Christian Militia

The phrase Christian militia (“Soldiers of Christ”) can be traced back many centuries. Until around the fourth century CE, however, given the Church's original condemnation of warfare, it had no connection to the bearing of arms. Instead, it referred to monks struggling alone against bodily temptation. Not until the 11th century did the Church explicitly declare that Christian soldiers dying in war would go directly to heaven. De Laude Novae Militae (A Celebration of the New Militia), a recruitment pamphlet written for the Knights Templar (ca. 1120), promises that those serving as God's ministers can slay heathens and apostates with impunity, for in doing so, they commit not homicide, but malecide: the killing of evil. “To die for Christ and to kill his enemies, there is no crime in that, only glory.”

The first bona fide soldiers of Christ were never granted priestly powers. However, their ministry was sanctified through a rite tacitly recognized by church officials as an “eighth sacrament.” It involved confession of sins, a purifying bath, and the donning of white linen, followed by an “armed vigil,” wherein the initiate's sword was placed on an altar and blessed. After this came a homily on the code of chivalry, a Mass, and the formal girding on of the initiate's hauberk and helmet. The final step was a sharp blow to the cheek, the socalled dubbing. This was to be the last blow he could take and not return.

The Hussite Revolt (1420–1434), named after the Anabaptist Jon Hus, engaged Roman Catholic Crusaders in southeastern Europe over disputes about the proper age of baptism and how best to distribute communion, evidence of the power of religion to generate militant and violent action. Later Martin Luther (1483–1546) rejected the notion of holy war as an oxymoron and along with it, the idea of Christian militia. State violence, he argued, should deal only with matters of this world; the Church should concern itself only with the spiritual needs of believers in the next. Thus, there must be two separate domains: the natural realm of politics and war versus the supernatural realm of the “new law,” overseen by Christ's commandment to love and forgive one's enemies.

This pronouncement had momentous consequences. First, it freed the Church of corrupting political-military entanglements; second, it liberated the state to pursue its own power interests without the Church's moral supervision. Third, and most important, it drove the impulse toward Christian warfare underground. Henceforth, soldiers of Christ would enact their desire to erect a New Jerusalem from the margins of society.

A closer approximation to what has since become familiar in the modern era was Thomas Müntzer's League of Elect, a 16th-century German peasant force that fought under a rainbow-colored flag for a New Jerusalem “purified of all un-cleanliness” (Cohn, 1970, pp. 247–248). Certain that their righteousness would grant them immunity from harm, they stormed into battle only to be exterminated; this time by a new breed of army: secular and iron disciplined.