Your Moral Code Has Christian Roots Whether You Know It or Not

The Foundation for Our Culture’s Morality

As he set out to write his 2015 book Bad Faith: When Religious Belief Undermines Modern Medicine, Paul A. Offit, MD, assumed he would “sound the same themes that have been sounded by militant atheists like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris: that religion is illogical and potentially harmful.” Offit was a professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania. He’d witnessed parents refusing the help their children needed for religious reasons, and he’d seen lives lost as a result. But after reading the Bible and researching history, Offit found his expectations scrambled. “Independent of whether you believe in the existence of God or that Jesus was the Son of God,” Offit reflects, “you have to be impressed with the man described as Jesus of Nazareth.”¹

Today, we see infants and children as full human beings. But as Offit discovered, that wasn’t true in the Greco-Roman empire.

Children weren’t considered to be people; they were property no different than slaves. So parents could do whatever they wanted to them. Children were stoned, beaten, flung into dung heaps, starved to death, traded for beds, sexually abused.

After researching the historic effects of Christianity, Offit came to this surprising view: “It is hard to overstate the [positive] influence of Jesus’ teachings on the fate of children.”²

You may read this and think, “OK, but what about the harms done in the name of Christianity?” That’s a fair question, and I’ll seek to answer it. But first, I want to make the case that even our ideas about what counts as harm have come to us from Christianity—whether we realize it or not.

How Church Could (Literally) Save Your Life

Rebecca McLaughlin

Rebecca McLaughlin presents scientific evidence that weekly church attendance guards against depression, increases mental and physical well-being, and extends life expectancy. Most importantly, it gives people the chance to meet the Great Physician, who alone offers eternal life.

Diagnosis

If you look back through history and around the world today, you’ll see a host of things that strike you as profoundly wrong. Offit mentioned some of them. Child abuse. Horrific violence. Enslavement. Starvation and oppression of the poor. Regardless of our views on God, we likely share a set of principles we see as universal moral truths. For instance, I’m guessing you believe all humans are innately valuable regardless of their sex, age, income, physical abilities, or racial heritage. I’m guessing you think we should help those trapped in poverty, that rape is morally repugnant, that infanticide is wrong, and that genocide is evil. Since most people in our culture— whether they identify as atheist, agnostic, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, or nothing in particular—hold these truths to be self-evident, we see these views as basic moral common sense. But if we look at history, they’re not.

Don’t take my word for it.

When agnostic British historian Tom Holland set out to write Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, he thought belief in universal human value and equality was the A-B-C of ethics, not dependent on any particular religion or philosophy. But like Offit, Holland changed his mind. His research showed that his core beliefs about universal value and equality were introduced and normalized across the West by Christianity. Their origins, as Holland puts it, “lay not in the French Revolution, nor in the Declaration of Independence, nor in the Enlightenment, but in the Bible.”³

So, was Jesus just ahead of his time—like Copernicus and Galileo, who discovered that the earth revolves around the sun? Was Jesus’s teaching about universal love and valuing the poor, sick, and oppressed merely an early-stage uncovering of moral truth that would’ve been discovered anyway? No. As Holland came to see, if we cut Jesus out of the equation, we won’t find our feet on solid, secular foundations for our ethical beliefs. Rather, we’re like someone “sitting on the great branch of Christianity, and sawing it off.”⁴

What does this mean for us?

It means that when we hear news from around the world and gasp with horror at the slaughtering, enslavement, and oppression we’re witnessing, the air with which we gasp is Christian air. When we recoil at rape, child abuse, sex trafficking, and people being mired in abject poverty, we’re grasping at the Bible’s diagnostic tools to recognize these things as wrong.

For Roman soldiers before Jesus’s birth, slaughtering, enslaving, and oppressing people were all in a good day’s work. What’s more, this work was smiled upon by Greco-Roman gods. We think it’s obvious that women are as valuable as men. But they thought women were clearly less valuable. We think sick and disabled people are equal in inherent worth to their able-bodied, healthy peers. But they did not. We think the rich should help the poor. But as Holland notes, the Greek and Roman gods “cared nothing for the poor.”⁵

The lingering sinfulness of Christians doesn’t prove the Christian message isn’t true.

It was Jesus’s teachings (with deep roots in the fertile soil of the Old Testament) that placed the hungry, sick, and dispossessed right at the center of our ethical concern. It was Jesus’s valuing of women that lifted women to a place of equal worth with men. As historian Kyle Harper explains, it was Christian sexual ethics that cut Roman men off from their ability to sexually abuse those they enslaved and gave us the idea of sexual consent for women.⁶ And as Offit discovered, it was Jesus’s valuing of children that changed how we see children to this day.

But is this really so unique to Christianity?

You may have heard that all religions have a version of the golden rule—that you should treat others as you’d want them to treat you—so there’s really nothing special about Christian ethics. But the question we must ask is “Who counts within the system?” In many ancient systems of belief, the “others” whom we should treat as we’d want them to treat us are those who share our beliefs, sex, nationality, or social status. But Jesus universalized the “other” we’re to care for to include those least like us. After affirming that to “love your neighbor as yourself” encapsulates the moral law of the Hebrew Scriptures, Jesus was asked, “And who is my neighbor?” In response, he told a story of love extended to a racial and religious enemy who’d been robbed and left to bleed out on the road (Luke 10:25–37).

Without the moral anchor dropped by Jesus, we’re left with “you do you.” You could say, “I think all humans have inherent worth and value,” just like I can say, “I think sushi is delicious.” But you can’t say everyone should think the same. Two years ago, I met an atheist professor at the Harvard School of Public Health whose research focuses on curbing the spread of infectious diseases. He told me how his work helps save the lives of vulnerable people in developing countries. I gently asked him if he knew his atheism didn’t give him grounds for his belief in universal human value. He said that he did know.

If you’re a nonreligious person, you may think, That’s precisely why I don’t believe in God. My atheist friends care deeply for the poor and vulnerable while you Christians talk a good talk and do nothing. It’s not hard to find extremely loving atheists and morally repugnant people who identify as Christian. So, does the moral diagnostic of the Bible prove (ironically) that Christianity is false, because of all the wrongs done in Christ’s name?

That’s a fair question.

If we look back throughout the last two thousand years and all around the world today, we’ll see many instances of supposed followers of Jesus slaughtering, oppressing, and abusing people. To be sure, some of these heinous acts were done by people falsely claiming to be Christians. Jesus warned that he’d always have fake followers. But other deeply sinful acts came from people who (as far as we can tell) were otherwise sincere in their faith. In Bullies and Saints: An Honest Look at the Good and Evil of Christian History, Australian historian John Dickson documents the moral highs and lows of those claiming to be Christians—and there are many lows. If the Bible taught that Christians are by definition good, the evils done by Christians would indeed disprove the Christian faith. But it doesn’t.

The Bible doesn’t claim that Christians are innately good. Instead, it teaches that we’re rotten to the core— so bad that Jesus had to die to take the punishment for all our sin. Becoming an authentic follower of Jesus should certainly result in growing love for others and rejection of our natural, sinful tendencies. But while the Bible promises complete forgiveness for our sins because of Jesus’s death, it also teaches that Christians will continue to be sinners till the day we die. The lingering sinfulness of Christians doesn’t prove the Christian message isn’t true. It’s actually one piece of evidence that Jesus’s death was necessary. If my heart were basically good, I might need a great example to set me on the right path. But I wouldn’t need the Son of God to die to take the punishment for all my sin. I might need a moral mentor. But I wouldn’t need a crucified Messiah. No Christian lives up to the moral standards set by Jesus. But we need those self-same standards even to decry the history of Christian sin. So, did Jesus set a moral standard and then leave an army of his so-called followers who failed to follow him in any way? No. If the many moral failures of Christians give us pause, we must also take into account the extraordinary record of good done in Jesus’s name.

Prescription

As Offit was surprised to find, Jesus’s emphasis on caring for the poor, sick, and oppressed has spurred his followers to found hospitals and rescue orphans. It’s led to abolition movements, poverty relief, and laws against forced sex. In the last two thousand years, Christians have been responsible for more self-sacrificing care for those in need than followers of any other faith or philosophical tradition. Jesus identifies so closely with those in need that he taught his followers that any time Christians care for “the least of these”—the hungry, thirsty, sick, imprisoned, or far from home—they’re caring for him (Matt. 25:31–46). As skeptic of Christianity Bart Ehrman puts it, “The very idea that society should serve the poor, the sick, and the marginalized” is “a distinctively Christian concern,” and without the spread of Christianity across the West, “we may well never have had institutionalized welfare for the poor or organized health care for the sick.”⁷

Many Westerners think Christians are all talk when it comes to those in need. But as atheist psychologist Jonathan Haidt points out, this simply isn’t true. Noting this prejudice among his fellow atheists, Haidt writes,

Surveys have long shown that religious believers in the United States are happier, healthier, longer-lived, and more generous to charity and to each other than are secular people. Most of these effects have been documented in Europe too.⁸

Haidt goes on to urge his nonreligious readers to sit with this evidence. “If you believe that morality is about happiness and suffering,” he argues, “then I think you are obligated to take a close look at the way religious people actually live and ask what they are doing right.”

So, does all this charitable giving land in church budgets? No. “Religious believers give more money than secular folk to secular charities, and to their neighbors,” Haidt observes. “They give more of their time, too, and of their blood. Even if you excuse secular liberals from charity because they vote for government welfare programs, it is awfully hard to explain why secular liberals give so little blood.”⁹ The idea that less religion means more generosity toward those most in need isn’t supported by the data.

Evangelicals like me often get the worst press for their hypocrisy and lack of care for those in need. Sometimes, the attacks are warranted. But in an article titled “Evangelicals Without Blowhards,” Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Nicholas Kristof, who has devoted much of his career to covering humanitarian crises, points out that evangelical Christians “are disproportionately likely to donate 10 percent of their incomes to charities.” Kristof challenges his readers,

Go to the front lines, at home or abroad, in the battles against hunger, malaria, prison rape, obstetric fistula, human trafficking or genocide, and some of the bravest people you meet are evangelical Christians (or conservative Catholics, similar in many ways) who truly live their faith.¹⁰

If you, like Kristof, are a “not particularly religious” person who cares deeply about the plight of the most vulnerable around the world, you may want to take a closer look at Christianity.

Direction for Use

In his 2019 book Outgrowing God: A Beginner’s Guide, new atheist author Richard Dawkins grudgingly acknowledges the evidence that people who believe in God behave better, on average, than their unbelieving peers. He says he finds it rather patronizing to the unenlightened masses to say to his readers, “Of course you and I are too intelligent to believe in God, but we think it would be a good idea if other people did!”¹¹ Yet this is one logical conclusion from the data. If, like Dawkins, you think you’re too intelligent to believe in God, you might not want to go to church yourself. But in the interest of the common good—especially the good of those in need—you’ll have to hope that other people do.

But this isn’t a consistent place to land.

As we saw earlier, Offit claimed that “independent of whether you believe in the existence of God or that Jesus was the Son of God . . . you have to be impressed with the man described as Jesus of Nazareth.”¹² But, actually, you don’t. If Jesus isn’t the Creator God of all the universe made flesh, we have no underlying reason to believe his teachings about universal human value. We might as well live selfishly. If we’re no more than complex biomedical machines wandering around a minor planet orbiting one of a countless host of suns in a completely pointless universe, then murder, rape, and child abuse are just shifting configurations of atoms and molecules. Our value and our values are not real. They are, as Harari puts it, “figments of our fertile imaginations.” So if we want to cling to human worth, it’s worth asking, “Is there any chance that Christianity is true?”

This article is adapted from How Church Could (Literally) Save Your Life by Rebecca McLaughlin.

Rebecca McLaughlin (PhD, Cambridge University) is the author of Confronting Christianity, named Christianity Today’s 2020 Beautiful Orthodoxy Book of the Year. Her subsequent works include 10 Questions Every Teen Should Ask (and Answer) about Christianity; The Secular Creed; and Jesus through the Eyes of Women. Rebecca is the host of the Confronting Christianity podcast.

Related Articles

3 Ways Attending Church Could Extend Your Life

Rebecca McLaughlin

October 27, 2025

Weekly church attendance is one of the very best things you can do for both your body and your mind, according to researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Why Moralistic Therapeutic Deism Is a Dead End

Jen Oshman

July 10, 2020

It's very easy to shelve God and decide we don't really need him, that we just need to believe in ourselves and to invent who we are and what we want to do.

Podcast: Why You Can't Put Jesus in a Box (Rebecca McLaughlin)

September 19, 2022

Rebecca McLaughlin discusses a number of unbiblical misconceptions that we may have about Jesus and offers encouragement for those with questions about who Jesus is.

Podcast: The Surprising Health Benefits of Going to Church (Rebecca McLaughlin)

October 27, 2025

Rebecca McLaughlin discusses how church attendance has positively fought against the levels of loneliness, depression, anxiety, and addiction in the world.