Author: John Stonestreet and Dr. Timothy D. Padgett
A common complaint about Christians is that we are hypocrites. We are, of course, 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 to know about what Christianity has contributed to the world throughout our history.
For example, Christians are among the most generous people in the world. In the fall of 2024, after Hurricane Helene destroyed so many Appalachian communities, among the first to arrive to help and last to leave were a couple of thousand Amish, who literally rebuilt the homes of strangers. 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.
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 said, “We no longer fight about whether to help the poor, but how best to help the poor.” That’s 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 beneath contempt, not to mention care. Women had no rights, and children, especially the disabled or 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 affirmed 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 so the powerful could show off. When the stronger helped the weaker, it was because they got something out of it. When they oppressed the weaker, it was simply because they could.
Christ’s call to love the unlovable shifted the entire moral compass of the West from dominance to self-sacrifice. As 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/atheist myself, with regard to at least this particular offshoot of Jesus’ teachings, I say: Thank God for Christianity.
In other words, the only reason it is “obvious” today that we should give to the poor—and Christians are wrong when they don’t—is because of Christianity in the first place. Christians rarely hit the target set for us by Jesus Christ. But the fact that we talk about how to care for the weak, the outcasts, and the poor and not just if we should, is a sign of Christianity’s enduring influence on the world.