Brad Littlejohn: Overcoming evil with good

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Tuesday, September 5th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Up next: the truth about American history.

WORLD Opinions commentator Brad Littlejohn says a new book on Christianity and freedom may help you get to the truth about liberty and justice for all.

BRAD LITTLEJOHN, COMMENTATOR: Christians in America have grown used to playing defense. Each new year seems to bring a new assault, whether it be on principles of public morality that nearly all Americans used to hold sacred, or a direct attack on Christians for their supposed bigotry, patriarchalism, and other alleged sins.

Many Christians have responded by internalizing the rhetoric of their accusers, taking a perverse comfort in lacerating themselves and their fellow Christians for various evils. Other Christians reverse the terms. It is not African-Americans, women, gays, or immigrants who are the oppressed victim class, but we Christians. If others will stoke resentment and present politics as a zero-sum battle between rival identity groups, then so will we. More responsible voices will try to argue that Christians should at least be left to be themselves within protected enclaves.

Such responses are understandable given the tide of vitriol that Christians routinely face today in many settings, but they are insufficient. In public debate, as in sports, the best defense is a good offense. And it’s time to look at the actual historical record. American historian Mark David Hall helps readers to do that in his new book, Proclaim Liberty Throughout the Land: How Christianity Has Advanced Freedom and Equality for All Americans.

Hall begins his story with Puritan New England, that supposedly drab theater of religious oppression. In fact, he notes that by relying on biblical law as a standard for civil law, the Puritans vastly reduced the number of capital crimes. They also rejected practices like torture that were still standard in European courts.

But that was just toward fellow whites, right? American Christians didn’t recognize that Native Americans had any rights, did they? Actually, in perhaps the most notorious example of Native American oppression—the removal of the Cherokees in the 1830s—it was the most irreligious segments of American society that supported removal, and evangelical Christians who were loudest in their support for Cherokee rights.

But what about that darkest stain on the American story, slavery? Now, there’s no question that Christians were complicit in this evil, and that many church leaders twisted Scripture to justify their oppressions. Christians today should not, must not hide from this admission. But again, we must reframe the question: Were self-conscious Christians, appealing to Christian principles, more or less likely to oppose slavery than the irreligious were? Here, Hall marshals a wealth of evidence from the Founding era till the Civil War. He shows Christians in the more devout Northern states first drew on biblical themes to outlaw slavery, and then expanded upon such themes to end slavery in the South as well. This story might well have been extended to Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” which drew extensively on Christian theology to resist to racial segregation.

It is high time for Christians to confidently tell this story in the public square, rather than the twisted progressive narrative. Christians in America have been far from perfect, but God has used their faith and love to help make this country a rare land of liberty.

I’m Brad Littlejohn.

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