Was Christianity ultimately good for the world or bad?

In the previous post I began to sum up the significance of my study of Jesus’s influence on our modern sense of morality; I ended by talking about how Christianity is often attacked for all the harm it has done, for example in pogroms against Jews leading to the Holocaust, the Crusades and the ongoing hatred of Muslims, the Inquisition – torturing people to death for believing the wrong things.  In addition to these major historical events, one also has to consider how it is that many Christians today advocate radical nationalism, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, the slaughter of civilians, and the burning of the planet—all claiming Christ is on their side. When other Christians say these views and actions are not “Christian,” I readily agree they are not consistent with the teachings of Jesus.  But they certainly are “Christian” – done by self-professed followers of Jesus often in his name.

I pick up here by looking at the positive side, in one of those rare attempts in modern discourse to consider both sides of an issue.  All this, again, comes from the Conclusion of my book Love Thy Stranger: How the Teachings of Jesus Transformed the Moral Conscience of the West (Simon & Schuster).

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At the same time, I also know there is another side, and it too needs to be given full credit, not as a way of mitigating the horrors, but as a way of seeing that very few religions, philosophies, or ideologies are thoroughly, incontrovertibly, inherently evil, just as none is thoroughly, incontrovertibly, inherently good. The reason for this reality is, or at least should be, obvious: ideologies are believed and enacted by humans, and humans are both terribly flawed and filled with great moral potential.

I often get asked, usually by non-Christians, whether I think, on balance, the Christian faith has done more good or evil in the world. I always reply that the question is unanswerable. There are no cosmic scales or AI-generated algorithms to provide an approximate, let alone, decisive answer. History is long, religion is complex, and good and evil are variable, coming in shades and degrees. What I will say, even to my non-Christian friends, is that even if we were preternaturally able to look at all the specific effects of the Christian faith in just about every time and place, we would find the same generalized answer: in addition to the terrible suffering that the Christian faith and those who follow it have created and are still creating, there is also a lot of good. We are remiss if we fail to notice it.

Much of the good brought to the world by the Christian faith has involved an important shift in the understanding of what it means to be a good person, a moral agent, and truly human. Unlike what could generally be found in the Greek and Roman worlds, the Jewish tradition that Jesus inherited and embraced stressed acting in love not only toward family members, friends, and those who could become friends but even complete strangers, especially needy members of the community. Jesus, possibly like other Jewish teachers before him, universalized this principal. God was the God of the whole world and everyone in it. To be right with God meant to live for others, whoever they were, whatever they looked like, wherever they lived or came from. Love of all, especially those in need, was paramount, even if it required some sacrifice. Even if it required the ultimate sacrifice.

The followers of Jesus believed his own life and death were models to be followed. It is true that few Christians in the decades, centuries, and then millennia after his death adhered to his teachings literally.[i] But, on the whole, they have thought that living for others was an essential element in being a thinking and moral person. It is very difficult to quantify the impact of this shift in ethical perspective, not just on individual lives but also on the social and political agendas of the Western world. We can, however, see the concrete results all around us. It was the Christian movement that led to the creation of public hospitals, orphanages, old persons’ homes, poorhouses, private charities, and governmental programs dealing with disaster relief, poverty, hunger, and homelessness.[ii]  Whether or not these institutions would have evolved in some other way based on other influences is impossible to know; what we can say is that they were Christian interventions.

Equally if not more important changes occurred on the personal level, in our moral vision of what it means to live in this world. I obviously do not mean that everyone in the West became and remains a committed altruist. After reading this morning’s news, I think a strong case can be made otherwise. There are more than enough people all around us, now as always, and in scarily increasing numbers, even among those who most loudly proclaim their commitment to Christ and his teachings, who do not share an altruistic impulse toward strangers (or even family members), who live in complete isolation from others or, worse, who seek society in order to dominate it, striving for their own good at all costs and showing zero concern for the welfare of others—from the solipsistic tyrant to that egomaniacal narcissist who lives next door.

But that is not most of us. Most of us continue to sympathize with those who are in pain or turmoil or danger. We want to help those in need, even if we don’t know who they are. We see it not just as something we ought to do, but something we want to do. If we choose not to do much or anything at all, we sometimes feel pangs of guilt and regret.

Why is that? The sense that we should help strangers in need did not come from our prehistorical ancestors, nor from the Greek and Roman worlds at the foundation of our civilization. It came from the social pressures asserted on the Western world by the moral instruction of early Christians based principally on the teachings of Jesus. Eventually, it came to be simply how people thought and felt, part of our psyche. Jesus, in the end, transformed the moral conscience of the West.

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[i] On the question of whether the widely held sense that early Christians were routinely, systematically, and brutally persecuted see Moss, The Myth of Persecution, esp. 127–62.

[ii] It may seem obvious to some readers that these institutional changes would have appeared anyway, without Christian involvement. I am not so sure, both because of the deeply embedded cultural assumptions in that world prior to Christianity and because of the unusual social and cultural forces that brought changes after the West became predominantly Christian. In any event, whether something else would have made the necessary social, political, cultural, and economic interventions necessary, it was Christianity that did so.