the crusades would be rejected as un-biblical. Certain Protestant denominations do endorse Augustine's concept of just war as a reasonable interpretation of the Bible, but that is quite different from the pagan militarism which Evola endorses.
