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It’s a particularly tiresome commonplace from porch atheists to assert that Christianity is and has never been anything but a drag on human progress. Such an attitude requires not just a stunning ignorance of global history, but an even more towering ignorance than the People’s Front of Judea demanding to know What have the Romans ever done for us?
When it comes to What has Christianity ever done for us? the answer is: nearly everything.
From the values that shape our personal moral frameworks to the institutions that support education, healthcare, and human rights, many of the things we take for granted today owe their existence to Christianity.
Even the porch atheists’ beloved science owes its existence to Christianity. While that simple statement invariably sends atheists into spluttering fits of rage, the fact of history is that, as physicist and historian of science Paul Davies has written, if a large meteorite had struck Western Europe in the 13th century, it’s unlikely that science would ever have happened.
Despite fanciful, virtue-signalling claims of an ‘Islamic Golden Age’, the contribution of Islam to science is negligible. Even today, just four Muslims have won Nobel Prizes in the sciences.
While the Greeks made important contributions to what would eventually become science, the Greek worldview remained rooted in the concept of the divinity of nature. It was only when Greek thought merged with Jewish thought, in Christianity, that nature became ‘de-deified’: that is, Christianity fostered the concept in an orderly, rational universe, which could be understood by systematic inquiry. This is why the first true scientists were all Christians, indeed churchmen, including the father of the crucial Experimental Method, Roger Bacon.
But it’s not just science that owes its existence to Christianity. The human rights industry so beloved of the left does, too. Again, anyone who studies pre-Christian history can only but be astonished by the callousness with which the vast bulk of humanity was treated. The idea that all human beings have intrinsic value is almost completely foreign.
Equality: Christianity underpins the belief in the equal value of every human life. This principle is reflected in the US Declaration of Independence, which states that all people are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights by their Creator […]
Human Rights: Christianity has been a driving force behind the development of human rights. The belief in the inherent dignity of every person, rooted in Christian teaching, has influenced modern human rights concepts and was the basis of advocacy.
Indeed, the paradigm case of human rights, the abolition of slavery, almost solely belongs to Christianity. While early Christian texts took the existence slavery as a given, they did not, as did Islam (founded by a slave trader) for instance, promote it. The abolitionist movement, the first serious effort in human history to stamp out what had hitherto been accepted practice the world over, was a revolutionary Christian movement. Even today, slavery most persists in those parts of the world where Christian culture has least sway.
Rule of Law: Christianity influenced Western legal systems by promoting the idea that both rulers and subjects are accountable to King Jesus and the higher law of heaven, fostering principles of justice, personal responsibility, and the tyrant-restraining reality of God over government […]
Political Philosophy: Christianity has contributed to the development of political philosophy, including ideas about governance, justice, and the role of the state. Concepts like the separation of powers and the moral responsibility of leaders find their roots in the Bible […]
Liberty of Conscience: Christianity’s concept of liberty of conscience has shaped religious and civil freedoms in the Western world. The notion that individuals should be free to follow their moral and religious convictions, without state interference or compulsion, has become a fundamental principle in modern societies.
Then there is the vast edifice of art and culture fostered in the Christian world, often directly inspired by the Christian faith, from the sublime artworks of Rome to the incomparable music of Bach.
As T S Eliot wrote:
“It is in Christianity that our arts have developed; it is in Christianity that the laws of Europe – until recently – have been rooted. It is against a background of Christianity that all of our thought has significance.
“An individual European may not believe that the Christian faith is true, and yet what he says, and makes, and does will all spring out of his heritage of Christian culture and depend upon that culture for its meaning…
“I do not believe that culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian faith. And I am convinced of that, not merely because I am a Christian myself, but as a student of social biology.
“If Christianity goes, the whole culture goes.”
Looking at Europe, at once aggressively anti-Christian and pathetically servile to Islam, we can practically watch it happen in real time.
