There is no weapon in the atheist's arsenal more frequently used than the history of Christian hypocrisy. The critic points to the slaughters of the Crusades, the horrors of the encomienda system in the Americas, and the brutality of chattel slavery in the South. They ask a piercing question: "If your theology teaches human dignity, why did your civilization practice human bondage?"

We must not dodge this question. We must not whitewash history. The answer is not to deny the sin, but to understand the source of the cure.

The Internal Critique

The critic mentions the encomienda -- the system of forced labor imposed by the Spanish in the New World. It was a monstrous injustice. But who ended it?

It was not a secular philosopher. It was a priest.

Bartolomé de las Casas was a slave owner who had a conversion. He looked at the Scriptures, and he looked at his slaves, and he realized he was in a state of mortal sin. He spent the rest of his life fighting the Spanish Crown, arguing that the indigenous peoples were free men with natural rights given by God.

This is the power of the transcendent. Because the Christian standard exists outside of human history, it stands in judgment over human history. Even when the entire political order accepts slavery, the Gospel remains like a burning coal, waiting to sear the conscience of the believer. The Christian can be judged by his own book.

The Marxist Alternative

Compare this to the Marxist view of history. For the strict materialist, history is a series of class struggles driven by economic necessity. Slavery, in the Marxist analysis, was not a "sin" in the theological sense. It was a historical stage -- a necessary step in the evolution of economic systems.

If there is no transcendent Good, then slavery is only "wrong" because it is obsolete. It is inefficient.

But the Christian says slavery is wrong because it violates the nature of the human person. This is why the abolitionist movements in the West were driven almost entirely by religious zeal. It was the Quakers, the Methodists, and the Evangelicals who argued that no man could own the Image of God. They did not argue from economics. They argued from the Transcendent.

The Land and the Vote

The critic points out that political rights were originally limited to landholding men. This is true. The unfolding of the Christian understanding of the person took centuries. It was a slow yeast working through the dough of a fallen world.

But notice the trajectory. In pagan Rome, rights were contracting -- the Emperor was becoming a god, and the citizen was becoming a subject. In the Christian West, rights were expanding. Why? Because the underlying logic of the Imago Dei could not be contained. If the poor man has a soul equal to the King, eventually the political structures must change to reflect that reality.

The Hypocrite vs. The Nihilist

The critic thinks that pointing out Christian sins refutes the Christian claim. But the existence of a broken rule does not disprove the rule. It proves the reality of the rebellion.

When a Christian supports slavery, he is failing his own worldview. He can be called to repentance. He can be shown the Cross and told, "This is what you are betraying."

But when a materialist system enslaves millions -- as the Gulags did -- to whom do they appeal? They cannot appeal to God. They cannot appeal to the dignity of the soul. They can only appeal to the Party or the State. And if the State says slavery is necessary for the Five Year Plan, the debate is over.

We do not defend the sins of our fathers. We confess them. But we refuse to throw away the only moral map that allows us to see that they were lost.