In his new book, The Two Swords of Christ: Five Centuries of War Between Islam and the Warrior Monks of Christendom, Raymond Ibrahim sets the record straight about Christian military orders led by great captains of faith and ferocity that understood the need for what he calls “muscular Christianity.”
The title of the book alludes to history’s dominant Christian military orders: The Knights of the Temple and the Hospital, together representing the “Two Swords.” In reinvigorating the accounts of these two orders, Ibrahim points to a larger theme also represented in the book’s title — namely, that Christians “are to fight two sorts of evils with two sorts of swords — a spiritual sword against spiritual enemies, and a physical sword against physical enemies.”