Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World's Largest Religion

by Rebecca McLaughlin

The idea that all human beings should be valued equally was far from normative in the ancient world. In Greek and Roman thought, free men had more inherent dignity and worth than women, slaves, or children, and disabled infants were routinely disposed of. Plato and Aristotle supported direct eugenics, the latter declaring, “Let there be a law that no deformed child shall live.”12 Into this world stepped a first-century Jewish rabbi who elevated women, valued children, loved the poor, and embraced the sick. The early Christian insistence on brotherhood across racial and ethnic boundaries, even across the dichotomy of slave and free, became a spark to ignite a new moral imagination.13 Values that many of us in the West today consider to be universal and independent of religious thought turn out not to have sprung from the ground during the Enlightenment but to have grown from the gradual spread and influence of Christian beliefs.14