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“The Columbus quincentenary has been the occasion for more controversy than celebration,” writes one scholar with massive understatement. From Newsweek to the Smithsonian Institution, from the National Conference of Catholic Bishops to the National Council of Churches, people have loudly debated what Columbus’s landing really means.

Was it “the expansion of Christianity into our hemisphere [that] brought to the people of this land the gift of the Christian faith with its power of humanity and salvation, dignity and fraternity, justice and love”? Or was it the beginning of “invasion, genocide, slavery, ‘ecocide’ and exploitation ” ?

The editors asked one distinguished historian and friend of Christian History to venture into the fray and suggest what Christians in 1992 should think of this momentous 500th anniversary.

Christian History cannot not notice the landing of Christopher Columbus in 1492. Anyone writing world history has to regard the event among the four or five most noticeable and notable in recorded history.

Christian History pays special attention to the branch of world history that deals with the story of Christianity. By bringing in Christ, his church, and the culture called Christianity, the magazine cannot avoid Columbus, 1492, and all that. His enterprise cannot be presented without reference to his faith.

Accusations against Columbus and his enterprise are manifold, and Christians today cannot escape being implicated. Whether and how the accusations are just needs some exploring.

Imagining away the landings, explorations, conquests, and settlements has become a big part of the quincentenary observance: “If only Spain hadn’t come to the Americas, how much better things would be for natives of the Americas” runs the sentiment. Yet consider this:

Early in 1492 the Christian troops of Ferdinand and Isabella ended an era of Islamic domain in Western Europe. Islamdom at the time was in as expansive a mood as was Christendom. Had Islam won a few more military victories—and had it commanded more nagging entrepreneurs like Columbus and his cohorts—the landscapes of the Americas would be vastly different.

Imagine a cityscape in which the minaret, not the church steeple, dominates. Picture a New York that looks like Tehran, a San Francisco that resembles Malaysian cities. Imagine a United States with 1–4 million Christians, instead of 1–4 million Muslims, fighting for attention. In neither script—the actual or imagined—do the people of the hemispheres remain unaware of each other.

Had the voyages of Columbus not been successful, certainly in 1493 or 1494 some other Spaniard would have made the crossing after which permanent contact would have occurred. Or not many decades later, England would have brought ships, troops, plunderers, and adventurers. If not Spain or England, then the Netherlands or France.

This provides a common-sense check when writers suggest that native peoples of the Americas should have been left alone. The explorers and conquerors from Spain may have done nearly everything wrong—sometimes it appears that way—but there is no way the American hemisphere would always have been left alone, free from diseases and swords, unaware of the Bible and the churches of Europe.

During this year of observance, narrators tell—some eagerly—a story of almost unrelieved exploitation, dehumanization, death, and murder. Experts in exaggeration seem to be contending to see who can bring the longest and most fierce list of charges against Spain and Europe.

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