21st-century journalists, politicians, and terrorists have found the crusades to be a remarkably versatile point of reference when they consider religiously articulated violence in the modern world. This article will explore how recent academic historiography relates to and can better inform modern debates about geopolitics, the role of religion in political life, as well as the broader question of how scholars can meaningfully participate in those debates. Historians need to walk a fine line between taking religious experience seriously while also rejecting simple explanations that see religion as especially culpable in inspiring violence, and that portray such violence as an irrational return to the “medieval”. The various sections of the article provide a few key examples of recent controversies over religious violence, and situate both traditional and recent crusades historiography within a contemporary political context. It will be argued here that recent crusades scholarship has provided nuanced and dynamic accounts of crusading piety that can be used to reject simplistic explanations of religious violence as pre-modern, and as inherent in particular faith traditions.

21 世纪的记者、政治家和恐怖分子发现，当他们考虑现代世界中宗教表达的暴力时，十字军东征是一个非常多才多艺的参考点。本文将探讨最近的学术史学如何与现代关于地缘政治的辩论、宗教在政治生活中的作用以及学者如何有意义地参与这些辩论的更广泛问题相关，并可以更好地为这些辩论提供信息。历史学家需要在认真对待宗教体验的同时拒绝简单的解释，这些解释将宗教视为激发暴力的罪魁祸首，并将这种暴力描绘成对“中世纪”的非理性回归。文章的各个部分提供了最近关于宗教暴力的争议的几个关键例子，并将传统和最近的十字军东征史学置于当代政治背景中。这里将争论的是，最近的十字军学术研究提供了对十字军虔诚的细致入微和动态的描述，可以用来拒绝将宗教暴力简单化的解释，认为它是前现代的，并且是特定信仰传统中固有的。