Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Sunday declared that all slavery in the world had been eradicated thanks to the Christian faith.
At the National Prayer Breakfast last week, conservatives accused President Barack Obama of comparing Christianity to the Islamic terrorist group ISIS when he observed that many religions had been used to justify violence throughout history.
"So we're responsible for the Crusades a thousand years ago?" Carlson complained. "Who's 'us' anyway? And by the way, who ended slavery and Jim Crow? Christians. The Rev. Martin Luther King. Christians."
"Christianity is the reason we don't have slavery in the world today," he added. "I mean, talk about ahistorical."
Co-host Ainsley Earhardt said that Obama's remarks were "completely inappropriate" because there were many evangelical Christians at the National Prayer Breakfast.
"Know your audience," she recommended. "No one expected the Inquisition to be mentioned at the National Prayer Breakfast."
"What's so striking though is his mention of the Crusades as a way to make the point, 'Before you judge ISIS, keep in mind that that Christians did it too,'" Carlson asserted. "The Crusades is a fixation among jihadis. There's not a press release from ISIS or from al Qaeda that doesn't call us Crusaders."
"And so for the president to use that specific word, aping the language of the jihadis is ominous and bizarre."
According to the 2014 Global Slavery Index, there are an estimated 35.8 million slaves in the world.
Late last year, leaders of the largest religions in the world -- including Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim and Christian faiths -- met to sign a declaration of commitment to end slavery by 2020.
At the time, Pope Francis called slavery an “atrocious scourge present on a large scale throughout the world."
