Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. For the Coulson Center, I'm John Stone Street. A common complaint leveled at Christians is that we're hypocrites.
Now, of course, we are, at least according to what Holy Scripture says about the human condition between the first and the new creations. There is, however, a larger perspective here, one that we should know about what Christianity has actually contributed to the world throughout human history. For example, Christians are among the most generous people in the world. In the fall of 2024, after Hurricane Haleem destroyed so many Appalachian communities, among the first to arrive and help and last to leave were a couple thousand Amish, who literally rebuilt the homes of strangers. And of course, groups like Samaritan's Purse were already there, as they so often are, providing for the hurting.
In fact, Christian kindness shows up not just when disaster strikes. Consistently, according to survey after survey, religious people, especially Christians, are exponentially more likely to volunteer their time and give their cash than their secular neighbors. And ironically, secular critiques of Christian generosity. depend on the Christian assumptions about life and human value that now dominate the Western mind. As Eric Metaxas has put it, we no longer fight about whether to help the poor, but we now fight about how best to help the poor.
And that's all because of Christianity. Tom Holland has documented as much in his book, Dominion. Instead of being the source of the contemporary morality of liberty, human dignity, and charity, as is often assumed, the Greco-Roman world was a brutal civilization where violence and cruelty drove the economy and secured political power. The poor were considered beneath contempt, not to mention beneath care. Women had no rights, and children, especially the disabled and the weak, were discarded outside city walls and left to die.
It was because Christians imagined and practiced human dignity that all of that changed. The skeptic scholar Bart Ehrman has confirmed as much in his recent book, Love Thy Stranger, How the Teachings of Jesus Transformed the Moral Conscience of the West. In the ancient world, public works were Privately funded, but not for the common good. It was for the powerful to show off. When the stranger helped the weaker, it was because they got something out of it for themselves.
When they oppressed the weaker, well, it was simply because they could. Christ's call to love the unlovable shifted the entire moral compass of the Western world from dominance to self-sacrifice. Here's how Ehrman put it in his book: Where would we be without hospitals, orphanages, nursing homes, and charities dealing with disaster relief, poverty, literacy, homelessness, and hunger? As an agnostic/slash atheist myself, with regard to at least this particular offshoot of Jesus' teaching, I say, thank God for Christianity. In other words, the only reason it is obvious to all of us today that we should give to the poor.
Christians are wrong when they don't do it is because of Christianity in the first place. Of course, Christians will rarely hit the target that was set for us by Jesus Christ, but the very fact that we talk about how to care for the weak, the outcast, the poor, and not just if we should, is a sure sign of Christianity's enduring influence on the world. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint. Today's Breakpoint was co-authored with Dr. Timothy Padgett.
If you're a fan of Breakpoint, leave us a review wherever you download the podcast, and you can find more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment by going to breakpoint.org.
