THE CROWN AND CRY: A Civic Essay Series

A Secretary of Defense leads a prayer in the Pentagon press room, asking that every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness. A crowd in a cold field nine hundred years ago answers a pope with a single cry: Deus vult, God wills it. The same two words are now tattooed on that Secretary's arm, and he has called the moment that produced them a formative moment in the history of the free world. In The Crown and the Cry, Gerard Tod turns to the First Crusade, Urban II's promise that killing could earn the remission of sin, the massacre that followed the fall of Jerusalem, and the conqueror who refused its crown one week later, to examine a recurring American habit: reaching for God not to comfort the frightened, but to authorize the force. This is not a book asking readers to take a side on faith itself. It asks five simpler questions: Who is speaking, and in what capacity? Is God invoked to comfort, or to authorize? Would the words sound righteous if the enemy used them first? Does the invocation arrive before the act, or after it, as a claim of credit? And what restraint does the speaker still owe the people on the other side of the prayer? Godfrey of Bouillon said no to a crown once, in the same city, the same week, his own army left the streets running with blood. This volume asks what a republic loses when no one left in office still knows how to say no. He refused the crown. He never once refused the sword beneath it.