https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2023/08/89996/
Christians in America have gotten used to being on the defensive. Not only are many of the moral principles that we hold sacred openly trampled in the media, the public square, or even the White House lawn, but Christians sometimes find themselves blamed for quite nearly all the evil in the world. Some of the charges lobbed our way are familiar ones, dating back centuries: Christians are killjoys and bigots, responsible for oppressing religious minorities and persecuting anyone who didn’t fit their mold—Exhibit A being the Salem witch trials. Others are of newer vintage: Christians, we are told, have taken the lead in purveying racism and xenophobia, and the pages of American history are littered with the destruction they have visited upon Native Americans, African Americans, and immigrants.
Some Christians have responded by endorsing these accusations with unseemly gusto, calling on their co-religionists to join them in self-lacerating “lament,” and hoping that profuse apologies to progressive advocates will avert these avenging angels from their own doorsteps. Others have responded by meeting resentment with resentment: if progressive elites are going to tell white Christians all the ways they have victimized others, then white Christians are going to stake their own claim to victimhood status.
Thankfully there is a third, more promising route: meet bad history with good history, and demonstrate that many of the moral triumphs that progressives take for granted are in fact the legacy of Christianity alone. Perhaps the most powerful recent such effort was Tom Holland’s Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, demonstrating how basic Christian values like the sanctity of human life, the virtue of compassion, and the equality of all classes and races have become so deeply ingrained that we no longer even recognize their Christian provenance. Mark David Hall’s new book, Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land: How Christianity Has Advanced Freedom and Equality for All Americans, marks another important contribution to this critical conversation. Although lacking the grand narrative sweep of Holland’s work, Hall does us the favor of focusing on the American experience, rebutting the false charges of the 1619 Project and similar polemics, and setting the record straight regarding the political and legal legacy of Christianity in America.