Related articles and links |  1 of 3

This article originally appeared in the October 5, 1992 issue of Christianity Today.

This year, the quincentenary of Christopher Columbus's discovery of America, one might have expected great commemorations and celebrations. Instead, the National Council of Churches came out against celebrating. The city of Berkeley, California, named 1992 "Indigenous People's Year." The Zurich, Switzerland, newspaper Tages-Anzeiger speaks of the "arrogance" involved when the "European West" thinks that it has "discovered" something and implies that the Spaniards and other colonizers massacred 120 million Indians. The French demographer Pierre Chaunu, who is a Membre de Institut Francais and a Reformed pastor, speaks of a "demographic catastrophe" (though it was caused not primarily by massacre, but by the unwitting introduction of diseases, such as smallpox, to which the native South and North American populations had not developed any immunity). It is as if the West, especially the Christian West, seems ashamed the Columbus anniversary is taking place at all.

Examples of the West's persistent feelings of inferiority abound. Stanford University, one of the nation's foremost centers of intellectual life, has "politically corrected" its required undergraduate course in Western Civilization. Hollywood films not only attack the white man's militarization, but also his culture and, implicitly, his Christianity.

It seems Christian North America is, in the words of H. F. Schrader of Lorrach, Germany, "constantly apologizing for the fact that it exists." Europeans and white North Americans have committed egregious wrongs—wrongs requiring repentance—but we must put the failings in correct perspective.

Fourteen-ninety-two held not only Columbus's discovery of what would be called America, but in the same year, Columbus's patrons, the monarchs of the newly united Spanish kingdoms, Ferdinand and Isabella, succeeded in driving the Muslims and Jews out of the Iberian peninsula' Romantic historians speak of a fruitful Christian-Muslim-Jewish symbiosis in Spain before 1492, which was smashed by the aggressive "Christianizing" efforts of the victorious Spanish monarchs. But inasmuch as world history is a long and bloody tale of invasion, conquest, migration, and expulsion—and even, at times, of extermination—it is hard to say who belongs exactly where. The Jews entered Spain, or the Iberian Peninsula, peacefully, in the context of the Jewish diaspora, but the Moors came by conquest. The invasions of the Christian West, unleashed by the followers of Muhammad, carried them up to Tours, in the north of France, almost to the English Channel, before they were turned back by the armies of Charles Martel in 732.

Why single out Christians? What business did the Muslims have carrying the crescent, with fire and sword, through the Christian lands of what is now Spain and France? We can ask what business the Christian Crusaders had in the Holy Land—but what business did the Arab conquerors have there four centuries earlier? What business did the Ottoman Turks have taking Constantinople in 1453 and ending a Christian Greek-speaking civilization that was over a millennium old? And indeed, what business did Lawrence of Arabia have in Arabia and modern Iraq, driving out the Ottoman Turks, with the perhaps unintentional result that those nations became oil-rich and aggressive toward one another and Israel? In other parts of the world, what business did the Mongols have in destroying the Christian civilization of Kievan Russia in 1242? Or the pagan Angles and Saxons in overrunning Romanized Christian Britain?

next page... |  1 of 3

July (Web-only) 2007, Vol. 51