Reading: Christianity's Social Impact

By David Feddes

Christianity's social impact

• Family life: following God’s design
• Education: enrich every mind
• Politics: freedom with order
• Economy: opportunity and generosity
• Valuing women
• Freeing slaves
• Spreading compassion

Previously we explored Christianity's impact on family, education, politics, and economy. Here we focus on Christianity's contribution to valuing women, freeing slaves, and spreading compassion.

Valuing Women

Paganism and women

• As a 12-year-old girl, you can be sold by your father to the highest bidder.
• Patria potestas: A man’s wife and children are legally his property. He has absolute power of life and death over you.
• Husband can kill you for adultery; he can have mistresses, prostitutes, temple orgies.
• He can divorce you; you can’t divorce him.
• If born female, you might live only a few hours, abandoned to weather and animals.
• Live males outnumbered females by 30%.
• Demosthenes: “The prostitutes are for our amusement; our slave women are for our personal service, and our wives are to bear us children.”

Jesus and women

• Jesus spoke against adultery, lustful looking, and legal but groundless divorce.
• Jesus taught women and made them partners in mission. (Luke 8:1-3)
• Jesus made women the first witnesses of his resurrection, even though rabbis banned women from testifying in court.

Early Christian standards

• Didn’t kill baby girls; adopted castaways
• Didn’t allow men to have prostitutes or mistresses; insisted on life-long faithfulness
• Told husbands to love their wives and sacrifice for them, not be harsh with them.
• Told fathers not to provoke children
• Didn’t withhold teaching from girls

Spreading Change

• Patria potestas was repealed. No longer lawful to harm or kill wife or children.
• Women could own property, have custody.
• Fewer child brides; Christians married later.
• More choice of spouse, rather than forced marriages.
• Women actively spread gospel truth.
• Christian men found that being in a loving, faithful, one-woman marriage was better than promiscuity.
• A joyful, intelligent, active wife turned out to be much better than a doormat with stifled talents and a stunted personality.
• A pagan writer exclaimed: “What women these Christians have!”

Muhammad & women

• Had at least 14 wives; struck favorite wife when she left house without permission.
• Married friend’s wife as gift from Allah
• Married a beauty who had just seen her husband, father, and brother beheaded
• Consummated marriage with 9-year-old
• Husbands are to beat wives who don’t obey. (Koran 4:34, 38:44)

Killing widows

• Various cultures have approved widow killing: Native Americans, China, Maori, Africa, Scandinavia, Eskimo.
• Hindu saying: “If her husband is happy, she should be happy… and if he is dead, she should also die.”
• Christian missionaries led opposition.

Valuing widows

• 88 times the Bible speaks of widows
• A defender of widows is God in his holy dwelling. (Psalm 68:5).
• Religion that God the Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after … widows in their distress. (James 1:27).
• Younger widows: remarriage, not death
• Relatives care for her, or church will.
• Valuable workers (1 Tim 5). Church helps widow, and widow helps church.
• Valuing a widow proves women matter even without husbands or children.

Abundant life for women

• Beware of multicultural claim that every culture or religion is equally good.
• Beware of radical feminist claim to liberate women by promoting abortion and making women like bad men who are career crazed and promiscuous.
• Jesus: “I have come that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” (John 10:10)

Freeing Slaves

Undermining slavery

• You have only one Master and you are all brothers. (Jesus in Matthew 23:8).
• There is neither slave nor free, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. (Gal 3:28)
• Paul called slave traders ungodly (1 Tim 1:9-10). He told slaves, “If you can gain your freedom, do so. (1 Cor 7:21).
• Slaves could lead churches; former slave Callistus became bishop of Rome.
• In second and third century: Christian-led households usually freed slaves.
• Chrysostom said there was one Christian way to own slaves: “Buy a slave, train him in a skill to earn his own living, and then set him free.”
• St. Patrick, a former slave, condemned all forms of slavery and taught new Irish Christians to set slaves free.
• Bishops and councils recommended redeeming captive slaves.
• Slavery nearly vanished in Europe, but then slavery came back with colonialism and African slave trade.

Abolishing slavery

• John Wesley thundered against slave traders, “Do you never feel another person's pain? Have you no sympathy?”
• William Wilberforce led a campaign to abolish slave trade in British Empire.
• Christian Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Gospel-powered slaves

• Church life gave slaves a setting to use their talents and to lead. They applied these leadership skills to other areas.
• Some Christian former slaves in the late 1800s went to Africa, spreading the gospel, education, family structure, and fresh possibilities for freed slaves.

Spreading Compassion

Is compassion natural?

• Plato: poor man no longer able to work should be left to die.
• Plautus: “You do a beggar bad service by giving him food and drink; you lose what you give and prolong his life for more misery.”
• Caste and karma: avoid sufferers

King of compassion

• He who is kind to the poor lends to the LORD, and he will reward him for what he has done. (Proverbs 19:17)
• When you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed. Although they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous. (Luke 14:13-14)

Actions in epidemics

• Pagans abandoned sick family and friends and left the dead unburied.
• Christians helped their fellow Christians and many non-Christians as well.
• This resulted in a higher survival rate among Christian communities, and led many unbelievers to become Christians.

Institutions of compassion

• Romans had medical facilities for rich people and soldiers, not ordinary people.
• In 325, Council of Nicea called for a hospital in every city with a cathedral.
• Christians started orphanages and hospitals in the Roman Empire. In later times, missionaries started orphanages and hospitals in India and other places.

Healing and relief

• Nursing: started with monks and nuns funded by offerings. Reached new level with Florence Nightingale.
• Henri Dunant, International Red Cross: “I am a disciple of Christ… nothing more.”
• In 1887 Christians started Salvation Army and Charity Organizations Society, which later was named United Way.

Helping the weak

• Alcoholics Anonymous and Twelve Step groups based on biblical principles
• Campaigns for laws against child labor
• Ministries to help prisoners and families
• First to establish homes for elderly that could provide medical care and help that was too much for families to provide

Christianity's social impact

• Family life: following God’s design
• Education: enrich every mind
• Politics: freedom with order
• Economy: opportunity and generosity
• Freeing slaves
• Valuing women
• Spreading compassion