Historian William Federer and the Truth of Christopher Columbus and His Faith
The grade school rhyme about Christopher Columbus will not suffice in today’s Woke world, “Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 14-hundred and 92.” That’s what Columbus Day, a national holiday, commemorates, the Italian explorer’s founding of the Americas. Some municipalities have changed the title to “Indigenous Peoples Day”, to honor the natives Columbus encountered, or conquered, or displaced… depending on which history class you take. But Columbus’s intent, though, was to find a new Western trade route to Asia, since Turkey, conquered by the forces of Islamic Jihad, cut off the Eastern passages. Columbus, in his underestimating the circumference of the earth, may have stumbled onto the New World, but does that make him unworthy of accolades? And does it mean he was motivated by greed instead of the Gospel? No, says historian William Federer. On this episode of Lighthouse Faith podcast, Federer, an author and national speaker, gives a veritable graduate school class on the centuries of history that leads up to Columbus’s journey across the Atlantic, his spiritual motivation for lobbying the Queen of Spain to sponsor him, and the subsequent effects of what has happened in the centuries since, as even those who’ve benefited from the establishment of the United States of America have forgotten its roots. Columbus may have had no idea that a vast swath of land, another continent lay in his path to Asia; in fact, till his death he thought he had found a shorter, western trade route. But there was no mistaking that his faith in a God, who moves mountains and calms the raging seas, was real.
