When the elite-driven push to put a woman on some of our currency started, the ideas flew fast and furious. One New York Times columnist had the nerve to suggest that eugenicist and anti-black racist Margaret Sanger be put on the $20 bill, to mark her contribution to women’s liberation from motherhood, or something. We raised our objections right here at The Stream.

Now as we learn that instead of Margaret Sanger, the Treasury will put abolitionist Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill, we couldn’t be any happier. Of course, some liberals are complaining, as Powerline documents. Perhaps they’re still holding out for Sanger. As many conservatives have noted, Tubman was a devout Christian Republican gun-owner who flouted evil Supreme Court decisions and unjust federal laws. Can you think of a better role model for Christians today than Tubman? Mark Tooley went into admirable depth on Tubman’s Christian commitment:

Deeply and charismatically religious, she was shaped all her life by Methodism. Her white owner in eastern Maryland had a Methodist minister son whose services Tubman’s family attended. That area was strongly Methodist, and some Methodists had freed their slaves, although not Tubman’s owner. Tubman possibly additionally attended local congregations and camp meetings of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, some of whose revivalistic exhorters were women, who with their male colleagues sometimes skirted or defied the law by hosting gatherings for slaves. …

Her certainty about hearing God’s voice fueled her tremendous courage, leading to her escape with help from Quakers, and thereafter to many years as a leader in the Underground Railroad. Repeatedly returning south covertly, she led scores and possibly hundreds to liberation in the north. No softie, she reportedly carried a gun and threatened to shoot escaping slaves who endangered the mission by equivocating. …

She lived until age 91, eventually moving into the home for elderly blacks she helped found with the African Methodist Episcopal Church, whose clergy led her funeral, where she was celebrated by whites and blacks, including aging Civil War vets, for her faith, service, sacrifice, tenacity and bravery. Her casket was draped in an American flag, and she was buried with a crucifix and a medal from Queen Victoria.

The New York Times and other liberal media managed somehow to miss this Christian dimension, to present Tubman’s resistance to slavery’s evil as founded on … well the same vast abyss of Nothing that undergirds current progressive claims about human rights and dignity. As philosopher Richard Weikart demonstrates in his powerful new book The Death of Humanity, a consistent secular Darwinist has no valid moral objections to slavery, eugenics or any other abuse of the human person since, on their count, we’re just the random result of chemical mutations.

We shouldn’t be too surprised that the Times avoided the sacred heart of Tubman’s story. As the Washington Examiner points out, the Times did much the same thing in its original (skimpy, ambivalent) obituary of Tubman, which also omitted any reference to her religion.

What we should love about the choice of Harriet Tubman is the precedent it sets. As a nation, we’re willing to say that someone who flouted our country’s solemnly unjust laws — such as the Fugitive Slave Act, which Tubman condemned and helped hundreds of escaped slaves to evade — will someday be honored as a hero, if only after more than a century has shown us the profound evil which our own institutions enabled and blessed.

Since God wrote the moral law on the human heart, too deep for human sophists or even Satan to ever efface, we have great hope that in the course of time our country will see the evil of abortion, which has claimed more lives than the Middle Passage or even slavery itself. We will honor those who fought it, especially those who (like Tubman) were scorned and persecuted for doing so. Assuming that paper currency still exists in 2116, perhaps the $100 bill will bear the face of a brave abortion abolitionist such as David Daleiden.