It’s a wonder I’m still a praying, church-going woman. Practically every novel I’ve read in the last five years features a main character who proclaims that they “don’t believe in all that stuff.” I see a particular pride, reading between the lines, and I see it coming straight from the author, who utters this line as he/she were as brave and original as the first person to wear her jeans tucked inside her boots.

I get it. Christianity gets a bad rap. They tell me wars have started in its name, though I can’t name one at the moment. Its believers judge people’s behavior, repress people’s sex lives (or, they used to), then find their own hypocrisy exposed.

I also note that many unbelievers lead good, moral lives.

I just wish they were honest enough to admit that what we know about “good” and “moral” traces straight back to revealed religion.

The case for this is stronger than I had supposed, if we are to believe Alvin J. Schmidt, the author of How Christianity Changed the World. “[I]n a rather nebulous manner many of us ‘know’ that much of our culture, especially in the Western world, bears prominent imprints of Christ’s influence,” says the Lutheran pastor and professor of sociology. Yet as he researched his Christmas sermon one year, he found that “most history texts commonly ignore the Christian influence even where it would be very pertinent to cite.”

And he began to “mine” the vast array of sources cited in this book.

So, what do we owe to Christianity?

How about the idea that human life is valuable, worth preserving?

Christianity appeared in the Roman world, where they dragged slaves into gladiator battles and enjoyed the spectacle. Taking care of sick people was unheard of, unless you were a valuable citizen, such as a soldier.

On top of it all, they fornicated to a frazzle 1 , committing every no-no in the book of Leviticus. This led to a lot of unwanted pregnancies. If the known-at-the-time abortifacients didn’t work and they ended up with a live child on their hands, no problem. Leave it out for the wolves. Dump it into the sea.

Then the Christians came along. Transformed by the teachings of Jesus Christ, they shunned the gladiator shows, cared for the sick and took in abandoned children.

Rome wasn’t the only culture where life was cheap. Cortes and his Conquistadores, “often correctly seen as ruthless, and who undoubtedly killed more of the enemy than was necessary . . . nevertheless, still retained enough Christian values to be appalled by what they saw in the pagan sacrifices of the Aztec and Maya Indians.”

“’It was the most terrible and frightful thing [he and his men[ have ever witnessed.’”

Schmidt demonstrates how the teachings of Jesus Christ inspired advances in medicine, astronomy, art, literature, architecture and more. Sometimes, the artist or scientist stated outright that they did their work for the glory of God. And sometimes, they built on the work already done by devoted followers of Christ.

“Yes,” you say, “but what about other cultures?”

Schmidt cites advances we inherited from Egypt, India and China, but India’s “pervasive animistic belief[s]” and China’s quasi-pantheistic identification of man and society with Nature” inhibited the multiplier effect he finds in the West. Ancient China “[n]o longer felt confident that their limited mind could grasp and control the laws of the Nature because Nature itself was not the subject to a Mind and Lawgiver transcendent to it.”

In other words, worldview matters.

Or let me put it this way to my recipe-loving readers: If you want cake, you need the right ingredients.

Photo credit: barnyz on Visualhunt.com / CC BY-NC-ND

  1. I stole that from here