By Amy Beange

You reap what you sow.” I started piano lessons at age nine. I would never be described as a prodigy or even particularly talented. But for seven years I showed up at my teacher’s house for my 30-minute lesson and put in a few hours of practice every week with the result that now, 30 years later, I can sit down with a piece of music and enjoy its melody. 

All those years of scales and repeating the tricky parts have led to a level of skill that makes me happy when I get a chance to exercise it. My visits to retirement homes are immeasurably brighter for including “O What a Beautiful Morning!” or “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” The time and effort spent getting to this point was not a lot of fun, but the result has been worth it.

As with skills, so with ideas. Stephen Covey, author of Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, is credited with a similar sentiment: “Sow a thought, reap an action; sow an action, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny.”

Greatness doesn’t happen by accident; a national character isn’t conjured from nowhere. Peace and prosperity is never accidental.  If we see end products that we admire and wish to perpetuate, we must drill down. What are the thoughts, those tiny seeds of potentiality, that were planted in the psyche many years earlier that led to the actions, habits, and character that formed the destinies and societies we wish to emulate?

In recent year religion in general has endured a good deal of public criticism, but Christianity has no doubt suffered the most. The Judeo-Christian tradition is the backbone of the West’s heritage, but the common perspective today is that it did little good and much harm. It advocated for a malicious vindictive God (Dawkins, The God Delusion), a mythical Jesus described in a contradictory and unreliable text (Hitchens, God is not Great) and it has inspired its adherents to commit terrible acts (Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation). The general consensus is that the world would do well to leave Christianity behind.  

And yet, hard as it is to believe, the tide may be about to turn. In his new book, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, non-Christian historian Tom Holland points out that the very standards by which people condemn Christianity were in fact established by Christianity. People, he says, can only critique the church for abuses because Christianity teaches that they are made in the image of God and that God’s Son loved them, and died for them. 

Confidence in a God who loves human beings concretely is the bedrock for other beneficial standards for society, including freedom of belief and expression, and tolerance for those with whom we disagree. Tolerance, mind, not imprisonment and execution. Without this standard springing directly from the Judeo-Christian tradition, how could anyone be called hypocritical? How could there be outrage over abuse? What is abuse? Naturalistic materialism can never say. “Nature eats her own,” notes theologian Douglas Wilson, and will do so until every last sun has gone out.”

Holland relates his visit to Iraq and the time he spent in a town where the Islamic State had enslaved the women and killed the men, several via crucifixion. The same sort of thing had been practiced by the Romans thousands of years earlier, he notes. At that time crucifixion was the way to dominate; not only to execute but to humiliate opponents and to serve as an unequivocal statement of Roman power. The experience prompted him to wonder what the world would be like had Christ not come and co-opted the cross, turning it into a symbol of hope that is expressed even in attenuated form for the total non-believer in things like the Red Cross Society’s humanitarian work.

Asked if human rights would have been implemented regardless of Christianity, Holland responds, “Why?” The idea of human rights as a natural, obvious concept just waiting to be discovered and implemented is not just wrong, it is wrong-headed, on the level making retirement plans depend on winning the lottery. Human rights are not things that exist; they are the consequences of particular ideas about human nature found only in Christianity. When considering the ancient world, we tend to focus on the glories of their architecture and philosophy. We admire the Parthenon and experiments with democracy.  But we are much less acquainted with their brutal views of human life: 

While studying the ancient world, Holland writes, he realized something. Simply, the ancients were cruel, and their values utterly foreign to him. The Spartans routinely murdered “imperfect” children.  The bodies of slaves were treated as outlets for the physical pleasure of those with power.  Infanticide was common.  The poor and the weak had no rights.

Such views were universal in the ancient world, which explains why slavery is one of the oldest institutions in human history. It has been quite clear to most people at most times in history that there are no universal human rights; that a human being’s value lies exclusively in the circumstances of birth and political connections.

But someone will argue, hasn’t science proven that humans are genetically so similar as to be equal? Can’t that serve as a basis for human rights? We don’t really need religion to hold up our deeply cherished values, do we? Yet experience shows that by itself science is inevitably manipulated to support whatever ends are determined by those in power. Holland points out that the Nazis used science to bolster claims of racial superiority. Science is never more than a tool that reflects the character of its users.

Given the wildly varying levels of ability, intelligence, wealth, power, and productive capacity found among human beings, it is not manifestly evident that all lives are equally valuable. Therefore, something much more profound is needed to undergird the notion, something of much greater import than vague sentiments about the “brotherhood of man.” Holland now believes that confessional Christians, as opposed to mere cultural Christians, ought not to shy away from the “weird” parts of the Bible. Any liberal can talk about being kind to one’s fellow man or giving to charity, he notes, but that isn’t what sets Christianity apart.  

What makes Christianity remarkable and revolutionary is its central tenet, that the fabric of history was ruptured, and everything set on its head when God became man. It is the supernatural character of the Christian message that gives it weight and significance; significance enough to shake and remake natural notions of the cheapness of life. Thus, Christians who jettison the supernatural aspects of the faith and water down its central message to be acceptable outside the faith, relegate themselves to irrelevancy.  

Holland isn’t the only non-believer changing his view of the Christian faith. That the West’s Judeo-Christian heritage might contribute something necessary to a world of human rights, toleration, and rule of law, is increasingly accepted by other atheists and agnostics. Author and journalist Douglas Murray sometimes refers to himself as a “Christian Atheist”, meaning that, while he does not believe in God, he acknowledges and admires the Christian heritage that is foundational to his cherished beliefs. He remarked in a podcast that in considering morality “we may have to accept that…the sanctity of human life is a Judeo-Christian notion which might very easily not survive [the disappearance of] Judeo- Christian civilization.

He goes on in a podcast: 

It seems obvious to me…studying what goes wrong at times in history…the massive problem of the secular world is always going to be how you create in the absence of the total structure of religion…how you in some way recreate…an impression of the Christian idea of the sanctity of the individual…it’s very obvious from a moment’s consideration that people are not equal. It’s extremely easy to foresee in the future, as it has been in the past, how whole groups of people can be regarded as being some kind of deadweight on the advancement of the species for those people who will always believe in advancement, and so, yes, I get worried about the whole area…[because] I see no evidence that we’re becoming enormously better as human beings.

Murray is referencing the case of a Belgian woman who, believing her family had disregarded her for being female instead of male, transitioned to male. But when she still found no relief, she was then assisted by the government in ending her life. “That’s the sort of thing we were told wouldn’t happen with the use of euthanasia,” he writes. “It was only going to be people, you know, with a few months to live with terminal cancer and people with extreme dementia…and there seems to be no particular outcry or note of it.”

If human life has no intrinsic value then it can be molded and even ended according to human wishes, based on criteria that can vary wildly and always dependent upon who holds the power. As Murray mentioned, history provides ample instances of the value of human life being circumscribed based on the wishes of certain people.  

Ideas have consequences. You reap what you sow. Do we live in a world where human life is more secure, valued and protected today than it was 50 years ago? Are we moving toward greater tolerance and respect? What makes those qualities possible in the first place? God has so ordered the world that we can observe how life goes when certain ideas take hold; what a wonderful time it is when at least some atheists can recognize that their cherished values are anchored in their nation’s religious heritage and can acknowledge that we disregard that heritage to our peril.