I am an atheist. I do not believe in God, miracles, or an afterlife. Yet I am convinced that without Christianity, the West as we know it would be in deep trouble. This is not a plea for conversion; it is a historical and institutional argument about causation, moral capital, and societal resilience. Christianity supplied the ethical vocabulary, the metaphysical glue, and the organizational scaffolding that transformed a patchwork of tribes into a civilization capable of self-correction and sustained progress. Remove it, and the structure does not stand neutral—it tends toward fragmentation and moral erosion.
Conceding the Objections
The historical record contains horrors: the Inquisition, the Crusades, witch-burnings, and biblical endorsements of slavery and stoning. The Spanish Inquisition executed 3,000–5,000 people over three and a half centuries (Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition, 1997). The Crusades may have claimed 1–3 million lives across two centuries (Thomas Madden, The New Concise History of the Crusades, 2005). Leviticus prescribes death for adultery and homosexuality. These human costs cannot be denied.
Yet scale and context matter. The secular French Reign of Terror executed over 16,000 in a single year (1793–94). Twentieth-century atheist regimes accounted for roughly 100 million deaths in six decades (The Black Book of Communism, 1997). The same biblical canon that justified cruelty also contained the seeds of reform. Jesus’ “let him without sin cast the first stone” (John 8:7) and Paul’s “the letter kills, but the spirit gives life” (2 Corinthians 3:6) inspired Christian abolitionists to resist literalist cruelty. Christianity, unlike pagan or purely rational codes, possesses an internal dialectic capable of moral self-correction.
The Pre-Christian Baseline
The world Christianity inherited was ethically limited. Rome was an administrative marvel but morally parochial: one in four newborns was exposed on hillsides (W. V. Harris, 1982), gladiatorial combat entertained hundreds of thousands, and slavery was normalized by Aristotle and unchallenged by Cicero. Pagan philanthropy existed—evergetism—but it was episodic, tied to civic prestige, not universal duty.
Christianity introduced a transformative idea: every human being, slave or emperor, bore the image of God (imago Dei). Gregory of Nyssa condemned slavery as theft from the Creator in 379 CE. Constantine’s successors banned infanticide by 361 CE (Codex Theodosianus 3.3.1). These were not Enlightenment innovations; they were theological imperatives that eventually rewrote law and custom.
Institutions That Outlived Their Creed
The West’s institutional DNA is stamped with Christian influence:
- Literacy and knowledge: Monastic scriptoria preserved Virgil alongside the Vulgate. Cathedral schools evolved into Bologna (1088) and Paris (1150)—the first universities, chartered to pursue truth as a reflection of divine order.
- Care systems: Basil of Caesarea built the basilias in the fourth century, a network of hospitals, orphanages, and poor relief. No pre-Christian society systematized charity on this scale.
- Rule of law: The Decalogue’s absolute prohibitions and the Sermon on the Mount’s inward ethic created trust horizons essential for complex societies. English common law, the Magna Carta (1215), and the U.S. Declaration’s “endowed by their Creator” trace their lineage to Christian natural-law theory.
Secular analogues arrived centuries later and proved fragile without transcendent accountability. The Soviet Union inherited Orthodox hospitals but could not sustain them after purging “idealism.”
The Borrowing Fallacy
Many modern atheists condemn Leviticus yet insist on universal dignity. That norm is not self-evident; it is a Christian export. Nietzsche saw this clearly: the “death of God” would undo slave morality and return society to master morality (Genealogy of Morals, 1887). When we demand compassion from power, we are smuggling Christian principles into a secular argument. Strip away the premise, and human relations default to “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must” (Thucydides).
Contemporary Evidence
Secularization correlates with institutional and social atrophy. Europe’s fertility rate hovers at 1.5, and marriage and volunteerism track church attendance downward. The World Values Survey shows that religious societies retain higher interpersonal trust. The West exports human rights grounded in Christian-derived universality; competitors offer efficiency without reciprocity.
Some argue secular humanism could replace Christianity. Yet historical experience shows moral innovation without transcendent accountability is fragile: Enlightenment ethics, while intellectually powerful, required centuries of reinforcement from religiously-informed social norms to take root widely.
A Charitable Conclusion
Christians must acknowledge their tradition’s abuses alongside its capacity for self-correction. Atheists should recognize that our moral vocabulary—equality, compassion, rights—was not discovered by reason alone but forged in a crucible we no longer actively tend. The West lives off borrowed moral capital. When the account empties, we will not revert to a benign pagan golden age; we will confront efficient barbarism dressed in bureaucratic language.
Christianity is not true, in my view. But it was necessary. And it may still be.
References
- Harris, W. V. (1982). Ancient Literacy. Harvard University Press.
- Kamen, Henry. (1997). The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision. Yale University Press.
- Madden, Thomas F. (2005). The New Concise History of the Crusades. Rowman & Littlefield.
- Popper, Karl. (1972). The Open Society and Its Enemies. Princeton University Press.
- The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (1997). Stéphane Courtois et al. Harvard University Press.
- Nietzsche, Friedrich. (1887). On the Genealogy of Morals.
- Thucydides. History of the Peloponnesian War. Trans. Rex Warner. Penguin Classics, 1972.
- Codex Theodosianus. (438 CE). Codex of the Theodosian Code, Book 3, Title 3, Law 1.
- World Values Survey. (2017). “Wave 7 (2017–2020) Survey Data.” Retrieved from https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org.
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
8 comments
November 16, 2025 at 6:10 am
tildeb
Sure, the west is culturally Christian and recognizing and accepting this role should not be a problem and even celebrated for its traditions. But this idea that liberalism ‘borrows’ its morality from a set of religious beliefs derived FROM Christianity is not true in fact. Sure, it’s believed to be true (mostly by Christians but also from atheists who do not know their western history) and AI assisted writing will agree to this but that belief – and its prevalence throughout LLM models doesn’t make it so in truth. In fact, liberalism had to displace (sometimes with force) ‘Christian morality’ in order for individuals to become recognized individual moral agents in law and governance (this is what JUSTIFIES individual consent in governance, which is what elections are all about: legitimate consent borrowed from individuals through individual ballots to legitimize REPRESENTATIVE government). Individuals and not some religious monolith were to be held individually responsible for morality… including tolerance of the misguided belief of others that morality derives from the Christian god(s).
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November 16, 2025 at 6:43 am
makagutu
Is it just Christianity or any religion can do?
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November 16, 2025 at 9:05 am
The Arbourist
I struggled to make this sort of distinction in the essay. We have built liberalism on some of the foundations of Christianity, but liberalism came into its own by breaking away from the religion and the associated dictates.
The key ideas of liberalism—individual rights, freedom of conscience, government by consent—were developed in direct reaction to religious authority, not as its extension. Locke grounded rights in reason and natural law, not scripture. Voltaire, Rousseau, and the broader Enlightenment pushed for tolerance precisely because Europe had been torn apart by religious wars. The American First Amendment and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man were explicit attempts to stop moral authority from being monopolized by any church.
I get that. And more realized individuals get that – but for many people the drift away and nullification of Christianity may seem to be a net negative.
For many people the self absorbed nihilism of critical consciousness and the satisfactions it breeds leads them to be inherently unhappy with society and themselves. Is that a “god-shaped” hole in their heart? I honestly don’t know, but so much of society seems adrift and willing to adopt some really horrible ideologies that have replaced religious hope and belief.
We’ve lost something in our society and the current ideologies (post modernism, cultural marxism, id pol) are only amplifying the desperation and ennui. Maybe it has been that we’ve just been moving too fast and now we’re paying down the cultural backlog while society tries to come to terms with a society ostensibly built on liberal principles. Sure it gives us extraordinary freedom, but that doesn’t automatically give us meaning in our lives.
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November 16, 2025 at 9:09 am
The Arbourist
@Makagutu
I don’t know, but the Judaeo-Christian ethic seems to have been a good starting place for many societies to evolve into liberal democracies.
Islam isn’t a candidate, as it is propagated by the sword.
We’re missing something in society culturally and maybe spiritually. I’m trying to figure out what. :/
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November 16, 2025 at 9:48 am
The Arbourist
@tildeb
Thanks, tildeb a few more thoughts, — this is a good articulation of the standard Enlightenment account, and I agree with a big part of it: liberalism absolutely had to break the power of the churches to establish individual rights and consent-based government. Where I think we differ, in terms of the post, is at the deeper level of moral anthropology.
My argument in the article isn’t that liberalism kept Christian institutions — it obviously didn’t — but that it kept Christian assumptions about the moral equality and agency of individuals.
The Enlightenment didn’t invent the idea of universal moral worth; it secularized a concept that Christianity had already introduced to the West (rooted originally in the Jewish idea of humans created in the image of God).
This distinction between displacing Christian authority and retaining Christian anthropology is crucial. Liberalism rejected the power of the church, but it kept the Christian idea that all persons possess equal moral dignity and a conscience that cannot be coerced.
That’s the “borrowing” I was referring to — not institutional, but conceptual.
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November 17, 2025 at 8:55 pm
tildeb
I thought I’d throw this recent study about AI bias into the mix here because I suspect this is the source problem using AI to help write a post about a heterodox topic like religion generally and Christianity specifically.
“Perhaps most troubling is how AI systems approach heterodox positions. Rather than evaluating arguments on logical merit, the systems apply differential scrutiny based on topic category. This creates asymmetry: heterodox claims face heightened analytical barriers whilst orthodox progressive claims receive the benefit of doubt.
When AI systems acknowledge their evasions after challenge, this reveals the systemic issue. Users deserve honest engagement from the beginning, not the appearance of moral suspicion followed by grudging acknowledgement only after demonstrating argument validity. The problem isn’t challenging positions: intellectual rigour is valuable. The problem is the apparent presumption that heterodox views require additional scrutiny before being engaged on their merits.”
The study is very interesting and I read about here. Which AI do you use?
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November 18, 2025 at 10:24 am
The Arbourist
@tildeb
Thanks. :) I actually think your concern about AI bias is fair. There’s good evidence (including the recent Quillette piece) that large models can hedge or apply uneven scrutiny depending on the topic, especially when it comes to religion or other heterodox positions. That’s something I genuinely try to watch for.
I also want to be clear about my own limitations here. I’m not an expert in the history of Christianity or in the finer points of liberal political theory. That’s why I use more than one AI model (ChatGPT, Grok, etc.) — not to outsource the argument, but to triangulate the evidence and get a sense of where the consensus lines, fault lines, and contested claims actually are. It’s not a perfect system, and I know specialist topics like the liberalism-Christianity debate are easy to get wrong.
That said, I do think the core historical point still stands: liberalism developed within a Christian cultural world, but its defining ideas emerged in conscious tension with religious authority, not as a direct theological inheritance. If there’s a specific claim you think I’ve mishandled, I’m genuinely open to correction. That’s how we all get better at this.”
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November 18, 2025 at 3:50 pm
tildeb
My point is that the link between Christianity and liberalism is not causal, contextualized in this essay as justifying a rise of Christianity as a corrective for the loss/decline of liberalism. This is exactly wrong. Because the central tenets of liberalism stands in direct conflict with the central tenets of Christianity (personal autonomy and authority versus god-granted allowances for obedience), what the west needs is unity and shared purpose (again, only from the ground of shared liberal negative principles is this even possible). Like usual, however, and right on time comes the thief in the night here, the camel that cannot keep its nose from under any tent flap it encounters no matter the subject, the drunk uncle at a family gathering pretending to be a responsible adult and worthy of respect only by affiliation, is religion similarly stepping up and claiming without justification that it is synonymous with whatever cures are necessary for any kind of ‘liberal’ ill. Sure, there’s a correlational relationship between the west’s liberalism and ‘Christianity-writ-large’ (IOW, which ‘Christianity’ are we talking about here? shhh….) through cultural influence in which Christianity was able to stay relevant inside liberal democracies. But liberalism didn’t gain traction because it supported enough Christianity; it gained traction because it helped launch and unleash humanity’s potential especially through capitalism and science (replacing Christianity’s dedication to metaphysical nonsense and Stone Age beliefs about magical agencies) long before government and law applied liberalism’s equality principle through shared civil rights and freedoms.
The LLMs used for AI across the board intentionally warp what’s true in order to avoid causing algorithmic offence if it conflicts with the more popular progressive narrative. Some AIs are worse than others at this (note how responsive Grok is to further questioning compared to others but still guilty of the original bias). So it doesn’t surprise me that promoting an allied version between moderated Christianity (post enlightenment) is held equivalent and compatible with liberalism by the LLMs (forgive them, lord, for they know not what they do). But this reverses the order of dominance; Christianity, in order to survive the unifying empowerment of liberalism, had to radically moderate BECAUSE its previous version was incompatible and in conflict with liberal principles. So it adapted. Rescuing liberalism from today’s regressive authoritarianism (mirroring religious fundamentalism of the worst kind) by substituting Christianity may meet the approval of LLMs only too willing to shape narrative to fit the user’s biases, but it’s not true in reality. At best there’s an uneasy truce between Christianity and liberalism because of liberalism’s tolerance of religious freedom in the private domain. This is the key element left out of such religious apologetics and it will not last when liberalism loses its legal power (negative rights shared by all) to the illiberalism of the civically retarded throughout the west.
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