You’re More Christian Than You Think
I know lots of people without any Christian faith. But I don’t know anybody without any Christian instincts.
Those people are hard to find.
The Invisible Hand
The secularization of the West is a real phenomenon.¹ Free-falling church attendance, the rise of the religious “nones,” and widespread denominational weakening confirm that “religion is in sharp decline among the populace.”²
But it turns out Christianity is hard to get away from. Much of its moral teaching, once new and controversial, has been absorbed so deeply that it now tags along as an unnamed assumption, part of what “everyone knows.”³ In this way, many Christian tenets have become the subconscious moral measuring stick by which we critique the world.
So while our disappearing church affiliations suggest our Christianity is no longer active, the public moral causes we choose tell a different story.
Three of our favorites give us away: individual rights, racial equality, and sexual consent.
All three are darlings of modern secularism.
And they’re all thoroughly Christian.
Individual Rights
We love our rights in the West.⁴ We design our rights, debate our rights, and demand our rights. Legal work includes defining rights. Justice means restoring rights. Children in America study the Bill of Rights.⁵ In France it’s the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.⁶ Part I of the Spanish Constitution is devoted to fundamental rights.⁷ Governing most of South and Central America is the 25-member American Convention on Human Rights.⁸
We can’t seem to get enough of a simple idea: being human comes with certain entitlements.
That’s a good thing. But it’s a learned thing. Who taught us this? Caesar and his armies? Homer and the Greeks? The Aztecs? The Berbers? No, none of these. If you read their histories, humanitarianism is not a key concern.
Maybe Darwin? Again no. Evolutionary biology cannot sponsor the leap to human rights. Random molecules that evolve meaninglessly do not somehow graduate to having rights that other random molecules must honor.
It was none other than Christianity, washing over us like a wave until it sunk in, that gave us the conviction that human rights are universal and unchangeable. From Hebrew texts affirming that the poor have rights that the non-poor must defend (Prov 31:8-9) to Jesus’ command for his followers to love both friends and enemies alike (Matt 5:44), a major strand of Christian teaching is that human beings are entitled to certain dignities simply because they are human.
History shows the effects of this belief. In Roman antiquity, babies left out to die were brought in by Christians to be loved and raised.⁹ In the unromantic Paris of the Middle Ages, women who had been subjected to prostitution were protected and restored at a place called Filles-Dieu (“daughters of God”).¹⁰ Groups of physically hurting people were given simultaneous care at an interesting Christian invention known as the hospital.¹¹ And in the court room, belief in natural law—that the God-given law of right and wrong is written on every human conscience and no government can justly violate it—was developed through the work of Christian medieval lawyers at the law school in Bologna, which would go on to become Europe’s first and oldest university (another Christian innovation).¹²
Our lingering love of human rights is an unmistakable echo of Christianity.
This doesn’t mean we always agree on what human rights are. Our society is currently debating whether a person has the right to change their gender by mental assent, or whether a woman has the right to remove the life she carries. A unanimous vote across the aisle is probably not coming soon, because we rarely agree on the borders of human rights. But we do seem to agree that such borders exist and matter.
And that alone is a priceless inheritance of Christianity.
Racial Equality
How do we know racism is wrong?
We do know it. An honest mind knows that phenotypic differences (e.g., hair and skin) and cultural differences (e.g., speech and customs) are diversified forms of human beauty to be acknowledged and appreciated, not threats to be feared, ignored, or worst of all, ranked. But racism does exactly that. Racism takes what is different-yet-equal and makes it (mythically) different-therefore-unequal, and builds a hierarchical society right on top of the lie. In this way, racism is the ruin of a just society.
We know this. But why do we know it?
It can’t just be “because we just know.” Racists “just know” their beliefs too. It can’t just be “because we feel strongly”. People feel things wrong things strongly all the time. And it can’t just be “because we’re modern.” All generations consider themselves modern and therefore right.
No, before our modern instincts taught us, something taught our modern instincts.
Christianity, again.
It’s true that the Euro-American church has a miserable track record of wandering away from Christian ethnic ideals to aid Crusades, imperialize the globe, and directly institutionalize slavery and racism.¹³ Yet it was always the recovery of those ideals which ultimately became our societal instructor for the better. Unlike the secular Enlightenment, which theorized that different races had different origin stories (enabling racism), the Christian sacred texts taught that in the beginning God created one humanity in his image, equalizing human dignity (Gen 1:27).¹⁴ Jesus went on to show that love, care, and worship of God should cross the most unexpected racial lines (Luke 10:25-37; John 4:7-9). And in the first century, the Christian church became the first people group in history built solely on shared belief, turning ethnic diversity into a strength instead of a weakness—an innovation that nations and companies are still trying to figure out how to emulate.¹⁵
And the church went on to make its higher contributions. Slavery in the British Empire was abolished by a Christian legislator because he was propelled by Christian convictions.¹⁶ Equal rights for minority groups were federally attained in the American South through the efforts of a preacher-turned-lobbyist in a direct expression of his Christian faith.¹⁷ And today, as the Christian church grows younger and more diverse in the West, it is showing the world not something new, but something old—the multiethnic family originally described in the New Testament.¹⁸
It turns out Christianity offers the most powerful tool kit in the world for uprooting racism and replacing it with justice and love: an education to dispel racial myths, a heightened sense of the offense of racism (because it offends not only man, but God), a guarantee of forgiveness and restoration for those who repent from that offense, and the methods of love needed to build better future relations across bloodlines.
This doesn’t mean you have to become a Christian to hate racism and create a better society.
It means Christianity will give you better reasons to hate racism and create a better society.
It already has.
Sexual Consent
In the 30s AD, while the early church was getting its start not many miles away, the Roman emperor Caligula had a habit of throwing orgies. The emperors before and after him did the same.¹⁹
For the people who were invited (that means required) to attend, the rules could change, but the bottom line was always the same. The emperor, if not all the men present, would do exactly what they wanted, with whom they wanted, where they wanted. Men, women or children, single or married, in a back room or in an open hall would not matter.²⁰ To object would be to die. (I’m not exaggerating this, I’m sanitizing it.)
Even then, this was considered bizarre. But the fact that it was even possible shows that the sexual world into which Christianity was born was wild enough to make the modern West blush.
Why do we now find this Roman licentiousness debased and ridiculous? Because it involves something we’ve learned to hate even more than we love the party: non-consensual sex. We know non-consensual sex isn’t tolerable because it scars the victim (usually women and children), sometimes physically and always emotionally. And it degrades the men who commit the acts, only to have their conscience catch up with them later with its crushing weight. Nobody wins.
Why has this become so much clearer to us? Christianity, again, has much to do with it.
Jesus taught that men couldn’t even divorce their wives in a courtroom, let alone discard them as sex objects at a party (Matt 19:3-9). And the prior texts of the Bible had described sex as reserved for a married man and woman for the express purpose of preventing shame (Gen 2:25), the very thing a Roman orgy was certain to produce.
Then in the 60s AD, a shockwave. The famous Christian missionary Paul, often represented as a misogynist, told the early Christians in Corinth (who were surrounded by Greco-Roman sexual libertarianism and male whim-following) that physical pleasure should be totally reciprocal between spouses. No male dominance in the bedroom. Literally: “The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does” (1 Cor 7:3-4).
A man’s sexuality. Under the authority of his wife. His pleasure subjected to her willingness. This wasn’t a slight tweak to the local understanding; it was a reversal of the known sexual universe.
This was never meant to be popular; it was meant to be good. But it ended up being both. By providing a sexual safety net for women and adding a spiritual dimension to sex for everyone, Christianity created the first sexual revolution in the history of the world.²¹
The modern West is often so frustrated with the church’s refusal to bless same-sex unions that it forgets Christianity once shaped the entire Western world’s understanding of human sexuality for the better.
And the world is still reaping the benefits.
What About Church Failure?
Church failure is just that—failure. Sad contradiction. It’s far too easy to find examples of the church ignoring the rights of all, flirting with (or marrying) racism, or harboring sexual misconduct. Many paragraphs of lamentation could be written here, and many tears shed. It’s no small matter. Righteous complaints against the church can seem to bring Christian optimism to its knees. The only response is the pastoral work of a lifetime: to model repentance with personal and historical humility, and lead the church down paths that are consistent with our creed.
But we can’t fail to notice that even this very objection serves the argument. How do people know to call the church’s failures “failures” without adopting Christian standards first? As one pastor said, “Christianity has such an enduring, pervasive influence that we cannot condemn the church for its failures without invoking Christian teaching and beliefs to do so.”²² In other words, if we were genuinely thinking like pre-Christians from a pre-Christian era, we wouldn’t look at the church’s sins and say, “How dare they?” We’d look at those sins and say, “Business as usual.”
The Church has done a lot of wrong. You know it because you’re churched.
A Call to Self-Awareness
It’s true that the Christendom of the old Western world was an illusion. Earth is not the center of the universe. The Church is not a nation-state. Popes and councils are not perfect. Those myths needed to be discarded.
But the secular neutrality of the new Western world is also an illusion. Humans have rights for a reason. Racism is wrong for a reason. Sexual consent matters for a reason. We didn’t get these moral conclusions from nowhere. And moral conclusions can only be supported by moral reasons, like tree branches can only be supported by a trunk. Lay axe to the root, and you’ll not long enjoy the fruit.
Sometimes I hear people say, “I can be good without God.”
It’s not just that they’re not as good as they think.
It’s that they’re not as godless as they think.
Steve Bruce, Secular Beats Spiritual: The Westernization of the Easternization of the West (Oxford: Oxford University, 2017), 6.
James Emery White, The Rise of the Nones: Understanding and Reaching the Religiously Unaffiliated (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2014), 14.
Timothy Keller, “Nietzsche Was Right” (The Gospel Coalition, September 23, 2020).
Ahmen Shaheed and Rose Parris Richter, “Is ‘Human Rights’ a Western Concept?” (IPI Global Observatory, October 27, 2018).
Engrossed Bill of Rights, September 25, 1789; General Records of the United States Government; Record Group 11; National Archives.
France, Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen, 26 August 1789.
Constitución Española, Spain, 27 December 1978.
Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos, November 22, 1969.
Louise Gosbell, “’As long as it’s healthy’: What can we learn from early Christianity’s resistance to infanticide and exposure?” (ABC Religion & Ethics, March 13, 2019).
André Vauchez, ed., “Filles-Dieu” in Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages (Oxford Reference: James Clarke & Co., 2005).
Gary B. Ferngren, Medicine & Health Care in Early Christianity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 2009), 2.
Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World (New York: Basic, 2019), 236.
Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2019).
Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Bold Type, 2016), 209.
Pippa Stevens, “Companies are making bold promises about greater diversity, but there’s a long way to go” (CNBC: June 11, 2020).
Kevin Belmonte, William Wilberforce: A Hero for Humanity (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007).
Marshall Frady, Martin Luther King, Jr: A Life (New York: Penguin, 2005).
Kate Shellnutt, “Guess Who’s Coming to Church: Multiracial Congregations Triple Among Protestants” (Christianity Today: June 22, 2018).
Seneca the Younger, On Anger xviii.1, On Anger III.xviii.1; On the Shortness of Life xviii.5; Philo of Alexandria, On the Embassy to Gaius XXIX.
Seneca the Younger, On Firmness, xviii.1.
Kyle Harper, From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Harvard University, 2013), 2.
Keller, “Nietzsche Was Right”, 2020.
