The Bible is the bedrock of civilized society

by Warren Nunn

Thomas Jones Barker, via Wikimedia Commons

Have you ever stopped to consider just how much positive effect Bible-believing Christianity has had on societies throughout the world? It is also no coincidence that in prosperous nations such as Great Britain, the United States of America, much of Europe, Canada, South Korea and Australia, a significant proportion of society historically embraced biblical Christianity.

Children raised by parents “in the discipline and instruction of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4) for generations grew up to influence all walks of life, including as business leaders, decision-makers, lawmakers, police and judges, and in the arts and sciences.

Among the things they were taught was that the Bible gave a true history of the world, including:

• when and how the world and everything in it was supernaturally created about 6,000 years ago;
• how Adam and Eve rebelled against God;
• why that rebellion brought sin into the world;
• why God judged the world through a global Flood;
• how God the Son came to earth as a baby in the person of Jesus Christ;
• why Christ died on the Cross to pay the penalty for sin;
• how Christ defeated death and rose from the dead;
• how people can now be reconciled to the Father by believing in Christ’s redemptive act on the Cross;
• how Christ will again come to the earth to judge the living and the dead.

When people in the 19^th and 20^th centuries began to embrace Charles Darwin’s evolutionary concepts, there was a gradual turning away from many of the teachings that came from biblical authority. In its place secular thought prevailed in education and—by extension— throughout the media and society. With the secular creation story (evolution) increasingly taught to the exclusion of anything else, this secularization trend has gathered pace in recent decades.

Rather than a majority of people in society being shaped by biblical authority, there is a significant pushback against such influence as parents abandon bringing up children within a Christ-centred worldview.

Praise from unlikely sources

Despite that, some people opposed to the very idea of the God of the Bible actually admit that Christianity has undeniable benefits—particularly in societies where people are desperately poor and oppressed.¹

For instance, British historian and author Tom Holland—known for his writings about the ancient world—spoke of a significant turnaround in his thinking:

“Today, even as belief in God fades across the West, the countries that were once collectively known as Christendom continue to bear the stamp of the two-millennia-old revolution that Christianity represents. It is the principal reason why, by and large, most of us who live in post-Christian societies still take for granted that it is nobler to suffer than to inflict suffering. It is why we generally assume that every human life is of equal value. In my morals and ethics, I have learned to accept that I am not Greek or Roman at all, but thoroughly and proudly Christian.”²

Holland appears to identify as a cultural Christian rather than a born-again evangelical, but this is still a significant shift because he had previously accepted an interpretation of history that came from Enlightenment writers who claimed that Christianity had ushered in an “age of superstition and credulity”.²

But, eventually, that understanding was shattered:

“The longer I spent immersed in the study of classical antiquity, the more alien and unsettling I came to find it. The values of Leonidas, whose people had practised a peculiarly murderous form of eugenics, and trained their young to kill uppity Untermenschen³ by night, were nothing that I recognised as my own; nor were those of Caesar, who was reported to have killed a million Gauls and enslaved a million more. It was not just the extremes of callousness that I came to find shocking, but the lack of a sense that the poor or the weak might have any intrinsic value. As such, the founding conviction of the Enlightenment—that it owed nothing to the faith into which most of its greatest figures had been born—increasingly came to seem to me unsustainable.”²

tom-holland.org

Even atheist Richard Dawkins has voiced concern about the decline of Christianity:

“There are no Christians, as far as I know, blowing up buildings. I am not aware of any Christian suicide bombers. I am not aware of any major Christian denomination that believes the penalty for apostasy is death. I have mixed feelings about the decline of Christianity, in so far as Christianity might be a bulwark against something worse.”⁴

Law and democracy

What Holland and others are at least in part acknowledging is that the Bible—as has been historically recognized—has served as the most important book for the development of both the rule of law and democratic institutions in the Western world.⁵

The reverse of that is that when the Bible’s influence and Christianity is suppressed in atheistic regimes where state power dominates the life and liberty of individuals, the results often inhibit personal freedoms.⁵

Think of the regimes under Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc. which, in the name of ideologies that rejected biblical principles, carried out mass murder, including on their own citizens.

By contrast, during her reign (1837–1901), Britain’s Queen Victoria frequently invoked Christian faith and sent out copies of the Bible “to show how much she values God’s Word”.⁶

The sentiment is highlighted in a painting of an imagined scene in which the Queen presents an African ambassador with a Bible.⁶ The associated explanation—which is not authenticated—is that when questioned on how Britain had become so powerful, the Queen said, on handing him a copy of the Bible, “Tell the Prince that this is the secret of England’s greatness”.⁶

Alexis de Tocqueville, the French author, political thinker and historian who visited the United States in 1831, remarked of the young country:

“In France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom pursuing courses diametrically opposed to each other; but in America I found they were intimately united, and that they reigned in common over the same country”.⁷

Public domain

Economic prosperity

More recently, some in the Chinese regime have asked questions about Christianity because of the suggested link between faith and economic success.⁸ At a conference, Chinese CEOs questioned Harvard scholars about the relationship between Christianity and economic prosperity in the United States. According to one report, they did not know how to respond.⁸ Perhaps those scholars hesitated to answer because of research published in 2003 in which two of the university’s scholars made the link between Christianity and economic success in South Korea.⁹ That conclusion was countered by dissenting voices,¹⁰ so it’s no surprise that secularized Harvard academics were uncomfortable with addressing questions about Christianity’s influence.

When addressing the impact of Christians in Africa, atheist Matthew Parris wrote that it would ‘suit him’ to believe that the “honesty, diligence and optimism in their work” he saw had no connection with their evident personal faith, but he had to concede that they were undeniably “influenced by a conception of man’s place in the Universe that Christianity had taught”.¹¹

Vishal Mangalwadi—when he launched his book The Book that Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization—highlighted why many European nations and the USA first prospered and had since declined.¹²

He said they thrived with biblical Christianity as the bedrock of society and what he described as the ‘party of faith’ nurtured the West intellectually in terms of education, by establishing schools and universities (think of the many US universities—e.g. Princeton—established on biblical principles, though sadly now mostly temples of secularism).¹²

But the new ‘bedrock’ of society now is science, applied and understood only from a non-theistic/materialistic perspective. It dominates education and the media, and is established ‘fact’ for a majority of people. Even though such a perspective has no logical explanation for such things as good and evil, its adherents will vehemently attack even fellow travellers for questioning its ‘materialism-is-fact dogma’.¹³

At the same time, this ‘bedrock’ ignores the historical fact that science flourished because of biblically-inspired logic, as historian Peter Harrison has pointed out:

“Had it not been for the rise of the literal interpretation of the Bible and the subsequent appropriation of biblical narratives by early modern scientists, modern science may not have arisen at all. In sum, the Bible and its literal interpretation have played a vital role in the development of Western science.”¹⁴

As well, this alternative ‘bedrock’ has no explanations, for example, for why people hijack passenger planes and fly them into buildings, or strap bombs to themselves and detonate them in crowded marketplaces, trains and buses.¹⁵

As Mangalwadi noted with the rejection of the Bible as the source of truth, so began the decline of the once-Christian West.¹²

How can we respond?

This is exactly where the world is right now, but we are sure there is an antidote. CMI has often pointed out that Genesis is not only key to the Gospel, it has long been the ‘frontline’ issue in the battle for biblical authority. Returning to Genesis foundations is critical because it explains that the world only makes sense from a biblical perspective, and why people—such as Hitler—commit atrocities. It provides the reason for death and suffering, counters superstition, addresses depression, answers atheism, and tells us why ‘bad’ seems ‘OK’ to some people.

Readers of CMI’s materials can be grass roots agents for change by continuing to be involved in creation evangelism firmly based in the foundational teaching in Genesis that leads to the Bible’s unfolding revelation.

In short, the antidote to the hopelessness of evolutionary secularism is the ultimate hope we find in Jesus Christ, revealed in the Bible, which also tells us God is omnipotent, all-powerful, and a God of love. He performs miracles, and He speaks to us through His Word. We have reason to love this God. We have reason to trust and to worship this God.¹⁶

And, above all, we have a reason to hope:

The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance. (2 Peter 3:9)

Which bedrock would you choose?

Related Media

Dinosaurs: the gateway drug to atheism

Pastor Joe Boot - Hold the Line on Biblical Authority

What would we know about creation if we only had the New Testament?

Science, the Bible, and the Age of the Earth (Creation Magazine LIVE! 8-04)