Even atheist historians and sociologists have begun acknowledging in recent years something Christians have always claimed: that the ethical architecture of the modern West — hospitals, universities, the concept of human rights, the abolition of slavery, the protection of children, the dignity of women, the care of the poor — traces its deepest roots to the Bible and to the communities the Bible shaped. Tom Holland, a British historian and unbeliever, published Dominion in 2019 arguing precisely this: that the values modern secularists take for granted are, in historical fact, the long-inherited sediment of Christian moral thought. Strip them of their Christian foundation, Holland argues, and they have no other historical source.
The Cultural Fingerprint
- Hospitals. The first hospitals in the modern sense were Christian — the Basiliad founded by Basil of Caesarea in the 4th century for the poor and leprous. The tradition carried through monastic infirmaries, the medieval Hôtel-Dieu network, and on to Florence Nightingale, whose nursing revolution was explicitly Christian.
- Universities. Oxford, Cambridge, Paris, Bologna, Harvard, Yale, Princeton — all founded by Christians for Christian purposes. Harvard's original motto: Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae — "Truth for Christ and the Church."
- Abolition of slavery. Gregory of Nyssa (4th c.) is the first person in recorded history to argue that slavery as an institution is a sin. The Quakers organized the first anti-slavery society. William Wilberforce, John Newton (former slave ship captain turned hymn writer of "Amazing Grace"), and Harriet Beecher Stowe stood on explicit biblical ground.
- End of infanticide and the care of children. Early Christians gained a reputation for walking the Roman trash heaps where unwanted infants (disproportionately female) had been exposed to die — and taking them home. Adoption as a normal moral practice is a Christian contribution to human history.
- Charity and the welfare of strangers. The pagan world found it baffling. The emperor Julian, writing in the 4th century in an effort to revive paganism, lamented that "these impious Galileans support not only their own poor but ours as well."
- Modern science. Copernicus (cathedral canon), Kepler (Lutheran), Galileo (Catholic), Newton (theologian who wrote more about the Bible than physics), Pascal, Boyle, Faraday, Maxwell, Mendel — the list of believing Christians who founded scientific disciplines is extensive.
- The modern missions-driven literacy revolution. Wycliffe Bible Translators and related organizations have translated the Scriptures into over 3,000 languages, often creating the first written form of tribal languages in the process — bringing literacy to peoples for whom no alphabet existed.
The Martyrs
One of the oldest evidences is the blood of those who died rather than recant. Tacitus describes the first wave in Nero's garden: Christians burned as torches, fed to animals, crucified. By AD 250 under Decius, systematic empire-wide persecution had begun. The Martyrdom of Polycarp, the 86-year-old bishop of Smyrna burned in AD 155, is a preserved eyewitness account; Polycarp's final words — "Eighty-six years I have served him, and he has done me no wrong. How can I blaspheme my King and my Savior?" — capture the pattern repeated ten thousand times.
Of Jesus' original twelve apostles, ten are recorded by early tradition as dying as martyrs — Peter crucified upside down in Rome, Andrew on an X-shaped cross in Greece, Thomas speared in India, Bartholomew flayed alive in Armenia, James the son of Zebedee beheaded in Jerusalem, and so on. Only John is recorded as dying a natural death, and only after surviving being boiled in oil (according to Tertullian) and dying in exile on Patmos. These men had every human reason to recant a story they had fabricated. None did.
Modern Transformation Stories
The strongest evidence for many people is not in the library but in the people they know. A few representative stories:
John Newton
Captain of a slave ship in the 18th-century Atlantic trade. Converted through a North Sea storm that nearly sank his ship. Became an Anglican minister, wrote "Amazing Grace," and was a mentor to William Wilberforce throughout the decades-long parliamentary fight that ended the British slave trade in 1807.
Saul of Tarsus
A rabbi hunting Christians became the greatest missionary in the religion's history, wrote thirteen letters that shaped Western thought, and was eventually beheaded in Rome for refusing to renounce what he had seen on the Damascus road.
Charles Colson
Nixon's "hatchet man," convicted in the Watergate scandal, converted in prison, and founded Prison Fellowship — today the largest prison ministry in the world, serving inmates in 120+ countries. Colson testified publicly that if the resurrection were a lie, Watergate had taught him twelve men in the highest offices of government could not keep a cover-up going for three weeks. Twelve Galilean fishermen holding a resurrection lie under Roman torture was unthinkable.
Malcolm Muggeridge
British journalist, satirist, and skeptic of religion for most of his life. Met Mother Teresa in Calcutta in 1968 for the BBC documentary Something Beautiful for God. Converted. Spent the last twenty years of his life writing about the Christian faith he had once mocked.
C. S. Lewis
Oxford tutor, avowed atheist, who described his own slow drift toward Christianity in Surprised by Joy: "You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet... In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England."
Francis Collins
The American physician-geneticist who led the Human Genome Project and later directed the NIH. An atheist in medical school until a patient's faith in the face of death forced him to consider whether his dismissal was intellectually honest. C. S. Lewis' Mere Christianity did the rest. He now describes faith and science as two complementary ways of knowing.
Lee Strobel
Legal affairs editor of the Chicago Tribune, atheist, set out to disprove his wife's new Christian faith. Two years of investigation ended with his own conversion and the book The Case for Christ.
The Global South
Christianity is growing most rapidly today not in its historical European heartlands but in China, sub-Saharan Africa, Iran, and Central Asia — often in the teeth of state persecution. When people are killed for meeting in secret house churches and still meet, the anthropologist's assumption that religion is dying has to be revised.
The Family Level
For most believers, the most compelling evidence is the quieter one: what Scripture has done in them and in the people they love. The alcoholic whose addiction fell away after decades. The marriage saved from divorce. The estranged father who learned to forgive. The terrified patient who faced surgery without fear. The grieving widow who found her grief carried by something larger than herself. These are not statistical miracles. They are the ordinary, daily evidence — cumulative across two billion living Christians — that a particular book, read as the word of a particular God, has a predictable and peculiar power to heal what nothing else seems to heal.
The evidence that matters most in the end is the evidence you become. — Summary of Dallas Willard's pastoral argument
Professing Christians have committed and tolerated real evils — the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Wars of Religion, complicity with slavery in the American South, abuse scandals in the modern church. Those are not footnotes. They are evidence that nominal adherence to a faith does not equal formation by it.
The test is not whether Christians are perfect. It is whether Christians who are actually formed by the faith — who read the Scriptures, pray, gather weekly, and live by its commands — produce different lives over the long haul. The empirical sociology says yes: robust religious practice correlates with lower divorce rates, higher charitable giving, more stable mental health, greater life satisfaction, lower rates of substance abuse. The people who are worst at living the Christian faith are those who claim the label but don't practice it. That is not the faith's failing; it is its critique.
Any strong conviction can produce change. But change toward what? The question is not just whether belief motivates but what the motivating beliefs are. Belief in a God who loves you, commands you to love your enemies, forgives the worst sinner, and promises to complete what he has begun in you produces a specific kind of moral formation — one marked by forgiveness, generosity, humility, and hope in the face of suffering.
History has produced few religious or philosophical movements that have abolished slavery, built hospital networks across continents, funded universal literacy, and continued to grow under persecution. It is reasonable to ask what is different about this one.