Is Christianity Good or Bad for the World?

Christianity is increasingly viewed as hateful and harmful. Is Christianity good or bad for the world? After 2,000 years, we have ample evidence to render a verdict. Jesus, the revolutionary, launched the largest movement in human history and changed the world.

While the existential question asks whether God exists, the axiological question asks what value-impact God’s existence has on the world. In this work, we identify and assess evidence of widely embraced goods and values” from rationality and the rise of universities and science to morality and the rise of compassion and charity” that are deemed good for the world, and then argue that Christianity enjoys explanatory scope and power for their existence and proliferation.

In addition, a novel apologetic argument from the existence of the pervasiveness of the Golden Rule in comparative religious and scientific worldview analysis reveals that Jesus’ treatment is inclusive in its application but exclusive in its explanation.

Regardless of one’s evaluation of that question, good or bad, the greatest mark of history seems to be the imprint of Jesus. In fact, Yale Historian Jaroslav Pelikan—who spoke eight languages by age 22—minced no words in the introduction to his book:

Regardless of what anyone may personally think or believe about Him, Jesus of Nazareth has been the dominant figure in the history of Western culture for almost 20 centuries. If it were possible, with some sort of super magnet, to pull up out of that history every scrap of metal bearing at least a trace of his name, how much would be left?