At the National Prayer Breakfast this morning, Mr. Obama, you admonished those of us who are becoming increasingly enraged at your weakness against radical Islam that,

“lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”

I would suggest that it is you who are on the high horse, insulting us who actually believe in Jesus Christ as our Savior (unlike you, who I’m convinced cares not one whit about your professed Christian faith) by equating the current atrocities committed in the name of Islam to long-ago and now-denounced actions of the Church.

May I remind you, since you seem to have ignored the teachings of Christ (if you ever learned them in the first place) that Jesus never commanded his followers to conquer to world, or to establish a Christian form of a caliphate. He commanded them to “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” That’s teach, not conquer.

Regarding the Crusades or the Inquisition, may I remind you that those events are far, far removed from the Church of today? And did that resplendent Ivy League education you received even inform you of the real reason for the Crusades? They were a response to Muslims invading Christian-held territory.

Thomas F. Madden, chairman of the department of history at St. Louis University, and an expert on the Crusades, wrote in First Things:

“All the Crusades met the criteria of just wars. They came about in reaction to attacks against Christians or their Church. The First Crusade was called in 1095 in response to the recent Turkish conquest of Christian Asia Minor, as well as the much earlier Arab conquest of the Christian-held Holy Land. The second was called in response to the Muslim conquest of Edessa in 1144. The third was called in response to the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem and most other Christian lands in the Levant in 1187.”

The Inquisition, with its notorious witch trials and torture of heretics, began nearly 1000 years ago. They officially ended nearly 200 years ago, but were largely a function of the Middle Ages. Perhaps you were unaware of this history, but that information is easy to find. A Google search does nicely.

And while you choose to denigrate your own country’s history by referring to “slavery and Jim Crow . . . justified in the name of Christ. . .” let me provide you once again with some easily obtained history. It was the 19th century Christian abolitionist movement which helped to bring about the end of slavery.

Oh, yes, the Jim Crow laws. How could you, as a black man, ignore the invaluable accomplishments of black Christians in ridding the nation of these injustices? Theologian Timothy Keller, writing in his book The Reason for God, cites civil rights historian David Chappell from the University of Oklahoma:

Chappell also shows how it was the vibrant faith of rank-and-file African-Americans that empowered them to insist on justice despite the violent opposition to their demands. Thus Chappell says there is no way to understand what happened until you see the Civil Rights movement as a religious revival.

How quick you were to correspond the long-ago past of my Christian heritage with the horrendous acts committed by those who cry “Allahu ackbar!” while they kill, torture, destroy, and lay waste the lives of those who don’t believe as they do. Yet in that speech at the National Prayer Breakfast did you ever refer to those who “carry out unspeakable acts of barbarism” as being justified in the name of Mohammed? No, no you did not. Not once. Not ever. It’s not that hard to say. Mo-ham-med. It’s quite easy, actually. So why didn’t you say it?

And another question: why did you invite the designer of Sudanese genocide to the prayer breakfast?

You invited Sudanese Prime Minister Ali Karti to a religious gathering when you should’ve known that he had been a leader of the Sudanese Defense Force, a group that committed genocide in South Sudan. Their goal: to cleanse South Sudan of non-Muslim blacks and to Arabize the nation. Charming guest you had.

Yet another question: now that Jordan is conducting a real war on ISIS — you know, that “brutal, vicious death cult” as you called it — why have you denied them the Predator drones they need to locate the forces of ISIS? Both parties in Congress are pressuring you to provide little Jordan with the tools they need to defeat that evil, so are you going to provide Jordan with increased support?

I’m going to close with the words and image of a personal hero of my faith, a young Christian theologian who went to his death in an effort to push back the evil that had overtaken his beloved country of Germany.

You may not want to name the source of the evil rampaging through Iraq and Syria. But by your silence and your reticence to act more vigorously to defeat it, you are telling where your sympathies lie. You are acting in accordance with those sympathies.