Christopher Columbus and the Birth of the Modern World
Far from the monster of Marxist myth, Columbus was a Christian visionary whose courage, faith, and genius ended the Middle Ages and made the modern world possible.
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by Rod D. Martin
October 12, 2025
Today we celebrate Columbus Day. This day is a commemoration of discovery, of the audacity to push past the map’s edge for the sake of truth, and the chain of events that led to the creation of America, the apotheosis of Western Civilization.
Which is precisely why the Left hates him, demonizing Columbus as a means of delegitimizing us.
But the truth is the polar opposite of the Marxist myth. Christopher Columbus stands among the most consequential men who ever lived: an adventurer, entrepreneur, navigator, and visionary whose courage cracked the medieval world wide open and let the light in. He bet everything — reputation, livelihood, even his own life — on a daring idea that changed the entire trajectory of human history.
Was he perfect? Of course not. Was he a model for our next era of human expansion and flourishing? Absolutely.
The Man and His Mission
Born in the late Middle Ages, Columbus nevertheless thought like a modern. He was Genoese by birth, Spanish by commission, and American by destiny. He petitioned, planned, calculated, and convinced. He raised capital in a world without established capital markets. He negotiated an extraordinarily entrepreneurial contract with the Spanish Crown (which it later broke). He understood risk — and he shouldered it.
He did all of this self-consciously as a Christian. Columbus believed God had set before him an open door: that the seas could be crossed, the world mapped, trade expanded, poverty reduced, and the Gospel carried farther than Europe had yet imagined. Read his own words and logs and you meet a man of prayer and providence, not some Hollywood villain. Postmodernist critics strain to hear him, if they bother to try at all, because they no longer share his premises. Their presentism and subjectivism obscures the truth, which for Columbus was anything but presentist or subjective.
Columbus embodied the best of what we think of as the American spirit long before there was an America. His venture was, in the purest sense, a startup with a ship. He was a man who refused to accept conventional wisdom, who built the plan, hired the team, secured the funding, and launched the product. And the little fact that his original model was incorrect — the idea that the Americas were not in fact East Asia — stripped not one iota of value from his otherwise directionally correct venture.
If there were a patron saint of entrepreneurs, Columbus would be the man.
In one especially modern twist, when the Crown later reneged on the contract it had signed, Columbus and his heirs sued. To this day, much of what we know of the “Admiral of the Ocean Sea” comes from the legal record of those lawsuits. That’s not the biography of a medieval barbarian. That’s a man who understood covenants, contracts. He was an adventurer, yes. But first and foremost, he was a venturer.
What Columbus Ended — and What He Began
Columbus was an explorer. He died a generation before Cortez or Pizzaro. He believed he’d reached East Asia. Virtually all the sins, both real and imagined, that are heaped upon him were unknown to him. One might as well blame George Washington for the Great Depression. The criticisms are largely nonsensical.
Columbus is accused of “ending paradise”. But what did he actually end? He ended the isolation that kept both hemispheres’ peoples impoverished and parochial. He ended a technological and commercial segregation that shackled human advancement. He ended the Middle Ages in Europe, expanded the physical and intellectual horizons of millions, and helped birth the modern world.
And even more important than what he ended is what he started.
Because Columbus sailed, a civilizational exchange unlike any before it was set in motion. The Columbian Exchange eventually sent crops, animals, ideas, technologies, and people back and forth across the Atlantic. It made possible the rise of nations in the New World that would, in time, proclaim and protect the rights of man. It created the conditions for the American experiment, which — despite our sins and struggles — has been, aside from salvation, the greatest blessing to the greatest number in the history of the world.
Yet the same modern world Columbus’s courage made possible now vilifies him. The modern caricature — mass murderer, genocidal maniac, proto-colonizer — is moral theater untethered from history. It rests on two pillars: first, the tragic collapse of Native American populations after first contact; second, a willful blindness to the world Columbus actually encountered.
On the first point, the facts are devastating but plain: the overwhelming majority of the deaths in the Americas were caused by disease, not by conquest: a medieval War of the Worlds that left most of the New World empty. The scale of this is almost incomprehensible.
This is horrifying. But it isn’t genocide. Europeans did not know what microbes were: they certainly had no idea that New World populations might not share Europeans’ immunity to them. Germ theory would not emerge for centuries. And indeed, the death toll was not one-way: a larger number, though a smaller proportion, of people died in Europe of New World diseases than died in the Americas.
As to the second point, we should be honest about pre-Columbian America. Critics attack Columbus for “ending” indigenous cultures. They never ask whether you would have wanted to live in any of them.
The hemisphere was not some untouched Eden populated by gentle environmentalists living in harmony with nature or each other. They practiced slavery. They went to war, unendingly and relentlessly, with each other. The Aztecs conducted human sacrifice on an industrial scale. In parts of the Caribbean, the strong preyed on the weak with a cruelty that shocks modern sensibilities. The Plains cultures we romanticize as “ancient” horse peoples existed only after horses arrived from Europe, and they became every bit as barbaric as the Mongols without their corresponding achievements. History is not a morality play with cardboard heroes and villains. It is fallen men in fallen cultures, everywhere, across time.
The narrative is nonsense. But as with so many of the left’s modern narratives, it has a singular, presentist purpose: demonizing Columbus is a useful lie meant to delegitimize America. Most of his critics know little about him. They just know they hate us.
What stands out about the West — what Columbus began to unleash on a global scale — is not that Europeans have been sinless, but that Western civilization has produced the most sustained self-critique, the deepest legal protections for individuals of all stations, the broadest diffusion of literacy, science, technology, and markets in human history, thus lifting billions out of misery. The Christian West abolished slavery, ended human sacrifice (unless you count abortion), and widely spread the idea that “all men are created equal.”
Did they get there all at once? Of course not. But without them, no one would have gotten there at all.
The fruits of that civilizational arc — rule of law, individual rights, modern medicine, sanitation, regular harvests, the end of famine, property rights, human dignity — are enjoyed today by the children of the “indigenous” and “settlers” alike. If you were a little Sioux girl with a passion for mathematics, or a dream of becoming an astronaut, or a CEO, when would you rather live, then or now? Be honest.
That is not a footnote to Columbus’s voyages. It is their long-term consequence.
Why We Celebrate — And Why We Ought To
We live in a time that unendingly calls good evil and evil good. The same people who enjoy every material and moral benefit of the civilization Columbus helped set in motion spend their days trying to tear it down. They topple statues, rename holidays, and demand ritual confessions from free citizens whose only “crime” is gratitude.
Resist them. Gratitude is the opposite of the envy that would burn down the world if it could. Gratitude remembers what was risked, and what was gained. Gratitude judges men by the standards of their times, learning from them without surrendering our own. Gratitude says: we are not ashamed of the West, because the West — self-correcting, self-critiquing, open to repentance — is by definition a process of ongoing improvement. And because of that, it has been the most humane engine of human flourishing the world has seen.
And of course, gratitude tips its hat to the man who first sailed west and did not fall off the edge. How many of us would have shown such courage and intrepidity?
Columbus Day is not a token of tribe but a testament of civilization. It teaches that courage builds, that faith propels, that law orders, that vision transforms. The good we inherit was not conjured from thin air — it was bought with risk and sweat, vision and prayer. Someone dared the edge of the map. Someone left a familiar shore and bet his life on a horizon he could not see. Someone believed the world was knowable, and proved it.
The Next Horizon
If you need one more reason to celebrate Columbus Day, look up. The same spirit that carried three small ships across an unknown ocean is what lifts rockets from Starbase and Cape Canaveral and will, God willing, carry men and women to Mars and beyond.
This is not kitsch. It’s continuity. The line from 1492 to the launchpad is the line of human daring squared with providence, of reason married to faith, of risk yoked to purpose. It is a line that says: God made real worlds and filled them with real wonders, and He made us to subdue them — not as vandals, but as stewards — to make all creation in the image of the Garden, and fill it.
We stand on the shore of a new ocean, one as vast as the heavens, containing wonders we cannot yet comprehend. But we will.
Columbus was not perfect. None of us is. But he is a worthy model of audacity in the service of something higher.
So celebrate. Teach your children who Columbus was and why he matters. Read a page of his log. But most of all, be grateful for the better world his voyages made possible — and resolve to be worthy of it. The wonder of Western Civilization is not an accident: it’s an inheritance. It can be squandered, as many are attempting. It can also be renewed. And if civilization is not merely to endure but advance in our day, we must appreciate his audacity and achievement to inspire a new generation of similarly intrepid explorers.
Happy Columbus Day.
Charles C. Mann: 1492 Before and After
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bghLhJ-c8os
Nov 5, 2012
No name seems more inextricably linked to the grand hemispheric experiment of "America" than Christopher Columbus. Seen alternately as explorer and conqueror, hero and villain, Columbus endures as an essential character in America's national story: his "discovery" of America in 1492 changed the course of history. Who better to interpret this undeniable influence than author Charles C. Mann? A correspondent for The Atlantic, Science, and Wired, Mann authored 1491, an award-winning study of the pre-Columbian Americas, and 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. Both of these books take a riveting look at the earliest days of globalization, introducing a new generation to the conundrum of the "New World." Mann shares an expansive and compelling vision of the "ecological convulsion" of European trade practices that continues to shape our world.