During an appearance on The Eric Metaxas Show, Terry Schilling — president of the anti-LGBTQ group American Principles Project — defended Christopher Columbus. Schilling downplayed Columbus’ crimes, called Indigenous people an “evil, barbaric group of people,” said that Christians “have no business criticizing” Columbus, and that the Americas “needed to be conquered.”

“In our lifetimes Columbus has been put forward as a raper of the Indigenous populations, which is mostly nonsense,” Metaxas said at the start of the segment. “What are we to make of this? This attack on Columbus? I mean I don’t know what to say about it anymore.”

Schilling called attacks on Columbus “preposterous” and motivated by Marxist ideology. “Once you realize that the common denominator amongst all the attacks on everything that Americans love and know — the common denominator is Marxism and a hatred of anything that upholds truth or glory or beauty or God,” he claimed.

Schilling admitted without going into detail that Columbus “did some bad things” but said that “Columbus contributed more in his life than any of the people that are criticizing him by like a hundred billion times fold.”

Among the atrocities committed by Columbus were the kidnapping of a Carib woman who was raped by one of his crew members, cutting off an Indigenous man’s ears to serve as a warning to others, and enslaving over a thousand people. As Governor of the Indies Columbus was so brutal and tyrannical that he was removed from his post.

“The worst things that they’ve accused Columbus of, if you compare that — what he’s been accused of, not even what he’s been convicted of — to what the Indigenous people were doing here in the Americas, it’s not even close!” he insisted. “Right? The Indigenous people were a barbaric, evil group of people, right?”

Metaxas spoke up at this point, apparently sensing that Schilling had gone too far, and pointed out that “that’s not true in every case.” But he added that “in many cases you cannot conceive of the horrors perpetrated by quote-unquote Indigenous people to other Indigenous people. Beyond belief. Horrors, torture, slavery among the Indigenous peoples.”

Schilling then continued his effusive praise of Columbus, calling him a “giant among men” and suggesting that modern Christians should support what he did.

“And here’s the thing that people don’t understand. He was not trying to enrich himself. He was obsessed — so when he was doing everything that he did, when he sailed the ocean blue in 1492, everyone was concerned that Christ was coming back, that God was coming back for the second time, and they wanted to reclaim the Holy Lands,” he explained.

“And what Columbus was obsessed with was establishing new trade routes that could be used to fund the new Crusades and take back the Holy Land so that Christians controlled it when God came back. He was not trying to enrich himself. He was trying to do yeoman’s work. So if you’re a Christian, you have no business criticizing him.”

Schilling went on to say that because some Indigenous people, like the Mayans and Aztecs, engaged in human sacrifice, the Americas “needed to be conquered.”

“We were liberating those poor, other Indigenous people that were being sacrificed and held hostage and just destroyed every day by these barbaric empires that were here,” he insisted. Of course Schilling also neglected to mention the wanton cruelty of the conquistadors who overthrew the Aztec and Mayan empires.

“But Columbus is a true hero and he established the New World and we should always honor him,” Schilling said.