Is Christianity Really So Bad?

Amazing Grace is perhaps one the most famous songs in all of human history. Its haunting melody carries timeless weight, and its succinct lyrics strike at the heart of what it means to be Christian. A song as heavy and poignant as Amazing Grace could only be constructed by someone who had truly experienced the furthest depths of the human condition; the lowest of lows and the highest of highs. Not a soldier, not a poet, not an orphan, not anything you would suspect. John Newton, the creator of Amazing Grace, was a slave trader.

Newton’s early life was anything but ordinary. As a young man, he was kidnapped by the English government and pressed aboard a merchant ship. After trying and failing to desert, he was flogged and traded to another ship, this one a slave ship. He ultimately was so unpopular on the slave ship that he himself was sold into slavery in West Africa and suffered mightily while indentured. After being rescued, Newton used his sailing skills to rejoin the slave trade. After some time in the business, he would eventually become a captain of multiple slave ships, such as the Duke of Argyle (1750) and African (1752–53 and 1753–54). While a slave trader, Newton also considered himself a Christian.

By 1764, Newton had suffered a stroke, given up salve trading, and had become an ordained minister in the Anglican church after decades of rigorous study. This was thirty-four years after his dealings in the slave trade. But what of his involvement in that nasty business? Did it simply disappear? Quite to the contrary; instead, it ate him alive. His dealings in what he describes as “a business at which my heart now shudders” became his sole fixation in undoing for the rest of his life.

In 1788, Newton published a pamphlet entitled Thoughts Upon the Slave Trade, in which he details his own upbringing, work, conversion, and final beliefs about slavery. His ultimate resolution, after experiencing all the good and evil that the world had to offer, was this:

“Only thus far my character as a Minister will allow, and perhaps require me, to observe, that the best human Policy, is that which is connected with a reverential regard to Almighty God, the Supreme Governor of the Earth. Every plan, which aims at the welfare of a nation, in defiance of his authority and laws, however apparently wise, will prove to be eventually defective, and, if persisted in, ruinous. The Righteous Lord loveth Righteousness, and He has engifted to plead the cause, and vindicate the wrongs of the oppressed. It is Righteousness that exalteth a nation; and Wickedness is the present reproach, and will, sooner or later, unless repentance intervene, prove the ruin of any people.”

Newton’s pastoral advice would be sought out greatly among the masses and it was this heart, one heavily burdened by sin but saved through faith, that would eventually gift us Amazing Grace.

Much ado today is made about the sins of Christians. It’s a common refrain to hear how awful Christians were (and are) when it comes to slavery, warfare, treatment of children and women, the hoarding of money, and in the overall neglect of the poor and needy. To many, this is vindication for not being a Christian. If they can’t practice what they preach, the thinking goes, why should anyone follow them? What kind of God would anoint these treacherous people? The reality, however, lies far from these claims.

We begin with money, as I believe this is the most common critique of Christians. Christians are rich, stingy, and don’t care about the poor, as the refrain goes. The reality, however, is that regular church attendants donate to charity more than three times the amount of their income as those who don’t attend church. Not only do Christians give more to religious organizations, they also give more on average to non-religious organizations. Despite earning significantly less overall, religious conservatives donate 30% more money to charity than liberal households do.  Since 2010, giving to Christian adoption ministries has risen by 81% and to orphan care ministries by 90%. For those who can’t donate their money, they donate much of their time or bodily health. Christians are by far more likely to volunteer in community-building services and are more likely to donate blood and other medicinal services than the rest of America. By any quantitative analysis, Christians give their money more freely than any other demographic.

Warfare as a topic is very difficult to quantify. Many wars that Christians have been involved in, from the Crusades to WWII, have been wars of defense and not offense. Because one cannot measure a negative (i.e. you cannot measure how many wars Christianity didn’t start), it is impossible to quantify how much less bellicose Christians are to their non-religious counterparts. Still, we shall endeavor to try.

The Encyclopedia of Wars claims “out of 1,763 wars surveyed over 10,000 years, religiously motivated or affiliated wars comprised, in total, 7%.” Of that 7%, over half (4%) were Islamic wars. That leaves 3% of all wars in human history to have been started by Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, and thousands of years of Paganism combined.

Featuring some notable atheists

 When it comes to the treatment of women and children, many atheists will claim “Christians only care about a child until they are born.” This could not be further from the truth. We have already seen that Christians donate overwhelmingly more money to charities and non-profits than their non-religious counterparts, but there is more to the story.

In 2004, The United States alone accounted for nearly 50% of global adoptions, while Christians account for a stunning 79% of domestic adoptions. While the global adoption number has fallen in recent years, it is primarily due to nations like China, Russia, and Guatemala banning the international adoption of their citizens. Strikingly, only 2% of the United States has adopted, meaning that 50% of global and 79% of domestic adoptions fall on the shoulders of just 2% of our nation. When you dive into that 2%, you find that the vast majority are Christians. 5% of Christians have adopted, more than double the national average.

Christian charity to people already born isn’t limited to adoption. 73% of substance abuse centers are faith-based, and Alcoholics Anonymous is primarily a Christian organization. The New York Times Opinion Section admits that over two-thirds of treatment centers are run by Christians, and are still somehow offended by Christians offering such a selfless service.

Likewise, women are honored by the church; not shunned. There are estimated to be over 4,000 Crisis Pregnancy Centers in the U.S. alone run almost exclusively off of voluntary donations from faith centers. CPC’s are anti-abortion facilities designed to help women considering abortion choose life instead by giving them critical support in their time of need. The vast majority are owned by faith groups. Likewise, somewhere between 60 and 75% of all homeless and women’s shelters are run by Christian organizations.

We end where we started; with slavery. British slave trading had begun in the 16th century, and would be outlawed only 300 or so years after that. Many people think that slavery in the West was a long-established practice that was foundational to the root of western culture, but this is not so. Slavery has been outlawed in the Western world almost as long as it was allowed. Only 100 or so years after slavery’s widespread adoption, Christian thinkers were already condemning the practice. In 1700, over 160 years before the civil war, Samuel Sewall published America’s first antislavery tract, titled The Selling of Joseph. The first group to put action over words were the Quakers, an American religious sect who banned slavery amongst themselves in 1754 – eighty years before England would. In fact, the entire abolition movement in the U.S. and England was primarily spearheaded by Christians like James Stephen, Jonathan Edwards Jr., Thomas Clarkson, Granville Sharp, John Brown, Benjamin Lay, John Woolman, Anthony Benezet, Benjamin Frankling, and more. The litany of Christian abolitionists is so long I could not get through even half of them here if I tried. I encourage the reader to dive into this rabbit hole lest you doubt the sincerity of the Christian movement in abolition.  

Historian and notable non-Christian Tom Holland has said this:

“People in the West, even those who may imagine that they have emancipated themselves from Christian belief, in fact, are shot through with Christian assumptions about almost everything. . . All of us in the West are a goldfish, and the water that we swim in is Christianity, by which I don’t necessarily mean the confessional form of the faith, but, rather, considered as an entire civilisation.”

It is impossible for non-Christians to understand just how fundamental Christianity is to their very existence. When Holland says that we live in Christian waters, consider that at one point, everyone making laws, and those who voted for them, did so consciously, and often subconsciously, because they were raised on Christian teachings and morality. What did that get us?

It got us bills like the Americans with Disabilities Act, which passed Congress almost unanimously. Despite costing trillions upon trillions of dollars, Americans gladly ponied up to make life more accessible for disabled people.

It also led to the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965, in which wealthy Americans found it so pressing to ameliorate the worlds ills that they voted overwhelmingly to allow unfettered access to America by the entirety of the third world. The U.S. has also spent roughly $4 trillion on foreign aid since WWII. While these decisions have been markedly unbeneficial for the nation, it is also impossible to conclude that we are selfish by any measure.

This line of thinking also provided entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Christian America has been so generous to those less advantaged, it is quite literally bankrupting our nation.

This is uniquely a Christian phenomenon. According to the OECD, only 42 nations (out of 195 total) provide entitlement programs for their citizens. Of the 42 that provide these programs, 38 are or were predominantly Christian. There is no other religion or ideology on earth that is anywhere near as magnanimous or selfless as Christianity. This is indisputable.

We close with the quote we presented at the beginning of this article by John Newton, but we highlight the most important sentence.

“Every plan, which aims at the welfare of a nation, in defiance of His authority and laws, however apparently wise, will prove to be eventually defective, and, if persisted in, ruinous.”

As the United States and virtually every country across Europe teeters towards the secular, we must realize what is at stake. The demonizing of Christianity threatens not only churches, but our very way of life. It threatens entitlement programs, charities, adoption, homeless and women’s shelters, volunteer time, and more. It pushes us closer and closer to anxiety, depression, and war. Resisting the church based on flawed criteria like greed or selfishness is not only quantifiably incorrect, it also guarantees that one will inherit those very traits they seek to avoid.