What Good Has Christianity Ever Done for Us?

In his book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, atheistic historian Tom Holland observes that all that we cherish as goods in the West - our belief in human equality, human dignity regardless of gender or age, justice for all regardless of station, the trustworthiness of our reason as a guide to truth - all of these and more are the fruits of two millenia of Christianity, and to the extent they exist anywhere else on the globe it's due to the influence of Christianity.

Another atheist, philosopher Jürgen Habermas, once stated that,

Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this we have no other options. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter.

I was reminded of Holland and Habermas - and others who've made similar observations - when reading the 2022 Erasmus Lecture (paywall) sponsored by the journal First Things and delivered by Anthony Fisher.

At one point in his talk Fisher cites a scene from an old Monty Python film, Life of Brian:

In Monty Python’s Life of Brian, John Cleese plays Reg, a member of the People’s Front of Judea. In a terrorist cell meeting, Reg asks rhetorically: “What have the Romans ever done for us?” His fellows respond with example after example of the benefits of Roman civilization.

“All right, all right,” Reg concedes. “But apart from sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a freshwater system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”

For all the historical ignorance, revolutionary fantasies, and plain ingratitude of modernity, the debt of Western civilization to Christianity is much greater.

All right, all right. But apart from the sanity that sanctity brings to a world of sin; the building of hospitals, hospices, and leprosaria; the creation of the university and the most comprehensive primary, secondary, and tertiary school system in the world; the endowment and staffing of orphanages, aged-care homes, and other welfare institutions—apart from those things, what [has Christianity] ever done for us?

Apart from ending human sacrifice, cannibalism, slavery, infanticide, and the chattel conception of women and children; the explication of a sublime moral code and vision of the virtuous person; the shaping of our language and discourse; the promotion of literacy, printing, and libraries; the sponsorship of much science, medicine, and technology, and of traditions of art, music, literature, and architecture; the development of much of Western common, civil, and constitutional law; and the establishment of a corpus of theological and philosophical thought that has provided metaphysical grounding for our politics and so much else—apart from all that, our secular antagonist presses, what have the [Christians] ever done for us?

The point made by Holland, Habermas and Fisher is that so much that we take for granted in the West we would not have ever had were it not for the Christian worldview that began 2000 years ago and has largely influenced the West for the last 1700 years.

It's good to remember this when people take Christianity to task for the sins of the Church. It's also edifying to ask on what other moral grounds would anyone be able to assert that the Church was wrong to, say, torture and burn people at the stake during the Inquisition or more recently for clergy to sexually abuse boys, or to commit any of the other crimes, real or imagined, imputed to the Church.

Take away the Christian understanding of the dignity of the person created in the image of God, take away the Christian understanding of human rights and what foundation is the critic standing on to criticize or condemn Christianity?

Certainly none of the offenses mentioned above would've been considered morally reprehensible in ancient Greece, Rome or Egypt. None of them would be thought to be wrong under Hindu morality or under strict Islamic law or according to the moral practices of the Orient.

The critic's moral judgment upon Christianity is unwittingly based on the residuum of two thousand years of Christian teaching that the critic has absorbed and adopted without even realizing it. He rejects Christianity while oblivious to the fact that apart from Christianity he has no basis for whatever moral beliefs he brings to bear to discredit Christianity and the Church.

To their credit, Holland and Habermas recognize this and acknowledge it which causes one to wonder why they don't abandon their atheism and become Christians.

They might claim that they just can't bring themselves to believe Christianity is true, but that would be a very odd response. It would mean that they're basing their whole way of life on principles they believe to ultimately be arbitrary and false, even as they celebrate those principles.

Why would anyone knowingly do such a thing?