Columbus Day: Worth Celebrating!

Today is America's 80th official #ColumbusDay! He's a flawed man (just like the rest of us), but he left an indelible legacy of courage, adventure, and exploration.

His name lives on in more ways than you could count. 23 of the 50 United States have a town or city named after Columbus. A university, a great river, our nation's capitol, a Canadian province, a movie studio, a record company, a broadcasting company (CBS), a sportswear company, a space shuttle (which disintegrated on re-entry in 2003), a Los Angeles-class Navy Submarine, and a South American nation share his namesake, Columbia. In fact, our nation was known mainly by the name Columbia in the 1700s. Our unofficial national anthem was "Hail, Columbia"

He quite easily had more of an impact than every single one of his modern critics combined — times a thousand. These are the people we give holidays to, or used to. The people who shaped the world. And say whatever else you want about Columbus, he did more than almost any other single person to shape the world we live in today.

He was a devout Christian who sailed, in part, to fulfill a religious quest. Columbus’s voyages were intense religious missions. He saw them as the fulfillment of a divine plan for his life—and for the soon-coming end of the world. As he put it in 1500, “God made me the messenger of the new heaven and the new earth of which he spoke in the Apocalypse of St. John [Rev. 21:1] after having spoken of it through the mouth of Isaiah; and he showed me the spot where to find it.”

Was Columbus also a deeply flawed man? Could he be brutal and unjust? Yes. Sure, Columbus captured slaves. He executed both Spaniards and Indians under his rule. He took gold. He was by all accounts a bad governor. This was a common flaw of explorers of the era. Many of them were brilliant on their ships but incompetent or downright horrible on solid ground.

There is nothing wrong with acknowledging the flaws of men like Christopher Columbus. Nobody is suggesting that we should honor them as perfect people or worship them as gods. The point of the statues, the monuments, and the holidays is to remember and celebrate the indispensable role they played in establishing the civilization in which we all now live — a civilization that just so happens to be the freest and most prosperous in the history of the world. Columbus, through his navigational brilliance, boldness, courage, vision, and determination, is one of the men we have to thank for that.

Credits: Matt Walsh, Christian History Institute