How Christianity Made the West Great

Christianity was a key impetus for higher education, representative government, and gender equality

Nov 12, 2024

Many people believe that Christianity has little or nothing to do with women’s rights, higher education, or representative government—all major pillars of Western civilization.

In fact, many say society started getting better only when Science and Reason progressed to the point where Superstition, Patriarchy, and Racism became philosophically untenable. But what if I were to suggest that science and higher learning can be traced back to Christian thought? Or that women’s rights entered the global consciousness only after the early church began elevating the women within its ranks? Many would be skeptical. If I were writing for a primarily liberal audience, most would think I was off my rocker. My stance is a bold one, but I will try my best to stick to the facts.

First of all, it’s not hard to see how Christianity could be so revolutionary and so attractive to so many.

Pagan culture was a hard sell, especially for women. The late sociologist Rodney Stark notes that the abortion and infanticide of baby girls was rampant in ancient Rome. Fathers wanted a male heir who could inherit the family name and estate, not a daughter, and if that daughter happened to be unhealthy or deformed, she would often be discarded. As a result, males significantly outnumbered females in cities like Rome and Athens. Those females that survived infancy were often forced into marriages at a young age (12 was the legal minimum set by Roman law), where they were expected to be chaste while their husbands were free to sleep around—and divorce them on a whim.

Furthermore, pagan government offered little in the way of human equality. Plato’s treatise on politics, The Republic, reflects the conventional wisdom of his time only too well. In his “ideal” society, he divides human beings into three rigid, impermeable classes: guardians (the ruling class), auxiliaries (the warrior class), and producers (the working class). Roman society worked much the same way, splitting humanity into slaves, freemen (plebeians), and elites (patricians). Rome’s richest families provided the hiring pool for its senators, who worked in a highly centralized government ruled by a dictator called a consul.

Christianity introduced a belief in the sanctity of each human life that necessitated a reversal of pagan cultural norms. The Bible taught that all are made in the image of God (Gen. 1:27), and as if to clarify any doubts about what that entailed, the Apostle Paul wrote, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). This was a radical statement to make in the first century, and it caused a tectonic shift in the value society placed on the individual. That shift occurred along three major fault lines (I will explore the fourth fault line, slavery, in a separate article).

Women’s rights

Christianity provided the moral impetus for greater equality between the sexes in the first century and well beyond.

In the early church, women enjoyed a number of privileges that pagan women did not—many of which were rooted in Biblical teaching. Rodney Stark lists several such perks in his book, The Rise of Christianity.

First, due to the Christian prohibitions against abortion and infanticide–and the fact that women were more likely to convert than men–it is estimated that females outnumbered males in the early church by a ratio of three to one, a dynamic that naturally lent itself to more female freedom. This is reflected in the way Spartan women enjoyed far more rights than Athenian women: because most Spartan males were away fighting in wars, women greatly outnumbered men and, in their absence, were allowed to own property, do business, study, and even exercise and wear short skirts in public–a far cry from the reality of Athenian women, who were fewer in number and were therefore possessively fought over by Athenian males.

In the same way–partly because of their growing population, partly because Paul warned against pressuring people into marriage (1 Cor. 7-9)–Christian women could afford to be choosier about whom and when to marry, which spared most of them from being child brides. According to Rodney Stark, “pagans were three times as likely as Christians to have married before age 13.” Christian widows were not pressured to remarry, and kept their husband’s property and the freedoms associated with it, unlike pagan women.

Christianity also taught husbands to be chaste and shun divorce, which made life a lot easier for women who lived in a culture where polygamy was the norm and a husband could divorce his wife simply by ordering her out of the house. Furthermore, as “co-heirs” of the promises of God (Acts 2:17-18; Rom. 8:17), women were given a high degree of authority in the church. There were many women deaconesses and “fellow workers” held in high esteem by the Apostle Paul, such that he names 16 of them in his letters–and many wealthy women underwrote the church’s expenses. This is in contrast to Judaism, where women were not even allowed to study Torah or worship alongside men in the Temple.

Christianity continued to be a potent force in the struggle for women’s rights long after the first century. Time and time again Christian women pioneered the cause of equality in their respective contexts—whether it was Nitobe Inazō in Japan (who expanded educational opportunities for Japanese women), Pandita Ramabai in India (who did the same for Indian women), or Christian women in China (who helped end the Chinese practice of miniaturizing girls’ feet). In the U.S., the suffrage movement was started by devout Christians. Writes one historian:

In 1847, [Elizabeth] Stanton… moved with her family to Seneca Falls, New York. It was there that she and [Lucretia] Mott, a devout Quaker, joined with three of Mott's Quaker friends to organize the first women's rights convention—the Seneca Falls Convention—in July 1848… the convention marks the beginning of the first women's rights movement in America.

Stanton would later join Quaker Susan B. Anthony, “who would become her life-long partner as leaders in the battle for women's suffrage.”

Higher education

In his book, Church History in Plain Language, Bruce Shelley deftly illustrates how Christianity sparked the education of the Western world long before the Enlightenment was even a thought in the Western mind.

After the fall of Rome in AD 475, the desire to preserve Scripture and the writings of church fathers drove Christians to establish monasteries where they also made copies of Roman classics, thus preserving higher learning through the mostly illiterate Middle Ages.

Indeed, the modern university emerged out of “cathedral schools” that trained clergy for ministry in the Middle Ages. The move toward democratizing education was consistent with Christian doctrine, because the idea of an intelligent designer signaled that the universe was intelligible—that it could be studied at all. Study was in service to understanding God and his creation, which was patterned after the image of the human mind, enabling it to be understood (as Thomas Aquinas argued). Such cathedral schools were the first universities, allowing the only place in a tough agrarian economy where pupils could rest long enough to engage in the life of the mind. They were also the first to implement a standardized curriculum, which was composed of the seven liberal arts—grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.

In the tradition of Plato’s Academy, rather than spoonfeeding students doctrine, these schools imposed discipline on the intellect by forcing them to arrive at conclusions through disputation, or argument and counterargument. As a result, Bruce Shelley writes that Christian scholasticism “came to stand for the painstaking arrival at logical conclusions through questioning, examining, and arranging details into a system of logic… Unquestioning acceptance of traditional ‘authorities’ was no longer assured, but the conclusions had to jibe with Christian doctrine.” Scholastics developed their intellect in light of God’s revealed truth and, similar to Plato, they assumed that knowledge and virtue were inseparable—a far cry from the secularized universities of today, most of which have decided to forgo moral formation in favor of career preparation, and have all but rejected the Platonic ideal of studying the true, the good, and the beautiful.

The desire to train young men for ministry also spurred the creation of the Ivy Leagues in early America. Harvard, Yale, and Princeton all started out as seminaries. Harvard’s founding mission statement informed students that “the main end of your life and studies is to know God and Jesus Christ.” Eighty years later, disturbed by Harvard’s seeming mission drift, a group of New England pastors would found Yale University in 1718.

The Enlightenment (or Aristotelian) view of man as independent from God grew up alongside the university system, but it could never replace Christianity’s influence on the development of the Western mind.

Representative government

The founders of America saw themselves as beholden to God, and wrote the Declaration of Independence “with a firm reliance [on] the protection of divine providence.” In the same document they recognize that “all men are created equal”, and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” There simply would be no self-representative government as we know it today without an emphasis on the sanctity and equality of each human life.

In the words of the Declaration, governments derive their “just powers” from the “consent of the governed”—a form of government we take for granted today, but one that would’ve been quite laughable in ancient times, when philosophers like Aristotle said that some human beings were “marked out for subjection” and birth dictated where you fell along the social strata—slave, freeman, or king. Democracy existed in ancient Athens for a few centuries, but overall, the strict hierarchalist view of human government would prevail for another 1,000 years. Christian ideas of human dignity would play an important role in dismantling that stratification.

British common law, the 13th-century forerunner to the U.S. Declaration and Constitution, was founded on uniquely Christian principles. The idea of a sovereign being subject to the rule of law—and of the law being an authority in itself—has roots in Christianity’s notion of a natural law written on human hearts by the supreme Law-Giver. “This tradition,” writes one scholar, “is embodied, among other things, in the laws of King Alfred the Great, the creation of the Magna Carta, and the courts of equity. England's most celebrated jurists - including the likes of Blackstone, Coke and Fortescue - who made vast contributions to the English common law, often drew heavily from their Christian faith when expounding and developing what are now well established legal doctrines.” American colonists would appeal to these doctrines in their criticism of King George III, arguing that any law that contradicted natural law was invalid by definition. Hence “taxation without representation” was used to justify revolt, because the law—in this case, the Stamp Act–lacked a moral grounding.

Adding to the furor, the Great Awakening saw swarms of churches rediscover the two pillars of apostolic faith–fidelity to Scripture and a personal experience of the Holy Spirit–thereby undermining the authority of priest and polity... and later, the British Crown. As one source puts it, “The religious movement toward democracy in church matters, carried over to a movement toward democracy in political matters.” To galvanize support for the Revolution, leaders as various as Thomas Paine, John Witherspoon, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson appealed to Scriptures like 1 Samuel 8, Deuteronomy 17, and the book of Judges. In the words of Liberty University Professor Dr. Roger Schulz, to the founders, “kings were not absolute monarchs with unlimited power; they were kings under law, bound to God’s word as a constitution, and their powers were limited.”

It was also recognized that a government was only as good as its people. Without virtue, and its source in “true religion”, the founders knew the fledgling American Republic would collapse under the weight of its own moral contradictions. As a result, President George Washington made a very Christian Thanksgiving Day Proclamation in 1789 emphasizing the necessity of the faith to human flourishing. Thomas Jefferson would do the same in his Thanksgiving Day Proclamation as President ten years later.

Of course, history is complex. Christianity was used to justify savage bloodlettings like the crusades and the inquisition, and natural law was categorically ignored in the case of slavery, in which some human beings were considered less equal than others. But we must remember that the actions of a few bad actors and a corrupt state church could never stop the logical conclusion of a shared Christian morality–a better civilization for all based on God’s equal regard for all human beings.

Some may argue that these societal changes could have easily come about through atheism, that Christianity contributed to the development of Western morality only by accident, and that parallel streams of thought empty into the same body of moral knowledge. However, to the extent secular ideologies promote human rights, they borrow from Christianity what they don’t earn. The trend toward equal rights did not begin with the Enlightenment in the 17th century or humanism in the 20th—it began in the first century with the crucifixion of a Jewish carpenter. It began with God.