Children’s Crusade

In “Children’s Crusade” (Chalcedon Report No. 152), Rushdoony argues that the belief in the natural innocence and saving power of children is a recurring humanistic heresy with catastrophic consequences. He traces this idea from medieval theology to the Children’s Crusade of 1212, where faith in childlike purity led nearly 100,000 children into death, slavery, disease, and disillusionment. The same doctrine, he contends, reappeared in the student movements of the 1960s, which proclaimed youth as morally superior and society as the source of evil. These modern crusaders, convinced of their own holiness, produced not renewal but narcotics, sexual chaos, terrorism, and hardened violence. Rushdoony warns that this impulse continues in contemporary movements such as Children’s Bills of Rights, which seek to free children from parental and ecclesiastical authority in the hope that autonomous youth will redeem society. At root, all crusades search for a “pure class” to save the world—children, youth, workers, races, or elites—thereby denying original sin, rejecting Christ as the only Redeemer, and replacing God’s law with self-righteous activism. The result is always the same: moral blindness, disillusionment, and destruction, followed by renewed longing for another miracle-working savior instead of repentance and obedience to Jesus Christ.