Concept

Christian Civilizational Impact

Intro

Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris all argue that the world would be better off without Christianity. This page makes the opposite case, and it does so with empirical history, not with theology.

A lot of what modern people value most was built on Christian foundations: mass literacy, hospitals, universities, the abolition of slavery, democracy, human rights, modern science, the dignity of women, the protection of children, the secular humanitarian aid sector. These things did not appear at random in human history. They appeared, in roughly the form we know them, in cultures shaped by Christianity, were defended on Christian premises, and spread along Christian missionary lines.

Three independent kinds of evidence support this. First, statistics. Sociologist Robert Woodberry's 2012 paper in American Political Science Review (one of the top journals in political science) found that, controlling for everything else, the density of historical Protestant missionary activity is the single strongest predictor of later democracy, mass literacy, press freedom, and rule of law in a country. Second, historians of ideas. Tom Holland (a non-Christian) in Dominion, Larry Siedentop in Inventing the Individual, Glen Scrivener in The Air We Breathe, and others trace specific modern moral concepts (universal human dignity, the equal worth of women, the moral relevance of the weak) back to Christian doctrine, where they were unknown or actively rejected in pre-Christian cultures. Third, the institutions themselves: the first universities, the first hospitals, the first systematic anti-slavery argument, the first orphanages, the first international humanitarian relief.

The argument has a sharp implication. The modern secular humanist who attacks Christianity using ideas about equality, rights, and human worth is using moral capital that came from the very tradition he is attacking. The vocabulary is borrowed. Nietzsche saw this clearly; so does Holland. You can keep the morality without the metaphysics for a while, but probably not forever.

This argument does not by itself prove Christianity is true. It is a historical-causal claim about what Christianity built. But it does powerfully refute the "the world would be better off without it" framing.

In full

The empirical-historical apologetic argument that Christianity has been a, or the, decisive constructive force in the development of the modern world's most cherished institutions, values, and outcomes, vernacular literacy, mass education, hospitals, the universities, the abolition of slavery, modern democratic government, human-rights universalism, scientific revolution, the legal categories of person and right, the secular-humanitarian aid sector, the elevation of women, the dignity of the worker.

The argument is deployed against the New-Atheist counterfactual "the world would be better off without Christianity" (Religion Causes Violence Objection; Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris) by inverting the framing: most of what the New Atheists value normatively, equality, human rights, science, democracy, opposition to slavery and torture, emerged in Christian civilizations, was theorized on Christian premises, and is empirically correlated with Christian historical formation. The case is empirical, not metaphysical, Christianity does not need to be true for the historical-causal argument to land.

The three load-bearing legs

The argument has three reinforcing legs of different evidentiary kinds:

1. Statistical-correlational (Woodberry)

Robert Woodberry's The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy (American Political Science Review 106:244-274, 2012) finds that, controlling for colonialism / geography / natural resources / pre-mission literacy / climate / disease burden, historical density of conversionary-Protestant missionary activity (1815-1960) is the single strongest predictor of subsequent

democratization,
rule of law,
mass literacy,
press freedom,
voluntary-association density,
modern economic development

across the non-Western world. The proposed mechanism is vernacular-literacy-via-sola-scriptura → schools and printing presses → civil-society substrate → democratic institutions. The effect specifically attaches to conversionary Protestants who prioritized lay scripture-reading; state-sponsored "comity" missions and Catholic missions do not show the same magnitude effect.

This is the statistical anchor, it converts the civilizational-impact claim from inspirational rhetoric into a published-peer-reviewed empirical finding.

2. Cultural-historical (Holland / Stark / Mangalwadi)

Tom Holland's Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World (2019) is the canonical book-length cultural-historical treatment, written by a non-Christian classicist who began the project skeptical and ended persuaded that the moral assumptions most modern Westerners take for granted are unintelligible apart from Christian formation. Holland's specific claims:

The valorization of weakness, the first-shall-be-last inversion of pagan honor-shame, was invented by Christianity against the Greco-Roman moral consensus.
Imago-Dei egalitarianism (every human bears God's image, equally) is the load-bearing premise of every modern human-rights regime; it has no analog in pagan antiquity.
Slavery's moral delegitimization (not merely its economic obsolescence) is a Christian-civilizational achievement traceable to Gregory of Nyssa → Christian abolitionism → Wilberforce → modern anti-slavery law. See Christian Abolitionist Movement.
The very category of "rights of the weak against the strong" is Christianly-derived.
Modern secular humanism is the bequest of Christian formation operating without explicit Christian metaphysical premises, it lives on borrowed capital.

Rodney Stark (The Rise of Christianity, 1996; For the Glory of God, 2003; The Victory of Reason, 2005) supplies the sociologist's-eye companion case, early Christianity's distinctive treatment of women, infants, the poor, the sick, and the enslaved was a competitive advantage in the Roman Empire and a cultural-revolutionary force. Vishal Mangalwadi (The Book That Made Your World, 2011) traces the same thesis from an Indian-Christian perspective.

3. Institutional-particular (the concrete legacy)

The argument is also cumulative-instantiated:

Universities. Originated as cathedral schools (Bologna, Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, etc.) under Christian patronage and theological motivation. The university-as-institution is a Christian invention.
Hospitals. The xenodochium (institution for care of strangers) and the dedicated medical hospital arose under Christian patronage in late antiquity; the world's oldest continuously-operating hospital, the Basiliad (founded by Basil of Caesarea c. AD 370), is Christian.
The Red Cross. Founded 1863 by Henri Dunant, an evangelical Christian, on explicit imitation-of-Christ premises.
Modern science. Stark (For the Glory of God) argues, controversially but with statistical support, that the scientific revolution emerged in Christian Europe specifically because Christian premises (an intelligible creation reflecting a rational Creator; matter as good; the world as worth studying) furnished the conceptual substrate that pagan-Greek and Eastern traditions did not. Mainstream historians of science partially dispute the strong form but the core observation that the scientific revolution was a Christian-civilizational phenomenon is uncontested.
Modern legal categories. The legal category of the person (Roman law had persona; Christian theology developed it into the human-rights-bearing subject); the criminal law's protections against torture and cruel punishment; the marriage contract as a freely-entered covenant; due process protections, all have Christian-civilizational genealogies.
The abolition of slavery. Christian Abolitionist Movement, William Wilberforce, the Clapham Sect, Quaker abolitionists, the African-American Black church, drove the moral delegitimization of slavery as a globally-eradicable institution, against the universal cross-cultural-historical consensus that slavery was permanent.
Modern philanthropy and humanitarian aid. World Vision, Samaritan's Purse, Catholic Charities, the Salvation Army, the international humanitarian-aid sector is largely Christian-founded and Christian-staffed; secular humanitarian organizations frequently absorb their templates.

The standard atheist counter, Zuckerman's Scandinavian case

Phil Zuckerman (Society Without God, 2008; Living the Secular Life, 2014) is the canonical academic response. The argument:

Contemporary Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway) are the most-secularized societies in human history by most measures of religious belief and practice.
They also rank at or near the top globally on life expectancy, child welfare, gender equality, low violent crime, low corruption, citizen happiness, institutional trust.
Therefore secularity is compatible with and may even correlate positively with civilizational flourishing, falsifying the strong Christian-civilizational-impact claim.

The Christian replies

The codex position is that Zuckerman's data does not falsify the Christian-civilizational thesis; it complicates the claim, requiring a more careful statement:

Post-Christian residual values. Scandinavia is the most deeply-Christianized region in European history (~800 years of unbroken state-Lutheran formation). The contemporary moral commitments Zuckerman praises, egalitarianism, the dignity of the weak, gender equality, anti-corruption, are Christian-formed values that have outlasted explicit Christian belief by perhaps two generations. The accurate description is not "secular societies flourish" but "societies recently secularized from deep Christian formation continue to flourish on inherited Christian moral capital for one or two generations." See Tom Holland (Dominion) for the developed version of this argument.
Demographic collapse. Scandinavian fertility rates (TFR ~1.3-1.5) are well below replacement (~2.1). The "Scandinavian model" is biologically failing to perpetuate itself, the most basic civilizational measure. Religiosity-fertility correlation (Eric Kaufmann, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? 2010) is robust cross-culturally; the most secular societies are the least biologically self-sustaining.
The historical-causal vs contemporary-correlational distinction. Even granting Zuckerman's contemporary metrics, the institutional substrate on which Scandinavian flourishing rests (high-trust civil society, mass literacy, welfare-state administrative capacity) was built in the explicitly-Lutheran 19th-20th centuries. Zuckerman documents flourishing-on-Christian-built-foundations and labels it secular flourishing.
Asymmetry with the body-count case. Atheist Regime Body Count supplies the negative side of the empirical comparison: the most-de-Christianized regimes in history (Soviet, Maoist, Cambodian, Albanian) produced mass-violence unprecedented in human history. The Scandinavian case is the positive secular comparison; the Soviet case is the negative one. The full empirical record includes both.
The "religion poisons everything" thesis is the load. Even if Zuckerman's case were entirely correct, it would falsify a strong Christian-civilizational claim ("only Christian societies can flourish"); it would not vindicate the New-Atheist thesis ("religion poisons everything"). The apologetic claim is the weak version: Christianity has been a major constructive civilizational force; New Atheism's counter is the strong version: Christianity is uniformly poisonous. The weak Christian claim survives Zuckerman; the strong atheist claim does not survive Robert Woodberry or Atheist Regime Body Count or Tom Holland.

Apologetic deployment

Standard live-deployment pattern when an atheist deploys "religion poisons everything":

Concede honestly. Religious people have done terrible things; religion has been weaponized in service of awful ends. The Crusades, Inquisition, Wars of Religion, witch trials, abuse coverups are real moral failures that Christians should not deny.
Distinguish the claim. The New-Atheist thesis is not "some religion has done some bad", every Christian agrees with that, but "religion-as-such has been net negative for human welfare." Defending that requires defending it empirically, not anecdotally.
Pivot to the positive case. "Here's the empirical record on the positive side: vernacular literacy, mass education, hospitals, universities, the abolition of slavery, modern democracy, human-rights universalism, the scientific revolution. Robert Woodberry's APSR paper is the statistical anchor; Tom Holland's Dominion is the cultural-historical anchor. Now please defend your strong claim against this evidence."
Pre-empt the Scandinavian deflection. Zuckerman's case is real but qualified, see the four replies above.
Close with the counter-factual challenge. "Name a contemporary society that flourishes by your metrics, was not Christian-formed for centuries, and is biologically reproducing itself. Once you've done that, we can talk about whether religion poisons everything."